Quest for Immortatlity

I made my way to the Museum of Nature and Science, aka the Natural History Museum.  I paid for my ticket and my audio tour, checked in my raincoat, as it has been rather wet outside, and made my way towards the time machine.  For I was taken back through the sands of time to the land of the Nile, on the "Quest for....................................Immortality",

....Oooh, I've got goosebumps already.

I discovered  a LOT of things that I had not known before.  For example, I   had not realised that, during mummification, they did not remove your heart, only your lungs, stomach, intestines and liver (which were placed in 4 sacred canopic jars.)  Like us, the ancient Egyptians believed that the heart was the center of all human conciousness.  I had forgotten that you would have to have had your heart in the underworld, because your heart would be weighed against the feather of truth.  According to their beliefs, the soul was taken down to the underworld, led by Anubis (the god with the head of a jackel and the body of a man, who was the patron of mummification etc.) into the presence of Horus ( son of Osiris and Isis, with the head of a hawk) who sat in judgement. Your heart was then weighed on a scale against the feather of truth, which was given by the goddess Maat who is either portrayed as a woman with outstretched wings, or with a feather on her head.  Ther are also two other gods present, one is the scribe who would record the weighing (it has the head of a bird with a long beak, and I think it is Thoth, but I wouldn't bet on it).  Then there is the god with, I think the body of something like a lion, I know that it had the head of  a crcodile, because it is depicted at the far end, waiting to devour the soul if the heart is either too heavy or too light.  If the heart equaled the feather, then the soul would be permitted to continue it's journey through the underworld.

So, the exhibit had all kinds of cool statues and all kinds of things, they even had  a reconstruction of the tomb of Thutmose III.  It's in the shape of an oval and all around the walls are the 12 hours of night, called "The Amduat". These scenes depict the journey of the Pharaoh through the underworld, hour by hour. 

It was all really quite fascinating!  Not that I want to be mummified or anything after I die. 

So, I spent about an hour in the gift shop, and still didn't get all the things that I had wanted, so I may have to go back.  In the meantime, I was able to acquire the specifice items that I  had wanted for me.  Namely a papyrus depicting the weighing of the heart and a scarab necklace covered in heiroglyphs.  The Egyptians believed that the scarab was a symbol of rebirth, because it would lay it's eggs in a ball of dung (being a very dead thing) and then more scarabs are "reborn" from it.  They believed that the scarab pushed the sun up every morning.  Another interesting tidbit, is that the Ancient Egyptians did not worship animals.  Instead, they worshiped the individual strengths of each animal, they emmulated their un-human like qualities.  I thought that was very interesting.

So ended my journey through ancient Egypt, and I had to return to the world that I came from.

Oh, I want to share one more interesting tidbit about mummification that I did not know before.   You know that when they took out the brains, they stuck a poker up your nostrils and ripped them out. (How's that for a good visual, eh?)  Well, what I didn't know is that they didn't know what to do with them, once they removed them, so they just... threw them away!  I just wanted to make sure that you all knew that interesting fact.  I have now "enriched your lives beyond your capacity to repay me", so I shall leave you now with the delightful thoughts of mummification dancing in your heads.