Why are Egyptian Mummies called Mummies?
The English word mummy is derived from mediaeval Latin mumia, a borrowing of the Arabic word mūmiyyah (مومية), which means “bitumen”. (Because of the blackened skin of unwrapped mummies, bitumen was once thought to be used extensively in ancient Egyptian embalming procedures. Asphalt and tar are forms of bitumen.) The Arabic word was itself borrowed from the Persian word mūmiya, meaning “bitumen”; this is related to another Persian word, mūm, which means “wax”. (The ancient Greek historians record that the Persians sometimes mummified their kings and nobility in wax, though this practice has never been documented in Egypt.) The dry climate of Egypt has always aided the preservation of mummies, as it is in one of the world’s driest regions. In pre-dynastic times, many bodies became “natural mummies”. These buried corpses could be found generations later in a good state of preservation. Well-preserved dried bodies were not something that society admired aesthecially, so early on, they be
The methods of embalming, or treating the dead body, that the ancient Egyptians used is called mummification. Using special processes, the Egyptians removed all moisture from the body, leaving only a dried form that would not easily decay. It was important in their religion to preserve the dead body in as life-like a manner as possible. So successful were they that today we can view the mummified body of an Egyptian and have a good idea of what he or she looked like in life, 3000 years ago. Mummification was practiced throughout most of early Egyptian history. The earliest mummies from prehistoric times probably were accidental. By chance, dry sand and air (since Egypt has almost no measurable rainfall) preserved some bodies buried in shallow pits dug into the sand. About 2600 B.C., during the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties, Egyptians probably began to mummify the dead intentionally. The practice continued and developed for well over 2,000 years, into the Roman Period (ca. 30 B.C. – A.D. 3
