MUMMIFICATION

This piece was inspired by the Matryoshka dolls. The way I will explain this is by going through each doll. The first doll is the inside drawing and the last one is the outer drawing.

Doll 1- This is made up of a body within the sarcophagus. The skin of the person has been 'peeled' off and now you are looking at the inside; although Egyptians didn't do this, I needed it to clearly show what they did to the interior. To make the dead body recognisable as the human body, I have drawn the rib cage. I also believed that they took out organs and not bones, so it serves that purpose as well. The heart was not taken out of the body either because they believed it was the centre of intelligence and feelings and they thought that the man needed it in the afterlife. They filled in the cavities with compounds that have been written on the page (Na2CO3, NaHCO3, NaCl, Na2SO4). These caused the desiccation of the body; my first thought was that of dead leaves, hence why there is an explosion of them. The red thread that goes from left to right symbolises life. It's snapped in the centre; the man is dead. However, once you close the last doll, you can't see the snapped bit. That's how my brain processed the information of storing the dried form of a body to delay decay. It's like storing a broken thread inside a pretty box. Speaking of boxes, I adorned the inside of the sarcophagus with a hint of blue; dead bodies are cold.

Doll 2- This has been drawn on a tracing paper for a specific reason; the information drawn here was supposed to be on doll 1, but I figured that to keep things organised I could use a see-through layer to minimise the distance to doll 1. Before embalming, more things were put inside the body. That includes cinnamaldehyde (in the form of cinnamon and cassia) and linalool (in the form of cassia and mastic); these compounds have been drawn on the left and on the right respectively. Some of these compounds have antimicrobial activity, which helped their body to be preserved for longer. Something else they put in there were onions...I have drawn them in the position of the eyes and teeth. The 'man' looks creepy now, but the whole process feels just that to me, so I guess it's not a big issue?

Doll 3- Not it looks more like a mummy. The different molecules drawn in are, from top to bottom: guaiacolm, dehydroabietic acid and sterane. All of these compounds are used to identify some of the resins used for embalming, rather than being compounds the Egyptians used for the process; this is why I used a different colour around these organic structures.

Doll 4- There's not much to say about this layer. The sarcophagus I have drawn is the same one that is found in the article I read for this piece. On the background there are two eyes; these are the eyes of Osiris- God of the Underworld and the Afterlife, according to Egyptian mythology. The background has been coloured in a distilled yellow/light brown colour to resemble the papyrus that Egyptians used.

After the whole piece was made; my A level Biology teacher, who has an incredible amount of knowledge about this topic, told me that the sarcophagus belonged to the boy king, Tutankhamun, who died at the age to 18 years old. Tutankhamun's body suffered damage at various stages- immediately before or after his death, during the hasty mummification process, within the tomb (there a chemical reaction caused it to ignite in its coffin) and while being extracted from the coffin.

As mentioned above, the brain, its function then unknown, was simply thrown away while the heart was considered the organ of reasoning. Tutankhamun, however, has no heart. This may have happened simply because the undertakers were careless, but it could also be a sign that Tutankhamun died far from home. By the time his body arrived at the undertakers' workshop, his heart might have been too decayed to preserve. This makes my piece a little unreliable as I did draw him a heart.

Reference for the website used for research: https://www.compoundchem.com/2016/10/27/mummification/