Funerary Beliefs Connected with Mummification
Mummification
symbolizes the fear the ancient Egyptians had of death and answers their
eager desire for immortality. "In no country of the earth is life more
attractive, more desirable (than it was in ancient Egypt)….Little wonder
that the Egyptians conceived a fanatical abhorrence of death, and devoted
no small part of their wealth to devising means of defeating it'' . This fundamental trait of the ancient Egyptians' psychology is quite apparent in the appeals of the dead inscribed on numerous Middle Kingdom funerary stelae, asking the passers-by to utter a prayer, behalf of the deceased, which is as follows: " O ye who live and exist, who like life and hate death, whosoever shall pass by this tomb, as ye love life and hate death so ye offer to me what is in your hands'' (Lange and Schafer 1902, P.3).
Fig 2: (Cairo Museum Guide
no. 219)
The third and innermost gold coffin of Tutankhamon
With an attitude such as this, the ancient Egyptians were ready to accept any explanati
ons, no matter how contradictory, and to resort to any practices, no matter how peculiar, so long as they might be allowed to cherish their ideal tranquility (Davies and Gardiner1915.Their imagination, accordingly, led they to believe that death does not necessarily terminate life, but that it merely means the dissociation of human life, where the spirit (incorporeal principle) abandon the body (Drioton, 1945) as can be concluded from the Pyramid Text: "The spirit is for the Heavens, (but) the corpse is for the earth.'' One's incorporeal principle was believed to include his immortal spiritual forces which are composed of the Ka, the ba, and the akh.
The ka, now generally believed to represent the ensemble of a person's qualities
or characteristics, was most probably consider a kind of protective genius
which is born with the child, remains with him as his double during his
life to protect him, and after death resides in the tomb and neighborhood.
The ba, or animating force, corresponds in some respects to what we call
the soul. It is most probably the soul which takes a place in the bark of
the sun, traveling in it around the underworld until, at the moment when
the eastern horizon had been cleared at daybreak, it would leave the bark
to return to the tomb to visit the mummy (Drioton. in Engelbach, 1961).
That is why the ba, represented as a bird with a human head, is generally
figured over the mummy visiting it. The akh is a divine or supernatural power which the person attained only after death. For the sake of convenience, we may refer to the individually or collectively as the ' soul'' or the "spirit".
If this analysis is correct, it follows that the soul—the ka and the ba (during day journey)—continued to live in the neighborhood of the body. ''Since, however, the matter-of-fact mind of the Egyptian could not, or did not like to, think of disembodied ghost, it was felt that the spirit still required a visible and tangible form in which to dwell.
This form was preferably the body itself (Hayes 1953). The soul depended
on the body and was fed by what the living brought and offered it. This
idea inspired most of the practices of the cult of the dead in Egypt
since the earliest times. It is the basis for the care which was taken
to protect the corpse the deceased from disintegration brought on by
natural decay. Hence, the ancient Egyptians developed the process of
mummification to keep the body in a good state and to preserve its physical
features so that the soul might identify it, for the destruction of
the body would have meant also the decay of the soul. To protect the
mummy it was encased in a series of coffins enclosed in a huge stone
sarcophagus and buried in a tomb surrounded by its furniture and provisions.
Thus, in the case of Tutankhamon. the mummy was encased in a gold coffin
(fig. 2) which was enclosed in two other coffins and a huge quartzite
sarcophagus which was in turn enclosed in four gilt shrines placed one
within the other.
The first, outermost coffin of Tutankhamon,
of heavy wood overlaid with gold upon gesso, kept in the quartzite sarcophagus
in the tomb of Tutankhamon, valley of the Kings, Thebes.
The tomb was furnished with a cult chapel, in which the soul, having
access to the "false door'' (fig. 5), could enjoy the fresh offerings
brought to it.
Fig 5 (Cairo Museum, Saqqara, no. 13947) False door
The care of the Egyptians for satisfying
the needs of the soul inspired them also to create small pleasure gardens
in the vicinity of the tombs of the New Kingdom (Drioton, in Engelbach
1961). In honor of the divine father Neferhotep, the harpist sang ''the
walls of the tomb are strongly built, thou hast planted trees round
thy pool. Thy ba-soul rests beneath them and drinks of their water".
Development and History
In the predynastic period (5000-3200 B.C.), the dead body was simply
loosely wrapped in linen, animal skin, or matting, and was buried in
a more or less tightly contracted position in a shallow grave in sand
(Reisner 1908). Although most of the bodies found in these decomposed
completely, leaving only the skeletons, some of them, such as those
discovered near Gebelein and in Nubia were found rather well preserved
(Reisner 1910).