Have you ever tried mummifying anyone? It’s quite
tricky. First you have to take out all the major organs and put them
in special canopic jars, watched by the sons of Horus. The lungs go in
one, to be guarded by Hapy, with a head like a baboon; the stomach
goes in the next, to be guarded by Duamutef with a head like a jackal,
and so on. The brain wasn’t important to the Egyptians, so they poked
a wire in through the spongy bone at the back of the nose, stirred the
brain around to loosen it up, and poured it out through the nose. Then
they filled the body with salt, and wrapped it in bandages. I got to
be a mummifier for this week’s episode, although unfortunately my
victim was still alive.
We still regard the ancient Egyptians with awe,
because of their enormous pyramids and the amazing treasures in the
tombs, especially of Tutunkhamen. But were they really so remarkable?
Well, yes they were. they did a great job of carving out a successful
civilization in the desert, with only the Nile for water. They were
fine surveyors, and aligned the pyramids exactly north-south and
east-west, which must have needed good astronomy and neat practical
mathematics.
They made wonderful boats out of planks of wood
tied together with string – no nails or bolts; beside the great
pyramid at Giza they buried two massive boats – presumably to carry
the pharaoh Khufu to the afterlife. Each was 43 metres long, and
buried as 1224 pieces in flatpack form – quite a challenge for a
mummy. And the process of mummification was remarkable; they preserved
for the afterlife not only their kings, but also their pet cats and
dogs, and they have survived in good nick for 3000 years.
What is more, the Egyptians developed a new
writing material – papyrus – from the stems of reeds on the banks of
the Nile, and wrote everything down. The Chinese invented paper much
later, around 100 BC, and the Sumerians may have beaten the Egyptians
to writing, with their curious cuneiform script of tablets of clay,
but the Egyptian system of hieroglyphs on papyrus is not only
immensely attractive but immensely informative about their culture.
There are medical and mathematical papyri, and one notorious one that
tells us all about the sexual fantasies of the pharaohs, something to
do with fishnet tights… but that’s another story.
