The practice of preserving dead bodies occurred all over the ancient world. Egypt is perhaps best known for its mummies, but the Inca of Peru also perfected a preservation process. Preserved bodies have also been found in such diverse places as peat bogs in Denmark, the Canary Islands, and the Aleutian Islands in Alaska.

Modern mummies have taken center stage in a number of movies as evildoers. For instance, in the 1999 film The Mummy, archeologists stumble into an ancient Egyptian tomb, causing an angry and lovesick mummy to wake up.


The Egyptians dreaded the thought that one day their world might cease to exist. With their belief in the power of magic, they developed a funerary cult which, in their eyes, ensured their survival for ever. This involved preserving the body of the deceased. The embalmers took the body to the Beautiful House, where they worked. They made a cut in the left side of the body with a flint knife and removed the liver and lungs. These were dried out and stored in special vessels called Canopic Jars. The brain was also removed, but the heart was left in the body, so that it could be weighed in the afterlife. Then the body was covered with crystals of a substance called Natron, which stopped it rotting, packed with dry material like leaves or sawdust, and wrapped in linen bandages.


The final stage of the embalming process was to put the body in the coffin. For a rich person, this could be an elaborate container made up of several different, richly decorated layers. The body would then be well preserved and, as far as the Egyptians were concerned would last forever. The reason they did this was that they thought that after a person's physical death a number of elements lived on. The most important was a person's "Ka" which they thought of as the body's double and which could bring the corpse back to life. Another spirit which survived was a person's "Ba", which had the head of the deceased and the body of a hawk. They also thought that a person's shadow had an eternal exsistance as well as their name.