Description
The ancient Egyptians spent seventy days turning a body into a mummy, and thousands of years later Europeans ground those mummies into powder and ate them as medicine. This is how you make one, one problem at a time. The first problem: a body buried in the hot desert sand dries out on its own, but jackals dig it up.
A coffin keeps the jackals out, but away from the sand the body rots. So the embalmers dried it themselves. The brain came out through the nose with a hook and was thrown away. The lungs, liver, stomach and intestines went into four canopic jars, each under one of the Four Sons of Horus. The heart stayed in, to be weighed against the feather of Maat in the afterlife, as the Book of the Dead describes. Then the body lay under natron, a natural salt, for forty days. Dry and shrivelled, it was packed with linen; Ramesses IV even got small onions for eyes. Hot resin, hundreds of metres of linen bandages and amulets between the layers (a scarab, the eye of Horus, a djed pillar), and finally a painted mask, so the soul could find its face.
From the Middle Ages into the 1700s, European apothecaries sold ground mummy as a drug called mumia. Painters bought it too, as a pigment called mummy brown, and one London colour maker sold it until the 1960s.
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