Teaching Ancient Egypt (Part 2)

Mummies

So at this point your kiddos should be familiar with Ancient Egypt. If not, I covered in Part 1 how to introduce it and go over some of the first interesting bits.

Now we move on to the really cool stuff: mummies!

Most kids are going to know what a mummy is. Most kids are going to be fascinated by them. And most kids are going to be completely grossed out by them. It’s what makes them so awesome. A read aloud I use every year to really teach them some cool facts about mummies is You Wouldn’t Want to Be An Egyptian Mummy by David Stewart (the whole series of these books are great because they really tap into that balance between gross but oh-so-cool that kids love). 

I love going over mummies, even though they are not really part of the VA SOLs for social studies because it is a great way to review all sorts of aspects of Ancient Egypt. For example, why did they decide to dry out the bodies of their dead with salt? One, because salt was readily available, and two because the environment is so dry it actually works (see? you tie it back to the natural resources for Egypt).

Next, talking about how the bodies were carefully prepared and wrapped in linen with all sorts of charms and such lets you review the Egyptian pantheon (aka – the Egyptian gods) and also the belief that the Pharaoh was a a god and thus needed to be taken care of. You can also discuss the Egyptian belief in the Afterlife: they thought your actual body was going to get up and hang out in your tomb, which is why the tombs were richly decorated and all sorts of goodies were left in them – chariots, beds, food, little shabti figures of servants and such.

You can pause here to explain that instead of burying the actual servants (you know, living human beings) with the pharaoh and thus unaliving them, the Egyptians made little figurines, called ushabti or shabti, of all sorts of servants and farmers and soldiers and that would do work for the deceased. Sometimes they even made many copies of the deceased so that if they needed to do something in the afterlife, the little shabti copy could do it for them.

Shabti box and shabtis of members of the Sennedjem family, from the Met Museum in New York

If you want, you can go into some of the gory details of mummification (reminding students that this is all happening to a dead body – the person no longer is there or feels any of it). I usually do a brief overview of the gore: the organs are removed, except for the heart, and put into special canopic jars (I usually show them a picture of those). The brain was thought to be fairly useless, so they would stick a hooked tool up the nose, scramble it all around a bit, and drain it out and toss the brain away. Then the body would be packed with salt and covered with salt and dry out for DAYS (like, 40 days). Then the dried body would be wrapped in linen, they might fix up the hair or hide any marks on the body from mummification. Each layer of linen required the priests doing the mummification to preform and say specific spells, and even to tuck trinkets and charms in the layers. Then once it was fully wrapped, a “death mask” was usually added which showed the face of the deceased, sometimes out of wood or if you were really special, it could be made out of gold. Then the body was placed in a box called a sarcophagus. There could be a LOT of those. Think of it like this: sarcophagus = mummy box. Some mummies only have one, some have a box, then a bigger box, then to make sure they are all boxed up, they would be placed in giant stone boxes in their tombs. Note that none of these boxes prevented damage from tomb robbers, even when they were big, giant stone ones. (Also please note that the process of mummification and burial developed over centuries and some techniques changed from period to period.)

People touring the Valley of the Kings in Egypt.

These mummy tombs were, at first, above ground – we know of some very famous ones (looking at you, pyramids). But once everyone realized that those were getting robbed almost instantly, burials were moved to a big desert canyon now known as “the Valley of the Kings”. This allowed for tombs to be dug into the ground/rock walls and supposedly hidden. But when the robbers were often the same people who made the tombs, or the relatives of the mummy that was just buried, this really didn’t prevent anything. Still, these tombs have provided us with piles of information, we learn about the people buried in them (when we can find them, of course, they were frequently moved either to protect the bodies of the dead or to make room for a new mummy to go into the tomb). We also learn about the everyday Egyptians, beliefs, political issues, important events, and all sorts of things from the artifacts left in the tombs and the decoration of the tombs. (more on that later)

Example of a rock cut tomb, the Valley of the Kings

The afterlife, mummification, and the whole burial process was an important part of Egyptian life. The family members of the dead were supposed to bring offerings, like food, to the dead so they could have a good afterlife.

Unfortunately for mummies, their afterlife got a little…rough. First, they were mistreated by grave robbers intent on the shiny precious charms buried in the layers of linen, taking no consideration for the body in their hunt for gold and gems. Not great. However, it gets worse.

Napoleon Bonaparte, one-time (two times?) Emperor of France, went on campaign in Egypt in the late 1700s. This campaign found a very, very important artifact, known as the Rosetta Stone – which we will get to – but the reports from this campaign contribute to a wave of interest in Ancient Egypt by Europeans that has since been dubbed “Egyptomania”. Dried and ground mummy had been used by Europeans since the 1500s as a medicine, but starting in the late 1700s, there is an explosion of interest in all things Ancient Egypt. Wealthy Europeans are falling all over themselves to get as many artifacts from Egypt as they can – stolen, fake, all collected without any regard to proper archeology. They are buying mummies and holding “unwrapping parties” where they would unwrap the mummy, then toss the body when it was done. Or, the mummy is dried and crushed and consumed as medicine or made into paint. Not a great way to spend the Afterlife…

Next up: Part 3, which will cover contributions and hieroglyphics

Need some notes and activities for your class for Ancient Egypt? Click this link to go to that section of my TPT store!

More information on mummies: Smithsonian Institution Egyptian Mummies

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