r/history • u/Magister_Xehanort • Dec 31 '22
Did we get Egyptian mummification totally wrong? It might have nothing to do with preserving the body after death, experts say. Article
https://www.businessinsider.com/ancient-egyptian-didnt-intend-preserve-mummy-bodies-say-scientists-2022-12705
u/tc2007 Jan 01 '23 edited Jan 14 '23
What about all the stuff that was also buried along with the Pharaohs? Servants, pets, gold etc? It was assumed for the afterlife right?
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u/prob_wont_respond Jan 01 '23
"bury me with my things, because you know they are mine"
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u/Tempest_1 Jan 01 '23 •
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Only enforced because the next king also wants to be buried with his favorite toys
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u/beingsubmitted Jan 01 '23 edited Jan 01 '23
It's weird. My understanding of what they're saying is basically that they felt the same about their dead as we do today, except we don't often examine our own practices through the same lens.
It's not uncommon for atheists to show deference and respect to human remains, despite them not believing they're in any way improving conditions for the deceased in the afterlife. People today bury loved ones with certain possessions simply because that's how "they would want it". How a person is laid to rest is part of their story, and their story is what really remains. The narrative is their afterlife.
It's meaningful for people today where and how people are laid to rest, separate from specific beliefs about the afterlife.
People today visit tombs and cemeteries, and when they do, it's meaningful to them, the living, that the remains are in that location, but they don't expect or want to ever exhume the body and examine it. I think it's the same with possessions. It doesn't matter that no one can see the possessions for the same reason it doesn't matter that you can't see your father's body at his grave. What matters is you know it's there, and that he's wearing the watch his brother gave him before the war. That's the story you like.
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u/mamacitalk Jan 01 '23
This is really profound and I’ve never deeply considered it before but you’re right. I’m not religious but I’d still uphold any last wishes my loved ones had and would voluntarily visit their grave, if they had one etc
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u/FlostonParadise Jan 01 '23
I think you're hitting on a significant aspect here.
What may seem old, alien, and the ideas of 'unsophisticated' ancient people may only be viewed as strange because of assumptions, othering, and an incomplete historical record that average folks assume as complete.
Where reality tends to be, ancient people were people just as we are today and just as intelligent.
I think a decent example is that a large swath of the planet today regularly eats the body of their own god! On its face, that a fucking weird idea, but people don't even raise an eyebrow at communion or think it odd at all.
In the future, if a faith like Christianity disappeared or evolved. The idea of consuming a god would probably be held as an archaic idea with similar retrospective judgement.
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u/t0rnberry Jan 02 '23
You're right. I never thought about it this way, but communion sounds pretty metal. "Here, a symbol of the flesh of our dead god. Consume it and strengthen your bond. Now, drink his blood!"
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u/InspectorG-007 Jan 01 '23
Could be just a display of wealth. Bling, but on a dynastic scale.
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u/jordantask Jan 01 '23
A display for who, though?
It seems that most of these tombs were built to be not easily accessible for fear of grave robbery, I suppose. So really the only people who would ever see your display of wealth would be the people burying you or the grave robbers.
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u/InspectorG-007 Jan 01 '23
For themselves. These people thought they were literal gods, right?
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u/jordantask Jan 01 '23
Then it’s not really a display of wealth and you’re back to “these are functional objects for the afterlife.”
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u/avengerintraining Jan 01 '23
It could have been for a big theatrical show of a funeral. All the valuable/impressive things he’s buried with for ooohs and aaahs, then would be the talk of the city, and something the next pharaohs now have to compete with.
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u/InspectorG-007 Jan 01 '23
It's a display of self validation and score keeping.
That behavior is pretty common among highly successful type-A personalities.
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u/jordantask Jan 01 '23
Except you can’t see it. You’re dead.
So, something more is going on.
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u/cataath Jan 01 '23
Maybe it's something like this:
You're born in line to the throne, your grandfather is pharaoh, and you grow up watching him boast about being the greatest king because his wealth exceeded all previous kings. Then he dies, and now it is your father who boasts of being the greatest king because his wealth (e.g., your grandfather's, plus what tribute your father received in his lifetime). Then your father dies, you become king, and realize that you now boast about being the greatest king, because of the accumulation of generational wealth. But you also realize the irony that your heir will one day supplant you as a greater king because all you have will be his.
So how do you preserve your legacy as the greatest king? Take the largest, greatest works with you to the grave. Not all of it, and not enough to diminish the kingdom (who cares if you where the greatest king of the second greatest empire?), but enough to ensure you progeny have to really work to make themselves earn the title of "great".
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u/Aenyn Jan 01 '23
But you don't bury yourself so if you don't convince your kids they should do it for you they could just as easily issue a new order to not bury you with your stuff - so even if the practice could have been invented for the reason you state, it wouldn't have continued for that reason because "bury me with my stuff so I can be stay a better pharaoh than you" is not very convincing.
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u/InspectorG-007 Jan 01 '23
Maybe they believed their afterlife spirit would see it?
Other spirits would see it and know how great they were?
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u/asund_ Jan 01 '23
Reading some of this thread and thinking about people discussing our billionaires in a few millennia.
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u/InspectorG-007 Jan 01 '23
Well, we don't build with stone a whole lot so I'm not sure how much will be preserved.
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u/jordantask Jan 01 '23
No, they thought they were literally going to use the grave goods in the afterlife.
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u/Mudcaker Jan 01 '23
Can’t it just be legacy and oneupmanship?
Last guy was buried with ten servants. They’ll stop talking about him when I’m buried with 50.
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u/AJDx14 Jan 01 '23
Other people can see it though. Unless you think the world ends when you die it could easily be meant to show future people how cool you were.
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u/jordantask Jan 01 '23
No. The tombs weren’t designed for re entry. Many of them are difficult to find and even more difficult to open. The only people who were ever expecting to see a tomb’s contents were the ones who put them in the tomb.
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u/O_oh Jan 01 '23
Display of wealth to the Gods.
Some people are concerned about how God judges them
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u/Ranessin Jan 01 '23
High officials were buried in the same way, mummified and none of those were seen as gods.
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u/kitsune001 Jan 01 '23
To then seal away for no one to ever see?
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u/Smartnership Jan 01 '23
“It’s not enough to have all the things… it’s equally important that others not have them.”
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u/InspectorG-007 Jan 01 '23
It's not a out others to see.
It's about the dying knowing he died with the most toys.
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u/ApizzaApizza Dec 31 '22
Why would you bury a statue in a tomb if the idea was to turn royal remains into religious statues? Wouldn’t you want it available to be viewed?
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u/ItsACaragor Jan 01 '23
It's especially ridiculous when you realize that the egyptians did not only mummify Pharaoh, they also regularly mummified high ranking public servants who were not seen as living gods at all.
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u/biedl Jan 01 '23
They mummified tons of animals too.
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u/youwantitwhen Jan 01 '23
So many that they were used as fuel.
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u/Garfield-1-23-23 Jan 01 '23
And pigment for brown paint.
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u/Canadian_dalek Jan 01 '23
And dietary supplements
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u/whitneymak Jan 01 '23
Mellified man deserves special attention as it's one of the more horrifying and unfathomably disgusting things I've ever heard of.
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u/littlel8totheparty Jan 01 '23
Wow wtf... the self sacrifice aspect and method is... disturbing.
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u/thecowintheroom Jan 01 '23
I think it sounds good. Do you know any street markets where I can try this delectable confection? I’ve got five years maybe you volunteer?
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u/Adept-Donut-4229 Jan 01 '23
Can't be any worse than 100-year-old rotten tofu...
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u/DaddyCatALSO Jan 01 '23
Didn't mummification remain the standard way of treating Egyptian dead who could afford well into Ptolemaic times?
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u/Seienchin88 Jan 01 '23
Absolutely yes. Even well into Roman times mummification happened. With beautiful pictures of the deceased painted on a piece of wood that covered their face.
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u/UnholyDemigod Jan 01 '23
I was under the impression that they mummified everyone, and the level of mummification was based on how much you could afford
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u/neologismist_ Jan 01 '23
And told stories in hieroglyphs about the afterlife? This new theory is highly suspect.
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u/exoriare Jan 01 '23
Most of the value of mummies is immediately after their death. Think Lenin or Kim Il Sung. By presenting a lifelike vestige of a canonical ruler, the current ruler presents themselves as a continuation of the regime.
The healthy way of resolving this is to eventually inter the remnant of ancien regime, but you'd only do this once everything had coalesced.
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u/masklinn Jan 01 '23
Except ancient Egypt did not even remotely just mummify rulers, after a while pretty much everyone was mummified, with the quality of the process (and subsequent interment) depending on your wealth. They even mummified pets.
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u/Felevion Jan 01 '23 edited Jan 01 '23
This entire theory seems to come from a single guy who is the curator of a museum in England and not an egyptologist as well as I saw no mention of any other names that believe this theory. Must also be a slow day for businessinsider as this article was posted here a month ago too.
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u/BathFullOfDucks Jan 01 '23
He has a ba, ma and PhD in egyptology and is the curator of one of the largest collections in the country. I disagree with him, but just because you haven't heard of him that doesn't mean he is just some rando
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u/generalvostok Jan 01 '23
To be fair, the ancient Egyptians thought everyone had a Ba. Don't know about a Ma or PhD, though.
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u/ItchySnitch Jan 01 '23
KA and HA, but close enough
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u/OggyBoggy Jan 01 '23
Someone explain all these abbrevations please
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u/HappyObelus Jan 01 '23
Those aren't actually abbreviations, but rather a joke about the parts of the soul according to ancient Egyptians.
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u/Specialist-Bird-4966 Jan 01 '23
First rule of abbreviations - you don’t talk about abbreviations…
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u/TheFirstArticle Jan 01 '23 edited Jan 01 '23
The next god emperor was jealous of the previous one? Not all statues are intended for the masses?
Some paint in these tombs fluoresces in ultraviolet and religious figures were known for also being surgeons and doctors. We know they performed cataract surgeries and the removal of cataracts and diseased eye tissue can make you see ultraviolet. If they also had a way to let others see the fluorescing paint it would be miraculous seeming.
Often paintings in dark places flicker and look like they are moving in the firelight.
The effect could have powerfully appealed to the powerful outside of the priest class.
Skeletons inside statues are somewhat common.
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u/JuniorRub2122 Jan 01 '23
Storage? Like how a museum has a permanent collection but they don’t always display every piece they have.
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u/ApizzaApizza Jan 01 '23
From my understanding, Egyptian tombs weren’t really built to be very easily accessed after they were closed. Which isn’t really what you’d want if they were just for storage.
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u/johnmrson Jan 01 '23
Aren't there plenty of "of the time" writings that explained what mummification was for? This new theory sounds pretty far fetched.
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u/Kheras Jan 01 '23
Yes, and writings dating back thousands of years. The Egyptians did not hold their funerary practices as a secret. Other societies that traded with them learned of the practices and wrote about them because they were interesting and different than the beliefs they themselves held.
This was over a long enough period of time that they track the evolution of these practices over a very long period of time.
Not much guesswork there, apart from arguing context or the translation of old/dead languages. Could there be a different meaning the pharaohs held that differs from what they told others? Maybe, but we have no basis to see in to their minds. And it’s a fallacy to inject contemporary thoughts as their own. Our way of thinking is alien to people who lived hundreds of years ago, much less thousands.
What we know from their own writings is that those who had use in the afterlife were preserved so that they could have a vessel to achieve immortality. And it extended beyond the pharaohs who had in themselves some aspect of the divine. Important nobility were not seen as living gods, yet they were also mummified.
That could be theater to help them feel important and keep order. And funerary priests may have had a different idea of their own afterlife versus the pharaohs.
Strangely, if we take the bait of the perspective descriptions of Victorian historians as accurate, then why would they not have rewritten female characters in a negative light? And why were there also celebrated female Egyptologists whom the author glosses over and ignores?
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u/Darkdarkar Jan 01 '23
It could be a belief at a certain point of time? We’re talking about a wide period of history here after all. Maybe it’s interpretation changed or got added to overtime.
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u/mauimudpup Jan 01 '23
So even though the book of the dead and pyramid texts say why they preserved the dead they did it for a different reason
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u/MentallyDormant Jan 01 '23
Yea, right? Like what?
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u/mauimudpup Jan 01 '23
Urr your question makes little sense. Those documebts explain how abd why the dead are to be preserved
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u/alexsdad87 Jan 01 '23
They’re agreeing with you. They just forgot the commas.
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u/MentallyDormant Jan 01 '23
I put one comma i thought it made sense
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u/alexsdad87 Jan 01 '23
Depending on how you read it, it can sound like you’re doubting the person you responded to.
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u/MSpiral32 Jan 01 '23
Doesn't the Book(s) of the Dead specifically include spells/rituals that talk about the body being reanimated in the afterlife? so having a preserved body would be necessary.
I suspect there is some lost nuance in this article. Maybe the ancient Egyptians didn't care about preserving recognizable facial features, but preservation of a body could still be important.
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u/Sqwill Jan 01 '23
Maybe they tried to preserve the body so maybe in the future there would be advances to bring them back to life? Like some kind of cryo tech today.
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u/Terpomo11 Jan 01 '23
Did they really have the concept of technological progress like we do? It seems like most ancient civilizations thought of history in terms of a past golden age from which we have gradually declined since.
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u/pm_me_ur_demotape Jan 01 '23
Would the from that era have thought that? I figured it would be Europeans from much later who would look back in an ancient golden age, i.e. the Roman empire
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u/Terpomo11 Jan 01 '23
As far as I know, it's a concept that's shown up in many historical civilizations.
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u/Adorable-Slip2260 Jan 01 '23
One bit of logic doesn’t sit well with this theory. That the mummified Pharos were sealed away and later hidden from any would be revealer.
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u/InspectorG-007 Jan 01 '23
Well, tomb robbery was rampant. Wasn't it?
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u/Hithlum Jan 01 '23
Ancient Egypt was a long time ago. Even if all of the tombs have been raided it need never have been rampant, let alone rampant near the time they were being created.
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u/RunningDude90 Jan 01 '23
Cleopatra was closer to us in time than she was the building over the pyramids, they were ancient even during ancient Egypt.
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u/Vladimir_Putting Jan 01 '23 edited Jan 01 '23
Reading this feels like entirely circular logic to me.
1- Ancient Egyptians didn't intend to preserve the bodies of their dead through mummification.
2- They intended to prepare the bodies for an afterlife, make them into divine representations, turn them into statues, etc.
3- They did this by preserving the bodies, through mummification.
???
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u/Stralau Jan 01 '23
"A lot of what we say when we describe ancient Egypt is less about what actually happened in ancient Egypt and more about the assumptions of Victorian upper-middle-class white, cisgender, bearded men," Price said.
See, this kind of phrasing makes me feel like this theory may have just as much to do with expressing our own cultural mores (critical of Victorian men) as anything the Victorians came up with expressed theirs.
The whole issue of grave gods is an interesting one that I often ponder: today we’ll often put a loved ones favourite book or pocket knife in with them, and we care about what clothes they wear, but no-one seriously thinks these are things they need for the afterlife. We do it from attachment. I sometimes think that role gets forgotten, however important the religious aspect might have been.
I don’t fully understand the distinction the article is trying to make though: the Egyptians must have known that what they are doing would have a preservative effect, but also known that it would not be perfect or bring the individual back to life. Were the tombs used for rituals beyond burial? I assume we know so, and the answer is in some sense positive. The body in the grave would’ve like the statue in the temple and be preserving the important individual in the afterlife, right? Although we also have elaborate tombs and grave goods belonging to scribes and other important people, not just godlike pharaohs. Were they considered gods too?
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u/YOUNGMaaddy Jan 01 '23 edited Jan 01 '23
A problem here lies with assuming ill, disingenuousness or non-relatablility due to the skin color and access to a certain living standard.
To fundamentally break down that idea... it's crtiticizing the legitimacy for these people to make distinctions about discovery or create hypothesis based purely in skin color and access to a certain standard of living.
In my eyes, absolute rubbish to say that, and if it was about any other race of humans we would have a very different response to the point being argued in your quote.
Therefore, maybe we can have an open mind towards the sincerity of victorian era people wanting to understand ancient people's and that scientific discovery is not absolute gospel. Constantly being refuted by itself...
Maybe ancient Egyptians mummified the dead for reasons modern humans don't grasp.... but to boil it down to such superficial attributes of the discoverers...
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u/etsatlo Jan 01 '23
Yep kind of lost me at that point too
These people stuck in their time and culture viewed the world wrongly, which we know now definitely not stuck out time or culture today
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u/ar4975 Jan 01 '23
On the back of the Rosetta stone they found some heiroglyphs that say "Weeeell, it's just a bit of a laugh, aint it?"
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u/ManlySyrup Jan 01 '23
"I have come here and will lead this passage to the farthest ends of the world"
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u/ZoraksGirlfriend Jan 01 '23
This doesn’t make sense to me. The mummies were anointed with oils and amulets, but were also put into a sarcophagus, which was put into another sarcophagus, which was put into a third sarcophagus. They weren’t meant to be displayed like statues.
Also, they give the example of King Tut not being well preserved. The leading theory for this is that his mummification was rushed due to politics. He died suddenly and there were two men who wanted to become pharaoh after him. One was a general who was off fighting a war and had to make his way back. It’s thought that the other guy rushed the mummification and burial so he could be proclaimed pharaoh before the general made it back to Thebes.
The typical mummification process took 70 days to complete, but I believe everything for Tut was done in a little over a month.
The article also points out that statues were anointed with oil and may have been wrapped on linens. I admit, I’ve never hear about them being wrapped and I would be curious to see the sources on that, but many religions anoint their statues with sacred oils. It was a common practice with the Catholicism I grew up in and it was a common practice in the ancient world. The conclusion that since both statues and mummies were anointed, that means mummies were probably made to mimic statues, comes across as reaching and ignoring other facts. Correlation does not equal causation.
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u/CharlieD00M Jan 01 '23
I wonder if it had anything to do with refusing to allow pharaoh and elite society members the disgrace of becoming stinking, rotting corpses. They could never rot, they must be preserved for the afterlife—which turned out to be sorta true because I doubt any ancient Egyptians imagined their mummified pharaohs and priests and cats would be exhumed and be celebrated & feared the world over.
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u/LinkFan001 Jan 01 '23
Nor would they have expected being eaten, turned into pigment, traded for port fees, etc.
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u/Raudskeggr Jan 01 '23
This theory is an interesting counterpoint to the popular understanding. It’s also probably incorrect, or at least further than justified by the body of evidence. Particularly the body of evidence describing the religious beliefs surrounding mummification and burial. It very much, from a religious standpoint, was to preserve the body for the deceased to live in the afterlife. Including grave goods and sometimes even livestock and servants for them to make use of in their postmortem retirement. Priests engaging in rituals, sealing protective spells into the linen wrappings, all of that.
Now what this theory could have almost gotten right was that there may have been a sort of dual purpose; that is the literal and sincere religious understanding, and a more cynical understanding from a practical societal purpose. Great monuments to dead kings helped reinforce the eternal and unchanging solidity of the social order (something Egyptians put a tremendous amount of emphasis on), ensuring that the power of the elites was unassailable. So there is that.
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u/OlyScott Jan 01 '23
They mummified lots of ordinary people, not just their kings. They mummified animals, too. I read about a guy who bought a lot of ancient mummified cats.
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u/Brigid-Tenenbaum Jan 01 '23
Look what we do to preserve the dead today.
Does it not make sense that it was essentially the same thing a few generations ago?
A time where they had no refrigerated storage.
Sure, it’s not affordable for everyone. But if you can afford it, culturally we do it.
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u/silverrain64 Jan 01 '23
Since the history of what we call "Ancient Egypt" was longer than the entirety of the Common Era/Anno Domini, it could be that all these beliefs about mummies were true at different points in history.
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u/SoVerySick314159 Jan 01 '23
The golden masks found in the sarcophagi of royals would then be idealized, god-like versions of the deceased rather than lifelike portraits, these Egyptologists said.
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u/MBH1800 Jan 01 '23
"A lot of what we say when we describe ancient Egypt is less about what actually happened in ancient Egypt and more about the assumptions of Victorian upper-middle-class white, cisgender, bearded men," Price said.
As a historian, he should know that you can't assume someone's gender identity who lived in the 1920s when such expressions would have been suppressed. For all we know, a lot of 1920s egyptologists may have been queer.
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u/apcat91 Jan 01 '23
The bearded part gets me. Why is that important 😂
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u/MBH1800 Jan 01 '23
Reminds me of when "mustachioed" was a thing you'd say about someone you didn't trust.
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u/avrand6 Jan 01 '23
Doesn't this contradict with the concept of a Ka Statue, which is meant to be a substitution in case anything happened to their physical body?
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u/doctorcrimson Jan 01 '23
I find it hard to believe salting the bodies and wrapping them before sealing them away wasn't about preservation.
The organ jar stuff I get was all ceremony, but they knew what salt and sealing did to preserve foods and hides. In fact, the two most popular condiments of the early mediteranian empires was preserved citrines and preserved salted sardine paste referred to as Garum.
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u/HaidenFR Jan 01 '23
Ok so if you turn your Pharaoh in a statue. Why do you hide it in a box? And what about normal people who had mummification?
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u/Stanazolmao Jan 01 '23
So many comments here show how barely anyone actually reads the article - he has said that preserving the body IS IMPORTANT but might not have been the main point - it's the authors of the article who wrote the clickbait "it might have nothing to do with preserving the body" which actually contradicts the article. Even if you just read the wikipedia page for the Book of the Dead it states a very similar point - "Mummification served to preserve and transform the physical body into sah, an idealised form with divine aspects".
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u/DontWakeTheInsomniac Jan 03 '23
Ah - I see. Some kind of spiritual metamorphosis?
It's a shame I had to scroll down so far to find such a comment.
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u/WanderingPlant Jan 01 '23
Rudolf Steiner theorized in Egyptian Myths and Mysteries that the act of mummification forced the soul to view and recognize their previous physical representation after dying. This was a novel thing because so often bodies were burned, buried or otherwise destroyed which allowed the soul to travel on the reincarnation path.
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u/Hakaisha89 Jan 01 '23
I mean, I guess.
For all we know, the preservation techniques used might just have been part of some very highly specific burial rites, rather then any actual preservation.
Or it was done with the intent to preserve, since the general technique was basically the same from start to end.
Quit an Occam's razor we got here.
While plausible, there is no evidence, as far as i know, to support it, while there is plenty that supports the preservation theory.
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u/adventurejay Jan 01 '23
What if they knew that at some moment in the distant future human beings would unlock the mystery of reanimating dead cells and literally bring their mummies back to life?!!! That’s probably why they separated the key organs into jars…because aliens maaaaaan.
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u/cj_taney Jan 01 '23
It's an interesting concept. I also wonder why many Roman statues are missing a nose.
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u/MentallyDormant Jan 01 '23
This is kind of a silly article lol. They literally using the term “embalming process”. While I appreciate the take, I believe two things were happening at once. They were very skilled in mummifying. 😒
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u/jackduloz Jan 01 '23
They were turning the bodies into statues?
Sounds a whole lot like preserving the body after death to me.
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u/Organization-Alarmed Jan 01 '23
In physics and history its the same: Its just guessing whats the most probable explanation (for now) without contradicting any previous founds. You gotta keep updating your model of thinking (best example in physics is the atoms model).
I do not see any issue with that, it just means we have enough knowledge for a new update.
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u/MeatballDom Jan 01 '23
A major part of the historical process is proposing new theories.
That doesn't mean the theory is correct.
If you don't like it, explain why, go into detail, provide evidence, make a comment not only worthwhile but also educational to other readers.
"I don't like the headline for reasons" helps no one.