Chapter 13 Eternal True Body

No matter which monument museum you visit, children always ask where the mummy is, and adults also gather around the mummy.Mummies are always the most eye-catching exhibits.People are always puzzled by their own kind who have been dead for thousands of years and have been dehydrated and embalmed. Many mummies have survived thousands of years and are still intact, as if the passage of time has not affected them at all.What kind of strange civilization made mummies come into being?Why did people at that time firmly deny that death is eternal?Mummies are messengers from the long-gone world, and although they are speechless, they can tell us a lot and make us solve these mysteries.

It is a common desire for people to protect the body after death from corruption and decomposition.According to the Gospel of John, the tormented body of Jesus Christ was embalmed by soaking "about 100 pounds in a mixture of myrrh and agarwood"; the body of Alexander the Great of Macedonia was preserved with honey; Brandy was used to preserve the remains of the British admiral Lord Nelson.As early as in ancient Egypt, the technology of embalming corpses has been developed to a very perfect level. The earliest mummies formed naturally in the sandy soil of Egypt scorched by the hot dry air. The 5,000-year-old bodies were excavated from shallow desert burials that were originally buried without coffins at all.In the era of the ancient pharaohs, it became popular to build sealed tombs, hoping to protect the corpses from predators.

The oldest and complete mummies known to exist are the few well-decorated mummies from the Fifth Dynasty (c. 2500 BC).From then on the mummy-maker's skill continued uninterrupted for 3,000 years, reaching its golden age in the 10th century BC. Most of the mummies showed a certain human expression, some smiling, some frowning, some dumbfounded, some satisfied, and some seemed to be dreaming.Shrunken and swarthy though they were, their posture looked as if in eternal sleep, neither frightening nor repulsive.Royal male mummies usually have their arms folded across their chests, while females have their arms naturally at their sides.

The purpose of processing the dead body is to preserve the identity of the deceased in the underworld. In 1976, the display cabinet containing the mummy of Ramses II in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, due to poor sealing, the air inside was mixed with fungi, causing the mummy to contract the so-called "museum disease" and urgently needed to be treated in France.When the mummy arrived in Paris, France gave it a royal reception.As the first ancient Egyptian mummy body to visit abroad, His Majesty received a salute from the guard of honor of the Republic at the airport.After the French experts cured his illness, they sent him back to his country.