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00:00This is the burial chamber of King Una.
00:29And there is where Una would have been resting.
00:41So this is his sarcophagus.
00:44But this has something remarkable.
00:49There you can just make out the outlines of a king who is spearing or harpooning perhaps a hippopotamus.
00:57I mean over here this is just totally the visible and invisible worlds combining.
01:06So it is a wonderful way to think of how the ancient Egyptians manipulated and maneuvered the two worlds.
01:15Of the living, the dead, humans, gods, what is seen and what is not seen.
01:22Gateways between the world of the living and the realm of the dead.
01:33The Egyptian pyramids and necropolises have withstood the test of time.
01:37For 3,000 years these tombs have sheltered the exceptionally well-preserved bodies of the dead we know as mummies.
01:46Mummies don't represent death. They represent life.
01:51It was the form of metamorphosis between this world and the next.
01:58For thousands of years the Egyptians skillfully embalmed the dead.
02:02Using ancestral rites whose secrets researchers are about to unveil.
02:06In laboratories and clinics scientists are teaming up to shed some light on the exceptional skills of embalmers.
02:22As well as on the past of these bodies preserved in eternity.
02:25You can clearly see the vertebrae. They're crippled with arthritis. Looks painful.
02:34New findings are challenging what we thought we knew about mummies.
02:41For the ancient Egyptians death was a very important event.
02:44But it was not the end. It was in fact a beginning.
02:55Let us embark on an immersive and unprecedented quest to discover the secrets of mummification in ancient Egypt.
03:08And a legendary people in pursuit of immortality.
03:25One of the reasons why the Egyptian civilization is so fascinating is that it holds the key to the most well-kept mystery.
03:39Here, in the necropolis of Saqqara, lies the secret of immortality.
03:47Built on the west bank of the Nile, on the edge of the desert,
03:50this site devoted to death was continuously active for 3,000 years.
03:59Having survived through the ages, it now provides a comprehensive overview of funerary rites.
04:05In the Old Kingdom, Saqqara was a royal cemetery in which Egypt's oldest monument can be found.
04:12The Step Pyramid of Pharaoh Jozer.
04:14In the depths of the pyramids, tombs sheltered the embalmed bodies of kings.
04:24But was mummification a privilege exclusive to the pharaohs?
04:33In 2019, the discovery of a funerary complex shook up Egyptologists' knowledge of funerary rites in the Old Kingdom.
04:41Professor Mohammed Megahed was in charge of the excavation.
04:48The unearthed tomb dates back to the Old Kingdom.
04:54Mohammed and his team first searched the funerary chapel.
05:00This part of the tomb served as a place of worship for the family of the deceased.
05:05This is what we call the living part of the tomb.
05:12This part of the tomb was completely open or accessible for the tomb owner family, friends, who can come every day, every week, but especially during special feasts in ancient Egypt.
05:23They come to remember the tomb owner, because this is his biggest wish, to be remembered.
05:30The chapel was closed by a door, and it was guarded by maybe one guard or two, perhaps two.
05:36Because we can see here, the Senate game.
05:40The Senate game is played by two guards.
05:42And what to do during a long night?
05:45You play a Senate game.
05:47This is the first room we found in the tomb of Khoui.
05:51I think we found this after one week of the excavation.
05:54So we came across here, and at that moment we knew that we are excavating one of the most important and beautiful tombs in the Old Kingdom.
06:04And the surprise was still waiting for us inside.
06:06This is the main part of the offering chapel.
06:27In fact, every important offering was coming here, to be placed on this offering table, the altar of the tomb.
06:37And the surprise was waiting underneath this offering table.
06:42We found a hole underneath this offering table.
06:45We had this idea to send one of our workers.
06:49We tied him in a rope.
06:50We sent him, I gave him my phone, and I told him, measure for us and film for us what you see.
07:02It was amazing.
07:03It was amazing.
07:04It was amazing.
07:05It was amazing.
07:06It was amazing.
07:12Below the rubble, 4,000-year-old paintings appeared in an exceptional state of preservation.
07:23This tomb is a treasure trove of funerary art.
07:25It isn't home to a pharaoh, but to a wealthy dignitary named Khoui.
07:39What they were about to find in the tomb would come as a great surprise.
07:51Inside the tomb of Khoui, we found remains of his mummy.
07:54We didn't find the complete mummy, but we found the remains of a mummy.
07:58And at that time, it was very important for us to document it very well and to preserve it,
08:04because we have very limited information about mummification in the Old Kingdom.
08:12The tomb was pillaged during the Middle Ages, leaving only a few broken artifacts and fragments of the owner's body.
08:19Over the last few years, archaeologists have been painstakingly working in the storerooms.
08:37Every last relic found in the various tomb is meticulously studied.
08:40The bones are systematically photogrammed.
08:47And every object is drawn with great precision, right down to the smallest amulet.
08:53The exceptional state of preservation of the human remains is raising questions among Egyptologists.
08:59At a time when it was assumed that only pharaohs were mummified,
09:03is it possible that this man could have been granted such honors?
09:10To clarify the issue, they turned to the leading expert on Egyptian mummies, Salima Ikram.
09:20She is the only person who can provide them with the answers.
09:29Hello.
09:31Salima, nice to see you.
09:33Lovely to see you.
09:35You brought some today.
09:36Hello.
09:37Hi sweetie.
09:38Thanks for coming.
09:39Thank you very much.
09:40Everything is fine.
09:41We have interesting things to show you.
09:42Excellent.
09:43Yes.
09:48Used to working on whole mummies, Salima will have to make do with analyzing what the looters left behind.
09:54To avoid damaging Kui's remains any further, she will x-ray the various elements on the spot.
10:15Hello.
10:16The reason we do archaeology is because we're interested in the past, but not in a general way.
10:26We're interested in the individuals who made up the past.
10:29So, for us, who work with human remains, it's like meeting people.
10:35And, you know, sometimes our conversations are a bit one-sided.
10:38But their bones and their bodies still tell us things.
10:43And so, this is a way of communication between the past and the present.
10:51The Egyptologists are going to x-ray the various parts of the mummies using a portable x-ray machine.
10:56To protect herself from exposure to radiation, Salima Ikram wears a lead apron.
11:16While this method is non-invasive for the object under study, it remains so for the researchers.
11:26So, we're going to look at the next step.
11:28Oh, Zainab.
11:31Ahmed.
11:36Everything's fused, everything's in good shape.
11:38There are no problems with his leg.
11:41We can see a nice amount of the resin and linen, which you can also see from here.
11:47It's sad that he's so incomplete, because the robbers broke him apart.
11:51But the sections that are well-preserved are fantastic.
11:56Because with his leg, you can see how he was wrapped.
11:58And you can see that it was modeled.
12:00So that, actually, that the embalmers were trying to give him the shape of the body.
12:04And they even tried to put in the muscles.
12:06Which means that the people who did this work actually knew what they were doing.
12:11And knew what a body looked like inside and out.
12:14So that is really extraordinary with this one.
12:16The sophisticated way in which the cloth strips were applied is quite outstanding for this time period.
12:24Until then, such quality was only found in tombs dating back to the New Kingdom some 1,000 years later.
12:31For us, who look at mummies, this was amazing because we don't have any other confirmed Old Kingdom mummies.
12:37And this has been carbon-14 dated as well, so it's not just the pottery, the position, the grave goods.
12:44But it is also C-14 that puts it into the Old Kingdom.
12:48I mean, it's like completely changes our view.
12:51Thanks to the people in this room.
12:53Thanks to the people, the person in this room.
12:55Everybody, everybody alive or dead?
12:57Alive or dead. This is it.
12:59This one is here. This one is there.
13:04This is the represent.
13:06Unearthing the remains of this mummy in such great condition, without it being of royal descent,
13:12redefines the history of embalming in ancient Egypt.
13:16Mummies have been known since the Old Kingdom.
13:19But the quality of this mummy's wrappings proves that mummification wasn't just a royal privilege.
13:24Following Salima's departure, Hannah V. Mazalova and Mohamed Megahed studied the linen strips found within the mummy's remains in detail.
13:33So, I prepared some of the textile pieces that were found in the chamber.
13:39And you see the different quality of the linen.
13:45This one is rather transparent.
13:48And it's very different from this.
13:52And it was a bandage.
14:01And some of them are very, very fine.
14:05Look at this.
14:07It's extremely fine clothes.
14:09So transparent that you're even afraid to hold it in your hand.
14:12We have a large quantity of textile from Huy's burial chamber.
14:18And this is not very usual in the Old Kingdom.
14:21We have plenty of textiles from later periods of Egyptian history.
14:25But the quantity of Huy's textiles and the variety of the textile itself, it's amazing.
14:33This, for instance, is much rougher.
14:36I think we might have intrusive textiles.
14:41But the majority of the textiles from the tomb, it's definitely from the mummy.
14:45The nice thing about this find is the variety of the style of the linen.
14:49So we don't have one type.
14:51We have different types.
14:53And especially those transparent ones, they are very hard to be made.
14:57It shows the status of Huy's himself.
15:02So he had access to material, to expensive material.
15:06It was expensive to obtain some textile like this.
15:10So it means he had access to royal workshop.
15:14And those textile either could be given to him as a gift from the king,
15:19or he was wealthy enough to obtain them from his own resources.
15:27For archaeologists, this discovery is edifying.
15:30It proves that even in the Old Kingdom,
15:32the application of certain ointments was a perfectly mastered art.
15:37It also shows that this process was more widespread than initially thought,
15:41not just reserved for kings after all.
15:46To find such a piece of information about mummification in the Old Kingdom,
15:50it's very important, it's very huge for us.
15:52Because now we can say that normal people like Huy, he was not royal, he was not a king,
15:58but normal people like Huy, they were having or they had access to better mummification.
16:05And I can say this is a clue for us.
16:09The examination of this mummy raises a major question in the history of ancient Egypt.
16:13How did the process of mummification come about?
16:28The first mummies found in Egypt date back to prehistoric times, known as the pre-dynastic period.
16:34They were not laid to rest inside tombs, but in the sand directly in the desert.
16:38They were not yet embalmed, they naturally dried out.
16:43The first examples of natural mummification can be found in Egypt,
16:49in various pre-dynastic archaeological sites dating from 5000 to 3000 BC.
16:55At that time, Egypt was not united under a single pharaoh.
17:00There were different kingdoms, different cities ruling.
17:02Each city had its own necropolis, and at that time mummification took place naturally after the bodies were buried.
17:11The British Museum in London has one of these natural mummies on display.
17:17Found in the Egyptian desert during the 19th century, the Gebeline man remains in an exceptional state of preservation to this day,
17:30despite being over 5000 years old.
17:33The salinity and dryness of the desert enabled his corpse to be preserved in one piece.
17:39Natural mummification might have inspired the Egyptians' desire to render bodies immortal.
17:49A dream expressed in an epic myth as far back as the Old Kingdom,
17:54and embodied by a divine couple, Isis and Osiris.
17:57The god Osiris and his goddess Isis, brother and sister, husband and wife, ruled over Egypt.
18:11Osiris tragically perished at the hand of their brother Seth,
18:17consumed by jealousy, who hurled the pieces of his body all over Egypt.
18:21Isis and her sister Nephthys traveled around the country to recover all the parts of his body,
18:31which they handed over to Anubis, the god of embalmers.
18:35He proceeded to mummify him.
18:40Once his body was whole again, Osiris was reborn for eternity.
18:48For the ancient Egyptians, part of death was also the mummification process.
18:58Because with mummification you transform yourself from a human being into a divine being,
19:04like a god who can live forever.
19:06So mummification was key for them because it was the form of metamorphosis between this world and the next.
19:13From the Old Kingdom onwards, pharaohs and dignitaries started to be buried in tombs.
19:23While pharaohs were laid to rest in pyramids, high-ranking dignitaries sought to get closer to them,
19:30by building rectangular structures called mastabas.
19:32But they were faced with a major obstacle.
19:37Inside the tombs, exposed to humidity and isolated from the sand, the bodies would decompose.
19:43How did it occur to Egyptians to think of a system that would prevent the process of putrefaction from happening,
19:52and thus stop the body from decaying?
19:57They most likely had observed bodies, which at the time had simply been buried in the sand and naturally preserved.
20:05The desert sand acts like silica gel. It just takes out the moisture and leaves the body.
20:16And then when they realize that if you separate the body from the sand, you have to come up with a technique to make you into a mummy.
20:25Over time, following in the steps of the god Osiris, Egyptian pharaohs and dignitaries developed embalming techniques designed to render the body of the deceased immortal.
20:383,000 years later, at the Museum of Besançon in France, the success of this mysterious process has enabled science to study bodies in pristine condition.
20:55Today, a mummy from the very end of the New Kingdom is about to reveal its most well-kept secrets.
21:08This is a very tricky endeavor, because we're trying to move a 3,000-year-old artifact.
21:19But it's more than that. In the end, we're moving a human body.
21:28There are ethical considerations in play. These are all extremely fragile objects, so we take a lot of precautions in moving around the room.
21:35There's a lot of tension, as we anticipate each step before we take the next one, to avoid damaging the sarcophagus or the mummy.
21:48This mummy is estimated to be a 60-year-old man. It is thought to weigh 50 kilos, which seems heavy.
21:55But that's because it is mounted on a wooden base, which makes it heavier.
21:58Other reasons for its weight are that the mummy is embalmed, so it is wrapped in several layers of linen cloth, not to mention several objects have been added to the sarcophagus.
22:09So there are additional strips of cloth inside the body, and a few items seem to have been added as well.
22:15All these elements explain the unusually heavy weight of this mummy in particular.
22:19The mummy is called Saruman. He was one of the priests who worshipped the god Amon.
22:30This piece is in our way, but there's no other place for it.
22:38The mummy will be taken to a clinic in Lyon for a CT scan.
22:41We are assessing its general condition. Some strips of cloth have been torn, especially around the foot.
22:54There's a big gap in the bandage around that part.
22:57We check on the sanitary status of Saruman every time we open or close the crate to make sure nothing is coming loose.
23:04Saruman underwent his first scan in 2007.
23:14This time, he will be exposed to much more powerful rays, a world first in mummy radiology.
23:20We are quite lucky today because we have been given the opportunity to study one of the most beautiful mummies I have seen in 17 years.
23:34It is the first mummy I have looked at under the scanner.
23:38I have worked on several projects and about 50 mummies since then,
23:42but I find this one to be the most exceptional mummy I have come across during my modest career.
23:46Today, we are going to examine Saruman once more through a specific scanner which isn't widely used at the moment.
23:55Still, it is a research device which could very well become the standard as far as laboratory equipment goes in the years to come.
24:07This CT scan is now equipped with new sensors called photon counting detectors.
24:12These detectors transform and improve the performance of conventional scanners by improving spatial resolution.
24:19In other words, the ability to observe finer details.
24:22They also improve contrast resolution which allows us to better detect lesions, organs and the overall anatomy of bodies.
24:30Modern techniques are leading us to new exciting and fascinating interpretations at the crossroads of medicine and Egyptology.
24:39We are able to make the mummies talk, so to speak, much more than ever before, which supplies us with a lot of new information.
24:54We are basically slicing up the body from head to toe through the scanner without touching it.
24:58The sharpness of these images is impressive. You can clearly see the vertebrae, some of which have merged together.
25:07Others show signs of cervical osteoarthritis. These are crippled with arthritis, looks painful.
25:15You can also see the teeth with a large cavity right here. He also had a small abscess at the root of his teeth.
25:20It's a real game changer in terms of visualizing details, as well as contrast.
25:27Right. Looking at this part, it's almost as if he could touch each strip.
25:33At the base of his neck, it looks like they put a cushion to fill in the gap in the back.
25:39Something else caught my attention around this part.
25:42There are tunnels. There are wormholes.
25:47Exactly. There are bugs in there. There is one right here.
25:52On the surface of the mummy, we can see small specks where insects have dug galleries to feed on the remains of Ceramon and his strips.
26:03In the case of Ceramon, he was found in what looked like a mass grave of a dozen people spread over three generations after him.
26:14So his tomb may have been opened several times, which must have led to secondary infestations.
26:20That's it.
26:22Right. Very interesting.
26:23Here's something noteworthy in terms of the mummification and embalmment process.
26:31See this very dense part of the face right here?
26:35I think it used to be some sort of liquid resin.
26:38It fills in the whole anatomy of the mouth.
26:41The resin was used to plump up the cheeks, to make the face seem fuller and not too flat.
26:48They wanted it to look round.
26:49It's obvious they wanted to give a normal appearance to his face by restoring volume and using any appropriate material to fill in the empty spaces.
27:02One of the reasons Ceramon's body has survived through the centuries is precisely thanks to the long and skillful embalming process.
27:11But what do we truly know about these ancestral rites?
27:19What do we know about these ancient rites?
27:20What do we know about these ancient rites?
27:21What do we know about these ancient rites?
27:22What do we know about these ancient rites?
27:27Whenever someone died, a masked priest would come to fetch the deceased.
27:34He thereby symbolically placed himself under the protection of Anubis, the jackal-headed god of embalming.
27:40This marked the beginning of a 70-day treatment, a race against time to preserve the integrity of the body.
27:50All according to a precise protocol, widely documented by historians from that period.
27:58The first step was to eviscerate the body.
28:01I think the Egyptians were quite an empirical people.
28:06So for the first stage of the process, they thought,
28:09what do we do whenever we need to preserve gay meat?
28:13We empty the animals.
28:15Then we salt them.
28:17Well, when it came to human bodies, with all due respect to them, they basically did the same thing.
28:22The deceased was placed on an embalming table, so that the officiants could make an incision in the left flank.
28:38Then they would remove the vital organs by hand, such as the lungs, liver, stomach and intestines, which they cleaned and isolated for separate treatment.
28:50The whole body was to be preserved, with the exception of the brain.
28:59Once the intestines had been taken out, they removed the brain.
29:02These gestures probably weren't very pleasant.
29:07They would break the ethmoid bone, which is the partition separating the nose from the brain, if you will.
29:14They would use a hook to reach the skull and start reducing the brain to mush as to dispose of it, extracting it through the same opening.
29:20The brain was thrown out. Although the Egyptians were good doctors, they didn't realize that the brain had many vital functions, which they attributed to the heart.
29:30They thought the heart was responsible for thought, intellect and emotion.
29:35So it was absolutely crucial that the heart remained attached to the mummy.
29:42Once eviscerated, the body was cleaned with palm wine and other plant-based substances still unknown.
29:50The body then had to be desiccated. This was the longest phase in the embalming process.
30:02Experimental archaeology is used as a tool to better understand each step of the process as a complement to written sources.
30:12Whenever Salima Ikram isn't in the field, she teaches at the American University in Cairo,
30:17where she regularly performs experiments in relation to the mummification process.
30:27Today, she chose a fish as a test subject.
30:30The basic idea of mummification, which is desiccation to preserve the appearance of the body, is the same for humans and animals.
30:48And the ancient Egyptians used something called natron, which is a naturally occurring salt that is found in two places in Egypt.
30:57Wadi Natron in the north and El Qab in the south.
31:01So the first thing to do is the interior needs to be desiccated.
31:06And so we will take some natron and we will make a natron sausage.
31:10I think the best way to learn about it is to do it, because then you actually, by experimental archaeology, have a better understanding of what the ancient Egyptians did,
31:27and also the chêne operatoire, who was involved, how they might have done things, and what were the logistics involved.
31:33First thing to do is to shove this in.
31:40Now we could put the natron directly inside the body, and when I was doing experimental work, that is what I did the first time.
31:49What the natron does is absorbs all the water, and it's wet, it stinks, it is disgusting, and you can't get it out, because it's just all goopy and stuck.
32:02With this way, you can take them out, you can change them, it's much more elegant, it's much more hygienic, and you don't feel quite so sick when you're doing it.
32:15Much like Selima, it is possible that the embalmers were able to improve their techniques through a series of experiments.
32:24Packets of natron were indeed found inside several mummies.
32:33Who were these embalmers?
32:36Were they divided into different professions?
32:40Desiccators, doctors, priests?
32:42While their identities remain a mystery, one thing is for certain.
32:48They were highly skilled in the medical field.
32:51There probably were several specialists involved.
32:55Thanks to written materials found much later, we do know that an individual was put in charge of cutting the opening in the mummy's left flank.
33:05It was his one and only task.
33:08Someone else would take the intestines out.
33:11But none of them were doctors.
33:13These people were not doctors.
33:14So the next step is to put natron.
33:21If you are cheap with your natron, you will wind up with infestations with beetles that will eat the body, or with flies also that will make holes in your body.
33:32So you have to use a generous amount of natron.
33:36So with a fish it's fairly straightforward, you just take it, and then you have to cover it with natron.
33:41Desiccation is one of the most important steps, so the bodies would be left to dry for weeks.
33:53They were basically crusted in salt, if I may put things bluntly.
33:57Then you ended up with desiccated bodies, which had obviously lost a lot of weight, about two-thirds of their mass.
34:05Donkeys would carry natron back from the mountains.
34:12Men would then cover the deceased in it.
34:17The bodies were bathed in a natron bed exposed to direct sunlight, as natural UV rays made desiccation more hygienic than behind closed doors.
34:27Then they were left to dry for 40 days, before embalmers took over to begin treating the skin.
34:38For the longest time, the preservation of flesh remained one of the most mysterious steps.
34:51The Louvre Museum in Paris could very well hold a piece of this puzzle.
34:56Twenty years ago, the museum acquired a medical papyrus known as Louvre-Karlsberg, part of which is being kept and studied in Denmark.
35:09Marc Etienne, curator in the Department of Egyptian Antiquities, is responsible for translating the fragment preserved in France.
35:22This papyrus is a scroll consisting of several fragments, which are in a fairly good state of preservation.
35:28But they did require a significant amount of restoration work.
35:33This specific papyrus turns out to be a medical manuscript.
35:38At the heart of these pieces, there is something which I find particularly astonishing, and that is a section describing the embalming ritual.
35:51Dating back to the New Kingdom, it is the oldest mummification record discovered to this day.
35:59Here is some sort of chart with titles at the top of various columns.
36:06This one reads, ingredients required for preparation.
36:11And underneath is a list of substances along with an indication of dosage, such as one measure or one half measure.
36:23Among these elements, you'll find incense and a few different types of oil.
36:26Here you also have menhet, which means wax.
36:31These instructions include information on dosage, but there is nothing about the measuring cup, so to speak.
36:39This papyrus is telling of the way in which embalmers would pass on the mummification process.
36:45A complex and highly regulated expertise, so much so that the fluids could not be applied at any time.
36:52These instructions are very specific.
36:57They indicate that one of the concoctions was to be heated during the winter, and definitely not in the summer, during the hotter season.
37:04That is one of the major new elements we learned from this text, the importance of preparing each mixture at a specific temperature and period in time.
37:15We had no knowledge of these details before.
37:17By translating this papyrus, Egyptologists discovered more about this tradition than they ever had during their study of mummies.
37:25This medical papyrus refers to a piece of linen dyed red and soaked in various antiseptic, antifungal and antibacterial substances.
37:39It was then to be applied to the mummy's face once it had dried out.
37:42The choice of colour is probably due to the deflective properties of red, to ward off evil spirits.
37:52This document specified that the piece of cloth should be applied to the face, which is where the majority of the body's natural openings are located.
38:01The nostrils, the eyes, which remain in spite of everything else, and the ears.
38:05It's a shield. Covering the mummy's face with a piece of cloth dyed red is an integral part of the metaphysical concern to protect the body.
38:20The physical remains, and therefore, the individual throughout eternity.
38:26This papyrus is a precious heritage, as it sheds new light on a highly codified procedure.
38:38However, it fails to mention the composition of the ointments used, yet it's a key element to understanding the art of embalming.
38:45At the University in Cairo, Salima Ikram is experimenting with the third stage of the process, by trying to soften the desiccated body of the fish.
38:59So this is the part where some of the oils are put on, and we know that they use things like moringa oil or lettuce oil,
39:08and possibly even some scented oils like almond oil, which would have come in in the New Kingdom.
39:13So there's a little bit of, I would just put it more on the parts that have become stiff, but we think that for the ancient Egyptians they would have rubbed it over the whole body.
39:24We don't have that many texts that tell us about mummification, which is why experimental archaeology is so important.
39:31Presumably each oil had a specific property, but it is difficult to know exactly what they are, though people are doing tests now to see what, in terms of mummification,
39:42is regarded as a crucial kind of thing.
39:50For Salima, those are the limits to this exercise.
39:53Although certain oils have been identified, the precise recipe for the eternal preservation of flesh remains unknown.
39:59A number of ointments and balms were rubbed into the skin to restore its elasticity and protect it from biological threats such as insects and fungi, which is why they had to use antiseptic and antibacterial substances.
40:17In embalming workshops, incense was used both to repel flies and the bad smells that emanated from the bodies when the ointments were applied.
40:31Resins were then applied to the body of the deceased.
40:35Their properties prevented the body from deteriorating.
40:39The resins like frankincense and myrrh are quite hard and they are pellets. This has to be melted.
40:50So when you have this, it is very nice to put it inside the body. It is very hot and molten.
41:04So when you coat this, it's very good because it really does get into the body cavity.
41:09Now the exterior you can paint it on and the more liquid it is, the easier it is to paint.
41:20And from what I have looked at with mummies that are unwrapped, large parts of the bodies are covered with this resinous material.
41:29While the resins have now been clearly identified thanks to the brownish colour they left on the mummies,
41:40the same cannot be said of the various mixtures applied to preserve the skin.
41:45It was a real cosmetic feat, requiring an almost medical expertise in the use of plants and herbs.
41:52What were these mysterious ingredients?
41:54One of the big challenges we have in the study of mummification is that we have no ancient Egyptian texts that tell us precisely how mummification was carried out.
42:08So there is no recipe that says, you take the body and you do this, et cetera, et cetera.
42:14There is no such thing as a comprehensive handbook for embalming, explaining the process in detail.
42:19But by cross-referencing several sources, you get fairly accurate information.
42:26We are finding more and more embalmer workshops and hiding places, such as large ceramic vases in which embalmers would keep the remains of the mummification process,
42:38such as dirty pieces of cloth or the remnants of the substances and products used.
42:43So the archaeology of mummification is contributing to our knowledge of the subject.
42:54The greatest source of information on the quest for immortality may well be in the necropolis of Saqqara.
43:00Every day, new discoveries lift the curtain on the mysteries of mummification, adding even more to our knowledge of funerary customs in ancient Egypt.
43:14As people excavate and they find new mummies in good context, we are finding that we have to revise the history of mummification and things that we don't really know because the ancient Egyptians were much greater experimenters than we have thought.
43:31The archaeology of mummification is still in its infancy, yet archaeologists are already dreaming of unraveling the secret of the plants responsible for the preservation of human flesh.
43:45The mysteries of mummification have only just begun to be unwrapped.
43:52¶¶
44:11¶¶
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