Mummification Recipe
Name______________________#_______
Date __________________ Period ______
Prep. Time: 70 days (that’s more than two months!)
Purpose:
The ancient Egyptians believed that the soul was divided into several
parts, the most important being the ka and the ba. In order for the ka to
live for eternity, it had to have a recognizable body to live in.
• Ba: the part of your soul that represented your individual personality.
This part of the person’s soul spent the day with its family and flew
back to the body at night.
• Ka: the life-force that would spend the day in the afterlife with Osiris
and return to the body at night.
Ingredients
• A corpse (dead body)
• Natron (mixture of salt and baking soda)
• Resin (tree sap, usually frankincense and myrrh)
• Linen strips
• Amulets (good luck charms like scarabs)
• Book of the Dead (instruction manual with spells)
Directions
1. Take the body to the mummification tent (Beautiful House) near the burial site.
2.
Have the priest in charge put on the mask of Anubis (jackal-headed god).
3.
Shove the brain hook up the nose of your corpse and wiggle it around until the
brain is nice and runny (they thought the brain was just for creating mucous/snot).
Turn the body over on its stomach and let the brain run out the nose.
4.
Make a cut on the side of the body and take out the following organs and dry them
in natron:
•
•
•
•
•
Heart
Stomach
Intestines
Liver
Lungs
5.
Once the organs are dried out, put them in the correct canopic jars representing
Horus’ four sons. (If mummified correctly, the body will be magically reunited in
the afterlife.)
Stomach Intestines Liver
Lungs
6.
Now that all of the organs are removed, wash the body with wine (the alcohol will
kill the bacteria) and rub the body with spices.
7.
Cover the body with lots and lots of natron (salt and baking soda) and let it sit for
40 days until it is totally dried out. Put the HEART back in the body for the
Weighing of the Heart Ceremony and place a SCARAB BEETLE amulet over the
heart so that it will come back to life.
8.
Cover the cut in the corpse’s side with a wedjet (Horus’ eye of healing).
9.
Put lots of jewelry on the body.
10. Wrap the body in linen strips placing amulets (good luck charms) on the body as
you wrap it and saying lots of spells from the Book of the Dead.
11. Pour resin (tree sap) over the body to waterproof the mummy.
12. Make the following to look like the person so that the ka can find its way back to
the body.
• Place a picture of the person’s face over the wrapped face.
• Make a wooden coffin that looks like the person and place the body in it.
• Place that coffin inside a stone sarcophagus that looks like the person.
13. Have a funeral procession follow the mummy to the burial site. Instruct the head
priest touch the mummy’s mouth with the magic scepter that will bring the soul
back to its senses and allow it to eat, drink, breathe, and move in the afterlife.