The Egyptian Way of Death

First the cadaver is washed with purified water, then smeared with resin and wrapped in linen. The sorrowing friends follow the bier; the widow kneels for a last farewell, tears streaking her cheeks. It could be anywhere, anytime.

Then fantasy takes over, as the placards on the wall — based on the Ani and Hunefer 19th Dynasty (1292-1186 B.C.) papyruses in the British Museum, and the first thing seen by the visitor to Luxor's Museum of Mummification — seamlessly draw the viewer into the afterlife of the ancient Egyptians. Watched by the goddesses Isis and Nephthys, the dead man is received by the jackal-headed god Anubis; his heart is weighed against a feather and judged by 14 enigmatic figures (seven cheerful, and holding the ankh, the ancient Egyptian symbol of life; seven more austere and unsmiling) before the god Osiris offers absolution and reunites the soul with the resurrected body.

This lurch between the prosaic and the fantastic is typical of Luxor's Museum of Mummification, the only museum in the world devoted to this method of preserving the dead, which evolved from the ancient practice of drying corpses out on the hot sands of the West Bank of the Nile. Its collection includes the tools and substances used in the process, objects which were placed in tombs and — most hauntingly — fine examples of mummies themselves.

The Egyptians believed that a righteous person's body had to be preserved for its owner to use again in heaven, in as lifelike and attractive a form as possible. So sometimes colored stones were inserted in empty eye-sockets, and the corpse's flesh was tinted — red for men, pale yellow for women — before it was placed in a casket, decorated outside and in with mystical paintings as protection from evil.

The process was also used for animals regarded as sacred. Among such favored creatures the museum boasts a magnificent mummified ram — believed to be the incarnation of the god Khnum — with gilded head and chest. It also displays the elegant alabaster canopic jars in which the organs were stored; the pretty wooden boats which were interred with the mummy to carry the soul across the Nile to Abydos, the resting place of Osiris; and the toylike ushabtis — figurines representing laborers whose job was to perform any manual tasks that, in the afterlife, the gods might require of the departed soul.

It's such a mixture of the gruesome, the playful and the elegiac that the museum offers; a fascinating insight into the practices of the distant past, and a moving and oddly reassuring testament to the way that our forefathers confronted the eternal imperatives of death and decay.