What was resin used for mummification

The shell also had a practical and religious function. Decades after its original wrapping and burial, the mummy was damaged, perhaps by tomb robbers, and became disarticulated. When rewrapping the body, embalmers may have added the shell to help hold it together—a preserved and whole body being necessary for an afterlife existence, according to Egyptian funerary belief.

Small cooking onions or linen pads were sometimes used to replace the eyes. Beginning in the third dynasty, the internal organs lungs, stomach, liver and intestines were removed, washed with palm wine and spices, and stored in four separate canopic jars made of limestone, calcite or clay. Prior to this, the abdominal contents were removed, wrapped and buried in the floor of the tomb.

However, the heart was left in the body because it was considered the centre of intelligence. T he corpse was then washed , wrapped in linen as many as 35 layers and soaked in resins and oils.

This gave the skin a blackened appearance resembling pitch. The term "mummification" comes from the Arabic word mummiya , which mean bitumen, a pitch substance that was first used in the preservation process during the Late Period. The family of the deceased supplied the burial linen, which was made from old bed sheets or used clothing. I n the Middle Kingdom , it became standard practice to place a mask over the face of the deceased.

The majority of these were made of cartonnage papyrus or linen coated with gesso, a type of plaster , but wood and, in the case of royal mummies , silver and gold, were also used. The most famous mask is Tutankhamun's.

T he ancient embalmers used very few tools, and once their work was completed, they sometimes left them in or near the tomb. The basic tool kit included a knife to make the abdominal incision, hooked bronze rods to extract brain matter, a wooden adze-like tool to remove internal organs, and a funnel to pour resins into the cranial cavity through the nose. T he Egyptians mummified animals as well as humans -- everything from bulls and hawks to ichneumons and snakes.

Some have been found in large quantities, while others are rare. Many species were raised in the temples to be sacrificed to the gods. Autopsies on cats show that most had had their necks broken when they were about two years old. Cats were highly valued members of the ancient Egyptian household.

They destroyed the rats and mice that would otherwise infest granaries, and assisted in hunting birds and fishing. In the nineteenth century, vast quantities of cat mummies were sent to England to be used as fertilizer. T his practice reached its height during the eleventh and twelfth centuries B. Dr Buckley began searching for the recipe several years ago when he and his team extracted and analysed the chemicals from Egyptian textiles that had been used to wrap mummies.

The textiles are part of an Egyptian collection at Bolton Museum in the north of England. Dating to around 4, BC, these particular fabrics were much older than the point at which it was believed that embalming and mummification originated.

This discovery led the team to the prehistoric mummy in the Turin museum collection. It has never undergone any conservation treatments, so it provided a unique opportunity to study unpolluted ancient Egyptian chemistry. Dr Jana Jones, Egyptologist and expert on ancient Egyptian burial practices from Macquarie University in Sydney, said: "The examination of the Turin body makes a momentous contribution to our limited knowledge of the prehistoric period and the expansion of early mummification practices as well as providing vital, new information on this particular mummy.

The fact that this same recipe was used almost 2, years later to embalm the Pharaohs, Dr Buckley said, means "we have a sort of Pan-Egyptian identity well before the formation of the world's first nation state in 3, BC. Its origins are much earlier than we thought".

It also reveals an insight into how and when the Ancient Egyptians perfected an antibacterial embalming recipe that protected and preserved their dead - leaving behind the iconic Egyptian mummies we are now so familiar with. Embalming was just one step in the careful process of preserving a body.