The world's fascination with Egyptian mummies has a long history. In the Middle Ages and even up into the eighteenth century, Europeans prized pulverized mummy remains and swallowed them in various solutions, believing them to be of great medicinal value. One of the first ocncerns of the Egyptian National Antiquities Service after its founding in the second half of the nineteenth century was how to prevent people from stealing and destroying ancient human remains, as well as mummies of hundreds of thousands of cats and millions of ibises.
No actual ancient recipes for preserving the dead have been found, but the basic process seems clear enough from images found in tombs, the descriptions of later Greek writers such as Herodotus and Plutarch, scientific analysis of mummies, and modern experiments. By the time of the New Kingdom, the routine wa roughly as follows:
The dead body was taken to a mortuary, a special structure used exclusively for embalming. Under the supervision of a priest, workers removed the brains, generally through the nose, and emptied the body cavity through an incision in the left side. They then placed the body, together with its major internal organs, in a vat of natron, a naturally occurring salt. It was left to steep in this solution for a period of a month or more. This caused the skin to blacken, so once the workers had retrieved a body from the vat and carefully dried it, they often dyed it to restore something of its color, using red ocher for a man, yellow ocher for a woman. They then packed the body cavity with clean linen, provided by the family of the deceased and soaked in various herbs and ointments. They wrapped the major organs in separate packets, either putting them in special containers to be placed in the tomb chamber or stuffing them back into the body.
The tedious ritual of wrapping the body could not begin. They first wound the trunk and each of the limbs separately with cloth strips, then wrapped the whole body in a shroud. They then wound it in additional strips of cloth, layer after layer, to produce the familiar mummy shape. The linen winders often inserted god luck charms and other smaller objects among the wrappings. If the family happened to have furnished a Book of the Dead, a selection of magic spells meant to hep the deceased durvive a "last judgment" and win everlasting life, it was tucked in between the mummy's legs.
Egyptians develped these techniques to ensure that the ka, or life force, could live on in the body in the afterlife. Whenever possible, a portrait statue was provided as an alternative home for the ka in the event that the mummy disintegrated.