The mummification process went through different stages, described in the following ten sentences. Can you put them in order?
2. Remove all internal organs.
3. Place heart back inside body.
9. After forty days stuff the body with linen or sand to give it a more human shape.
10. After seventy days wrap the body from head to toe in bandages.
7. Make a cut on the left side of the body, near the tummy.
5. Place the lungs, intestines, liver and stomach inside special canopic jars.
6. Rinse the inside of the body with wine and spices like myrrh.
4. Let the internal organs dry.
8. Cover the corpse with natron (salt) for seventy days.
1. insert a hook through a hole near the nose and pull out part of the brain.
It is an interesting project for 11 year old Cedar. The pictures in her book are somewhat disturbing though and as she is sitting at the craft table in the livingroom opposite her seven year old sister, Iris, who is struggling with nightmares about people eating children, she is careful to shield the images. Iris sort of wants to see them enough to peek and sort of doesn’t, enough to cover her eyes and be distracted from her letter to Nannie.
Ancient Egypt is just what’s on the class 5 Steiner curriculum so that’s what they’ve been sent home with. I’m troubled over it, though. Is this the right thing for a pandemic?
Cedar: Do you know why Egyptian gods have animal heads, Iris?
Iris: Because they are scary.
Cedar: No. Because the Egyptians were very impressed by all the things animals could do that humans couldn’t. So they thought the gods were part animal and more powerful because of it.
Hmmmm…So maybe, given this pandemic has started due to the insatiable appetite of some humans for animal meat, and their mistreatment of these animals and the mistreatment even of the meat, this may be a perfect theme afterall.
But I don’t’ say anything. I just think it and lodge it somewhere for a discussion later when perhaps I don’t feel like I’m having my brain pulled out by a hook through the nose. Will that moment ever come though?
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