Packing The Body With Natron - A Step-By-Step Guide To Egyptian Mummification For Kids - Part 5 of 12
Welcome to the next part of our Step-By-Step Guide To Egyptian Mummification For Kids. You can find out what's happened so far in our Mummification journey, here.
Things get pretty gory when it comes to Egyptian Mummification. At least that's certainly been the case so far. Our Pharaoh has died (I know; shriek, whimper, whine) and now that we've removed all of the organs from his dead body, we can pack it out before we take our first break (a break? Finally!!).
Step 5 – Clean and Dry:
More scrubbing (didn't we already do this in step 1?)
Now that the important bits from the torso (the stomach, liver, lungs and intestines) have been placed to one side, you can focus on cleaning out the rest of the Pharaoh's torso. Grab some more of that nice palm wine from step 1 and give the Pharaoh’s insides a good scrubbing. You could also use some spices to make the body smell nicer (it’s probably getting pretty whiffy by now).
Pack out the body
Once cleaned, you’ll need to pack out the insides of the body to give it a normal human shape again. Taking out all of the organs has left it looking flat like a human pancake. You’ll need lots of dry stuff to pack out the body with. Think sand, salt, sawdust, linen rags, spices like myrrh and cassia, that kind of thing.
Grab some Natron salt
Okay, last thing to do before you get a seventy-day break (that’s like getting a 10 week summer holiday!). You need to cover the whole body in salt. No, not like a thin layer of the stuff. We’re talking fully dunked into a bath of salt. Natron salt to be specific. Natron is a divine salt that occurs naturally in ancient Egypt. Which is good, because we’re going to need a lot of it to cover the whole body. Now we leave the Pharaoh like this for seventy days and the Natron will remove all of the moisture and fat in the body to completely dry it out.
Meanwhile, we can go have a cup of tea and wait for seventy days to be over.
If like me, you can't wait for seventy long days to pass before jumping into more gory mummification stuff, don't worry. Why don't we have a look at what to do with the organs of our dead Pharaoh in the meantime, with step 6:
