Nature, besides, upon this torrid soil, gave the first idea of this mode of preserving the remains of men and animals: the mummy[1] of the sands, a natural phenomenon, was a revelation to a people so wise and industrious. The course of our work will demonstrate, we hope, the simple connection of these facts; it had already arrested M. le Comte de Caylus, who, in a memoir read to the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, in 1749, thus expresses himself: “The Egyptians, according to appearances, owe the idea of their mummies, to the dead bodies which they found buried in the burning sands which prevail in some parts of Egypt, and which, carried away by the winds, bury travellers and preserve their bodies, by consuming the fat and flesh without altering the skin.”
The same opinion is advanced by Rouelle. In our general history of the preservation of the human body, the mummy of the sand, and those induced by other local circumstances, will have the first place; and the art of embalming among the Egyptians and the Guanches will occupy the second. This art, we have already said, presents among these people, a general character, which does not appear in any other country. No where, indeed, are the processes of preservation so efficacious, and these two nations alone, have been able to endow their mummies with the power of resisting destruction.
We shall see in the sequel this custom establish itself among the Jews, the Greeks, the Romans and moderns—but it no longer displays a general character; it is no longer a law, a social institution; religious belief, superstition, personal interest, salubrity, no longer obliged them to recur to it. Sentiments of veneration, respect, and attachment, to which we have given the priority to all others, sufficed to perpetuate this custom, and have preserved it for a long series of ages, from the epoch of the Jews, down to our day.
Joseph commanded the physicians in his service to embalm the body of his father, which they executed according to order, in the space of forty days.—(Genesis.)
Saint John informs us, that Nicodemus took a hundred pounds of a mixture of myrrh and aloes, with which to embalm the body of Jesus Christ, which they enveloped in sheets with aromatics, according to the usual mode of burying the dead among the Jews.
Testimony of a similar nature, transmitted to us by historians, show us this usage in vigor among the Persians, the Arabians, the Ethiopians, &c.: for kings, princes, and persons of distinction, to whom they would not consider that they had rendered the respect due to their memories if they had failed to preserve preciously what remained of them.
Corippus, in his funeral oration on the Emperor Justinien, thus expresses himself on the embalming of this emperor:
“Thura sabæa cremant, fragrantia mille
Infundunt pateris, et odoro balsama succo, locatis
Centum aliæ species; unguentaque mira feruntur
Tempus in æternum sacrum servantia corpus.”[2]
The Romans, nevertheless, often contented themselves, in washing and rubbing the body with certain perfumes.