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Here’s the 4,000-year-old formula in four grisly steps:

Step 1: A priest poked a special hook up the dearly departed’s nose to yank out the brains (which were considered useless).

Step 2: The liver, stomach, intestines, and lungs were all removed, cleaned, preserved, and sealed in special “canopic jars” carved to look like the gods who guard these organs. The heart – considered crucial equipment for the perilous journey through the underworld – was kept in place.

Step 3: Priests packed the body inside and out with a special salt to sop up the moisture. After the body dried for 40 days, it was stuffed with rags and plants so it didn’t look like a deflated balloon.

Step 4: Priests rubbed the corpse’s skin with oils and resins to soften it. Layers of linen, treated with the same oils, were wrapped around the mummy, giving it the famous bandaged look seen in movies. Finally, the priests tucked amulets into the wrappings and uttered spells to activate their protective powers.

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King Tutankhamun, aka King Tut, wasn’t the first boy king to rule ancient Egypt, but he is the most famous, thanks to the discovery of his tomb and its trove of treasures in 1922. The most valuable artifact was Tut’s mummy, nested inside the many coffins and boxlike shrines to protect his spirit for eternity. Unfortunately, Egyptologists a century ago weren’t as gentle with mummies as they are today. They cut Tut into pieces to pry his body from the sticky sacred oils that coated the inside of his coffin. Such rough handling inflicted injuries on the 3,300-year-old mummy that made it tough to tell what caused Tut’s demise.

Some suspected he was murdered. But modern technologies like 3-D scanning revealed that the all-powerful king was actually in poor health. He suffered from a bone disease that made walking a chore. Bouts of malaria left him shaky and weak. None of the tests pointed to foul play as the cause of Tut’s death. Instead, the likely culprit is a broken leg revealed by x-rays. Perhaps the frail pharaoh tumbled from one of the chariots found in his tomb. With his immune system already weakened by malaria, Tut could have easily died from an infection in the busted bone.

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Tomb walls in ancient Egypt were inscribed with spells to frighten away grave robbers. “To all who enter to make evil against this tomb,” read one inscription, “may the crocodile be against them on water and the snakes and scorpions be against them on land.” Indeed, tragedy tracked the discovery of King Tut’s grave by archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922. When the sponsor of the Tut expedition, Lord Carnarvon, died less than a year after the tomb was opened, reporters pounced on the idea that he’d fallen victim to a mummy’s curse. It wasn’t crocs or scorpions that did in Lord Carnarvon, however. He died from an infected mosquito bite. Despite the threat of curses (along with confusing dead-end corridors and decoy treasure rooms), most royal tombs were raided and robbed in ancient times – sometimes by the very workers who built them and knew their layouts.

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Archaeologists combing Egypt have excavated an entire zoo’s worth of preserved animals: cats, dogs, donkeys, lions, rams, and shrews. Ancient Egyptians made these mummies for many reasons. Beloved pets were embalmed and entombed with their owners so that they might reunite in the afterlife. Sometimes, only the meat was mummified, to serve as an eternal jerky snack. Crocodiles, ibises, and other animals linked to specific gods were mummified by the millions. Although some mummies ended up in museums, the majority of human and animal mummies were burned as torches, used as fertilizer, or even ground up for medicine!

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To the people of ancient Egypt, death was only the beginning. Egyptians kings (called pharaohs) were thought to become gods when they passed away. Ordinary Egyptians believed they would spend eternity with their ancestors in a perfect version of Egypt. But gaining entry into the afterlife wasn’t as easy as tumbling off a pyramid. The Egyptians believed the spirits of their dearly departed wouldn’t have a happy afterlife without access to their former bodies, so priests perfected the process of mummification to keep corpses from rotting away.

Since their rediscovery, in the 19th century, we have learned a great deal about the ancient Egyptians and the reasons they left mummies behind. It is commonly said that the Egyptians mummified their dead to preserve the body for the afterlife, but this is an oversimplification of a very complicated process and a corresponding set of beliefs. The practice of embalming, anointing, wrapping and reciting spells for the dead reflects the sophisticated way in which the Egyptians viewed life, death, and the underworld.

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Before the invention of pulleys or iron tools, Egyptian work crews relied on strong muscles and even stronger ropes. The blocks were quarried on-site or shipped down the Nile River from across the kingdom. Gangs of workers loaded the blocks on wooden sledges and hauled them across sand moistened with water, which made the sledges slide more easily. The blocks were then hauled up long mud ramps at the rate of one block every two minutes. No one knows how laborers were able to get the 2.5-ton stone blocks from the quarries to the building site. Wheels wouldn’t have been useful on the desert sand and gravel, so they most likely dragged the blocks with wooden sleds and ropes. Some think that workers used quarter-circle wooden sleds that fit around a rectangular block. They attached the sleds to the block, and a crew of about eight men rolled them along the ground, much like rolling a keg of beer. Others say the laborers used wooden rollers.

Picture Credit : Google