How Egyptian Mummies Were Made, Step by Step

The work began with washing. Then came the brain, which the embalmers did not try to preserve. Herodotus, the Greek historian who wrote about Egypt in the fifth century BCE, describes the most expensive method of his own day this way: embalmers drew out part of the brain through the nostrils with a hooked instrument and dealt with the rest by pouring in drugs (Herodotus, The History, MIT Classics Archive).

His account is the famous one, and it is an important ancient description, but it is not a description of every mummy. Archaeological evidence shows that brain-removal methods varied over the centuries (Smithsonian Institution). One royal example has been seen in detail with modern scanners: the 2005 CT scan of a young king, told in the story of Tutankhamun's skull, shows the nose route and the resin poured into the empty skull afterward.

Next, the embalmers opened the body. Through an incision in the left side they removed the organs of the chest and the abdomen, which were then treated separately (Australian Museum).

One organ usually stayed where it was. The heart was left inside the body because Egyptians regarded it as the center of a person: of knowledge and emotion, of identity, and of moral judgment (Smithsonian Institution). In a process that removed so much, leaving the heart was a deliberate choice about what made the dead person who they were.

The organs that came out were not thrown away. The stomach, intestines, lungs and liver were dried and stored in four containers now called canopic jars, because the dead were understood to need them for existence in the afterlife. Each jar was associated with one of the four sons of Horus, who protected its contents (Australian Museum).

The custom changed over time. From about 1000 BCE, organs were increasingly wrapped and returned to the body, or placed in boxes, while symbolic or even empty canopic jars could still go into the burial (Smithsonian Institution). The British Museum holds canopic jars with separately mummified organs that show the practice in a real burial.

Now the body was ready for drying. It was covered and packed with natron, a naturally occurring salt mixture, for about 40 days, according to the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. The British Museum gives the same figure of about 40 days for drying, within a process of up to 70 days overall (British Museum mummification resource). Herodotus tells it differently: in his account the body lay in natron for 70 days. The famous 70 days survives in both versions, as the whole process in the museums' accounts and as the time in natron in his.

Why did this stop the body from rotting? Decay needs moisture and microbes. Natron drew water out of the body and its cavities, and Egypt's hot, dry environment helped. The resins, oils, waxes and other balms applied later sealed the surfaces and could hold back bacteria and fungi (Australian Museum). Long before embalming developed, bodies buried directly in desert sand could dry out naturally, which is how some of the earliest Egyptian burials were preserved. Nature can do this elsewhere too, by very different means, as in the bog bodies of peat bogs.

The combination did not work the same way for everyone. Some bodies were preserved naturally, some received incomplete treatment, and some Roman-period mummies are poorly preserved inside very elaborate wrappings (UCL Digital Egypt).

When the drying was done, the embalmers removed the natron and washed the body again. They filled the empty cavities with linen, plant material, sawdust, sand or packets of natron, and applied oils, ointments and resins. Then came the wrapping: many layers of linen, often with amulets placed among them, a mask and sometimes false eyes, before the mummy went into its coffin and tomb (The Met, "Tutankhamun's Funeral"). Herodotus, for his part, describes linen wrapping with gum.

All of this resin could be applied generously. In Tutankhamun's case it hardened so firmly that it stuck the king to his coffin, as the story of Tutankhamun's mummy tells.

What did it smell like? Embalming was meant to create and keep pleasant scents, which were associated with purity, so the workshop's materials included oils, resins, waxes, balms and herbs. A modern non-invasive study of Egyptian mummies in a museum collection, reported by AP, detected woody, spicy and sweet notes rather than signs of decay (AP). Any particular mummy's smell depends on its ingredients, its age and how it has been conserved since.

The embalmers' own pots have a story to tell. Rageot, Hussein, Altmann-Wendling, Stockhammer and colleagues analyzed the residues inside 31 labeled ceramic vessels from a 26th Dynasty embalming workshop there, dating to roughly the seventh century BCE, and published their results in Nature in 2023 (Rageot et al., Nature, 2023).

Because the pots were labeled, the team could match names to contents. Using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, they linked labels to substances and to uses, including mixtures for treating the head and for treating the wrappings. The ingredients included plant oils, animal fats, beeswax, bitumen, conifer products, Pistacia resin and other resins. Some came from far outside Egypt, including materials associated with the Mediterranean and with tropical forest regions, such as dammar and elemi.

What the study shows is specialists at work: complex recipes, specialized knowledge, ingredients chosen for particular tasks and long-distance trade networks to supply them. It is also the record of one workshop at one time. The recipes were not necessarily the same in every period or every workshop.

Mummification came in levels of quality. People with fewer resources could receive shorter, simpler or incomplete treatment, and some bodies were preserved mainly by drying in desert sand or with resin (The Met, "Tutankhamun's Funeral"). Herodotus describes cheaper methods too, in which the body was purged rather than opened and then treated with natron.

Animals were mummified as well, and in huge numbers. Animal mummification became especially widespread during the first millennium BCE. Cats, ibises, crocodiles, dogs, bulls, birds, snakes and other animals were mummified mostly as gifts dedicated to deities, while selected sacred animals were treated as divine manifestations (British Museum animal-mummy resource). Some animal cemeteries contain hundreds of thousands of bundles, including some with only partial remains or substitutes inside. The Met's cat mummy, from Egypt and dated between 664 BCE and the first century CE, is one carefully wrapped example of these religious gifts.

Mummification lasted for thousands of years, but it did not stay the same. During the Roman period, roughly the late first century BCE to the early fourth century CE, the thoroughness of embalming declined in many communities even as wrappings could become more elaborate. Mummification continued into Byzantine Egypt, including among some Christians, but many Christian burials used simple linen shrouds with little or no removal of organs (The Met, Kharga Oasis). UCL Digital Egypt records that the practice ended after the Arabic conquest (UCL Digital Egypt).

Egypt is the most famous home of mummies, but its people were not the first to make them. UNESCO identifies the Chinchorro sites of northern Chile, at Arica, the Morro de Arica and the Camarones area, as holding the oldest known artificially mummified human bodies (UNESCO World Heritage Centre). The exact dates depend on the individual and the dating method, but the Chinchorro tradition is generally more than 7,000 years old, older than Egyptian artificial mummification, and its techniques included taking bodies apart and reassembling them. Their story is told in full in our piece on the Chinchorro mummies.

A few shorter answers to close.

An elaborate mummy was a person washed, emptied, dried, filled, anointed and wrapped by specialists over roughly ten weeks. The steps can sound clinical when listed, but the choices inside them, the heart left in place, the organs kept and given their own protectors because the dead would need them in the afterlife, the scented resins and the amulets among the linen, are about caring for a whole person. Modern science, from residue analysis to CT scans, keeps adding detail, and the field of what bones tell archaeologists shows how much the dead can still teach the living.

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