October 28, 2023 • 40 mins
A mummy is a human being whose soft tissue has been preserved after death, and there are mummies around the world -- including natural mummies, as well as corpses that have been intentionally embalmed. Listen to this classic episode with Chuck and Josh to learn more.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, everybody. Did you ever want to know how mummies
work and how you mummify a person? Well you can
learn if you listen to this one from March fifteenth. Hey,
look at that date, March fifteenth, twenty eleven. How mummies work.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's
Charles W Chuck Bryant. We're about to do this stuff
you should know. Thang, Yeah, do you like that? I did?
How you doing? Man?
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Great? Now that I've switched out my foul smelling microphone cover?
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Yeah, this is actually take two, but it things nasty.
I'm not getting near it, but can you trually imagine Chuck? Yeah,
and something's future facted on the mic cover, the Peak
Clipper cover.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Yeah, weird. You know, in real studios it changes out
of it now and.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Then these things have been running for at least a year.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Fifty cents? All right, what's your chuck your sterling intro?
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Speaking of fifty cents, do you remember when we were
talking about fossils.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Yeah, and we said that every once in a while,
something happens so that a fossil naturally occurs, and that
it's desiccated, the skin is dried out. Yeah, that's a mummy.
Yeah who knew? I knew? Yeah, me too. Actually, when
we talked about that, I was like, we have to
do how mummies work, and here we are.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
I'm kind of surprised, just when it's slipped under the
radar for so long. This yeah right up our alley.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Yeah, I went and looked. I'm like, surely we do
have it and be fast.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
It was gruesome.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Yeah, it's it's like stuff you should know died in
the wool. Yeah. Yeah, and you're about to hear why
dear listeners, because we're about to talk about all the
things that happened to a corpse after death, which we've
done before, but we need to go over again. Mummies
are cool, though, they are very cool. So, Chuck, let's
say that that you were stabbed in the stomach enough
(02:03):
time so that you could not move any longer. You
couldn't walk back home. It was out in the woods,
and the one person you're with, the very person who
stabbed you, left you there to die. You bleed out,
you're dead. Things start happening to your body, right, yeah,
pretty quickly, up first is autolysis.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Yes, that is uh, that's kind of gruesome. That's when
your organs that have digestive enzymes actually say, well, this
is what we do, so we're going to start digesting
the organs.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
Right and not like my stomach is eating itself because
I'm hungry, Like my stomach is actually eating itself. It's
rupturing and oozing and it's it's being reduced to nothing. Yeah,
while that's going on, and that actually I think if
I remember correctly, that kind of helps kickstart the process
of putrefaction, right.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Yeah, autolysis starts within a few hours after you're dead.
The body, the body knows.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
And if you want like a really big overview of
this or an in depth look at what happens to
the body immediately after death, you should listen to our
Rigor Mortis podcast if you haven't already. Yeah, body farms.
I talked about it in there too.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
So yes, puture faction, you're right, is followed by or
follows autolysis. And that is when bacteria does its little
job and produces everything to a skeleton. And you know,
depending where you are, this gonna happen in a few.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Months, right, depending on where you are now, We as
human beings are a subtropical species, right, Chuck, you know that, sure,
So we are designed, if you believe in that kind
of thing, to decomposed. Decompose most readily in a warm,
humid climate. That's where the bacteria that breaks down our
tissue lives or thrives moisture warmth. If you have cold, dry, yeah,
(03:53):
things change a little bit. Like a refrigerator exactly. Which
is a good place to store a body if you
want to preserve it, or food if you want to
eat it. That's a good point to your body if
you want to eat it. For an in depth look
at that, you might want to listen to our cannibalism
podcast though. That's right, right, But let's say you don't
have a refrigerator. Nature provides it for you on some occasions.
(04:15):
There's ut See the ice man.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Right, yeah, see the ice man.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Yeah, that's the iceman.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Yeah, nineteen ninety one and the Italian Alps. This dude
is very well preserved natural mummy.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
He's amazing.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Died and basically got buried in ice and kind of
stayed that way.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Yeah. I think they have the impression that he fell
into a crevasse. Yeah, died, but it was during like
a blizzard maybe, and he was covered with snow and
ice that stuck around for millennia. But he's so well preserved.
You can see the tattoos on his skin and still.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Yeah, well and we knew, Hey, they tattooed people fifty
three hundred years ago exactly. Little window into what life
was like for Iceman.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Yeah he was. He had I think a nice little
set of air and his bow and copper age European guy.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
That's why he had a wallet sized photo of you
as well of me. Yeah, it's not possible. He was
from the future. That's my that's what I think.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
He just blew my mind. Chuck good. So ice, as
we talked about in Fossils too, was a is a
very good preservant. But nothing does it. Oh, Pete Bogs too.
You remember I finally showed you that picture of Tolan Man.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Can't forget about Pete.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
Again if you have not gone and looked up Tolon Man.
It's awesome, Like his whiskers are still there and he
lived a couple thousand years ago, right.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
What's his name? Did they name him just Tolan Man?
Speaker 3 (05:39):
Toland Man? I would have named him Pete Terrible. So
those two are pretty good. But the money, the natural
money preserve it is sand.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Yeah, I had no idea.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
The reason why sand is such a great preservative is
because it actually wicks away and absorbs and just removes
the any type of humidity in the body, which allows
the body to desiccate, which means that there is no
place for bacteria to live, which means the tissues, the
tissue remains intact. And that's all about mummy is Yeah,
(06:14):
it's a it's a corpse with its tissue intact.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Well, and this kind of kickstarted the whole mummification artificial
mummification craze in Egypt because at first they buried bodies.
They weren't in caskets, they were you know, buried in
the hot sand. Yeah, and that preserved the body for
so long. They said, well, hey, if the body's preserved,
and that means the spirit's preserved. And this all of
(06:38):
a sudden, we have new views on the afterlife and life.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
Right, So what they decided to do and this was
so what I guess what you've just said though, is
that the mummification, the whole concept of mummies that we
have that was so ingrained in the Egyptian culture. Happened
by accident, right, Yeah, So they started they figured this out.
So they start purposefully burying people in the sand with
(07:03):
the intent of them being mummified. Right. But the problem is,
somewhere along the way they begin to have horrible thoughts
of their dead relatives choked with sand. Right, So they
started to say, maybe we should put some sort of
barrier up in between the corpse and the sand. Yeah,
and that led to caskets, right.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Yeah, started with just like a wicker covering, and then
that eventually led to wooden boxes. But here's the rub. Yeah,
now the body is not preserved. Now the body rots desicates. Well,
no it.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
Doesn't, it's just a normal corpse. Now, yeah, becomes you've
put a barrier between the body and the preservant in
the form of a tomb.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
So what's an Egyptian to do?
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Then?
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Well, the Egyptians, being the very pious culture that they were,
and the very intuitive and smart culture that they were.
You should for that, you should go read did the
Greeks get all their ideas from the Africans? Good article?
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Did you read them?
Speaker 3 (07:59):
Yeah? We do that. Podcast man let's do that, Okay.
They they decided that they needed to rectify their their
religious beliefs with their problem, their their need to preserve bodies.
And what did they do.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Well, they said, maybe we can replicate this natural process
that we've discovered through man made artificial means and the
trial and error. Yeah, it's kind of like it's called embalming, Josh.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
And they actually figured out, Chuck that like, one of
the one of the problems with the desiccation, the natural
desiccation in the desert was that the skin turned like
this crisp brown right, like you know, over baked chicken.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
It's exactly what looks like.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Actually, yeah, And with these embalming techniques that they eventually mastered,
they they could they could preserve a body better than
it could be preserved naturally, which is man conquering nature.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
It's right, conquering death even well, come on, it's a cluss.
They didn't have huge success at first. They would embalm
the bodies mainly to keep it away from the elements,
wrap it in linen, soaked in resin, and they would
create nice little shapely forms that look kind of like people.
But that didn't really do a whole lot because the
bandages didn't really halt the composition. They basically figured out
(09:22):
that it happens from the inside out.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Right.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
It took it took them a few centuries, if not millennia.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Basically wrapping it up, and it's just disintegrating within the
bandages at first.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Right, But those bandages are important because they stick around
pretty much the whole time. Same with the resin right. Yes,
so those two very early embalming techniques are mummification techniques
stuck around, But it was a big leap when they
figured out, oh wait a minute, this is going on
inside and so we need to start addressing.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
That by removing organs.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Right, And it's about here I think that we hit
the Middle Kingdom. And like the mummies that we think
of were produced in the from the eighth keent the
twentieth dynasties of the Middle Kingdom.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Yeah, that was when the like the heyday of mummification, right.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Right, which was between fifteen seventy and ten seventy five BC. Yeah,
the mummies that we think of, the ones that are
still around like really well preserved today, they were preserved
during this time, right, right, So what do you do
when you realize that everything bad is happening to a
corpse from the inside out. How do you address that?
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Should we just walk through the process one by one,
the gruesome process? Yeah, okay. First thing you do is
you take it and it varies, you know, the different processes.
And within the processes, they had things that they would say,
sort like religious rights that they would go through as well.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
Yeah, very sacred processes.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
But they would take the body generally to the Red
Land desert region. It's not near a whole lot of people,
so people aren't grossed out, but it is near the
Nile River. They needed the Nile River to well, we'll
see that in sess second step one, step one. You
need the Nile for step one. They think they did
it an open tents obviously to get some good ventilation going.
And the first place they took the body was to
(11:10):
the eyebo, the place of purification.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
Yeah, that was basically the Nile or the place where
they the place near the Nile where they rinsed the
body with you washed the body off.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Yeah, it's like a rebirth symbol of rebirth.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Right, So the the the corpse was hastened or some
of the spirit was hastened in the afterlife, and we
should probably say here so it doesn't get too confusing.
There were three spirits that the Egyptians believed comprised a person, right,
the Ka, the Ba, and the ah.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
Ah Yeah akh, Yeah, it's always tricky to pronounce that.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Right, So I think with this purification process, the ka
or the or the Ba or the ah, we're moved
along to the to the next world. Yeah, but the
Ka that was the one that was inextricably linked with
the corpse, which became the whole reason for mummification. As
(12:07):
long as the corpse was preserved, the ca was preserved
and the afterlife could you know, the person could live
in the afterlife. But once the corpse died, the kaw
died and that second death was final, which is why
they wanted to preserve bodies in the first place. Right, Yeah,
it's pretty cool. It's like the opposite of ashes to
ashes and dust to death, that's right.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
So after they've washed the body and sort of reborne
it in the rivers of the Nile, they carried the
body to the per Niffer and that is the house
of mummification. And this is kind of where this is
the basement of the Fisher House. Basically, huh and six
feet under the fissures. Oh, yeah, this is in the basement.
This is where we go and the gang would get
to work. Yeah, they would lay it on a wooden table.
(12:52):
The body. They removed the brain by hammering a chisel
through the bone in the nose.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
You know, I knew that already before this articles Christian
Slaters and like he's in like one of the creep
shows or Amaze Amazing stories or tales from the crypto
movie pump up the volume. It might have been that,
but I think it was like a smaller vignette, like
(13:18):
a mini movie within the larger movie. It's called like
lat number nine or whatever and leaving the cube, think
it was. Now that's called Brotherhood of the Tiger. Now
I think they change. Yeah. Anyway, they there's a mummy
who's hell bent on taking other people's brains using these
hooks or whatever.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Well, and that's exactly what they do. They make a
nose hole basically larger than the nostrils. They insert a
big hook, iron hook, and start scooping it out. Eventually
they go down to a spoon and eventually they just
rinse out the remaining bits of brain. And what's funny
is so hold on. They discard the brain because they thought,
I don't know why we have this stuff in our heads,
but we probably don't need it in the.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Afterlife, right, which is kind of unusual for the Egyptians
because they they preserved organ yeah, you know, but the brain.
And what's funny though, like I think what we've just
kind of meander passed that we should kind of meditate
on for a second, Chuck, is that they get to
a point where they fill the head with water. I imagine,
close the nose in the mouth and shake the head
(14:16):
around to slosh all this stuff out, and then lean
the head over and let all the last bits come out.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Yeah, that's how I would do it.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
I wonder if they did shots of that stuff, it
was like part of the ceremony.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
I would draw the line there. Well, they probably just thought,
I don't know, they didn't even know what the brain was.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Yeah, that's true. It's just waste.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
So the brain's out, Josh. Then they take a blade
made from obsidian sacred stone, cut a little incision on
the left side and reach in and start pulling out
the organs that they can get to right, and then
preserving those, like you said, except for the kidneys because
they didn't think they were important.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Either, which they were, you know, I mean the kidneys
are important, but it's not like brain important.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Well, I mean you need kidneys to live. I'm sure
they preserve the appending you need all of Yeah, that
was probably the most holy right of the organs.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
So they actually when they preserve these things, they would
they would wrap them in uh in resin strips of linen, right,
Basically they would mummify each organ, yeah, and then they
put them in and canopic jars. Basically it was like
here's your body, and then also here are your organs.
I forget you.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
They'd leave the heart though, because they thought the heart
was you know, linked to the soul and the spirit.
And they're kind of on the money there, I think.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
So these organs take up space in our chests and
abdominal cavities, so they would actually stuff the body with
like incense and other materials as well.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Right, yeah, well, first they'd rinse it. Once they I forgot,
they'd take out the lungs to the abdomen.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
Yeah, right right there.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
You can't get along the little side slit and then
they would rinse the chest cavity with palm wine and
then they would stuff it. They would actually basically yeah, straw,
Well I didn't say what actually you just said other materials.
I would use straw, maybe frankincense, a little murrhor yeah,
(16:14):
just to complete the trilogy.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Stuff you should know, stuff you should know.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
Yeah, straw, frankinsense and yeah, straw.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
That that kept the body from like caving in on itself,
basically maintaining a little bit of shape.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
And then is the key. This is the key to mummification.
And as a matter of fact, I'm just gonna say
it now. I found it on the internet. There is
a step by step, very easy to follow recipe on
I think Wiki how, which I don't normally go on,
but it's the only place I could find a recipe
(17:19):
for mummifying a chicken using the Egyptian method, and it
calls for natron, right, Yeah, that's the key. Natron is
this basically a compound that the Egyptians figured out they
could gather and combine from the Nile, which is basically
baking soda, sodium bicarbonate and salt table salt sodium chloride.
(17:43):
You mix the two together and it becomes this perfect preservant.
So they would put natron powder, which is like this
just accelerated the technique of mummification, like by light years. Sure,
and they would cover the body with this stuff and
leave it and it would just completely dry the body out. Right.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Yeah, this took about forty days. They had to guard
the body while this was going on, obviously, because they
didn't want vultures digging through the natron for what lies beneath.
After the forty days, they moved the body then to
the wabet, which is a house of purification. Yank all
that incense and the stuffing out, refill it with the
natron resin, soaked linen and other materials again whatever these
(18:26):
mysterious things are. Then they would sew all the incisions up,
cover the skin with resin, and then say, hey, it's
time to wrap this puppy.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Yeah, and this is where we get the idea for
the mummy, our modern idea of a mummy always wearing
link bandages.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
That are always coming off.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
Yeah. You can just see the eyes maybe like teeth
or something. Yeah, So this is where we're at. They're
at the bandaging procedure that thirty five or forty days,
while the nature and powder was doing its work wicking
away all of the basically acting as the desk KNT. Yeah,
the family of the deceased was going around town going
(19:05):
do you have any linens we can have forever? Yeah?
Do you have some linens we can have?
Speaker 1 (19:10):
And could you like your linens to spend eternity in
the eavans above.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
With our dad. They collected about four thousand square feet
just top top of my head, that's about how much
they gathered sure of linen and would bring it to
the embalmers, and the embalmers would say, hey, we like
this piece. That piece is horrible. Are you really going
to bury your dad in this? And they would take
(19:36):
the best stuff and they would cut it into or
they would tear them into strips three to eight inches
wide of bandages and they would start the rapping, which
would take a little while. Right, Yeah, it takes a week.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Or two, I guess probably depending on how big the
body is. Common sense. Start with the hands and feet.
You wrap all. This is the initial under wrapping, I guess.
You wrap everything individually, each little finger each it'll toe
everything and then once everything's wrapped individually, they do a
whole body wrap, applying new layers, coating the linen with
(20:09):
again the hot resin to keep everything in place. Uttering spell.
Sometimes they would wrap amulets over different parts of the body.
Wrap it up in there with you, protect you in
the next world, that kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
Right, and then presto chaninjoh, you are a mummy. And
before we go further the process we've just described, this
really ornate, wonderful, lengthy process.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Where this is going.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
You would think about it like, there's so many There
were a lot of Egyptians running around, and a lot
of them died on any given day, and there was
a lot of work to be done. So this process
that we just described was for the people who had
lots of money. For some reason, the wealthy have always
been revered, right, and I've also gotten special treatment right. Right.
(20:58):
If you were just an ordinary schmo like me or Chuck,
you were going to get the budget package, which is
basically like instead of like carefully removing all of the organs,
preserving each one, they would inject oil like this oil
mixture into your cavities, let it sit for a few days.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
It would stop up all your orifices first, sod leak out.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
Thank you. So I don't know how they did that.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
I guess with other materials.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Right, So they would stop you up full of oil,
let you sit for a few days, and then unstop
your orifices and let all the oil drain out, and
it would carry the liquefied organs and tissue out with it.
It's a lot easier, a lot faster.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
So even this many thousands of years ago, you get
what you paid for exactly. That's pretty sad. Yeah, there's
always been a budget package. Or maybe that's a good
thing that it wasn't only just reserved. Like if you
don't have any money, you just can't get mummified.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
That's a way to go.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
They thought, you know what, let's think of a cheaper
way to do this for you folks.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Right, let's just fill.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
You up with the oil, stop up your orifices, and
give you a good shake.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
Yep, So you're prepared. You're all wrapped. However, they got
your organs out there out, you're bandaged, and you are
now about to be outfitted what's called a cartonage cage,
which is kind of like a breastplate. Some cool like
forearm armor, leg armor pretty much this thing that's going
(22:29):
to hold your body together for a while. And a
funerary mask, which is like the famous masks we think
of when we think of like King Tut, like it's
a death mask. And these were extremely important because they
directed the spirit the ka to the right body afterward,
So it was in a person's visage or possibly that
(22:50):
of a god, but the spirit would be in on
you know, what to look for.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
They would know that.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
That's how they knew it was. Who.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
Sure, this guy is supposed to supposed to either look
like Josh or Anubis. Either way, I think that's him
right overay there, right, so let's grab him.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
And speaking of a Nubis, you would be committed to
your tomb following a funeral procession where you were carried
in your suet, right, which so that's.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
What you think of with King Tutt. That's the casket
that looks like a person, like the gold casket in
the shape of a human.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
Right, it's a suet. It's a suet that would be
carried to your tomb, and there would be a priest
dressed as the jackal god Anubis. There were there was
the ceremony of the mouth, which is pretty cool because
there was some sort of weird understanding. I guess that
you had died and now certain things had to be restored,
(23:47):
and the ceremony of the mouth was this passing over
of sacred objects to like the across the suet's face,
the casket's face, and it would restore your five cents. Yeah,
because you need that exactly, so you're placed and this
is weird. Chuck, did you find this odd that your
casket was placed leaned up against the wall.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Yeah, It almost like I would do that while I
was getting everything ready and then I would lay it down.
So it almost made me think that they kind of
forgot and they say, oh, well, we left that first
one leaning against the wall, so I guess that's the
way we do it. Yeah, but that's not true. No,
I'm sure they had a very good reason.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Probably because it was easier to just walk up right
out of there.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Well, yeah, I would think they wanted to leave it upright,
but standing it upright they didn't have, like the perfectly
level floor probably wasn't too secure, so they just gave
it a little lean.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Sure, little help, which is far less secure than just
laying it down on the floor. Yeah. Following that, you
are your furniture. Don't forget your canopic jar of organs
laid next to you, little food maybe, sure, your furniture
basically the stuff you're going to need in the next
life to be comfortable. Yeah, and you're set. Your tomb
(25:03):
is sealed up, and it's probably inscribed with something along
the lines of as for anybody who shall enter this
tomb in his impurity, I shall wring his neck as
a bird's. It was a standard mummy curse. Yeah, a
mummy curse on the tomb.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
Yeah. People became in the nineteen twenties. Howard Carter dug
up King Tut's tomb, and people were just crazy for
mummies at the time.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Westerners are like, oh my gosh, this is so interesting.
This curse thing is so neat. Laurel and Hardy are
doing mummy curse movies and a microbiologist from Germany named
Gothard Kramer or Cramer said, there may be something to
this curse thing because they bury people with food produces
mold spores, So when they unearth this tomb, all these
(25:49):
mold spores are released into the air and it might
kill you. So it's not that there's something to the curse,
but it could lead people to tie the two together.
If you unearth the tomb, then you die.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
Certainly, there's something weird about the Carter expedition who unearthed
King Tut's tomb in nineteen twenty two because eleven of
the people who were involved, not necessarily present, but involved,
died within seven years. I think eleven people in a canary.
His canary died like right when they entered the tomb.
(26:19):
A cobra ate it. It's bad luck, it is, and
then it just went downhill from there. So there's all
sorts of explanations, but it's also oddly intriguing. And like
you said, egypt Mania gripped the West. Oh yeah, they
loved it all right. And there was actually unraveling parties
where people get their hands on mummies and then like
unbandage them, see what's in there, which is like, that's
(26:42):
not what you do with a dead body. This desecration.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
Yeah, it's bad luck too, you know.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
So that pretty much is the Egyptian mummy, and that's
what we mainly think of. But they weren't the first
people to do this kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
No, and then isn't that interesting?
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Yeah? They the first the oldest mummies actually on the
planet are from northern Chile, the Chinchoro people. Yep, Chinchiro,
let's go with Chinchoro. Okay, Uh this they started doing
this about two thousand years before the Egyptians, but they
were not very much like uh, the Egyptians. They basically
(27:49):
dismembered and disemboweled the body, put it back together again,
sewed it up, and then covered it with black mud.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Well they put it back together with like straw and sticks,
and that's what they had. It was like they make
qupie dolls out of like these bodies.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Basically, yeah, covered it with black mud and shaped it
into a human form. But they believe that this wasn't
necessarily done to preserve the body for the afterlife. Maybe
it was more for the people left on the planet
Earth to mourn the death of their loved one keep them.
Speaker 3 (28:22):
Around a little longer, which is very sweet.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
Because they saw evidence of like retouching of the paint,
signs of wear and tear, so that you know, basically
they were kept in the households for a little while.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
They think basically statues freaky freaky statues. Yeah, and that
was five thousand BC, which is two thousand years before
the Egyptians came onto the scene at all. It's right.
And the would you say the Cinchoro people, Yeah, they were,
which you said a lot.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
I think I went with Chinchoro, but someone will point
that out if I'm wrong.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
I agreed. They're not the only ones in South America
who got into move cation either. The Incas very famously
did as well. They had a little habit of sacrificing
children to their gods, and they culture relativism chuck, and
they would through this process like the child and the
(29:15):
child's family were just treated like royalty for this, like
it was a high honor to be chosen to be
sacrificed to the gods. And they would get the child
really wasted on this fermented corn concoction, take the child
up to the cave. Sometimes I think they would whack
the kid over the head, or other times they would
(29:38):
get the child so wasted that they just would leave
them there in the cold temperatures, exposed to the freezing temperatures,
and the child would die of exposure. I can't say
jerks about this, you can, but there's a very famous
mummy called the Maiden, who's a fifteen year old girl
and she was sacrificed as thanks to the gods for
(30:00):
a really good corn harvest by the Incas in Peru
five hundred years ago. Oh yeah, did you see that
picture I sent you?
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Oh? Yeah, was that her?
Speaker 3 (30:07):
It's like looking at a girl who's sleeping, but she's
been dead for five hundred years. Yeah, like you if
you've been to South America's I know you have her
Central America. Like, she looks just like one of those
girls you might see down there, like a Central American
indigenous person.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
She's probably short.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
Then she looks kind of short.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Yeah, that'd be funny if she was like six to two.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
But then moving on up, there's also one and it
didn't make it into this article, but chuck, I've been
there myself. Juannawanto, Mexico has a mummy museum and they
have the world's smallest mummy. I think it might have
been a fetus really, but they were all naturally mummified,
to the great surprise of the nineteenth century townspeople who
(30:51):
had to move a graveyard and found like, okay, there's
a lot of mummies.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
How big was it?
Speaker 3 (30:56):
It was very small. You known object coffee up, coffee
cup okay, sandered coffee cups on it, gotcha. But then
there's like people, they're still wearing their suits, and it's
really amazing. You walk into this little Mexican building and
there's just dead people everywhere, just behind this glass. It's
(31:17):
very neat. If you ever go to Guanawanto, Mexico, you
have to go to the mummy museum.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
I think I should. Yeah, Lady Chang China. Chinese were
they were lousy with mummies. Yeah, they love to mommify people.
She was an aristocrat from about two thousand years ago,
and she is believed to be about the best preserved
ancient mummy so far. Did you see her picture? Yeah,
with their tongue sticking out pretty well mummified, yeah, and
(31:42):
her hair still. Yeah, she was. They haven't studied her
a whole lot, the Chinese haven't, so they don't know
exactly how she was prepared, but they do think that
mercury and the embalming fluid might have had something.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
To do with it.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
Yeah, I would imagine that will do it. Mercury, yeah, sure,
and also in China, mummies have kind of rewritten history
a little bit. Some very very ancient mummies from one
thousand BC. Before one thousand BC, they found some people
of Indo Iranian descent. They're they linked them to like
(32:20):
basically Mesopotamia through tattoos and like other implements that they had.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
In the shape of their face, the way they looked.
Speaker 3 (32:27):
Yep, and they figured out, like, wait a minute, these
people were like Indo European traders.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
What are they doing here?
Speaker 3 (32:33):
And they just made their way to settle right in
the deserts of China before the Han dynasty ever showed up. Yeah,
so that kind of changed things a little bit.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
I'm sure if we talk about mummies, we got to
talk about the more modern day mummies because of the
big interest in mummification thanks to Tut being found was
the big one. Yeah, that's right around the time Lenin
died Russia and they said, you know what, let's preserve
linen and display in the Kremlin. So that's exactly what
(33:07):
they did, and we do not know exactly how because
it's an ancient Russian secret. I don't know about ancient,
but it's a Russian secret, and they it's ongoing because
they continue to immerse him in a preservative bath every
now and then.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Andy's wears a waterproof suit.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
That's right. And if you've ever seen pictures of Lenin
or eva perone, did they look pretty lifelike? Yeah, but
hers is way cool. They basically replaced all the fluids
in her body with wax, right, which would be a
very modern take on the ancient practice.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
There's also incorruptible corpses of the Catholic Faith. It's basically
a person who is so pure on earth that their
body just didn't didn't rot. And there's example of those.
There's one he's like a prince, he's like a child prints.
I think he died in like he died more than
(34:04):
a thousand years ago, or about it a thousand years ago,
and his body's totally preserved and there's no evidence that
he was embalmed or anything like that. What they don't
understand that there are some bodies out there that just
defy logic. I wrote an article and you should read
It's a miracle. How can a courpse be incorruptible?
Speaker 1 (34:25):
We need to keep in track of these awesome ideas. Correct,
Where's our person, where's our boy? Charlie or no, our
boy Friday, Okay, Charlie, where I got that? And then Josh,
finally we have. In the nineteen seventies, some scientists discovered
something called plastinization, and that is when all of the
(34:46):
water and lipids and the body cells are replaced with
polymers and you basically become like plastic, very flexible and durable.
You don't decompose and you don't stink too bad. And
that is used to preserve bodies, mainly for anatomical research
at this point.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Or for bodies world or bodies the exhibitive.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
You've been, No, I've never been, but that's how they
do it.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
It is really something. I mean, you're right there up
on this corpse missing its skin and like it is
a dead person, and it's really interesting. There's one, the
one that I went to in Atlanta. It's two eyeballs
and they're connected to the spinal cord which is going
down and then the coming off the spinal cord are
the major nerves of the central nervous system and that's it,
(35:32):
and it's just laid out perfectly, really kind of surprising.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
I'm shocked that I haven't been to that yet.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
It's pretty cool. It's definitely worth going to.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
I did the dialogue in the dark thing.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
I have not been there. That's next door. Yeah, that
was that kid. You know.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
I was a little disappointed. Yeah, not in the exhibit itself,
but the way they do it. I think it could
have been like really awesome. But the way they do it,
it wasn't as awesome as it could have been. Just
my take.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
Me and her sister went and she said they would
have liked it. But there was this very loud, drunk
woman who kept like falling into people what they wanted
to kill.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
Nothing you can do about that, you know, in the
dark weather, you could just like kick her in the
shin and run away.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
Uh huh.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
We should mention Bob Doctor Bob Bryer real quick though.
He is an Egyptologist who in nineteen ninety four said,
you know what, I want to try and replicate the
Egyptian technique and he did it. Chicken, Yeah, with a chicken,
and he did it. It was pretty successful at the University
of Maryland School of Medicine. And one of the things
he learned from doing this that the the way the
(36:35):
body ends up looking as a result of the mummification process,
not the fact. Yeah, that it's been in the ground
for thousands and thousands.
Speaker 3 (36:43):
Like the shriveled, wrinkled look. Yeah. Yeah, So that's one
thing I learned. That's a big thing to learn, though,
I mean, think about it. That's Egyptology hasn't really advanced
much in the last fifty years, has it not that
I know.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
I know Heraldo didn't find squat, No he didn't.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
No, that wasn't Heraldo. Heraldo looks for pones.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Oh, that's right. I watched that one. That was fun.
I was a youngster and I was so excited and.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
Yeah, but so disappointed when it was just a total disaster. Yeah,
well it's it for mummies, right, chuck you anymore? I'm
I'm Are you mummied out? Yep? All right. If you
want to learn more about mummies, check out m M
M I E S in the handy search bar at
howstuff works dot com. You can learn how to mummify
a chicken on wiki how and what else? I think
(37:29):
there might be a website for the mummies of wanna
want to that's I think g u A n A
j u A t oh maybe sounds good to me?
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Does it, you know, I think, uh, Matt and Rachel
from Cool Stuff on the Planet did a thing on
the Egyptian Mummy. Oh yeah, or not Egyptian Mummy museumm
Wana Wanta Mummy musum.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
Yes, Cool Stuff on the Planet check it out. That
is definitely worth watching as well. It's worth watching anyway.
And I said handy search bar somewhere in there, which
means I guess time for a listener.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Man, Hi, Chuck and Josh and Jerry. My name is Maddie.
I'm twelve years old. I love your podcast. I wait
all day at school to get home so I can
check for new podcasts. They always help me fall asleep,
but not because they're boring, but because it gets my
brain thinking and the brain gets tired.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
That's cool, Mary, So it's fun.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
I was wondering if you give a shout out to
my best bud, Casey. Casey has a tumor in his
leg and is in a wheelchair. He tells me he
is very miserable, but at least he gets to listen
to me talk about you guys and fun fact. He
also has a pet rooster named Lewis Sweet, and Lewis
is house trained so he just runs around the house.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
That is awesome house strained chicken.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
So please give Louis I'm sorry Casey a shout and
Louis while we're out. It sure make him feel better.
It would make his day or even his year. And
tell me which podcast you're going to put it on,
because I am just twelve and some of them are inappropriate.
Speaker 3 (38:50):
Oh was this one appropriate? I don't know, Probably not,
the shaking the brain part out. We'll figure it out, okay,
We'll tell them to just listen to the listener mail
and let it parents listen to the rest.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
And also a suggestion the infamous story of that French
queen who said let the meat cake. I don't remember
her name, that's uh Marie Antwin, Marie Antoinette. That was
Kirsten Dunst. And remember I do not have Facebook, so
please answer me by email, she says.
Speaker 3 (39:19):
And then oh is it she? Is it d d
or tt It's d d oh okay.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
And then her signature is potato in a mushroom for Maggie.
I don't even know what that means to all the
kids are saying it these day. Really, yeah, all right,
potato and a mushroom everybody.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
You just said, Maggie, it's Maddie, right, Maddie. Okay, Maddie,
thanks for that email. Maddie. Did we give a shout
out to Lewis and Casey?
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Well, Casey, we hope you're feeling better, but I'm sorry
to hear about that, and I hope you're up and
around before.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
You know it.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
Take care of Lewis. Yes, if you're an egyptologist and
you have some good mummy stories, we want to hear it.
Speaker 4 (39:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
You know what, if you have any good mummy story,
we want to hear it, wrap it up in an
email and send that email to stop for podcast at
HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 4 (40:09):
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody. Did you ever want to know how mummies
work and how you mummify a person? Well you can
learn if you listen to this one from March fifteenth. Hey,
look at that date, March fifteenth, twenty eleven. How mummies work.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's
Charles W Chuck Bryant. We're about to do this stuff
you should know. Thang, Yeah, do you like that? I did?
How you doing? Man?
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Great? Now that I've switched out my foul smelling microphone cover?
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Yeah, this is actually take two, but it things nasty.
I'm not getting near it, but can you trually imagine Chuck? Yeah,
and something's future facted on the mic cover, the Peak
Clipper cover.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Yeah, weird. You know, in real studios it changes out
of it now and.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Then these things have been running for at least a year.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Fifty cents? All right, what's your chuck your sterling intro?
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Speaking of fifty cents, do you remember when we were
talking about fossils.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Yeah, and we said that every once in a while,
something happens so that a fossil naturally occurs, and that
it's desiccated, the skin is dried out. Yeah, that's a mummy.
Yeah who knew? I knew? Yeah, me too. Actually, when
we talked about that, I was like, we have to
do how mummies work, and here we are.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
I'm kind of surprised, just when it's slipped under the
radar for so long. This yeah right up our alley.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Yeah, I went and looked. I'm like, surely we do
have it and be fast.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
It was gruesome.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Yeah, it's it's like stuff you should know died in
the wool. Yeah. Yeah, and you're about to hear why
dear listeners, because we're about to talk about all the
things that happened to a corpse after death, which we've
done before, but we need to go over again. Mummies
are cool, though, they are very cool. So, Chuck, let's
say that that you were stabbed in the stomach enough
(02:03):
time so that you could not move any longer. You
couldn't walk back home. It was out in the woods,
and the one person you're with, the very person who
stabbed you, left you there to die. You bleed out,
you're dead. Things start happening to your body, right, yeah,
pretty quickly, up first is autolysis.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Yes, that is uh, that's kind of gruesome. That's when
your organs that have digestive enzymes actually say, well, this
is what we do, so we're going to start digesting
the organs.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
Right and not like my stomach is eating itself because
I'm hungry, Like my stomach is actually eating itself. It's
rupturing and oozing and it's it's being reduced to nothing. Yeah,
while that's going on, and that actually I think if
I remember correctly, that kind of helps kickstart the process
of putrefaction, right.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Yeah, autolysis starts within a few hours after you're dead.
The body, the body knows.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
And if you want like a really big overview of
this or an in depth look at what happens to
the body immediately after death, you should listen to our
Rigor Mortis podcast if you haven't already. Yeah, body farms.
I talked about it in there too.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
So yes, puture faction, you're right, is followed by or
follows autolysis. And that is when bacteria does its little
job and produces everything to a skeleton. And you know,
depending where you are, this gonna happen in a few.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Months, right, depending on where you are now, We as
human beings are a subtropical species, right, Chuck, you know that, sure,
So we are designed, if you believe in that kind
of thing, to decomposed. Decompose most readily in a warm,
humid climate. That's where the bacteria that breaks down our
tissue lives or thrives moisture warmth. If you have cold, dry, yeah,
(03:53):
things change a little bit. Like a refrigerator exactly. Which
is a good place to store a body if you
want to preserve it, or food if you want to
eat it. That's a good point to your body if
you want to eat it. For an in depth look
at that, you might want to listen to our cannibalism
podcast though. That's right, right, But let's say you don't
have a refrigerator. Nature provides it for you on some occasions.
(04:15):
There's ut See the ice man.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Right, yeah, see the ice man.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Yeah, that's the iceman.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Yeah, nineteen ninety one and the Italian Alps. This dude
is very well preserved natural mummy.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
He's amazing.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Died and basically got buried in ice and kind of
stayed that way.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Yeah. I think they have the impression that he fell
into a crevasse. Yeah, died, but it was during like
a blizzard maybe, and he was covered with snow and
ice that stuck around for millennia. But he's so well preserved.
You can see the tattoos on his skin and still.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Yeah, well and we knew, Hey, they tattooed people fifty
three hundred years ago exactly. Little window into what life
was like for Iceman.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Yeah he was. He had I think a nice little
set of air and his bow and copper age European guy.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
That's why he had a wallet sized photo of you
as well of me. Yeah, it's not possible. He was
from the future. That's my that's what I think.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
He just blew my mind. Chuck good. So ice, as
we talked about in Fossils too, was a is a
very good preservant. But nothing does it. Oh, Pete Bogs too.
You remember I finally showed you that picture of Tolan Man.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Can't forget about Pete.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
Again if you have not gone and looked up Tolon Man.
It's awesome, Like his whiskers are still there and he
lived a couple thousand years ago, right.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
What's his name? Did they name him just Tolan Man?
Speaker 3 (05:39):
Toland Man? I would have named him Pete Terrible. So
those two are pretty good. But the money, the natural
money preserve it is sand.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Yeah, I had no idea.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
The reason why sand is such a great preservative is
because it actually wicks away and absorbs and just removes
the any type of humidity in the body, which allows
the body to desiccate, which means that there is no
place for bacteria to live, which means the tissues, the
tissue remains intact. And that's all about mummy is Yeah,
(06:14):
it's a it's a corpse with its tissue intact.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Well, and this kind of kickstarted the whole mummification artificial
mummification craze in Egypt because at first they buried bodies.
They weren't in caskets, they were you know, buried in
the hot sand. Yeah, and that preserved the body for
so long. They said, well, hey, if the body's preserved,
and that means the spirit's preserved. And this all of
(06:38):
a sudden, we have new views on the afterlife and life.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
Right, So what they decided to do and this was
so what I guess what you've just said though, is
that the mummification, the whole concept of mummies that we
have that was so ingrained in the Egyptian culture. Happened
by accident, right, Yeah, So they started they figured this out.
So they start purposefully burying people in the sand with
(07:03):
the intent of them being mummified. Right. But the problem is,
somewhere along the way they begin to have horrible thoughts
of their dead relatives choked with sand. Right, So they
started to say, maybe we should put some sort of
barrier up in between the corpse and the sand. Yeah,
and that led to caskets, right.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Yeah, started with just like a wicker covering, and then
that eventually led to wooden boxes. But here's the rub. Yeah,
now the body is not preserved. Now the body rots desicates. Well,
no it.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
Doesn't, it's just a normal corpse. Now, yeah, becomes you've
put a barrier between the body and the preservant in
the form of a tomb.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
So what's an Egyptian to do?
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Then?
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Well, the Egyptians, being the very pious culture that they were,
and the very intuitive and smart culture that they were.
You should for that, you should go read did the
Greeks get all their ideas from the Africans? Good article?
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Did you read them?
Speaker 3 (07:59):
Yeah? We do that. Podcast man let's do that, Okay.
They they decided that they needed to rectify their their
religious beliefs with their problem, their their need to preserve bodies.
And what did they do.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Well, they said, maybe we can replicate this natural process
that we've discovered through man made artificial means and the
trial and error. Yeah, it's kind of like it's called embalming, Josh.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
And they actually figured out, Chuck that like, one of
the one of the problems with the desiccation, the natural
desiccation in the desert was that the skin turned like
this crisp brown right, like you know, over baked chicken.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
It's exactly what looks like.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Actually, yeah, And with these embalming techniques that they eventually mastered,
they they could they could preserve a body better than
it could be preserved naturally, which is man conquering nature.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
It's right, conquering death even well, come on, it's a cluss.
They didn't have huge success at first. They would embalm
the bodies mainly to keep it away from the elements,
wrap it in linen, soaked in resin, and they would
create nice little shapely forms that look kind of like people.
But that didn't really do a whole lot because the
bandages didn't really halt the composition. They basically figured out
(09:22):
that it happens from the inside out.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Right.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
It took it took them a few centuries, if not millennia.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Basically wrapping it up, and it's just disintegrating within the
bandages at first.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Right, But those bandages are important because they stick around
pretty much the whole time. Same with the resin right. Yes,
so those two very early embalming techniques are mummification techniques
stuck around, But it was a big leap when they
figured out, oh wait a minute, this is going on
inside and so we need to start addressing.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
That by removing organs.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Right, And it's about here I think that we hit
the Middle Kingdom. And like the mummies that we think
of were produced in the from the eighth keent the
twentieth dynasties of the Middle Kingdom.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Yeah, that was when the like the heyday of mummification, right.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Right, which was between fifteen seventy and ten seventy five BC. Yeah,
the mummies that we think of, the ones that are
still around like really well preserved today, they were preserved
during this time, right, right, So what do you do
when you realize that everything bad is happening to a
corpse from the inside out. How do you address that?
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Should we just walk through the process one by one,
the gruesome process? Yeah, okay. First thing you do is
you take it and it varies, you know, the different processes.
And within the processes, they had things that they would say,
sort like religious rights that they would go through as well.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
Yeah, very sacred processes.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
But they would take the body generally to the Red
Land desert region. It's not near a whole lot of people,
so people aren't grossed out, but it is near the
Nile River. They needed the Nile River to well, we'll
see that in sess second step one, step one. You
need the Nile for step one. They think they did
it an open tents obviously to get some good ventilation going.
And the first place they took the body was to
(11:10):
the eyebo, the place of purification.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
Yeah, that was basically the Nile or the place where
they the place near the Nile where they rinsed the
body with you washed the body off.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Yeah, it's like a rebirth symbol of rebirth.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Right, So the the the corpse was hastened or some
of the spirit was hastened in the afterlife, and we
should probably say here so it doesn't get too confusing.
There were three spirits that the Egyptians believed comprised a person, right,
the Ka, the Ba, and the ah.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
Ah Yeah akh, Yeah, it's always tricky to pronounce that.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Right, So I think with this purification process, the ka
or the or the Ba or the ah, we're moved
along to the to the next world. Yeah, but the
Ka that was the one that was inextricably linked with
the corpse, which became the whole reason for mummification. As
(12:07):
long as the corpse was preserved, the ca was preserved
and the afterlife could you know, the person could live
in the afterlife. But once the corpse died, the kaw
died and that second death was final, which is why
they wanted to preserve bodies in the first place. Right, Yeah,
it's pretty cool. It's like the opposite of ashes to
ashes and dust to death, that's right.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
So after they've washed the body and sort of reborne
it in the rivers of the Nile, they carried the
body to the per Niffer and that is the house
of mummification. And this is kind of where this is
the basement of the Fisher House. Basically, huh and six
feet under the fissures. Oh, yeah, this is in the basement.
This is where we go and the gang would get
to work. Yeah, they would lay it on a wooden table.
(12:52):
The body. They removed the brain by hammering a chisel
through the bone in the nose.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
You know, I knew that already before this articles Christian
Slaters and like he's in like one of the creep
shows or Amaze Amazing stories or tales from the crypto
movie pump up the volume. It might have been that,
but I think it was like a smaller vignette, like
(13:18):
a mini movie within the larger movie. It's called like
lat number nine or whatever and leaving the cube, think
it was. Now that's called Brotherhood of the Tiger. Now
I think they change. Yeah. Anyway, they there's a mummy
who's hell bent on taking other people's brains using these
hooks or whatever.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Well, and that's exactly what they do. They make a
nose hole basically larger than the nostrils. They insert a
big hook, iron hook, and start scooping it out. Eventually
they go down to a spoon and eventually they just
rinse out the remaining bits of brain. And what's funny
is so hold on. They discard the brain because they thought,
I don't know why we have this stuff in our heads,
but we probably don't need it in the.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Afterlife, right, which is kind of unusual for the Egyptians
because they they preserved organ yeah, you know, but the brain.
And what's funny though, like I think what we've just
kind of meander passed that we should kind of meditate
on for a second, Chuck, is that they get to
a point where they fill the head with water. I imagine,
close the nose in the mouth and shake the head
(14:16):
around to slosh all this stuff out, and then lean
the head over and let all the last bits come out.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Yeah, that's how I would do it.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
I wonder if they did shots of that stuff, it
was like part of the ceremony.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
I would draw the line there. Well, they probably just thought,
I don't know, they didn't even know what the brain was.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Yeah, that's true. It's just waste.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
So the brain's out, Josh. Then they take a blade
made from obsidian sacred stone, cut a little incision on
the left side and reach in and start pulling out
the organs that they can get to right, and then
preserving those, like you said, except for the kidneys because
they didn't think they were important.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Either, which they were, you know, I mean the kidneys
are important, but it's not like brain important.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Well, I mean you need kidneys to live. I'm sure
they preserve the appending you need all of Yeah, that
was probably the most holy right of the organs.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
So they actually when they preserve these things, they would
they would wrap them in uh in resin strips of linen, right,
Basically they would mummify each organ, yeah, and then they
put them in and canopic jars. Basically it was like
here's your body, and then also here are your organs.
I forget you.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
They'd leave the heart though, because they thought the heart
was you know, linked to the soul and the spirit.
And they're kind of on the money there, I think.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
So these organs take up space in our chests and
abdominal cavities, so they would actually stuff the body with
like incense and other materials as well.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Right, yeah, well, first they'd rinse it. Once they I forgot,
they'd take out the lungs to the abdomen.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
Yeah, right right there.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
You can't get along the little side slit and then
they would rinse the chest cavity with palm wine and
then they would stuff it. They would actually basically yeah, straw,
Well I didn't say what actually you just said other materials.
I would use straw, maybe frankincense, a little murrhor yeah,
(16:14):
just to complete the trilogy.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Stuff you should know, stuff you should know.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
Yeah, straw, frankinsense and yeah, straw.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
That that kept the body from like caving in on itself,
basically maintaining a little bit of shape.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
And then is the key. This is the key to mummification.
And as a matter of fact, I'm just gonna say
it now. I found it on the internet. There is
a step by step, very easy to follow recipe on
I think Wiki how, which I don't normally go on,
but it's the only place I could find a recipe
(17:19):
for mummifying a chicken using the Egyptian method, and it
calls for natron, right, Yeah, that's the key. Natron is
this basically a compound that the Egyptians figured out they
could gather and combine from the Nile, which is basically
baking soda, sodium bicarbonate and salt table salt sodium chloride.
(17:43):
You mix the two together and it becomes this perfect preservant.
So they would put natron powder, which is like this
just accelerated the technique of mummification, like by light years. Sure,
and they would cover the body with this stuff and
leave it and it would just completely dry the body out. Right.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Yeah, this took about forty days. They had to guard
the body while this was going on, obviously, because they
didn't want vultures digging through the natron for what lies beneath.
After the forty days, they moved the body then to
the wabet, which is a house of purification. Yank all
that incense and the stuffing out, refill it with the
natron resin, soaked linen and other materials again whatever these
(18:26):
mysterious things are. Then they would sew all the incisions up,
cover the skin with resin, and then say, hey, it's
time to wrap this puppy.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Yeah, and this is where we get the idea for
the mummy, our modern idea of a mummy always wearing
link bandages.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
That are always coming off.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
Yeah. You can just see the eyes maybe like teeth
or something. Yeah, So this is where we're at. They're
at the bandaging procedure that thirty five or forty days,
while the nature and powder was doing its work wicking
away all of the basically acting as the desk KNT. Yeah,
the family of the deceased was going around town going
(19:05):
do you have any linens we can have forever? Yeah?
Do you have some linens we can have?
Speaker 1 (19:10):
And could you like your linens to spend eternity in
the eavans above.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
With our dad. They collected about four thousand square feet
just top top of my head, that's about how much
they gathered sure of linen and would bring it to
the embalmers, and the embalmers would say, hey, we like
this piece. That piece is horrible. Are you really going
to bury your dad in this? And they would take
(19:36):
the best stuff and they would cut it into or
they would tear them into strips three to eight inches
wide of bandages and they would start the rapping, which
would take a little while. Right, Yeah, it takes a week.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Or two, I guess probably depending on how big the
body is. Common sense. Start with the hands and feet.
You wrap all. This is the initial under wrapping, I guess.
You wrap everything individually, each little finger each it'll toe
everything and then once everything's wrapped individually, they do a
whole body wrap, applying new layers, coating the linen with
(20:09):
again the hot resin to keep everything in place. Uttering spell.
Sometimes they would wrap amulets over different parts of the body.
Wrap it up in there with you, protect you in
the next world, that kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
Right, and then presto chaninjoh, you are a mummy. And
before we go further the process we've just described, this
really ornate, wonderful, lengthy process.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Where this is going.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
You would think about it like, there's so many There
were a lot of Egyptians running around, and a lot
of them died on any given day, and there was
a lot of work to be done. So this process
that we just described was for the people who had
lots of money. For some reason, the wealthy have always
been revered, right, and I've also gotten special treatment right. Right.
(20:58):
If you were just an ordinary schmo like me or Chuck,
you were going to get the budget package, which is
basically like instead of like carefully removing all of the organs,
preserving each one, they would inject oil like this oil
mixture into your cavities, let it sit for a few days.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
It would stop up all your orifices first, sod leak out.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
Thank you. So I don't know how they did that.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
I guess with other materials.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Right, So they would stop you up full of oil,
let you sit for a few days, and then unstop
your orifices and let all the oil drain out, and
it would carry the liquefied organs and tissue out with it.
It's a lot easier, a lot faster.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
So even this many thousands of years ago, you get
what you paid for exactly. That's pretty sad. Yeah, there's
always been a budget package. Or maybe that's a good
thing that it wasn't only just reserved. Like if you
don't have any money, you just can't get mummified.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
That's a way to go.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
They thought, you know what, let's think of a cheaper
way to do this for you folks.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Right, let's just fill.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
You up with the oil, stop up your orifices, and
give you a good shake.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
Yep, So you're prepared. You're all wrapped. However, they got
your organs out there out, you're bandaged, and you are
now about to be outfitted what's called a cartonage cage,
which is kind of like a breastplate. Some cool like
forearm armor, leg armor pretty much this thing that's going
(22:29):
to hold your body together for a while. And a
funerary mask, which is like the famous masks we think
of when we think of like King Tut, like it's
a death mask. And these were extremely important because they
directed the spirit the ka to the right body afterward,
So it was in a person's visage or possibly that
(22:50):
of a god, but the spirit would be in on
you know, what to look for.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
They would know that.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
That's how they knew it was. Who.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
Sure, this guy is supposed to supposed to either look
like Josh or Anubis. Either way, I think that's him
right overay there, right, so let's grab him.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
And speaking of a Nubis, you would be committed to
your tomb following a funeral procession where you were carried
in your suet, right, which so that's.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
What you think of with King Tutt. That's the casket
that looks like a person, like the gold casket in
the shape of a human.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
Right, it's a suet. It's a suet that would be
carried to your tomb, and there would be a priest
dressed as the jackal god Anubis. There were there was
the ceremony of the mouth, which is pretty cool because
there was some sort of weird understanding. I guess that
you had died and now certain things had to be restored,
(23:47):
and the ceremony of the mouth was this passing over
of sacred objects to like the across the suet's face,
the casket's face, and it would restore your five cents. Yeah,
because you need that exactly, so you're placed and this
is weird. Chuck, did you find this odd that your
casket was placed leaned up against the wall.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Yeah, It almost like I would do that while I
was getting everything ready and then I would lay it down.
So it almost made me think that they kind of
forgot and they say, oh, well, we left that first
one leaning against the wall, so I guess that's the
way we do it. Yeah, but that's not true. No,
I'm sure they had a very good reason.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Probably because it was easier to just walk up right
out of there.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Well, yeah, I would think they wanted to leave it upright,
but standing it upright they didn't have, like the perfectly
level floor probably wasn't too secure, so they just gave
it a little lean.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Sure, little help, which is far less secure than just
laying it down on the floor. Yeah. Following that, you
are your furniture. Don't forget your canopic jar of organs
laid next to you, little food maybe, sure, your furniture
basically the stuff you're going to need in the next
life to be comfortable. Yeah, and you're set. Your tomb
(25:03):
is sealed up, and it's probably inscribed with something along
the lines of as for anybody who shall enter this
tomb in his impurity, I shall wring his neck as
a bird's. It was a standard mummy curse. Yeah, a
mummy curse on the tomb.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
Yeah. People became in the nineteen twenties. Howard Carter dug
up King Tut's tomb, and people were just crazy for
mummies at the time.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Westerners are like, oh my gosh, this is so interesting.
This curse thing is so neat. Laurel and Hardy are
doing mummy curse movies and a microbiologist from Germany named
Gothard Kramer or Cramer said, there may be something to
this curse thing because they bury people with food produces
mold spores, So when they unearth this tomb, all these
(25:49):
mold spores are released into the air and it might
kill you. So it's not that there's something to the curse,
but it could lead people to tie the two together.
If you unearth the tomb, then you die.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
Certainly, there's something weird about the Carter expedition who unearthed
King Tut's tomb in nineteen twenty two because eleven of
the people who were involved, not necessarily present, but involved,
died within seven years. I think eleven people in a canary.
His canary died like right when they entered the tomb.
(26:19):
A cobra ate it. It's bad luck, it is, and
then it just went downhill from there. So there's all
sorts of explanations, but it's also oddly intriguing. And like
you said, egypt Mania gripped the West. Oh yeah, they
loved it all right. And there was actually unraveling parties
where people get their hands on mummies and then like
unbandage them, see what's in there, which is like, that's
(26:42):
not what you do with a dead body. This desecration.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
Yeah, it's bad luck too, you know.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
So that pretty much is the Egyptian mummy, and that's
what we mainly think of. But they weren't the first
people to do this kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
No, and then isn't that interesting?
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Yeah? They the first the oldest mummies actually on the
planet are from northern Chile, the Chinchoro people. Yep, Chinchiro,
let's go with Chinchoro. Okay, Uh this they started doing
this about two thousand years before the Egyptians, but they
were not very much like uh, the Egyptians. They basically
(27:49):
dismembered and disemboweled the body, put it back together again,
sewed it up, and then covered it with black mud.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Well they put it back together with like straw and sticks,
and that's what they had. It was like they make
qupie dolls out of like these bodies.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Basically, yeah, covered it with black mud and shaped it
into a human form. But they believe that this wasn't
necessarily done to preserve the body for the afterlife. Maybe
it was more for the people left on the planet
Earth to mourn the death of their loved one keep them.
Speaker 3 (28:22):
Around a little longer, which is very sweet.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
Because they saw evidence of like retouching of the paint,
signs of wear and tear, so that you know, basically
they were kept in the households for a little while.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
They think basically statues freaky freaky statues. Yeah, and that
was five thousand BC, which is two thousand years before
the Egyptians came onto the scene at all. It's right.
And the would you say the Cinchoro people, Yeah, they were,
which you said a lot.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
I think I went with Chinchoro, but someone will point
that out if I'm wrong.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
I agreed. They're not the only ones in South America
who got into move cation either. The Incas very famously
did as well. They had a little habit of sacrificing
children to their gods, and they culture relativism chuck, and
they would through this process like the child and the
(29:15):
child's family were just treated like royalty for this, like
it was a high honor to be chosen to be
sacrificed to the gods. And they would get the child
really wasted on this fermented corn concoction, take the child
up to the cave. Sometimes I think they would whack
the kid over the head, or other times they would
(29:38):
get the child so wasted that they just would leave
them there in the cold temperatures, exposed to the freezing temperatures,
and the child would die of exposure. I can't say
jerks about this, you can, but there's a very famous
mummy called the Maiden, who's a fifteen year old girl
and she was sacrificed as thanks to the gods for
(30:00):
a really good corn harvest by the Incas in Peru
five hundred years ago. Oh yeah, did you see that
picture I sent you?
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Oh? Yeah, was that her?
Speaker 3 (30:07):
It's like looking at a girl who's sleeping, but she's
been dead for five hundred years. Yeah, like you if
you've been to South America's I know you have her
Central America. Like, she looks just like one of those
girls you might see down there, like a Central American
indigenous person.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
She's probably short.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
Then she looks kind of short.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Yeah, that'd be funny if she was like six to two.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
But then moving on up, there's also one and it
didn't make it into this article, but chuck, I've been
there myself. Juannawanto, Mexico has a mummy museum and they
have the world's smallest mummy. I think it might have
been a fetus really, but they were all naturally mummified,
to the great surprise of the nineteenth century townspeople who
(30:51):
had to move a graveyard and found like, okay, there's
a lot of mummies.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
How big was it?
Speaker 3 (30:56):
It was very small. You known object coffee up, coffee
cup okay, sandered coffee cups on it, gotcha. But then
there's like people, they're still wearing their suits, and it's
really amazing. You walk into this little Mexican building and
there's just dead people everywhere, just behind this glass. It's
(31:17):
very neat. If you ever go to Guanawanto, Mexico, you
have to go to the mummy museum.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
I think I should. Yeah, Lady Chang China. Chinese were
they were lousy with mummies. Yeah, they love to mommify people.
She was an aristocrat from about two thousand years ago,
and she is believed to be about the best preserved
ancient mummy so far. Did you see her picture? Yeah,
with their tongue sticking out pretty well mummified, yeah, and
(31:42):
her hair still. Yeah, she was. They haven't studied her
a whole lot, the Chinese haven't, so they don't know
exactly how she was prepared, but they do think that
mercury and the embalming fluid might have had something.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
To do with it.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
Yeah, I would imagine that will do it. Mercury, yeah, sure,
and also in China, mummies have kind of rewritten history
a little bit. Some very very ancient mummies from one
thousand BC. Before one thousand BC, they found some people
of Indo Iranian descent. They're they linked them to like
(32:20):
basically Mesopotamia through tattoos and like other implements that they had.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
In the shape of their face, the way they looked.
Speaker 3 (32:27):
Yep, and they figured out, like, wait a minute, these
people were like Indo European traders.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
What are they doing here?
Speaker 3 (32:33):
And they just made their way to settle right in
the deserts of China before the Han dynasty ever showed up. Yeah,
so that kind of changed things a little bit.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
I'm sure if we talk about mummies, we got to
talk about the more modern day mummies because of the
big interest in mummification thanks to Tut being found was
the big one. Yeah, that's right around the time Lenin
died Russia and they said, you know what, let's preserve
linen and display in the Kremlin. So that's exactly what
(33:07):
they did, and we do not know exactly how because
it's an ancient Russian secret. I don't know about ancient,
but it's a Russian secret, and they it's ongoing because
they continue to immerse him in a preservative bath every
now and then.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Andy's wears a waterproof suit.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
That's right. And if you've ever seen pictures of Lenin
or eva perone, did they look pretty lifelike? Yeah, but
hers is way cool. They basically replaced all the fluids
in her body with wax, right, which would be a
very modern take on the ancient practice.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
There's also incorruptible corpses of the Catholic Faith. It's basically
a person who is so pure on earth that their
body just didn't didn't rot. And there's example of those.
There's one he's like a prince, he's like a child prints.
I think he died in like he died more than
(34:04):
a thousand years ago, or about it a thousand years ago,
and his body's totally preserved and there's no evidence that
he was embalmed or anything like that. What they don't
understand that there are some bodies out there that just
defy logic. I wrote an article and you should read
It's a miracle. How can a courpse be incorruptible?
Speaker 1 (34:25):
We need to keep in track of these awesome ideas. Correct,
Where's our person, where's our boy? Charlie or no, our
boy Friday, Okay, Charlie, where I got that? And then Josh,
finally we have. In the nineteen seventies, some scientists discovered
something called plastinization, and that is when all of the
(34:46):
water and lipids and the body cells are replaced with
polymers and you basically become like plastic, very flexible and durable.
You don't decompose and you don't stink too bad. And
that is used to preserve bodies, mainly for anatomical research
at this point.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Or for bodies world or bodies the exhibitive.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
You've been, No, I've never been, but that's how they
do it.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
It is really something. I mean, you're right there up
on this corpse missing its skin and like it is
a dead person, and it's really interesting. There's one, the
one that I went to in Atlanta. It's two eyeballs
and they're connected to the spinal cord which is going
down and then the coming off the spinal cord are
the major nerves of the central nervous system and that's it,
(35:32):
and it's just laid out perfectly, really kind of surprising.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
I'm shocked that I haven't been to that yet.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
It's pretty cool. It's definitely worth going to.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
I did the dialogue in the dark thing.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
I have not been there. That's next door. Yeah, that
was that kid. You know.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
I was a little disappointed. Yeah, not in the exhibit itself,
but the way they do it. I think it could
have been like really awesome. But the way they do it,
it wasn't as awesome as it could have been. Just
my take.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
Me and her sister went and she said they would
have liked it. But there was this very loud, drunk
woman who kept like falling into people what they wanted
to kill.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
Nothing you can do about that, you know, in the
dark weather, you could just like kick her in the
shin and run away.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
Uh huh.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
We should mention Bob Doctor Bob Bryer real quick though.
He is an Egyptologist who in nineteen ninety four said,
you know what, I want to try and replicate the
Egyptian technique and he did it. Chicken, Yeah, with a chicken,
and he did it. It was pretty successful at the University
of Maryland School of Medicine. And one of the things
he learned from doing this that the the way the
(36:35):
body ends up looking as a result of the mummification process,
not the fact. Yeah, that it's been in the ground
for thousands and thousands.
Speaker 3 (36:43):
Like the shriveled, wrinkled look. Yeah. Yeah, So that's one
thing I learned. That's a big thing to learn, though,
I mean, think about it. That's Egyptology hasn't really advanced
much in the last fifty years, has it not that
I know.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
I know Heraldo didn't find squat, No he didn't.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
No, that wasn't Heraldo. Heraldo looks for pones.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Oh, that's right. I watched that one. That was fun.
I was a youngster and I was so excited and.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
Yeah, but so disappointed when it was just a total disaster. Yeah,
well it's it for mummies, right, chuck you anymore? I'm
I'm Are you mummied out? Yep? All right. If you
want to learn more about mummies, check out m M
M I E S in the handy search bar at
howstuff works dot com. You can learn how to mummify
a chicken on wiki how and what else? I think
(37:29):
there might be a website for the mummies of wanna
want to that's I think g u A n A
j u A t oh maybe sounds good to me?
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Does it, you know, I think, uh, Matt and Rachel
from Cool Stuff on the Planet did a thing on
the Egyptian Mummy. Oh yeah, or not Egyptian Mummy museumm
Wana Wanta Mummy musum.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
Yes, Cool Stuff on the Planet check it out. That
is definitely worth watching as well. It's worth watching anyway.
And I said handy search bar somewhere in there, which
means I guess time for a listener.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Man, Hi, Chuck and Josh and Jerry. My name is Maddie.
I'm twelve years old. I love your podcast. I wait
all day at school to get home so I can
check for new podcasts. They always help me fall asleep,
but not because they're boring, but because it gets my
brain thinking and the brain gets tired.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
That's cool, Mary, So it's fun.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
I was wondering if you give a shout out to
my best bud, Casey. Casey has a tumor in his
leg and is in a wheelchair. He tells me he
is very miserable, but at least he gets to listen
to me talk about you guys and fun fact. He
also has a pet rooster named Lewis Sweet, and Lewis
is house trained so he just runs around the house.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
That is awesome house strained chicken.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
So please give Louis I'm sorry Casey a shout and
Louis while we're out. It sure make him feel better.
It would make his day or even his year. And
tell me which podcast you're going to put it on,
because I am just twelve and some of them are inappropriate.
Speaker 3 (38:50):
Oh was this one appropriate? I don't know, Probably not,
the shaking the brain part out. We'll figure it out, okay,
We'll tell them to just listen to the listener mail
and let it parents listen to the rest.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
And also a suggestion the infamous story of that French
queen who said let the meat cake. I don't remember
her name, that's uh Marie Antwin, Marie Antoinette. That was
Kirsten Dunst. And remember I do not have Facebook, so
please answer me by email, she says.
Speaker 3 (39:19):
And then oh is it she? Is it d d
or tt It's d d oh okay.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
And then her signature is potato in a mushroom for Maggie.
I don't even know what that means to all the
kids are saying it these day. Really, yeah, all right,
potato and a mushroom everybody.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
You just said, Maggie, it's Maddie, right, Maddie. Okay, Maddie,
thanks for that email. Maddie. Did we give a shout
out to Lewis and Casey?
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Well, Casey, we hope you're feeling better, but I'm sorry
to hear about that, and I hope you're up and
around before.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
You know it.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
Take care of Lewis. Yes, if you're an egyptologist and
you have some good mummy stories, we want to hear it.
Speaker 4 (39:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
You know what, if you have any good mummy story,
we want to hear it, wrap it up in an
email and send that email to stop for podcast at
HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 4 (40:09):
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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