Stuff You Should KnowA mummy is a human being whose soft tissue has been preserved after death, and there are mummies around the world -- including natural mummies, as well as corpses that have been intentionally embalmed. Listen to this classic episode with Chuck and Josh to learn more.
Hey, everybody. Did you ever want to know how mummies work and how you mummify a person? Well you can learn if you listen to this one from March fifteenth. Hey, look at that date, March fifteenth, twenty eleven. How mummies work.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W Chuck Bryant. We're about to do this stuff you should know. Thang, Yeah, do you like that? I did? How you doing? Man?
Great? Now that I've switched out my foul smelling microphone cover?
Yeah, this is actually take two, but it things nasty. I'm not getting near it, but can you trually imagine Chuck? Yeah, and something's future facted on the mic cover, the Peak Clipper cover.
Yeah, weird. You know, in real studios it changes out of it now and.
Then these things have been running for at least a year.
Fifty cents? All right, what's your chuck your sterling intro?
Speaking of fifty cents, do you remember when we were talking about fossils.
Oh?
Yeah, and we said that every once in a while, something happens so that a fossil naturally occurs, and that it's desiccated, the skin is dried out. Yeah, that's a mummy. Yeah who knew? I knew? Yeah, me too. Actually, when we talked about that, I was like, we have to do how mummies work, and here we are.
I'm kind of surprised, just when it's slipped under the radar for so long. This yeah right up our alley.
Yeah, I went and looked. I'm like, surely we do have it and be fast.
It was gruesome.
Yeah, it's it's like stuff you should know died in the wool. Yeah. Yeah, and you're about to hear why dear listeners, because we're about to talk about all the things that happened to a corpse after death, which we've done before, but we need to go over again. Mummies are cool, though, they are very cool. So, Chuck, let's say that that you were stabbed in the stomach enough time so that you could not move any longer. You couldn't walk back home. It was out in the woods, and the one person you're with, the very person who stabbed you, left you there to die. You bleed out, you're dead. Things start happening to your body, right, yeah, pretty quickly, up first is autolysis.
Yes, that is uh, that's kind of gruesome. That's when your organs that have digestive enzymes actually say, well, this is what we do, so we're going to start digesting the organs.
Right and not like my stomach is eating itself because I'm hungry, Like my stomach is actually eating itself. It's rupturing and oozing and it's it's being reduced to nothing. Yeah, while that's going on, and that actually I think if I remember correctly, that kind of helps kickstart the process of putrefaction, right.
Yeah, autolysis starts within a few hours after you're dead. The body, the body knows.
And if you want like a really big overview of this or an in depth look at what happens to the body immediately after death, you should listen to our Rigor Mortis podcast if you haven't already. Yeah, body farms. I talked about it in there too.
So yes, puture faction, you're right, is followed by or follows autolysis. And that is when bacteria does its little job and produces everything to a skeleton. And you know, depending where you are, this gonna happen in a few.
Months, right, depending on where you are now, We as human beings are a subtropical species, right, Chuck, you know that, sure, So we are designed, if you believe in that kind of thing, to decomposed. Decompose most readily in a warm, humid climate. That's where the bacteria that breaks down our tissue lives or thrives moisture warmth. If you have cold, dry, yeah, things change a little bit. Like a refrigerator exactly. Which is a good place to store a body if you want to preserve it, or food if you want to eat it. That's a good point to your body if you want to eat it. For an in depth look at that, you might want to listen to our cannibalism podcast though. That's right, right, But let's say you don't have a refrigerator. Nature provides it for you on some occasions. There's ut See the ice man.
Right, yeah, see the ice man.
Yeah, that's the iceman.
Yeah, nineteen ninety one and the Italian Alps. This dude is very well preserved natural mummy.
He's amazing.
Died and basically got buried in ice and kind of stayed that way.
Yeah. I think they have the impression that he fell into a crevasse. Yeah, died, but it was during like a blizzard maybe, and he was covered with snow and ice that stuck around for millennia. But he's so well preserved. You can see the tattoos on his skin and still.
Yeah, well and we knew, Hey, they tattooed people fifty three hundred years ago exactly. Little window into what life was like for Iceman.
Yeah he was. He had I think a nice little set of air and his bow and copper age European guy.
That's why he had a wallet sized photo of you as well of me. Yeah, it's not possible. He was from the future. That's my that's what I think.
He just blew my mind. Chuck good. So ice, as we talked about in Fossils too, was a is a very good preservant. But nothing does it. Oh, Pete Bogs too. You remember I finally showed you that picture of Tolan Man.
Can't forget about Pete.
Again if you have not gone and looked up Tolon Man. It's awesome, Like his whiskers are still there and he lived a couple thousand years ago, right.
What's his name? Did they name him just Tolan Man?
Toland Man? I would have named him Pete Terrible. So those two are pretty good. But the money, the natural money preserve it is sand.
Yeah, I had no idea.
The reason why sand is such a great preservative is because it actually wicks away and absorbs and just removes the any type of humidity in the body, which allows the body to desiccate, which means that there is no place for bacteria to live, which means the tissues, the tissue remains intact. And that's all about mummy is Yeah, it's a it's a corpse with its tissue intact.
Well, and this kind of kickstarted the whole mummification artificial mummification craze in Egypt because at first they buried bodies. They weren't in caskets, they were you know, buried in the hot sand. Yeah, and that preserved the body for so long. They said, well, hey, if the body's preserved, and that means the spirit's preserved. And this all of a sudden, we have new views on the afterlife and life.
Right, So what they decided to do and this was so what I guess what you've just said though, is that the mummification, the whole concept of mummies that we have that was so ingrained in the Egyptian culture. Happened by accident, right, Yeah, So they started they figured this out. So they start purposefully burying people in the sand with the intent of them being mummified. Right. But the problem is, somewhere along the way they begin to have horrible thoughts of their dead relatives choked with sand. Right, So they started to say, maybe we should put some sort of barrier up in between the corpse and the sand. Yeah, and that led to caskets, right.
Yeah, started with just like a wicker covering, and then that eventually led to wooden boxes. But here's the rub. Yeah, now the body is not preserved. Now the body rots desicates. Well, no it.
Doesn't, it's just a normal corpse. Now, yeah, becomes you've put a barrier between the body and the preservant in the form of a tomb.
So what's an Egyptian to do?
Then?
Well, the Egyptians, being the very pious culture that they were, and the very intuitive and smart culture that they were. You should for that, you should go read did the Greeks get all their ideas from the Africans? Good article?
Did you read them?
Yeah? We do that. Podcast man let's do that, Okay. They they decided that they needed to rectify their their religious beliefs with their problem, their their need to preserve bodies. And what did they do.
Well, they said, maybe we can replicate this natural process that we've discovered through man made artificial means and the trial and error. Yeah, it's kind of like it's called embalming, Josh.
And they actually figured out, Chuck that like, one of the one of the problems with the desiccation, the natural desiccation in the desert was that the skin turned like this crisp brown right, like you know, over baked chicken.
It's exactly what looks like.
Actually, yeah, And with these embalming techniques that they eventually mastered, they they could they could preserve a body better than it could be preserved naturally, which is man conquering nature.
It's right, conquering death even well, come on, it's a cluss. They didn't have huge success at first. They would embalm the bodies mainly to keep it away from the elements, wrap it in linen, soaked in resin, and they would create nice little shapely forms that look kind of like people. But that didn't really do a whole lot because the bandages didn't really halt the composition. They basically figured out that it happens from the inside out.
Right.
It took it took them a few centuries, if not millennia.
Basically wrapping it up, and it's just disintegrating within the bandages at first.
Right, But those bandages are important because they stick around pretty much the whole time. Same with the resin right. Yes, so those two very early embalming techniques are mummification techniques stuck around, But it was a big leap when they figured out, oh wait a minute, this is going on inside and so we need to start addressing.
That by removing organs.
Right, And it's about here I think that we hit the Middle Kingdom. And like the mummies that we think of were produced in the from the eighth keent the twentieth dynasties of the Middle Kingdom.
Yeah, that was when the like the heyday of mummification, right.
Right, which was between fifteen seventy and ten seventy five BC. Yeah, the mummies that we think of, the ones that are still around like really well preserved today, they were preserved during this time, right, right, So what do you do when you realize that everything bad is happening to a corpse from the inside out. How do you address that?
Should we just walk through the process one by one, the gruesome process? Yeah, okay. First thing you do is you take it and it varies, you know, the different processes. And within the processes, they had things that they would say, sort like religious rights that they would go through as well.
Yeah, very sacred processes.
But they would take the body generally to the Red Land desert region. It's not near a whole lot of people, so people aren't grossed out, but it is near the Nile River. They needed the Nile River to well, we'll see that in sess second step one, step one. You need the Nile for step one. They think they did it an open tents obviously to get some good ventilation going. And the first place they took the body was to the eyebo, the place of purification.
Yeah, that was basically the Nile or the place where they the place near the Nile where they rinsed the body with you washed the body off.
Yeah, it's like a rebirth symbol of rebirth.
Right, So the the the corpse was hastened or some of the spirit was hastened in the afterlife, and we should probably say here so it doesn't get too confusing. There were three spirits that the Egyptians believed comprised a person, right, the Ka, the Ba, and the ah.
Ah Yeah akh, Yeah, it's always tricky to pronounce that.
Right, So I think with this purification process, the ka or the or the Ba or the ah, we're moved along to the to the next world. Yeah, but the Ka that was the one that was inextricably linked with the corpse, which became the whole reason for mummification. As long as the corpse was preserved, the ca was preserved and the afterlife could you know, the person could live in the afterlife. But once the corpse died, the kaw died and that second death was final, which is why they wanted to preserve bodies in the first place. Right, Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's like the opposite of ashes to ashes and dust to death, that's right.
So after they've washed the body and sort of reborne it in the rivers of the Nile, they carried the body to the per Niffer and that is the house of mummification. And this is kind of where this is the basement of the Fisher House. Basically, huh and six feet under the fissures. Oh, yeah, this is in the basement. This is where we go and the gang would get to work. Yeah, they would lay it on a wooden table. The body. They removed the brain by hammering a chisel through the bone in the nose.
You know, I knew that already before this articles Christian Slaters and like he's in like one of the creep shows or Amaze Amazing stories or tales from the crypto movie pump up the volume. It might have been that, but I think it was like a smaller vignette, like a mini movie within the larger movie. It's called like lat number nine or whatever and leaving the cube, think it was. Now that's called Brotherhood of the Tiger. Now I think they change. Yeah. Anyway, they there's a mummy who's hell bent on taking other people's brains using these hooks or whatever.
Well, and that's exactly what they do. They make a nose hole basically larger than the nostrils. They insert a big hook, iron hook, and start scooping it out. Eventually they go down to a spoon and eventually they just rinse out the remaining bits of brain. And what's funny is so hold on. They discard the brain because they thought, I don't know why we have this stuff in our heads, but we probably don't need it in the.
Afterlife, right, which is kind of unusual for the Egyptians because they they preserved organ yeah, you know, but the brain. And what's funny though, like I think what we've just kind of meander passed that we should kind of meditate on for a second, Chuck, is that they get to a point where they fill the head with water. I imagine, close the nose in the mouth and shake the head around to slosh all this stuff out, and then lean the head over and let all the last bits come out.
Yeah, that's how I would do it.
I wonder if they did shots of that stuff, it was like part of the ceremony.
I would draw the line there. Well, they probably just thought, I don't know, they didn't even know what the brain was.
Yeah, that's true. It's just waste.
So the brain's out, Josh. Then they take a blade made from obsidian sacred stone, cut a little incision on the left side and reach in and start pulling out the organs that they can get to right, and then preserving those, like you said, except for the kidneys because they didn't think they were important.
Either, which they were, you know, I mean the kidneys are important, but it's not like brain important.
Well, I mean you need kidneys to live. I'm sure they preserve the appending you need all of Yeah, that was probably the most holy right of the organs.
So they actually when they preserve these things, they would they would wrap them in uh in resin strips of linen, right, Basically they would mummify each organ, yeah, and then they put them in and canopic jars. Basically it was like here's your body, and then also here are your organs. I forget you.
They'd leave the heart though, because they thought the heart was you know, linked to the soul and the spirit. And they're kind of on the money there, I think.
So these organs take up space in our chests and abdominal cavities, so they would actually stuff the body with like incense and other materials as well.
Right, yeah, well, first they'd rinse it. Once they I forgot, they'd take out the lungs to the abdomen.
Yeah, right right there.
You can't get along the little side slit and then they would rinse the chest cavity with palm wine and then they would stuff it. They would actually basically yeah, straw, Well I didn't say what actually you just said other materials. I would use straw, maybe frankincense, a little murrhor yeah, just to complete the trilogy.
Stuff you should know, stuff you should know.
Yeah, straw, frankinsense and yeah, straw.
That that kept the body from like caving in on itself, basically maintaining a little bit of shape.
And then is the key. This is the key to mummification. And as a matter of fact, I'm just gonna say it now. I found it on the internet. There is a step by step, very easy to follow recipe on I think Wiki how, which I don't normally go on, but it's the only place I could find a recipe for mummifying a chicken using the Egyptian method, and it calls for natron, right, Yeah, that's the key. Natron is this basically a compound that the Egyptians figured out they could gather and combine from the Nile, which is basically baking soda, sodium bicarbonate and salt table salt sodium chloride. You mix the two together and it becomes this perfect preservant. So they would put natron powder, which is like this just accelerated the technique of mummification, like by light years. Sure, and they would cover the body with this stuff and leave it and it would just completely dry the body out. Right.
Yeah, this took about forty days. They had to guard the body while this was going on, obviously, because they didn't want vultures digging through the natron for what lies beneath. After the forty days, they moved the body then to the wabet, which is a house of purification. Yank all that incense and the stuffing out, refill it with the natron resin, soaked linen and other materials again whatever these mysterious things are. Then they would sew all the incisions up, cover the skin with resin, and then say, hey, it's time to wrap this puppy.
Yeah, and this is where we get the idea for the mummy, our modern idea of a mummy always wearing link bandages.
That are always coming off.
Yeah. You can just see the eyes maybe like teeth or something. Yeah, So this is where we're at. They're at the bandaging procedure that thirty five or forty days, while the nature and powder was doing its work wicking away all of the basically acting as the desk KNT. Yeah, the family of the deceased was going around town going do you have any linens we can have forever? Yeah? Do you have some linens we can have?
And could you like your linens to spend eternity in the eavans above.
With our dad. They collected about four thousand square feet just top top of my head, that's about how much they gathered sure of linen and would bring it to the embalmers, and the embalmers would say, hey, we like this piece. That piece is horrible. Are you really going to bury your dad in this? And they would take the best stuff and they would cut it into or they would tear them into strips three to eight inches wide of bandages and they would start the rapping, which would take a little while. Right, Yeah, it takes a week.
Or two, I guess probably depending on how big the body is. Common sense. Start with the hands and feet. You wrap all. This is the initial under wrapping, I guess. You wrap everything individually, each little finger each it'll toe everything and then once everything's wrapped individually, they do a whole body wrap, applying new layers, coating the linen with again the hot resin to keep everything in place. Uttering spell. Sometimes they would wrap amulets over different parts of the body. Wrap it up in there with you, protect you in the next world, that kind of thing.
Right, and then presto chaninjoh, you are a mummy. And before we go further the process we've just described, this really ornate, wonderful, lengthy process.
Where this is going.
You would think about it like, there's so many There were a lot of Egyptians running around, and a lot of them died on any given day, and there was a lot of work to be done. So this process that we just described was for the people who had lots of money. For some reason, the wealthy have always been revered, right, and I've also gotten special treatment right. Right. If you were just an ordinary schmo like me or Chuck, you were going to get the budget package, which is basically like instead of like carefully removing all of the organs, preserving each one, they would inject oil like this oil mixture into your cavities, let it sit for a few days.
It would stop up all your orifices first, sod leak out.
Thank you. So I don't know how they did that.
I guess with other materials.
Right, So they would stop you up full of oil, let you sit for a few days, and then unstop your orifices and let all the oil drain out, and it would carry the liquefied organs and tissue out with it. It's a lot easier, a lot faster.
So even this many thousands of years ago, you get what you paid for exactly. That's pretty sad. Yeah, there's always been a budget package. Or maybe that's a good thing that it wasn't only just reserved. Like if you don't have any money, you just can't get mummified.
That's a way to go.
They thought, you know what, let's think of a cheaper way to do this for you folks.
Right, let's just fill.
You up with the oil, stop up your orifices, and give you a good shake.
Yep, So you're prepared. You're all wrapped. However, they got your organs out there out, you're bandaged, and you are now about to be outfitted what's called a cartonage cage, which is kind of like a breastplate. Some cool like forearm armor, leg armor pretty much this thing that's going to hold your body together for a while. And a funerary mask, which is like the famous masks we think of when we think of like King Tut, like it's a death mask. And these were extremely important because they directed the spirit the ka to the right body afterward, So it was in a person's visage or possibly that of a god, but the spirit would be in on you know, what to look for.
They would know that.
That's how they knew it was. Who.
Sure, this guy is supposed to supposed to either look like Josh or Anubis. Either way, I think that's him right overay there, right, so let's grab him.
And speaking of a Nubis, you would be committed to your tomb following a funeral procession where you were carried in your suet, right, which so that's.
What you think of with King Tutt. That's the casket that looks like a person, like the gold casket in the shape of a human.
Right, it's a suet. It's a suet that would be carried to your tomb, and there would be a priest dressed as the jackal god Anubis. There were there was the ceremony of the mouth, which is pretty cool because there was some sort of weird understanding. I guess that you had died and now certain things had to be restored, and the ceremony of the mouth was this passing over of sacred objects to like the across the suet's face, the casket's face, and it would restore your five cents. Yeah, because you need that exactly, so you're placed and this is weird. Chuck, did you find this odd that your casket was placed leaned up against the wall.
Yeah, It almost like I would do that while I was getting everything ready and then I would lay it down. So it almost made me think that they kind of forgot and they say, oh, well, we left that first one leaning against the wall, so I guess that's the way we do it. Yeah, but that's not true. No, I'm sure they had a very good reason.
Probably because it was easier to just walk up right out of there.
Well, yeah, I would think they wanted to leave it upright, but standing it upright they didn't have, like the perfectly level floor probably wasn't too secure, so they just gave it a little lean.
Sure, little help, which is far less secure than just laying it down on the floor. Yeah. Following that, you are your furniture. Don't forget your canopic jar of organs laid next to you, little food maybe, sure, your furniture basically the stuff you're going to need in the next life to be comfortable. Yeah, and you're set. Your tomb is sealed up, and it's probably inscribed with something along the lines of as for anybody who shall enter this tomb in his impurity, I shall wring his neck as a bird's. It was a standard mummy curse. Yeah, a mummy curse on the tomb.
Yeah. People became in the nineteen twenties. Howard Carter dug up King Tut's tomb, and people were just crazy for mummies at the time.
Yeah.
Westerners are like, oh my gosh, this is so interesting. This curse thing is so neat. Laurel and Hardy are doing mummy curse movies and a microbiologist from Germany named Gothard Kramer or Cramer said, there may be something to this curse thing because they bury people with food produces mold spores, So when they unearth this tomb, all these mold spores are released into the air and it might kill you. So it's not that there's something to the curse, but it could lead people to tie the two together. If you unearth the tomb, then you die.
Certainly, there's something weird about the Carter expedition who unearthed King Tut's tomb in nineteen twenty two because eleven of the people who were involved, not necessarily present, but involved, died within seven years. I think eleven people in a canary. His canary died like right when they entered the tomb. A cobra ate it. It's bad luck, it is, and then it just went downhill from there. So there's all sorts of explanations, but it's also oddly intriguing. And like you said, egypt Mania gripped the West. Oh yeah, they loved it all right. And there was actually unraveling parties where people get their hands on mummies and then like unbandage them, see what's in there, which is like, that's not what you do with a dead body. This desecration.
Yeah, it's bad luck too, you know.
So that pretty much is the Egyptian mummy, and that's what we mainly think of. But they weren't the first people to do this kind of thing.
No, and then isn't that interesting?
Yeah? They the first the oldest mummies actually on the planet are from northern Chile, the Chinchoro people. Yep, Chinchiro, let's go with Chinchoro. Okay, Uh this they started doing this about two thousand years before the Egyptians, but they were not very much like uh, the Egyptians. They basically dismembered and disemboweled the body, put it back together again, sewed it up, and then covered it with black mud.
Well they put it back together with like straw and sticks, and that's what they had. It was like they make qupie dolls out of like these bodies.
Basically, yeah, covered it with black mud and shaped it into a human form. But they believe that this wasn't necessarily done to preserve the body for the afterlife. Maybe it was more for the people left on the planet Earth to mourn the death of their loved one keep them.
Around a little longer, which is very sweet.
Because they saw evidence of like retouching of the paint, signs of wear and tear, so that you know, basically they were kept in the households for a little while.
They think basically statues freaky freaky statues. Yeah, and that was five thousand BC, which is two thousand years before the Egyptians came onto the scene at all. It's right. And the would you say the Cinchoro people, Yeah, they were, which you said a lot.
I think I went with Chinchoro, but someone will point that out if I'm wrong.
I agreed. They're not the only ones in South America who got into move cation either. The Incas very famously did as well. They had a little habit of sacrificing children to their gods, and they culture relativism chuck, and they would through this process like the child and the child's family were just treated like royalty for this, like it was a high honor to be chosen to be sacrificed to the gods. And they would get the child really wasted on this fermented corn concoction, take the child up to the cave. Sometimes I think they would whack the kid over the head, or other times they would get the child so wasted that they just would leave them there in the cold temperatures, exposed to the freezing temperatures, and the child would die of exposure. I can't say jerks about this, you can, but there's a very famous mummy called the Maiden, who's a fifteen year old girl and she was sacrificed as thanks to the gods for a really good corn harvest by the Incas in Peru five hundred years ago. Oh yeah, did you see that picture I sent you?
Oh? Yeah, was that her?
It's like looking at a girl who's sleeping, but she's been dead for five hundred years. Yeah, like you if you've been to South America's I know you have her Central America. Like, she looks just like one of those girls you might see down there, like a Central American indigenous person.
She's probably short.
Then she looks kind of short.
Yeah, that'd be funny if she was like six to two.
But then moving on up, there's also one and it didn't make it into this article, but chuck, I've been there myself. Juannawanto, Mexico has a mummy museum and they have the world's smallest mummy. I think it might have been a fetus really, but they were all naturally mummified, to the great surprise of the nineteenth century townspeople who had to move a graveyard and found like, okay, there's a lot of mummies.
How big was it?
It was very small. You known object coffee up, coffee cup okay, sandered coffee cups on it, gotcha. But then there's like people, they're still wearing their suits, and it's really amazing. You walk into this little Mexican building and there's just dead people everywhere, just behind this glass. It's very neat. If you ever go to Guanawanto, Mexico, you have to go to the mummy museum.
I think I should. Yeah, Lady Chang China. Chinese were they were lousy with mummies. Yeah, they love to mommify people. She was an aristocrat from about two thousand years ago, and she is believed to be about the best preserved ancient mummy so far. Did you see her picture? Yeah, with their tongue sticking out pretty well mummified, yeah, and her hair still. Yeah, she was. They haven't studied her a whole lot, the Chinese haven't, so they don't know exactly how she was prepared, but they do think that mercury and the embalming fluid might have had something.
To do with it.
Yeah, I would imagine that will do it. Mercury, yeah, sure, and also in China, mummies have kind of rewritten history a little bit. Some very very ancient mummies from one thousand BC. Before one thousand BC, they found some people of Indo Iranian descent. They're they linked them to like basically Mesopotamia through tattoos and like other implements that they had.
In the shape of their face, the way they looked.
Yep, and they figured out, like, wait a minute, these people were like Indo European traders.
What are they doing here?
And they just made their way to settle right in the deserts of China before the Han dynasty ever showed up. Yeah, so that kind of changed things a little bit.
I'm sure if we talk about mummies, we got to talk about the more modern day mummies because of the big interest in mummification thanks to Tut being found was the big one. Yeah, that's right around the time Lenin died Russia and they said, you know what, let's preserve linen and display in the Kremlin. So that's exactly what they did, and we do not know exactly how because it's an ancient Russian secret. I don't know about ancient, but it's a Russian secret, and they it's ongoing because they continue to immerse him in a preservative bath every now and then.
Andy's wears a waterproof suit.
That's right. And if you've ever seen pictures of Lenin or eva perone, did they look pretty lifelike? Yeah, but hers is way cool. They basically replaced all the fluids in her body with wax, right, which would be a very modern take on the ancient practice.
There's also incorruptible corpses of the Catholic Faith. It's basically a person who is so pure on earth that their body just didn't didn't rot. And there's example of those. There's one he's like a prince, he's like a child prints. I think he died in like he died more than a thousand years ago, or about it a thousand years ago, and his body's totally preserved and there's no evidence that he was embalmed or anything like that. What they don't understand that there are some bodies out there that just defy logic. I wrote an article and you should read It's a miracle. How can a courpse be incorruptible?
We need to keep in track of these awesome ideas. Correct, Where's our person, where's our boy? Charlie or no, our boy Friday, Okay, Charlie, where I got that? And then Josh, finally we have. In the nineteen seventies, some scientists discovered something called plastinization, and that is when all of the water and lipids and the body cells are replaced with polymers and you basically become like plastic, very flexible and durable. You don't decompose and you don't stink too bad. And that is used to preserve bodies, mainly for anatomical research at this point.
Or for bodies world or bodies the exhibitive.
You've been, No, I've never been, but that's how they do it.
It is really something. I mean, you're right there up on this corpse missing its skin and like it is a dead person, and it's really interesting. There's one, the one that I went to in Atlanta. It's two eyeballs and they're connected to the spinal cord which is going down and then the coming off the spinal cord are the major nerves of the central nervous system and that's it, and it's just laid out perfectly, really kind of surprising.
I'm shocked that I haven't been to that yet.
It's pretty cool. It's definitely worth going to.
I did the dialogue in the dark thing.
I have not been there. That's next door. Yeah, that was that kid. You know.
I was a little disappointed. Yeah, not in the exhibit itself, but the way they do it. I think it could have been like really awesome. But the way they do it, it wasn't as awesome as it could have been. Just my take.
Me and her sister went and she said they would have liked it. But there was this very loud, drunk woman who kept like falling into people what they wanted to kill.
Nothing you can do about that, you know, in the dark weather, you could just like kick her in the shin and run away.
Uh huh.
We should mention Bob Doctor Bob Bryer real quick though. He is an Egyptologist who in nineteen ninety four said, you know what, I want to try and replicate the Egyptian technique and he did it. Chicken, Yeah, with a chicken, and he did it. It was pretty successful at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. And one of the things he learned from doing this that the the way the body ends up looking as a result of the mummification process, not the fact. Yeah, that it's been in the ground for thousands and thousands.
Like the shriveled, wrinkled look. Yeah. Yeah, So that's one thing I learned. That's a big thing to learn, though, I mean, think about it. That's Egyptology hasn't really advanced much in the last fifty years, has it not that I know.
I know Heraldo didn't find squat, No he didn't.
No, that wasn't Heraldo. Heraldo looks for pones.
Oh, that's right. I watched that one. That was fun. I was a youngster and I was so excited and.
Yeah, but so disappointed when it was just a total disaster. Yeah, well it's it for mummies, right, chuck you anymore? I'm I'm Are you mummied out? Yep? All right. If you want to learn more about mummies, check out m M M I E S in the handy search bar at howstuff works dot com. You can learn how to mummify a chicken on wiki how and what else? I think there might be a website for the mummies of wanna want to that's I think g u A n A j u A t oh maybe sounds good to me?
Does it, you know, I think, uh, Matt and Rachel from Cool Stuff on the Planet did a thing on the Egyptian Mummy. Oh yeah, or not Egyptian Mummy museumm Wana Wanta Mummy musum.
Yeah.
Yes, Cool Stuff on the Planet check it out. That is definitely worth watching as well. It's worth watching anyway. And I said handy search bar somewhere in there, which means I guess time for a listener.
Man, Hi, Chuck and Josh and Jerry. My name is Maddie. I'm twelve years old. I love your podcast. I wait all day at school to get home so I can check for new podcasts. They always help me fall asleep, but not because they're boring, but because it gets my brain thinking and the brain gets tired.
That's cool, Mary, So it's fun.
I was wondering if you give a shout out to my best bud, Casey. Casey has a tumor in his leg and is in a wheelchair. He tells me he is very miserable, but at least he gets to listen to me talk about you guys and fun fact. He also has a pet rooster named Lewis Sweet, and Lewis is house trained so he just runs around the house.
That is awesome house strained chicken.
So please give Louis I'm sorry Casey a shout and Louis while we're out. It sure make him feel better. It would make his day or even his year. And tell me which podcast you're going to put it on, because I am just twelve and some of them are inappropriate.
Oh was this one appropriate? I don't know, Probably not, the shaking the brain part out. We'll figure it out, okay, We'll tell them to just listen to the listener mail and let it parents listen to the rest.
And also a suggestion the infamous story of that French queen who said let the meat cake. I don't remember her name, that's uh Marie Antwin, Marie Antoinette. That was Kirsten Dunst. And remember I do not have Facebook, so please answer me by email, she says.
And then oh is it she? Is it d d or tt It's d d oh okay.
And then her signature is potato in a mushroom for Maggie. I don't even know what that means to all the kids are saying it these day. Really, yeah, all right, potato and a mushroom everybody.
You just said, Maggie, it's Maddie, right, Maddie. Okay, Maddie, thanks for that email. Maddie. Did we give a shout out to Lewis and Casey?
Well, Casey, we hope you're feeling better, but I'm sorry to hear about that, and I hope you're up and around before.
You know it.
Take care of Lewis. Yes, if you're an egyptologist and you have some good mummy stories, we want to hear it.
Yeah.
You know what, if you have any good mummy story, we want to hear it, wrap it up in an email and send that email to stop for podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com.
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