tree resin into the cranium to halt decomposition of remaining tissue.2 Extract the internal organs through a slit in the abdomen wall. (You’ll have to reach in with a sharp knife and feel around for them.) Wait! Leave the heart. Egyptians considered the heart to be the control center for thought and action, so they figured they’d need it in the afterlife. What to do with the other organs? Put them in jars decorated with the heads of gods or a likeness of the departed. The jars go in the tomb with the mummy.
3 Bathe the body in spices and palm wine. Cover it with natron salts, a sodium paste found in drying lakebeds, to retard spoilage and dry the skin.
4 When the body is good and dry, stuff rolled-up linen cloths inside, kind of like stuffing a turkey. Try to restore the person’s shape to something resembling lifelike.
5 Wrap more linen, cut into neat strips, around the outside of the body to create that creepy, bandaged look that will scare the pants off moviegoers a few millennia later.
6 Put the body in a coffin, preferably a double coffin (one inside another). If you’re working on a pharaoh, put the coffin inside a stone sarcophagus inside a hidden tomb.
Preserved pharaohs in Egypt
Perhaps nobody devoted quite so much thought and energy to death and the afterlife as the ancient Egyptians. After burying their dead with great care and ceremony since perhaps 4000 BC (Chapter 4 has more on ancient Egypt), the Egyptians began artfully mummifying their pharaohs sometime before the 24th century BC.
By 2300 BC, the practice had spread beyond royalty. Any Egyptian who could afford it was dried and fortified for the trip into the afterlife. The mummy was buried with possessions and even servants for use in the next world.
Carter first gazed by candlelight into the wonders of that tomb, unseen for more than 3,300 years. That moment has been held up ever since as the ideal archaeological breakthrough — completely unlike most great discoveries, which are scratched out of the ancient dust and painstakingly pieced together.
The discovery made all the papers, and so did Carnarvon’s untimely death. The earl died of an infected mosquito bite a few months after he helped Carter find the tomb. Naturally, some people blamed his death on an ancient curse against anyone who disturbed the boy king’s eternal rest. (Grave robbers had been the scourge of Egyptian royalty.)
The notion of Tutankhamen’s curse may have disappeared if it weren’t for a 1932 horror movie called The Mummy, which is wrong on every point of archaeology and Egyptian religion but features a compellingly compelling performance by Boris Karloff in the title role. The Mummy was successful enough that many remakes and variations followed.
Tracking the Centuries
About 4000 BC: Egyptians begin burying their dead with ritual care.
About 3300 BC: A well-equipped male traveler in the Italian Alps succumbs to an arrow wound and falls face-down into the snow.
About 1600 BC: The volcano on the island of Santorini erupts, destroying the island, wiping out villages, and probably ending a civilization.
1352 BC: Tutankhamen, young king of Egypt, dies and is mummified.
About 1250 BC: A confederation of Greek kings and warriors attacks the city of Troy, in today’s Turkey.
Ninth century BC: The bard Homer sings about the Trojan War.
Early fourth century BC: In Athens, the philosopher Plato writes about Atlantis, a land lost under the sea.
1870s: Heinrich Schliemann, a German commodities broker and amateur archaeologist, finds Homer’s Troy.
1922: British archaeologist Howard Carter opens Tutankhamen’s perfectly preserved tomb.
1991: Hikers in the Italian Alps discover the 5,300-year-old mummy of a well-outfitted traveler. Researchers nickname him Ötzi.
Chapter 3
Putting History into Perspective
IN THIS CHAPTER
In several places in this book, I refer to the year 1492, when the explorer Christopher Columbus, sailing under a Spanish flag, landed for the first time on an island in the Bahamas, east of Florida. That year is a big dividing point in history, in that it marks the beginning of European colonialism in the Americas. The Western Hemisphere changed in ways that were devastatingly tragic for the people who had been living there. Diseases from Europe killed them by the millions. The rest of the world, meanwhile, saw changes that ranged from new crops (corn, potatoes, tobacco, peppers, coffee) to population migrations, to new, lucrative markets for slave trading (the most pernicious kind of population migration). A global economy took root once European navigators realized they could sail to new worlds, and soon around the world, in their little wooden ships.
Yet according to The New York Times, a survey conducted back in 2008 showed that fewer than half of teenagers in the United States could correctly pick the date of Columbus’s discovery from a multiple-choice list. If today’s teenagers, or adults, were given the same test, how many would choose the right answer? Many people have trouble putting history and its events into perspective. The history of the world is such a huge topic, covering so many eras, cultures,
