Dr Zahi Hawass explains Ancient Mummy Recipe

This is one of the most beautiful mummies that, actually, I discovered at Saqqara only few months ago. We went inside the burial chamber and we found this mummy completely by accident. The tomb is dated to the Old Kingdom, about 4200 years ago. But I never expected to discover inside the Old Kingdom tomb a typical Late Period mummy.

It's very important to talk about mummification to explain really what happened.

When the deceased died, they took his body to wash. And after the washing they began to open the stomach. They took all the viscera of the king and everything inside his stomach was removed. Then they put it on natron to dry and after that they covered them with linen and they put them inside a box.

After that they left the heart in the body, because the heart is a place of knowledge: it gives knowledge to the deceased in the afterlife. But they took out the brain, because if you leave the brain inside the mummy, the brain can be damaged. And this why they went through the nose and they insert some thin material inside and they took the brain out. After that they took the body and they closed everything open in the body of the deceased - like his nose and like areas inside here. And after that they cleaned and washed the body completely with wine that was made from dates. And they put the wine made of dates inside the body.

Why did they do all of that? Why did the Egyptians mummify the body like this? Because they believed in the afterlife. They believed they had to preserve the body for a long time, because this time inside the tomb is for the eternal life.

The Egyptians did all of this because of their belief in the afterlife. And that's why building a tomb and mummification had built Ancient Egypt.