ABOUT MUMMIES.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 153, 4 August 1914, Page 6

ABOUT MUMMIES.

A FACE FORTY CENTURIES OLD.

-For Professor Grafton Smith's second lecture on mummification in ancient Egypt, the Great Hall at the University was so crowded that a number of seats had to be found even on the dais behind him and his magic lantern sheet, says a Sydney exchange. With the aid of numbers of often rather gruesome pictures, he showed the whole evolution of the practice of embalming the dead, from the first crude attempts up to a highly complicated process, involvingconsiderable skill. And then he told how the decline followed, until mummification was finally stamped out on the introduction of Mohammedanism into Egypt, The Egyptians' object an trying to preserve the bodies of their dead was that they should be ready to receive the wandering vital principle or "Ka," which went out with the life of the man. And it was desired not only to preserve the actual tissues, but also to keep the body lifelike. The earliest embalmers, therefore, applied the bandages with which they wrapped the body in such a way as to preserve, as far;as possible, its natural features. Those bandages Avere soaked at first in the salts found in the desert, and later they were covered with a paste made of resin and caustic soda. Eyebrows, moustache, and so on were even painted on the bandages, and a Avig was provided! At this time the viscera were removed from the body through' a hole in the side, and put in the jars within the tomb. The blurred and distorted features of a mummy of this early type were shown on the screen. KAMKSES THE GKEAT. Professor Smith told how, in a hole in a cliff of a valley near Thebes, were discovered the mummies of the most famous of the Pharoahs and their Queens of the eighteenth and subsequent dynasties. Their tombs had been robbed, and it was thought that the contents were lost, but the priests had found them again and rewrapped and hidden them> here in ordinary rough coffins. The first to be unwrapped was JRameses the Great, the man who had the names of tho builders of so many monuments erased, and his own put in their place. He did not look a very inviting sort of person—on the screen. After the driving out of the "shepherd kings," the Asiatic invaders who held

Egypt for a couple of centuries after the twelfth dynasty, the Egyptians, hitherto unwarlike, invaded Asia, and their increased intercourse with "foreign parts" brought them more and better resins and balsams, with the aid of which their art of embalming was further developed. After the eighteenth dynasty the mummies were so hardened with resin as to last much longer. Also the brain was now removed, and the cavity packed with resin and linen. Pictures showed by a comparison of mummies and modern Nubian women how, for thousands of years, the fashion of plaiting the hair had remained the same. The mummy of Queen Thiy, the beautiful, was shown, and also her statue, which had really a queer archaic beauty, and Pharoah Mencptah, popularly and probably wrongly supposed to be the Pharaoh, of the Exodus. STUFFED WITH MUD. ... At the close of the twentieth dynasty the attempt was made to keep the mummified body as presentable and lifelike as possible by stuffing out its hollows with linen, and even mud! Also the viscera were now wrapped up and restored to their places again, all but the heart and kidneys, which as the seat of the mind, and the emotions were supposed never to have been removed at all. The body now took the place of the statue which had been hitherto regarded as the representation of the deceased, and it was painted as formerly the statue had been painted —red for a man, and yellow for a woman. Iti the twenty-third century, when the viscera were wrapped up, when they were put back, small images of the gods who were .supposed to protect the different organs —Anubis, the jackal, with the £tomac-h, the human-headed god •with the liver, the hawk with the intestines, ami the baboon with the lungs. It was because the jackal was so often found in cemeteries that lie was made a god of the dead! Not only were the chest and neck, and cheeks and Jimbs of the body stuffed out with rags, but the attempt was even made to remedy physical blemishes—with a fairly lifelike effect, as shown on the screen. But from 900 B.C. onward the art, now so complicated that few were experts at it, began to decline again. The work was scamped, and "faking" was resorted to, at the same time that more and more ornaI ment was lavished on the coffin. Through the Christian era the people still tried to preserve the bodies of their dead, though only with salt, as in the beginning, until finally Islam killed the practice altogether.