#The ritual of embalming papyrus author manual#
#The ritual of embalming papyrus author skin#

#The ritual of embalming papyrus author skin#

The bulk of the papyrus, which is the second-longest medical papyrus surviving from ancient Egypt, deals with herbal medicine and skin illnesses. Based on the palaeography-that is, the sign forms-the six meter long papyrus is dated to approximately 1450 BC, which means that it predates the only two other examples of embalming texts by more than a thousand years. The two parts of the papyrus originally belonged to two private collectors, and several sections of it are still missing. thesis, is the Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg-so called because one half of the papyrus belongs to the Louvre Museum in Paris and the other half is part of the University of Copenhagen's Papyrus Carlsberg Collection.

The manuscript, which Schiødt has been working on for her Ph.D. In between the four-day intervals, the body was covered with cloth and overlaid with straw infused with aromatics to keep away insects and scavengers, Sofie Schiødt says. A ritual procession of the mummy marked these days, celebrating the progress of restoring the deceased's corporeal integrity, amounting to 17 processions over the course of the embalming period.

#The ritual of embalming papyrus author manual#

The importance of the Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg manual in reconstructing the embalming process lies in its specification of the process being divided into intervals of four, with the embalmers actively working on the mummy every four days. According to Sofie Schiødt, this would fit well with the red linen procedure described in this manuscript. This process was repeated at four-day intervals.'Īlthough this procedure has not been identified before, Egyptologists have previously examined several mummies from the same period as this manual whose faces were covered in cloth and resin. The red linen is then applied to the dead person's face in order to encase it in a protective cocoon of fragrant and anti-bacterial matter. We get a list of ingredients for a remedy consisting largely of plant-based aromatic substances and binders that are cooked into a liquid, with which the embalmers coat a piece of red linen. 'One of the exciting new pieces of information the text provides us with concerns the procedure for embalming the dead person's face. the drying of the body with natron, have been omitted from the text,' Sofie Schiødt explains. The text reads like a memory aid, so the intended readers must have been specialists who needed to be reminded of these details, such as unguent recipes and uses of various types of bandages. 'Many descriptions of embalming techniques that we find in this papyrus have been left out of the two later manuals, and the descriptions are extremely detailed. The manual has recently been edited by Schiødt. Most secrets of the art were probably passed on orally from one embalmer to the other, Egyptologists believe, so written evidence is scarce until recently, only two texts on mummification had been identified.Įgyptologists were therefore surprised to find a short manual on embalming in a medical text that is primarily concerned with herbal medicine and swellings of the skin. In ancient Egypt, embalming was considered a sacred art, and knowledge of the process was the preserve of very few individuals.