M. Maspero remarks : — " La momie paraît avoir été desséchée 
plutôt qu'embaumée" * 
Apart from these doubtful examples of embalming all the real 
mummies in the Cairo Museum belong to the ])eriod included 
between the latter part of the 17th dynasty and the beginning of 
the 6th century of the Christian era. 
During this period of almost two thousand years the mode of 
embalming underwent very considerable changes. In the IcSth, 
19th and 20th dynasties the methods adopted aimed solely at the 
preservation of the tissues of the body itself ; and this was 
accomplished with a success that can only have been the result of 
long ages of experiment. At the beginning of the 21st, or pos- 
sibly in the last years of the 20th, dynasty the embalmers 
mtroduced an entirely new practice, to the study of which this 
memoir will be mainly devoted. This new practice was an 
attempt to restore to the shrunken and distorted body the form 
which it had in great part lost during the early stages of the 
embalming process : this was done hy packing under the skin 
linen, sawdust, earth, sand and various other materials to be 
mentioned later. At a later period the embalmers abandoned 
this extraordinary practice and devoted there chief attention to 
simulating the form by means of the wrappings rather than by 
stuffing the body itself: then we find a rapid deterioration in the 
manner of preservation of the body and at the same time a great 
elaboration in the art of bandaging. This reached its height in 
Ptolemaic times. In the later (Roman) period the extensive use 
of bitumen as a preservative led to the rapid degeneration of the 
art ; and in Christian times when the use of pitch was discarded 
the embalmers returned to the use of common salt, which may 
possibly have been the earliest means employed for the preservation 
of the body. 
1 Maspero, op. cit., p. 397. 
