Bodies In Linen example essay topic

Seth Loos li Ancient Egyptian Burial 12 October 2001 Ancient Egyptian Burials profound belief in life after death is why burials in ancient Egypt are so elaborate. There was two different ways to artificially preserve bodies. When the Ancient Egyptians buried their dead they did not want the bodies to be washed away by the floods. They also didn't want to use up valuable farmland for cemeteries. The dead were buried close to the villages in the higher elevated dry deserts that covered the Nile. One-way of preserving a body was the linen and plaster method.

The body would be wrapped in many layers of preservative linen. This would give the body the look of mummies that are in today's movies. The idea of wrapping the bodies in linen was to preserve as much as the body's features as possible. The linen and plaster was used to hold the shape of the face. Another widely used method of preserving bodies has to do with Natron. Natron is a natural salt that is found in Egypt.

The salts would dry out the body parts so rotting would go slow. Salts were used to "pickle" a dead body. The Egyptians experimented with many different ways of mummifying. Only kings and their royal wives were buried in pyramids. Funerals depended on how much money you had. There were many different burials for different people.

The poor, craftsmen and artists, nobles and courtiers, royal family, and the kings had different methods in which they were buried. The poor people didn't have very elaborate funerals. They were just buried in the sand. Given the gifts of a pot, some food and some other small goods is what poor people used to survive in the world after life.

Craftsmen and artists were buried with a little more care but the burials were still not fancy at all. Buried in the fetal position they were basically just thrown in the dirt and mud. The nobles and courtiers were sometimes given the gift of a tomb. The nobles and courtiers were buried in shafts that sometimes were nice. The families of the nobles were sometimes buried with them. Just as poor people wanted to be buried near the rich to share in their offerings, the courtiers and nobles wanted to be near the king in death.

People thought that their chance of an afterlife was better if they were placed near the king they had served. For the royal family was given a cemetery of their own and the wives of kings were sometimes placed in small pyramids, not all queens were buried this way. The King's sons and some queens were buried in a large mastaba. Most kings were buried in pyramids; others chose to be buried in different ways. There are nearly a hundred pyramids in Egypt, some are big and some are small. Soon after death, the body was taken to the wa bet, the 'pure place,' where the embalming actually was carried on.

This appears to have been a tent, away from residential areas, on the edge of the desert. The dry heat of the desert air and the sun pounding down on the linen roof would have speeded the drying process. Drying and wrapping took about seventy days. The formal mourning period may have coincided with the embalming.

During the New Kingdom, the process of mummification began in the Per-Never - the House of Beauty. A profound belief in life after death is why burials in ancient Egypt are so elaborate and organized. Because of the Egyptian funerals our funerals are the way they are today. We do some of the same things but in different ways.

Bibliography

Hobson, Christine. The World of the Pharaohs. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987 Budge, Wallis.
The Mummy. New York: Bell Publishing Company, 1989.