Mummification and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt
The ancient Egyptians believed that the soul survived death, but only if the body was preserved. This belief gave rise to the practice of mummification, the most distinctive and most-studied funerary tradition of the ancient world. For nearly three thousand years, the Egyptians developed increasingly sophisticated techniques to preserve the bodies of the dead. The mummies of the pharaohs and the great nobles of Egypt have given us an extraordinary record of ancient disease, diet, lifestyle, and even family relationships. The Egyptian religion of the afterlife, the magical spells of the Book of the Dead, and the great funerary architecture of the pyramids and the tombs of the Valley of the Kings are all expressions of this single, central conviction: that life did not end at death, but only changed form.
This cluster page explains how mummification was done, what the Egyptians believed about the afterlife, and what the surviving mummies tell us about the ancient world. It links out to the Book of the Dead, the Egyptian Pharaohs cluster, and the Pyramids of Giza cluster.
The Egyptian Afterlife
The Egyptians believed that each person was composed of several distinct elements. The ka was the life force, the spiritual double that lived on after death. The ba was the personality, often represented as a human-headed bird that could leave the tomb and travel the world. The akh was the transfigured spirit, the union of ka and ba in the afterlife. The ib was the heart, the seat of emotion and morality. The ren was the name, given at birth and needed for survival in the afterlife. The shut was the shadow.
The survival of these elements depended on the survival of the body. The Egyptians believed that the ka had to recognize the body and return to it each night, and the ba had to be able to enter and leave the body. If the body decayed, the soul would be condemned to wander the earth in misery, or to be destroyed altogether.
The most important test of the dead soul was the Weighing of the Heart ceremony. The heart of the deceased was placed on a scale, balanced against the feather of Ma’at, the goddess of truth and cosmic order. If the heart was lighter than the feather, the soul was judged worthy and could pass into the Field of Reeds, the Egyptian paradise. If it was heavier — weighed down by the sins of the deceased — it was devoured by Ammit, the “Devourer of the Dead,” a hybrid monster with the head of a crocodile, the forebody of a lion, and the hindquarters of a hippopotamus.
The Mummification Process
The earliest Egyptian burials were simple: the body was laid in a pit in the hot sand, desiccated by the heat, and naturally preserved. The earliest experiments with artificial mummification date to the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2600 BCE), and the technique was refined over the next two and a half thousand years.
The classical mummification process, as described by the Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century BCE, involved about seventy days. The body was first washed in palm wine. Then a cut was made in the left flank, and the internal organs — the stomach, liver, lungs, and intestines — were removed. (The heart was left in place; the brain was discarded, as the Egyptians did not understand its function and did not consider it important.) The organs were separately preserved, sometimes in canopic jars, sometimes (in the New Kingdom) replaced inside the body cavity after being dried in natron.
The body was then covered in natron, a naturally occurring mixture of sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate found in the Wadi El Natrun in the Egyptian Western Desert. The natron dried the body out completely, killing bacteria and preventing decomposition. After about forty days in the natron, the body was washed, packed with sawdust or resin-soaked linen, and wrapped in long strips of linen, with amulets inserted between the layers to protect the deceased.
The wrapped mummy was then placed in a coffin, often nested inside a series of nested coffins, and the coffin was placed in a stone sarcophagus, which was then placed in the tomb. The mummy was surrounded by the ushabti figurines (small servant statues who would work in the afterlife on behalf of the deceased), the canopic jars, the funerary furniture, and the magical texts of the Book of the Dead.
You can read the full step-by-step process in the long-tail guide on the subject.
The Book of the Dead
The Book of the Dead is a collection of about 200 spells, prayers, and magical texts that the Egyptians used to guide the deceased through the dangers of the afterlife. The spells were written on papyrus scrolls and placed in the tomb with the body. The most famous spell is the “Negative Confession,” in which the deceased declares to the gods that they have not committed a list of about forty-two specific sins.
The Book of the Dead is not a single book but a collection of spells that were selected and arranged for each individual mummy. The earliest examples date to the New Kingdom (c. 1550 BCE), but the tradition probably goes back much further. The most famous surviving copy is the Papyrus of Ani, now in the British Museum.
The Great Tombs
The Egyptians built their tombs to last forever. The pyramids of the Old Kingdom, the rock-cut tombs of the Middle Kingdom, and the tombs of the Valley of the Kings of the New Kingdom were all expressions of the same conviction. The pharaohs of the New Kingdom were buried in deep, complicated tombs in the Valley of the Kings across the Nile from Thebes. The most famous tomb, that of Tutankhamun, was discovered almost intact by Howard Carter in 1922. The royal mummies, however, were often moved from their original tombs to hidden caches in antiquity, partly to protect them from tomb robbers.
The nobles and priests of Egypt were buried in smaller, often beautifully decorated tombs in the Theban necropolis. The most famous is the tomb of Nefertari, the wife of Ramesses II, whose wall paintings are among the most beautiful surviving works of Egyptian art.
The Scientific Study of Mummies
The study of mummies has been one of the great success stories of modern archaeology and medicine. Mummies have been unwrapped (often in front of audiences in the nineteenth century), X-rayed, CT-scanned, DNA-tested, and examined for the parasites, bacteria, and viruses that afflicted the ancient Egyptians. The mummy of Tutankhamun, the mummy of Ramesses II, the mummies of the New Kingdom pharaohs, and the mummies of hundreds of ordinary Egyptians have given us a uniquely detailed picture of the health, diet, and lifestyle of the ancient world.
Mummies have also been used to study ancient DNA. The 2010s saw the first major ancient DNA studies of Egyptian mummies, which revealed the complex genetic heritage of the Egyptian people and shed light on the long-debated question of how much continuity there was between ancient and modern Egypt.
The Legacy of Mummification
The Egyptian practice of mummification profoundly shaped the way later cultures thought about death. The Greek historians Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus both described the process in detail. The Romans adopted Egyptian funerary practices for some of their own dead. The early Christian church condemned mummification, but Egyptian mummies became one of the great curiosities of the medieval and early modern world, used as pigments (mummy brown), as medicine, and as exhibits in the great museums of Europe. The modern world’s fascination with mummies is, in some sense, a continuation of this long tradition.