Mummification, Step by Step — and Why the Brain Was Thrown Away

Mummification was not a mystical rite performed in secret. It was a trade, with price tiers, a standard timetable and a workshop, and it ran in Egypt for well over three thousand years. What it preserved, and what it threw out, tells you exactly what the Egyptians thought a person was made of.

Why Preserve the Body at All

Egyptian belief held that a person was several things at once: the body, the ka or life force, the ba — roughly the personality, shown as a bird with a human head — and the akh, the transfigured being that survives. The ba travelled by day and returned to the body at night. If the body was gone, it had nothing to return to. Preservation was not sentiment; it was the physical requirement for continued existence.

The Process

• The brain was removed first, usually through the nose using a hooked instrument, and discarded
• An incision in the left side of the abdomen allowed the lungs, liver, stomach and intestines to be taken out, dried separately and placed in four canopic jars
• The heart was left in the body — it was the seat of intelligence, memory and character, and would be needed at judgement
• The body cavity was cleaned, packed and covered in natron, a naturally occurring salt from Wadi Natrun that draws out moisture; this stage took around forty days
• The dried body was oiled, resinated, padded to restore its shape, and wrapped in linen with amulets set between the layers
• The whole sequence conventionally took seventy days from death to burial

The Brain

The organ modern readers find hardest to explain away is the one the Egyptians simply removed and did not keep. There is no jar for it, no protective deity, no spell for its preservation. The heart, by contrast, is everywhere in the funerary literature — weighed against the feather of Maat, protected by amulets, addressed directly in spells warning it not to testify against its owner.

The Egyptians located thought, memory, emotion and moral character in the heart. On that model the brain was packing material, and there was no more reason to keep it than the fluid drained from the body cavity. They were wrong about the anatomy and entirely consistent about the theology.

Not Everyone Got the Same Treatment

Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, describes three grades of service at very different prices — the full procedure for those who could afford it, a cheaper version using injected oils to dissolve the organs in place, and a basic cleansing and drying for the poor. The archaeological record broadly supports the existence of tiers. Most Egyptians were never mummified at all.

Everything about the process points at one conclusion: they were not preserving a corpse, they were maintaining an address. The body had to remain recognisable so that the parts of the person still in motion could find their way back to it.