Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

Then I looked up and saw a great curled wig of black hair which the records state was made for King Rameses, and wondered why the spiced old gentleman below did not match his wig to his natural flaxen hair.

Near this casket is one containing Seti I, the Pharaoh who preceded Rameses, another great warrior and conqueror, who is said to have made a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea. Not so far away is the mummy of Meneptah, the tyrant who hardened his heart against the Israelites and would not let them go. Seti lies in his coffin with his black arms crossed and his black head cushioned on yellow grave clothes. His features are as peaceful as perhaps they seldom were in life and he appears to sleep well.

The dead past became marvellously real when I looked at another box in which lay a mummied princess with the body of her tiny baby, not many days old, in the coffin beside her, and when I saw gold bracelets of the same patterns that our belles wear to-day and earrings quite as beautiful as those made by Tiffany, I felt that human nature was the same six thousand years ago as it is now, and that these people of the past had the loves and hates, the cares and the vanities of the world of to-day. I wondered what Rameses took for the colic and whether Queen Akhotupu, who lived before Moses, and who now lies here, had hysterics. I noted the flowers which were put in another mummy case beside a king and I could not reconcile the beautiful teeth and the fine intellectual face of King Seti, whose daughter is supposed to have found Moses in the bulrushes, with the fat, bloated fingers, showing that he had the gout. There was as good living in the days of the Israelites as there is in Egypt to-day, but then as now, only the rich had fancy cooks and the poor ate scraps. In the tomb of Ti near Memphis I saw in chambers of granite down under the sands of the desert, wall after wall covered with painted pictures of the life of the time when the tomb was made thousands of years before Christ.

I saw the body of a princess standing upright against the side of the wall. Her face was plated with gold, and the mummy cloths which wrapped her round and round were embroidered. One might make a similar bundle of any modern girl. Another of these ladies had hair which appeared to have been done up in curl papers, and its colour was as red as my own.

Many of the mummy caskets are splendid. They are made of fine woods, painted inside and out with pictures describing the life of the occupants. Some are covered with carvings and some with heads which may have been likenesses of those who lay within.

It costs much to die now. It must have cost more then. The expense of making a first-class mummy was twelve hundred dollars, and the money of that day was worth ten times what it is now. The caskets, which were more expensive than any of the coffins we have to-day, were incased in great sarcophagi of stone or wood, a single one of which must have cost a fortune.

I have asked the archæologists why the Egyptians made their mummies. Their reply is that the desire for mummification came from the religion of the ancient Egyptians, who believed in the transmigration of souls. They thought that the spirit wandered about for several thousand years after death and then came back to the home it had upon earth. For this reason it was desirable to keep the body intact, for every one looked to his mummihood as his only chance of re-creation hereafter.

When the art of embalming began no one knows, but it certainly dates back to the building of the Pyramids. We know that when Jacob died in Egypt, his son Joseph had him embalmed and the Bible says it took forty days to do the job properly. It also relates that when Joseph died the Egyptians embalmed him and put him away in a coffin. Herodotus, who was one of the best travel writers of all times, describes how embalming was done and tells the details of mummy-making. He says the art was carried on by a special guild, whose members were appointed by the government and who had to work at fixed prices. The bodies were mummified in three different ways. By the first and most costly method, the brains were extracted through the nose by means of an iron probe, and the intestines were taken out through an incision made in the side. The intestines were cleaned and washed in palm wine, covered with aromatic gum, and set aside in jars. The cavity of the body was next filled with spices, including myrrh, cassia, and other fragrant substances, and it was then sewn up. After this it was soaked in a solution of natron, a kind of carbonate of soda, being allowed to lie in it for a couple of months or more. When it had been taken out and wrapped in fine linen so smeared over with gum that it stuck to the skin, the mummy was ready for burial.

The second process, though cheaper, took about the same time. In this the brains were not extracted and the body was so treated in a solution that everything except the skin and bones was dissolved. There was a third process which consisted of cleaning the corpse and laying it down in salt for seventy days. The first process cost about twelve hundred dollars; the second, one hundred dollars; and the third, considerably less.

Other authorities describe different methods of mummification. Most of the mummies discovered, however, have been preserved by means of gums of some kind and by pitch and carbonate of soda. The mummies prepared with gums are usually green in colour with skins which look as though they were tanned. They often break when they are unrolled. The bodies preserved with pitch are black and hard, but the features are intact, and it is said that such mummies will last forever. In those treated with soda the skin is hard and rather loose, and the hair falls off when it is touched. The pitch mummy ordinarily keeps its hair and teeth.