Making a Mummy

To make our mummy we followed the steps shown in Egypt In Spectacular Cross-Section.
1. delivery
2. de-braining
3. gutting
4. washing and stuffing
5. drying
6. cleaning and packing
7. oiling
8. wrapping
9. protecting
10. securing
11. finishing
Any step we couldn't actually do (like #2), we pretended to do.





Here Gerrick is measuring the body for its coffin (part of #1). We will be making it later.




Since we really couldn't perform #5 (drying) on Barbie and it is such an important part of the process, we are also mummifying a piece of apple to demonstrate this step. We found instructions for this here, and will be checking our results of this experiment in one week. (This week's Unplugged Project theme is wrinkle. We suspect both of our apples will be wrinkled in one week, but while the one left uncovered will be rotting, the one in the desiccant should be preserved.)




Part of #7 (oiling) involves applying a final coat of resin. We used a 1 part white glue/2 parts water solution to represent the resin.




Egypt in Spectacular Cross-Section states that in the wrapping stage (#8), they began with the limbs. We chose to follow the above shown steps from Egyptian Mummies. This book states that during the New Kingdom mummies were wrapped beginning with the head.

We began wrapping cut strips of bandages and applying "resin" to secure them.





About here is when Gerrick decided this was too hard for him to handle.





So...I continued the wrapping while he took pictures.





Step #9 (protecting)--Amulets were placed within the bandages to ward off evil spirits. When we were shopping for "the corpse" at Goodwill, we also found this little snake--the perfect amulet for our mummy.





We stopped after step 9; he didn't want to wrap the mummy in a shroud because he liked it like this.

Update:
You can see our 1-week mummified apple results here ,
our 3-week results here ,
and a complete list of Ancient Egypt resources here.