"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(opens in new tab) 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."

"It's a big 180," Campbell Price(opens in new tab), the museum's curator of Egypt and Sudan, told Live Science.

It'll be interesting to see what other Egyptologists have to say on the matter.

It was to prepare them for the afterlife.

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I don't see how that contradicts mummification for preservation. Like, literally why not both? They weren't accidentally doing everything you're supposed to do to preserve people.

Is this actually new information? I had a picture book about mummies as a kid that detailed all the weird ceremonial bullshit that was part of the process and how keeping the organs in jars instead of throwing them out was so the deceased could still use them in the afterlife because that was somehow part of the process of getting to heaven.

If kids are being taught that it’s all about preservation these days, that’s a damn shame. They’re missing out on all the cool stuff.

I think to say this applied to all mummies everywhere is as irresponsible as saying all Americans like Hot dogs

It surely could have applied to some.....but others probably not

I thought it was supposed to preserve the body for the afterlife? That’s what I was taught in school so this isn’t a 180 to me.

This must be a great time to be an Egyptologist

Isn't it? If the purpose isn't to "preserve the body for the afterlife," and is instead to guide the soul, and the preservation of the body is just a coincidental byproduct of their rituals, I would say that's a pretty significant 180.

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I think it isn't a 180 simply because we were all taught about how basically every other part of the ritual, their tombs, etc. revolved around making their afterlife experience easier / better in some way shape or form

So learning that they may have mummified the bodies for the sake of that person's afterlife, with preservation being a byproduct, isn't really a huge revelation. It's neat and definitely different than what we all thought, but it's more like a 90, not a 180, if that makes sense

While it is true that the preservation could just be a byproduct of some very specific rituals, these rituals are still laid out to act the exact same as preservation. Could it not just be that it’s both?

I think the headline and article might have been worded in misleading ways. Yes, the purpose of mummification was to prepare the deceased body for the afterlife, but there are specifics of Egyptian theology, which I will not delve into because I am not an Egyptologist, that required the body to be preserved. Mummification took 70 days and highly specialized knowledge to perform properly. Other cultures have developed less time- and labor-intensive ways of “preparing the deceased for the afterlife” and Egyptian embalmers wouldn’t have done all this work for no reason.

Edit to add: it’s probably fair to say that preparing the deceased for the afterlife was the end goal, not preservation for its own sake. But it was still significant for the deceased person’s remains to be recognizable.

It's a complete 360!! This changes everything!!

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If we're operating on the idea that all the other items left in the tomb were to bring into the afterlife, then why wouldn't the believe the body could be brought as well?

That wasn’t my point, my point was that the body was being preserved so it wouldn’t decay when going to the afterlife

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Pre-scientific cultures did not distinguish between the symbolic / metaphorical and practical / physical the way we do. To say the reason wasn't this practical thing but instead was this symbolic thing is a modern failure to understand that. One doesn't preclude the other and even treating them as separable is questionable.

I'd like to see what some other egyptologists have to say about this. This seems like a pretty wild claim to make seemingly without any new information. Also, this doesn't seem consistent with certain other things. Like embalmers eventually learning to remove the organs for better preservation of the bodies. And later dynasties adjusting their processes for better preservation after discovering mummies of plundered pharaohs' tombs.

Additionally, since pharaohs were the incarnation of the god Horus on earth, guiding the deceased to divinity doesn't really ring true.

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The difference here is between body and soul. As far as I'm understanding it. Preserving body meant to transfer both into afterlife, body intact and soul too. The new thesis is, it was just meant to preserve the soul, the body isn't needed in afterlife. That's a big difference in belief and religion.

Pre-Astronautics will be happy to hear about it.

What doesn't make sense to me here is, why take all the organs out if the body doesn't matter, just the spirit?

Pre-scientific? What does that even mean? You don’t think Egyptians practiced science?

If you're asking if they followed the scientific method then no.

Pre-scientific communities did not delineate between physical and metaphysical.

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> If the purpose isn't to "preserve the body for the afterlife," and is instead to guide the soul, and the preservation of the body is just a coincidental byproduct of their rituals, I would say that's a pretty significant 180.

Is there significant evidence that early Egyptian cultures believed in the concept of a soul distinct from the physical body?

I could be mistaken, but my understanding is that the concept of a soul/body dichotomy was more of a Hellenistic Greek thing and wouldn't come around for a couple thousand years after the Egyptians started mummifying folks.

Can you expand or provide evidence for this? It seems counterintuitive, implying less sophisticated thought, though people were just as intelligent

Wondering how you / anyone could know

Yes, i think this distinction is only a surprise to people who didn't have very much knowledge of Egyptology in the first place. This quote from the article tracks with how ka statues have been found serving the same purpose as sarcophagi in housing the dead person's ka:

>  "I think that actually has a somewhat deeper meaning…and is basically about turning the body into a divine statue because the dead person has been transformed."

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The implication has nothing to do with intelligence. Many religions have believed that the metaphysical is intertwined with the physical world in tangible ways. A perfect example of this is the Greeks. They saw their pantheon as human shaped arbiters but also as vast forces of nature, like war or the seasons. It was a way to relate nature to ourselves, give it a human face that people can petition to for some semblance of control and order in their lives. But specifically they believed that they could speak directly to the gods and the gods could manifest on earth. In this way they did not draw hard lines between the physical and metaphysical, more like lines of who gets where and how.

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If the claim is that mummification wasn’t intended to allow us to take mummies out of their tombs and put them through an MRI machine, I guess that’s true.

I’m far from a professional Egyptologist but they put a lot of importance on staying facially recognizable. It’s why defacing statues and chiseling images off of walls was such an impactful act of desecration.

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Yeah, the Egyptians believed in reincarnation and that they were eventually going to need their bodies again which seems to me would make preservation an essential goal of the mummification process. I don't really understand how they are coming to this conclusion without presenting any new findings; especially given the claim that egyptologists have apparently been very wrong about a central component of Egyptian society for decades.

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Horus still had to be guided to the Other Side. If I’m not mistaken, the reason pyramids are pyramids is to help the soul ascend to “Heaven”.

Some one consult Wallis Budge about this.

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Not sure where you heard that. Pyramids were an evolution in grandeur of mastabas which were themselves an effort to better preserve the bodies by preventing them being uncovered by the wind or scavenging animals.

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You don’t think they came up with ideas, tested them, and then verified the outcome?

Well regarding the Pyramids of Giza it's just a modern theory that they were used as tombs. No mummies, bodies or human remains has ever been found in them.

The inside chambers are completely bare with no ornaments, inscriptions or traces of ones passing into the afterlife.

It's quite interesting since they are dated as the oldest of pyramids.

I was under the impression that no bodies/mummies have ever been found in the pyramids.

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History is full of misconceptions I can only imagine what people will think of us today in the year 4000.

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Yes, the headline was misleading and the article lacked substance. My superficial knowledge suggests that mummification was part of an elaborate set of incantations and rituals somewhat described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

This short video gives a brief description of what the funerary process was about. Mummification was just one element. https://youtu.be/1yv_MXNYbAo

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I think it's a little rude to call them pre-science. They had amazing engineers that could build giant pyramids and move heavy blocks of stone really high up off the ground via a clever system of ramps, pulleys, and possibly slave labor.

Probably because they were looted.

Downvoting because I'm envious this subreddit allowed your post but not mine

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>and possibly slave labor.

I thought the modern understanding was that they most likely weren't slaves?

How could you possibly know that? I'd say the fact that they built what they did is more evidence for science based thinking than anything..

I'm farely certain this isn't true. The Giza pyramids may not have had mummies, but they contained sarcophagi and other funerary equipment. And besides that, the pyramid complex contains other buildings including mortuary temples that pretty clearly indicate they were intended to be tombs. Not to mention there are Egyptian texts that refer to the pyramids explicitly as tombs and other pyramids have been found with mummies and are clearly tombs. I don't think there's any question among egyptologists that the Giza pyramids, like other pyramids, were tombs.

As someone who has read quite a few coffin texts... wut? This is 100% an unnecessarily provocative article that tries to turn a minor misunderstanding (the concept of exactly what the mummification process was meant to preserve) into a big thing, and probably mainly to get publicity for their exhibition.

Egyptian embalming wasn't embalming in the modern sense (it wasn't intended to be a lifelike embalming*), but the part of the soul that went to the afterlife required the body (khet) to be preserved to do so. Through preservation of the body (not just by natron, but sanctified bandages and all sorts of treatments, although in any but the "perfect rite" the organs weren't preserved), the rememberance of their name and the appropriate rites the deads vital essence and personality were reunited in death to form their "living intellect".

*The process was probably inspired by, and had much more incommon with, the natural desert mummification process.

sarcophagi were though

It's called the xbox 360 because when you see it, you'll turn 360 degrees and walk away.

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"Apples never were for eating but being fermented in the ground and get the local wildlife drunk"

Mummification went back into Egyptian pre-history. Started with burying bodies in hot dry desert sands, which preserves them. Then elaborated progressively from there (something similar happened in other places, like Peru). They did not believe in reincarnation, but certainly saw the afterlife as involving a material body (later burials included a shabti - a ritual doll - with the inscription 'when in the afterlife I am called to work in the fields, you, my shabti, will go and work for me'). They don't seem to have taken this to a literal extreme - after all mummification involves removing the brain and internal organs, which would make it hard to function as one does in this life.

Every single one? I find that hard to believe.

It's possible that what they found in Khufu's pyramid was a sarcophagus, but considering bodies have never been found I'm inclined to believe that pyramids had a different purpose.

To be fair, if you have removed the organs, have you truly preserved the body?

"I saved you a bag of chips."

"Thanks! Wait, there are no chips in it."

"I said I saved you a bag of chips."

That's just down to the Egyptians' knowledge of physiology and beliefs about what preservation meant. The Egyptians believed you thought with your heart and that was really the organ you needed to return and hence left that in the body. They obviously had some belief in magic and I think as part of the resurrection process they would have thought that the returned person would be able to use some spells to fully restore themselves.

Then you would be at odds with basically every Egyptologist. The pyramids weren't just stand-alone constructions. There is a full complex of buildings including mortuary temples and other buildings associated with funerary rites.

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I never claimed to be an expert, but it seems weird that we're not finding mummies in pyramids if that was the whole purpose for their existence.

How is this news? this was taught in school

This makes sense to me. About a decade ago a guy donated his body to scientists who wished to try the Egyption mummification process. They knew the "recipe" but had been unable to do it before because of legal reasons. I seem to remember they even made a documentary on it. Anyway the expectations were that it body would look fairly more lifelike than the 2500 year old mummies they had unbandaged. The belief was the extreme darkness and shriveling was the result of centuries slowly drying out. To their great surprise (as I recall) was that the mummy looked like that right away. I figured the high priests just quickly wrapped it up in a bunch of bandages so no one could see how bad the job came out. One couldn't imagine that being a preservation job that would be acceptable

I'm struck by how bizarre the "mask" comment is in the article, as if death masks weren't something done to preserve the likeness of the dead by Europeans for centuries.

Not an expert, but what if the reason we are not finding mummies is that they have either ascended heaven or someone is making a mummy army in secret to rule over the world?

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After reading that article I found nothing to contradict my current understanding. No, Egyptians were not just preserving bodies for the sake of preserving them. Pharoahs, which were really the main people to be mummified until the practice became more democratized in the new kingdom , were viewed as divine incarnations of different gods. So of course they would be "making the body divine". This is a god you are handling. You are going to use things normally used for offerings. They had temples to worship and present offerings to deceased pharoahs. Also distinct acts of vandalism on mummies in ancient times to deprive their souls of a home along with other Egyptian writings both point to a need for preservation as well as a not in the article itself that's states ancient Egyptians as well as Victoria's believed the body was necessary for the afterlife. Annoyed at how click bate this was for basically no substance.

The claims that the Giza pyramids was used as tombs are not backed up by raw evidence, they are built very different from the later Pyramids that was used as tombs hence why I called it a modern theory, it's a theory because it lacks evidence.

It's strange and a big mystery that the largest pyramids of Giza contain no human remains, bodies, mummies or inscription in the walls like the later ones.

Later Pyramids were definitely used as tombs and have both texts and inscriptions on the walls referring them as tombs, I'm just mentioning the Giza pyramids here.

I mean, technically yes, and technically no.
It was not intended to preserve bodies after death But it was intended to preserve bodies in the afterlife.
Which is basically the same thing, and it's just an article that goes "SEMANTICS!"
The intent of preserve bodies into the afterlife, and send with them the resources they require in the next life, be it for as is, or for them to ascend to divinity, it's a thing thats very common in many ancient cultures across the world.

After 4 or 5 thousand years? I don't. The tombs which get discovered untouched tend to be dug into cliffsides or buried, as far as I understand it. They only survived because people forgot where they were.

Difficult to misplace a pyramid

But if you turn 360 degrees you’ll walk straight into it

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In the same way that a pyramid is hard to misplace, wouldn't it be easy to guard?

There's no way they've been consistently guarded for all that time. People have been nicking masonry from them, I'm certain they could get lightweight valuables in and out as well

Giza pyramids are not dated as the oldest of pyramids.

Well, seems like a good time to for instance read up on the Mehdi's who legit removed all pharao remains from the tombs in Luxor to keep them safe in a 'mummy stash', proving that tombs were indeed being raided and guarded, and that even the guards would remove objects as to not let them fall into the hands of looters.

Egyptologist here, it's not.

ITT: a 21th century internet user that finds it odd that 'we' haven't found any precious item in a structure that is 5000 years old.

Sorry I ment to say one of the oldest* There are still debates to this day on which pyramids were built the first since we cannot be certain.

From my understanding of Ancient Egyptian religion and culture, the human soul needed to recognize their dead body in order to function well in the after life. If the body was disfigured to be unrecognizable, then the soul is lost in the after life. To be honest, it’s been a long while since studying about this so understanding may have changed since.

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There is no such debate. There is a very well established chronology of pyramid development from Mastaba tombs to the Step Pyramid of Djoser, to the Giza pyramids and so on.

The burial of Neferuptah was found intact inside her pyramid at Hawara.

"Their reasoning? Both processes contained a similar ingredient: salt. The idea was that you preserve fish to eat at some future time," Price said. "So, they assumed that what was being done to the human body was the same as the treatment for fish."

What kind of proof is that? It even says in the next sentence they didn't use salt, but natron. This whole thing screams like a advertisement for the "Golden Mummies of Egypt" exhibit.

They weren't intending to preserve the bodies, but instead were preparing them for a transition to divinity.

And the central aspect of this divine ritual involved... preserving the body.

It's like arguing I didn't intend to cook dinner, I just wanted to turn raw ingredients into an edible meal because I was hungry. And to do that I had to cook.

I'm very aware of the current chronology of the establishment pyramids.

Since the history of the Giza pyramids are LOST to mankind we are best guessing by books/texts written by Romans/Egyptians from local stories when they visited/lived in Egypt.

We also have carbon dating which varies a lot, a group collected 70 samples and got the results 2853 to 3809 BC. That's a difference of 400 years which very well might make the Pyramid of Giza the oldest.

People must understand that we don't know how old the Pyramids are, we are only doing calculated guesses.

The debate should ALWAYS be open around a subject like this specially regarding lost history, just because it's convenient to not change the order doesn't mean the first order is the correct one.

I've been inside the pyramids of Giza. They were very much a personalized tomb for a single, highly revered, person.

The outer shells of the sarcophagi are still present inside. You can't remove them without breaking them apart or disassembling the rest of the structure.

Just a tip: should you find yourself in Giza you too may visit a pyramid and go inside. It's hot and damp in the burial chamber, and you'll certainly be in a long line of people. Glad I did it, wouldn't do it again though.

Not even 'one of the oldest' :) not to be that guy but as someone who has actually visited Giza and Sakharra, while I do agree that there are mysteries surrounding the Giza complex, I feel like you lack some general knowledge surrounding Egyptology, maybe read up on the whole thing, it's very interesting!

There is no question that the step pyramid was built by Djoser, a third dynasty pharaoh and that the Giza pyramids were built by three pharaohs from the fourth dynasty. We absolutely know how old the pyramids are, the order that they were built in, and by whom.

Maybe someone at some point wanted to be buried there I know they have different chambers in the pryamids, the sarcophagi or what we believe it to be is sure interesting.

A highly revered person would have treasures beyond imagination, inscriptions of the greatness of their era and most definitely human remains,mummies which does not exist at all, zero, absolutely null in the pyramids of Giza.

The pyramids of Giza differ so much from the other pyramids or tombs we have found, just because 9/10 pryamids were used as tombs it doesn't automatically mean the 10th are also.

I'm not saying I'm correct, but it sure is interesting that the pryamids of Giza lacks so very much of what the other tombs have.

It's not much of a mystery, they were looted.

Well you are simply wrong, a calculated guess is still a guess.

Not a calculated guess, but a theory supported by evidence from both the archaeological and textual record.

Sure they must have taken great lengths to cut down 100% the inscriptions on the walls and loot them, however nobody can deny that treasures very well might have been looted.

In the last 100 years we have discovered more chambers that were previously unknown and untouched yet they are still empty.

Right on, so we've got one body so far. There are and were quite a few pyramids out there yeah? Lot of them not even in Egypt. Are you suggesting that based on this one body all pyramids MUST be tombs?

I was replying to your impression that no bodies/mummies have ever been found in pyramids.

What do you propose they were instead?

> People must understand that we don't know how old the Pyramids are, we are only doing calculated guesses.

We have actual, written history of Egypt going back for thousands of years. They recorded who was buried in each pyramid, both on the pyramids themselves and in their records. The Greeks and Romans themselves have written histories that talk about their interactions with Egypt and corroborate much of what they wrote.

Egypt wasn't some kind of insular backwater, the Egyptians interacted with other states. Sometimes they were a regional superpower, sometimes they were closer to a vassal state, sometimes they were broken up into multiple states. There's over six thousand years of continuous history there, a lot can happen.

It's so sad when you learn why females were made to decompose more before their male counterparts before being mummified. And no, it wasn't because they thought less of the women. I'll let y'all do your own study on that one.

The Giza pyramids are not the beginning of pyramid history. The evolution of pyramid building is directly traceable from mastabas, to stacked mastabas, to the first attempt at pyramids, to the great pyramids, to the later pyramids. All of which were used as tombs. It doesn't make any sense that the Giza pyramids, which are smack dab in the middle of that history, would have a different purpose. The fact that mummies haven't been found in the Giza pyramids is just something conspiracy theorists use a jumping off point for wild theories that they had some other mysterious use. All archaeological evidence points to them being tombs.

I'm not mad, if you've got other mummies to show please share. I don't think I ever said that the tomb theory wasn't plausible, I just find it interesting that there aren't mummies being discovered in pyramids. Or at least, that's the rumor.

You've informed me of this queen that was discovered and I have no reason to doubt the validity, I've heard of her and her being discovered in the pyramid.

I'll just state again like I did in the beginning, if it's so obvious that ALL of the pyramids are tombs then why are we finding so few bodies? I'm skeptical that every single one was just looted. And there are a lot of pyramids that have nothing to do with the Egyptian pharaohs, are they all tombs too? Every single one? As far as what else they could be I don't know, but I'm curious.

A theory is in itself a guess of the unknown, there are also plenty of evidence that also challenge the current narrative.

I know about the textual records and they sure are interesting, however let's stick to facts and those are that we don't know the exact date of the great pryamid of Giza for now we can only estimate.

The great thing about history is that for all we know we might discover another technology next week that might pinpoint even more exact then carbon dating, it explains everything about the pyramids challenging everything we are believed to know.

In the end, it's all about beliefs and I believe the chronology are very much up to debate now and in the future, not choosing to debate history is just sad overall in my opinion nobody wins on that.

From what I can find, it wasn't unusual for pyramids in this time period to lack inscriptions, that mostly started later. The great pyramid also contains what very much looks like and is commonly agreed to be a sarcophagus.

As for other empty rooms, they might have been recently found by us, but could have been found before and resealed over this period of several thousand years. Or it's possible that they were initially made and then never used, I don't think this is uncommon in ancient tombs. It is also theorized that some of these rooms were meant to throw of robbers or were used during construction.

This is a stance you take in a seminar, but not one that anyone would realistically believe

Inscriptions on the walls of tombs was something that began with the 5th dynasty, after the great pyramids were built. No mystery there.

It's not weird in the slightest. Mummified bodies in Egypt and elsewhere have been stolen out of their tombs for millenia. Because people would pay a lot of money for them. That's what's believed to have happened here. The British weren't the first people to do that, it predates the existence of the UK. But some of the sarcophagi that were left behind were too big to steal, they couldn't get them out of the pyramids. Which indicates that they were there first, long before the roof was finished, which seems to point to the fact they were important and necessary to be inside the pyramid, maybe the main reason for the pyramid's existence in the first place.

The reason there were little to no hieroglyphs on the walls is because that's a practice that didn't start until the next age centuries later.

But as others have said, the pyramid's of giza are basically a big graveyard, there's tons and tons and tons of tombs and mastabas surrounding them, which were used to bury people. And those weren't the tombs of lowly workers who died making it, you had a to have a good deal of money at the time to have one, especially on a site that was so important.

That was the joke, at the time, yes, back in 2005 or whenever it was exactly. At least that eventually became the joke, even if it wasn't initially. But it was just a way to make fun of the dumb name for the console when it was announced. Here's the know your meme page about it

Although yeah because of this, someone did make this animated gif of Michael Jackson walking up to an xbox 360, spinning 360 degrees, and then moonwalking away, so that the joke still fits.

Hope this is still animated as I upload it but if not you might have to Google "xbox 360 Michael Jackson gif"

Here's the gif

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Mummies have been found in dozens of pyramids. They are mostly destroyed or partial due to damage during looting. Pyramids are basically giant "Rob me" signs, so it's really not weird that they were almost all looted. There are plenty of Egyptian records noting the pyramids and other tombs had been looted. It was not only pharaohs that built pyramids, other nobles and officials had pyramids and mastabas built as well. It's not like egyptologists just decided that pyramids were tombs one day and that was the end of it. There has been well over a century of research that supports that conclusion.

What else would it be used for? There are plenty of indications it was at least meant to be a tomb, even if it ended up not housing any bodies, so what is there to counter this? You literally cannot progress the field of history, or indeed most fields, if you require 100% certainty on everything, because we just don't have that, especially for something as far back as the pyramids of Giza. So unless you have an actual alternative theory of what the Giza pyramids were for we have to work on the most likely assumption, that they're tombs.

We'll probably never know what it was used for because not much research is done anymore since the narrative is set, it's open for tourism and is more in maintenance and preserving then in research.

If you look at it objectively as for what it is, it is not a 100% sell that it is a tomb. Add some historical texts based on the daily talk on the streets 2600-500 bce, surrounding pyramids acting as tombs then sure maybe it makes more sense it's a tomb.

All I'm doing is challenging it for what it really is without pushing all the external parts to the core, it starts to challenge ones believes and people don't like that.

But let's call it a tomb for today, in 150 years it might be called something else that's the way history goes.

The problem with challenging a supposed theory is you have to have alternatives to back it up, or else there's no value to it. Challenging a narrative just for the sake of challenging it isn't productive and wastes time that could be spent challenging areas that are actually up for debate.

It literally says it applies to ancient Egyptian mummies, not "all mummies everywhere"

I have no idea what you're referring to, can you elaborate?

They make them less appealing to the men mummifying them.

Ah, I see why you were hesitant to elaborate.

Right and I don't think ity applies to all ancient egyptian mummies. It is a typical overstep

I'm sure the Egyptians who built the great Pyramid of Giza are all laughing at us both in the afterlife, for only they know the real purpose it was built for.

there are a lot of "I think" in this article without much explanation of why and what new evidence there might be to support it