Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 6, 2025
In the Middle Empire, which is the period under discussion, the process of mummification had reached a middle stage, and, while we are unable to explain exactly the causal relationship, it is clear that this advance in the treatment of the body accompanied a spread of the belief in the Osirian immortality. The Hyksos, Asiatic invaders, had held Egypt for a century or more.
Multitudes are buried in the river, the stream is a tomb, and the place of mummification is a canal. The gentle folk weep, the simple folk are glad, and the people of every town say, 'Come, let us blot out these who have power and possessions among us. Men resemble the mud-birds, filth is everywhere, and every one is clad in dirty garments. The land spinneth round like the wheel of the potter.
The value of master words was so firmly fixed in the Egyptian mind that misunderstood texts of all sorts were copied out and placed in the graves to secure to the dead some vague benefit in the other world. The process of mummification was at its height. The bodies were no longer preserved. The process was merely the creation of a simulacrum of the dead Osiris So-and-So.
Later, however, his experience taught him that the best mummified body was sometimes destroyed, either by damp, or dry rot, or decay in one form or another, and that mummification alone was not sufficient to ensure resurrection or the attainment of the future life; and, in brief, he discovered that by no human means could that which is corruptible by nature be made to become incorruptible, for the very animals in which the gods themselves were incarnate became sick and died in their appointed season.
I wonder what the old Egyptians put into the heads of their mummies to make them so heavy." "Bitumen," answered Godfrey, and proceeded in a cheerful voice to give an account of the Egyptian process of mummification to his tutor, which Isobel and he had acquired in the course of their miscellaneous reading at Monk's Acre.
Possibly at the time the Indians of America sought to preserve their dead from decomposition some such ideas may have animated them, but on this point no definite information has been procured. In the final volume an effort will be made to trace out the origin of mummification among the Indians and aborigines of this continent.
And yet the old feeling was never lost that the dead was somehow in the grave and might suffer hunger and thirst. When Christianity came into Egypt, all the gaudy apparatus of the Osiris religion was swept out of existence. The body was to rise again and might not be mutilated. Mummification, which destroyed the body in order to preserve a conventional simulacrum, ceased abruptly.
Near by was the interesting necropolis already mentioned, in which was discovered evidence of the continuance of the cramped position of burial and of the absence of mummification among a certain section of the population even as late as the time of the IVth Dynasty.
And more even than ever do I find it little, aged, with wornout blood and worn-out sap; I feel more fully its antediluvian antiquity, its centuries of mummification, which will soon degenerate into hopeless and grotesque buffoonery, as it comes into contact with Western novelties.
And more even than ever, do I find it little, aged, with worn-out blood and worn-out sap; I feel more fully its antediluvian antiquity, its centuries of mummification, which will soon degenerate into hopeless and grotesque buffoonery, as it comes into contact with Western novelties.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking