Taking on Habits of Twentieth Century Town
Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Egypt, March 10 (By the Associated Press)
Luxor, like King Tutenkhamun, has been roused from its repose of 3,000 years and is taking on something of the habits and characteristic of a 20th century town. For ages a conventional stopping place for Nile excursion steamers and tourists, it has lately become a center for people of all classes, including students, college professors, antiquarians, doctors, undertakers, dressmakers and souvenir hunters. The newly-found tomb of Tutenkhamun is the magnet that draws them all. Tourists are attracted here out of curiosity, but professional men and women, undertakers, embalmers, dressmakers, and milliners, come in the hope of getting new ideas for their business from the mummy chamber of the ancient king.
Undertaker Amazed
To modern undertakers the skill of the ancient Egyptians in preserving their dead against the ravages of ages is a source of amazement and mystery, and many of them have applied to Howard Carter, discoverer of Tutenkhamun, for the privilege of examining the Pharaoh’s body when it is divested of its garb of gold and its bitumenized bandages.
Embalming in ancient times was a much more elaborate and expensive process than it is today. It required three months for its completion, and cost $1,500. It was a luxury that could be afforded only by the rich. The ancients believed that mummification in this life was the only sure means of their resurrection in the next. Pathetic efforts were made by the poor to secure eternal life to their dead. American archaeologists in Luxor have lately found skeletons of humble peasants placed near the graves of the royal dead. Their relatives, it appears, too poor to pay for embalming, placed the bodies hear the graves of the nobles In the hope that their poor frames would partake of the sacredness of the nobility and thus rise with them In the next life.
Embalming a Body
The first step in embalming a body in Pharaohonic days was to place it in a powerful saline solution for three months. The intestines were then removed by means of a sharp-edged stone, the brain, heart and liver were taken out and the body Impregnated with myrrh, accacia, bitumen and aromatic oils. It was then wrapped in hundreds of yards of linen soaked in preservative. The annotating of the mummy was accompanied by prayers and incantations to the gods, led by the high priests.
Herbert E. Winlop, director of excavation at Thebes for the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, showed the correspondent a 4,200-year-old Egyptian princess that he unearthed last week in the Valley of the Queens. Allowing for natural emaciation and shrinkage, the body Is amazingly well preserved. The teeth and hair are intact. The neck, wrists and ankles bear a series of slight indentures, indicating, according to Mr. Winlop, that her ancient highness wore a necklace, bracelets and anklets which undoubtedly had been stripped from her by tomb-robbers soon after her interment.
The royal mummy, Mr. Winlop said, was that of a woman of 22 or 23, who undoubtedly had been a favorite in the court of one of the Amenuhotep kings. Her bosom and arms were delicately tatooed with heraldic figures, Indicating her noble lineage. Over the lower part of the abdomen was a long seared brand which the American expert said probably had been inflicted with a red-hot iron by the doctors of that time as a counter-irritant to relieve the pain due to an organic malady from which the princess suffered.
New Britain Herald, New Britain, CT, March 30, 1923