Egyptian Mummies and Funerary Art: Death as Sacred Technology
For the ancient Egyptians, death was not the opposite of life but its continuation by other means — and mummification was the technology that made that continuation possible. The body had to be preserved because the soul (the ka and the ba ) needed a physical anchor to return to; without it, the elaborate afterlife described in the Book of the Dead could not proceed. Mummification was therefore not a macabre obsession but a loving investment in the future — the most expensive thing a family could do for one of its members was to ensure their body's preservation and their tomb's proper equipment. The art that accompanied the Egyptian dead — the painted coffins, the golden death masks, the shabtis (small figurines who would perform labor in the afterlife), the canopic jars holding the preserved organs, the decorated walls of the tomb — constitutes a complete theological and artistic program: the most comprehensive visual meditation on death and survival ever created by any civil...