What Did the Embalmers Actually Do in the 70 Days?

When the first cut was made, the people watching picked up stones and chased the cutter away. Then a team of specialists spent seventy days emptying, salting, perfuming and wrapping a single body, and sometimes quietly fixing their own mistakes. This is the corner of Egyptian history nobody films: not the pharaoh in his golden mask, but the men in the reed tent at the edge of the desert who made him. Step inside the beautiful house, the per-nefer, and follow the full 70 days of mummification, from Herodotus' three price levels and the stoned 'slitter' of Diodorus, through forty days under natron, canopic jars, hundreds of meters of recycled linen, amulets and imported resins, to onions in a pharaoh's eyes and the embalmers' carefully buried trash. Topics covered: ancient egyptian embalmers, mummification process step by step, 70 days of mummification, per-nefer beautiful house, natron drying, canopic jars four sons of horus, herodotus on mummification, diodorus paraschistes, mummy wrapping linen and amulets, embalming mistakes in mummies, tutankhamun embalming cache kv54, saqqara embalming workshop. Timestamps: 0:00 — The tent where the green fields end 3:04 — Three wooden dolls and a price list 6:44 — The man who cuts, then runs 10:43 — Forty days buried in salt 14:51 — Four jars, four guardians 17:19 — Hundreds of yards of somebody's bedsheets 21:27 — The jackal who leans over the table 23:55 — The pharaoh with onions for eyes 27:28 — Burying the trash like a person Stay to the end for the part almost nobody knows. #AncientEgypt #EgyptianHistory #Mummification References: 📜 Herodotus, Histories Book II (85-90) — mourning customs, the three wooden models and price levels, the steps of each embalming method 📜 Diodorus Siculus, Library of History Book I (91) — the scribe's mark, the paraschistes chased with stones, embalmers' honored status, costs in talents and minas 📜 Genesis 50:2-3 — forty days for embalming and seventy days of mourning for Jacob in Egypt 📜 Book of the Dead, Spell 30B — the heart scarab text asking the heart not to testify against the deceased 📜 Ritual of Embalming (Papyrus Boulaq 3 and Papyrus Louvre 5158) — spells accompanying the application of oils and bandages 📜 Edwin Smith Papyrus — Egyptian surgical knowledge of head injuries 📜 Rageot et al., Nature (2023), on the Saqqara embalming workshop vessels — labeled bowls, imported dammar and elemi resins, composition of antiu 📜 Theodore M. Davis excavation of KV54 (1907) — Tutankhamun's embalming cache of natron, linen and pottery Illustrations created with AI tools. Narration: AI voice. Script researched from the sources above.