Ancient Egyptian mummification was never intended to preserve bodies, new exhibit reveals

[Still Waters]

It's long been believed that ancient Egyptians used mummification as a way to preserve a body after death. However, an upcoming museum exhibition indicates that was never the case, and instead the elaborate burial technique was actually a way to guide the deceased toward divinity.

Researchers from the University of Manchester's Manchester Museum in England are highlighting the common misconception as part of preparations for an exhibition called "Golden Mummies of Egypt" that opens early next year. This new understanding about mummification's intended purpose essentially upends much of what is taught to students about mummies.

So, how exactly did this misconception flourish for so long? Price said the Western-led idea began with Victorian researchers who wrongly determined that ancient Egyptians were preserving their dead in a similar fashion as one would preserve fish. Their reasoning? Both processes contained a similar ingredient: salt.

https://www.livescience.com/ancient-egyptians-mummification-purpose-divinity

[Oniomancer]

What's this? A cherished ideal of Egyptology being overturned by modern science? And made more esoterically religeous?

[Wepwawet]

It's certainly a popular misconception that the Egyptians preserved their dead just because it was their practice, or that their beliefs meant that they needed an intact body left behind in the realm of the living or they would have a damaged existance, or no existance in the realm of the dead.

The article has the crucial word "purity", for this is what is going on with mummification. For the Egyptians death was a form of murder, the cause of death being Set, even if you were run over by a chariot or died of a heart attack. So death was an "unclean" evil act that had to be made pure. Mummy is of course not their word, it's Arabic for bitumen as late period mummies tended to be covered in bitumen. Their word for a mummy was "sah", and this included not just the body, but also the wrappings and coffin. Sah means "worthy", and in the context that the deceased has been purified, been made worthy, for their continued existance. The sah is also not just the mummified and wrapped body, it is essentially also the same as a statue of the deceased, and this is why statues are found buried, including those of kings in tombs were no human remains are found because the statue is no different to the actual body in theological terms.

It's also a popular belief that those animal mummies that do not contain an actual animal, or just bits of an animal, are evidence of fraud on the part of the necropolis officials who sold these mummies to pilgrims, but this may also be a misconception as the form of the mummy is good enough, it's a stand-in for the real thing just as the ka statue is just about indivisible from the corpse of a human in theological terms. So, while clearly a large number of animals were used for these mummies, maybe not as many as we think, so perhaps millions of kittens were not sacrificed, I don't know, it's just a thought based on their beliefs outlined in the paragraph above, and may also be an aberation as these countless millions of animal mummies in mass graves date from the Late Period, some experts thinking that it was a sort of reaction to them loosing control of their own country, of going way over the top as an over compensation, but that's conjecture.