The eye in the Egyptian mummy.

ALTHOUGH the practice of mummification seems rather macabre and grotesque to modern man it was carried out in Ancient Egypt for a specific purpose. The intention was to preserve the body from the ravages of putrefaction, to maintain the identity of the dead man and, in later periods, to create a form which would resemble the embalmed God Osiris. The oldest preserved human bodies were not, in fact, deliberately mummified but desiccated by the dry, hot sand of the desert in which they were rudely buried. With the addition of an elaborate funerary equipment to formal tomb burial it became imperative that some other methods be devised to replace the simple desiccation of the earlier sand interments. It is probable that embalming did not begin until the dynastic period, and there is no doubt that various elaborations and sophistications were added from time to time. The Egyptians left no contemporary accounts of the processes employed, and the only written evidence is to be derived from Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus.* The descriptions of Herodotus especially, have been frequently quoted and are probably in essentials reliable. Apart from these classical authors however, our knowledge of mummification is largely built up from observation of the mummies themselves. It is true to say that universal agreement has not yet been reached on some important points; e.g. whether the natron used was applied to the body in fluid or solid form. In the period when the practice was at its most elaborate it was customary to remove the brain through an opening in the ethmoid bone, and the abdominal and thoracic viscera (except the heart) through an abdominal incision which was placed in different sites at different periods. The brain, which was removed in pieces, was not very suitable for preservation but the other viscera were preserved, usually in so-called Canopic jars. An interesting account of the histological examination of such Canopic material is given by Shaw (I938). It is well known that the eye, after death, soon looses the bright glistening appearance of the cornea, becomes dulled, and that the tension, of the anterior chamber in particular, falls so that the cornea becomes readily deformed. This is a process which is not readily checked even in the laboratory and the Egyptians made no attempt to preserve the globe. The usual * Herodotus (484-406 B.C.). Book 2, Sections 85-88. Translations of the relevant passages from Diodorus Siculus (died A.D. 34) are given by Elliot Smith and Dawson (1924) and Ruffer (9 iI). 336