Mummification
The ancient Egyptians mummified the dead bodies of those who could afford such an elaborate and costly procedure . it is important to remember that this was a practice followed only by the royal family and the wealthier classes of Egyptian society. The word used to describe an embalmed and wrapped body is of course “mummy”, but this is in fact a misnomer because it comes from the Arabic “mummiya” meaning pitch or bitumen , neither of which were actually used in Egyptian mummification. However , bodies mummified during the Late period (c.747_332 BC) were often so badly embalmed that they were blackened and brittle, and as they were found to burn well it was assumed that they had been dipped in bitumen.
The Greek writer Herodotus made a slightly erroneous account of the mummification process in c.450 BC, and two damaged papyri have survived from the first century AD outlining the final stages of the process .
Unfortunately no embalmer,s handbook has survived from the Pharaonic Period. Consequently, our understanding of the procedure, and how it developed, is based mainly on examination of the bodies themselves.
In the Early Dynastic Period(c.3100_c.2686 BC) dead bodies were tightly wrapped in strips of resin-soaked linen. this did not prove to be wholly successful, because although the handages hardened in the from of the body , the body itself decayed , so during the Third Dynasty (c. 2686_c.2613 BC) methods of preserving the body itself were explored. The ancient Egyptians came to realize that if they wanted the body to survive they had to dehydrate it from the inside and the outside at the same time, and that to do this effectively they had to remove the internal organs.
Up until this time , the dead had been buried in a contracted foetal position , but it was found to be easier to reach the internal organs if the body was stretched out, so the dead came to be buried in this position.
The oldest surviving mummy dates to the late Fifth Dynasty (c.2400BC) , but it is known that the ancient Egyptians were removing the internal organs , and embalming and burying them separately, at least as early as the Fourth Dynasty , because the internal organs of  Queen Hetepheres , the mother of the Great Pyramid builder , Khufu (c.2589_c.2566 BC), were found in a canopic chest.
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