— 5 — 
M. Maspero remarks : — " La momie paraît avoir été desséchée 
plutôt qu'embaumée" ^ 
Apart from thèse cloubtful examples o£ embalming ail the real 
mummies in the Cairo Muséum belong to the periocl included 
between the latter part o£ the 17th dynasty and the beginning of 
the 6th century o£ the Christian era. 
During this period o£ almost two thousand years the mode o£ 
embalming underwent very considérable changes. In the l.Sth, 
19th and 20th dj^nasties the methods adopted aimed solely at the 
préservation o£ the tissues o£ the body itsel£ ; and this was 
accomplished with a success that can only have been the resuit of 
long âges o£ experiment. At the beginning o£ the 21st, or pos- 
sibly in the last years o£ the 20th, dynasty the eml^almers 
introduced an entirely new practice, to the study o£ 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 o£ the 
emljalming process : this was done by 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 chie£ attention to 
simulating the form l)y means of the wrappings rather than by 
stuffing the body itself: then we find a rapid détérioration in the 
manner of préservation of the body and at the same time a great 
élaboration in the art of bandaging. This reached its height in 
Ptolemaic times. In the later (Roman) period the extensive use 
of Ijitumen 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 sait, which may 
possibly have been the earliest means employed for the j^reservation 
of the body. 
i Maspero, op. cit., p. 397. 
