Online Activities: Ancient Egypt

Natural Mummies

North Africa is very hot and dry. The Sahara would stretch right across from near the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea if not for the Nile River. The Nile has allowed people to live in Egypt and develop a great civilization. The dark rich soil deposited by the annual flood, the Inundation, enabled farmers to grow two crops a year. During each flood, however, all the fertile land was flooded, and property lines and low-lying structures were washed away.

When the Ancient Egyptians buried their dead, they did not want the bodies to be washed away by the floods, nor did they want to use up valuable farm land for cemeteries. The dead were buried close to the villages of the living, in the higher, dry deserts that flanked the Nile.

These deserts are so dry that bodies placed into them will quickly lose all moisture. Without moisture, the bacteria which cause decay will not be able to survive, and the body will simply dry up – a natural mummy.

The Egyptians must have found many natural mummies over the centuries before the Age of the Pyramids. Knowing that it was natural for a body to be preserved, the Egyptians may have felt that it was unnatural for it to decay, and that there must be some important reason why bodies did not decay, but retained their hair and skin, and continued to be recognizable for many years after death.

Most preserved bodies of Ancient Egyptians from the Age of the Pyramids are natural mummies. There are far more skeletons, however, than mummies, in the tombs of the Age of the Pyramids. Bodies are less likely to be preserved if buried in fine tombs, than if left in the sand. Why?

The problem with burying bodies in the hot dry sand is that, although the body is safe from decay, it is not safe from animal scavengers, nor from thieves who might dig the body up to take jewellery or other grave goods. To keep bodies safe, the Egyptians began, about five thousand, five hundred years ago, to bury some people in very large baskets, wooden boxes, or underground tombs with stone floors. Unfortunately, while these burials were often perfectly safe, without the contact of hot sand to speed the drying process, the flesh rotted, leaving only skeletons.

Because the natural course of events in Egypt was for the body to be preserved and to remain recognizable after death, the decay of bodies which were carefully protected in fine tombs was unacceptable.

 

 

Predynastic burial

Egyptian Desert