Mummies

• A mummy can be a human being or an animal, both were protected from decaying after death.
• There are three ways a dead body can become mummified: by freezing, by drying, or as the ancient Egyptians did, by using secret chemicals.
• It is believed that Egyptians started the practice of mummification as early as 3000 B.C.
• Only a few descriptions of mummy-making have been found. It was probably considered too sacred to be written down.
• The earliest known Egyptian mummies were not wrapped in cloth but were dried out naturally after being buried in the hot, dry, and sandy ground of Egypt.
• Egyptian legend said that King Osiris was the first to be mummified.
• No one knows exactly what secret ingredients Egyptians used for mummification but scientists now believe that the ingredients included oil of cedar (similar to today's turpentine) and natron, a mineral with a high salt content.
• If you unwrap just one mummy, you'd get a strip of linen that would reach up and down a football field four times.
• The mummy of an important person would have as many as twenty layers of wrappings.
• In 1977, when Egyptian authorities discovered that the 3,000-year-old mummy of Pharoah Ramses II was being invaded by beetles, the mummy was sent to France to be treated and cured by a team of scientists. Ramses II traveled to France with a passport stating his occupation as: "King—deceased."