Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-Bey.
There was fastened to the breast, immediately below the neck, a stone or green porcelain scarab, containing an inscription which was to be efficacious in preventing the heart, “his heart which came to him from his mother, his heart from the time he was upon the earth,” from rising up and witnessing against the dead man before the tribunal of Osiris.* There were placed on his fingers gold or enamelled rings, as talismans to secure for him the true voice.**
* The manipulations and prayers were prescribed in the “Book
of Embalming.”
** The prescribed gold ring was often replaced by one of
blue or green enamel.
The body becomes at last little more than a skeleton, with a covering of yellow skin which accentuates the anatomical, details, but the head, on the other hand, still preserves, where the operations have been properly conducted, its natural form. The cheeks have fallen in slightly, the lips and the fleshy parts of the nose have become thinner and more drawn than during life, but the general expression of the face remains unaltered.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, after Rosellini.
A mask of pitch was placed over the visage to preserve it, above which was adjusted first a piece of linen and then a series of bands impregnated with resin, which increased the size of the head to twofold its ordinary bulk. The trunk and limbs were bound round with a first covering of some pliable soft stuff, warm to the touch. Coarsely powdered natron was scattered here and there over the body as an additional preservative. Packets placed between the legs, the arms and the hips, and in the eviscerated abdomen, contained the heart, spleen, the dried brain, the hair, and the cuttings of the beard and nails. In those days the hair had a special magical virtue: by burning it while uttering certain incantations, one might acquire an almost limitless power over the person to whom it had belonged. The ernbalmers, therefore, took care to place with the mummy such portions of the hair as they had been obliged to cut off, so as to remove them out of the way of the perverse ingenuity of the sorcerers.