Stuff You Should Know - How Mummies Work

Episode Date: March 15, 2011

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. Join Chuck and Josh to learn more.. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. 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 thing.

Yeah, I do like that. I did. How you doing, man? Great. Now that I've switched out my foul-smelling microphone cover. Yeah, this is actually take two. This thing's nasty. I'm not getting near it, but I can only imagine. Yeah, something's future-facted on the mic cover, the P-Clipper cover. Yeah, weird. You know, in real studios, they change these out every now and then. These things have been running for at least a year now. Like 50 cents. All right. What's your, what's your sterling intro? Speaking of 50 cents, do you remember when we were talking about fossils? Oh, 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. Yeah. And here we are. I'm kind of surprised this one has slipped under the radar for so long. Yeah. Right up our alley. Yeah. Well, I went and looked. I'm like, surely we do have it. Fascinating. There it was. Grewsome. Yeah, 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 you were stabbed in the stomach enough time so that you could not

move any longer. Okay. 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. 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. 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, 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 kick

start the process of putrefaction, right? Yeah. Autolysis starts within a few hours after you're dead. The body, the body knows. 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. That Body Farms. We talked about it in there too. So yes, putrefaction, you're right, is followed by, uh, or follows autolysis. And that is when bacteria does its little job and reduces everything to a skeleton. And, you know, depending where you are, this can happen in a few 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 decompose, 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. 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 too. Or a 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. There's, you see the Iceman, right? See the Iceman? Yeah, that's the Iceman. Yeah, 1991 in the Italian Alps,

this dude is very well preserved, natural mummy. Amazing. Died and basically got buried in ice and kind of stayed that way. 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 still. Yeah, and we knew, hey, they tattooed people 5,300 years ago. Exactly. Little window into what life was like for Iceman. Yeah, he had, I think, a nice little set of arrows in his bow and copper age, European guy. I think he had a wallet-sized photo of you as well. Of me? Yeah. It's not possible. He was from the future. That's what I think.

You just blew my mind, Chuck. Good. So ice, as we talked about in fossils too, is a very good preserve. Sure. But nothing does it. Oh, peat bogs too. Remember, I finally showed you that picture of Tollenman? Can't forget about peat. Again, if you have not gone and looked up Tollenman, it's awesome. Like his whiskers are still there. I know. And he lived a couple thousand years ago. Right? What's his name? Did they name him? Just Tollenman? Tollenman. I would have named him Peaty. Terrible. So those two are pretty good. But the money, the natural money preserve is sand. Yeah, I had no idea. The reason why sand is such a great preservative is because it actually wicks away and absorbs and just removes 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 tissue remains intact. And that's all a mummy is. Yeah. It's a corpse with its tissue intact. 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, then that means the spirit's preserved. And this, all of a sudden, we have new views on the afterlife and life. Right. So what they decided to do, and this was, so what I guess what you just said, though, is that 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 the intent of them being mummified. Yes. But the problem is somewhere along the way, they began 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? Yeah. It started with just like a wicker covering, then that eventually led to wooden boxes. But here's the rub. Yeah. Now the body is not preserved. Now the body rots, desiccates. Well, no, it doesn't desiccate. It's just a normal corpse now. Yeah, becomes a skeleton. You put

a barrier between the body and the preservant in the form of a tomb. So what's an Egyptian to do then? 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. Did you write them? Yeah. Did we do that podcast? No, man. Let's do that. Okay. They decided that they needed to rectify their religious beliefs with their problem, their need to preserve bodies. And what did they do? Well, they said, maybe we can replicate this natural process that we've discovered through man-made artificial means. And that's trial and error. Yeah, it's kind of like, it's called embalming, Josh. And they actually

figured out, Chuck, that like one of the problems with the desiccation, the natural desiccation and the desert was that the skin turned like this crisp brown, right? Like, you know, over baked chicken. It's exactly what it looks like, actually. Yeah. And with these embalming techniques that they eventually mastered, they could preserve a body better than it could be preserved naturally, which is man conquering nature. That's right. Conquering death even. Well, come on. It's close. 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 that it happens from the inside out. Right. It took them a few centuries, if not millennia. They're basically wrapping it up and it's just disintegrating within the bandages at first. 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 or mummification techniques stuck around. Yeah. 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 that by removing organs. 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 18th to 20th dynasties of the middle kingdom. Yeah. That was when the like the heyday of mummification, right? Right. Which was between 1570 and 1075 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. So what do you do when you realize that everything bad is happening to a corpse from the inside out? How do you how do you address that? 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 of like religious rights that they would go through as well. Yeah. It's a very sacred process.

Yes. But they would take the body generally to the red land desert region is 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 a second. Step one. Step one. You need the Nile for step one. They think they did it in open tents, obviously, to get some good ventilation going. And the first place they took the body was to the Ibu, the place of purification. Yeah. That was basically the Nile or the place where they the place near the Nile where they rinse the body with the wash the body off. Yeah. It's like a rebirth symbol of rebirth. Right. So 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 Ak. Ak. Yeah. It's always tricky to pronounce that. Right. So I think with this purification process, the Ka or the Ba or the Ak were moved along 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 long as the corpse was preserved, the Ka was preserved. And the afterlife could, you know, the person could live in the afterlife. But once the corpse died, the Ka 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 dust. Right. So after they've washed the body and sort of reborn it in the rivers of the Nile, they carry the body to the Purr Nifer. 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 Fishers. Oh, yeah. This is in the basement. This is where Rico and the gang would get to work. Yeah. They would lay it on a wooden table, the body. They remove the brain by hammering a chisel through the bone in the nose. You know, I knew that already before this article. There was like a Christian Slater's and like, he's in like one of the creep shows or amazing stories or tales from the crypt, the movie. Pump up the volume. It might have been

that, but I think it was like a smaller vignette, like a mini movie within the larger movie. It was called like Lot Number Nine or whatever. And cleaning the cube. I think it was, no, that's called Brotherhood of the Tiger now. I think they changed the name. Anyway, there's a mummy who's hell bent on taking other people's brains using these hooks or whatever. 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, 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 afterlife. Right. Which is kind of unusual for the Egyptians because they preserve organs. Yeah. But not the brain. No. And what's funny though, I think what we just kind of meander past 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 and the mouth and shake the head around to slosh all the stuff out and then lean the head over and let all the last bits come out. Yeah. That's how I would do it. I wonder if they did shots of that stuff as like part of the ceremony. I would draw the line there. Would you? Well, they probably just thought, I don't know. They didn't even know what the brain was. Yeah, that's true. It's just waste.

So the brains 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 either. Which they were, you know, I mean, the kidneys are important, but it's not like brain important. Well, I mean, you need kidneys to live. I'm sure they preserve the appendix. Technically you need all of your rest. That was probably the most holy right of the organs. So they actually, when they preserve these things, they would wrap them in resin strips of linen, right? Basically, they would

mummify each organ. Yeah. And then they put them in canopic jars. Basically, it was like, here's your body and then also here are your organs. Don't forget those. Take these with you. 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. So these organs take up space in our chest and abdominal cavities. So they would actually stuff the body with like incense and other materials as well, right? Yeah. Well, first they'd rinse it. Once they, I forgot, they'd take out the lungs to the abdomen. Yeah, right there. You can't get a lung out of the ribcage.

A little side slit. And then they would rinse the chest cavity with palm wine, and then they would stuff it with patchouli, basically. Yeah. Straw. Well, it didn't say what actually, just said other materials. I would use straw. Maybe frankincense. Little mirror. Yeah. Just to complete the trilogy. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana.

Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid.

Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Standing at eight feet, two inches tall, Charles Byrne was the tallest man in the world. In fact, it earned him the nickname the Irish Giant. And when Charles arrived in London in 1782, he caused quite a stir. But by May the following year, death came calling for Charles in the form of tuberculosis. And while most people were ready to mourn his passing, one man was plotting with gleeful excitement for a chance to dissect the Irish Giants remains. This January, Grim and Mild presents will shift focus from the great wide

world around us to the universe inside us all in a journey that will span thousands of years and countless borders. We plan to unpack the dark and twisted history of healing medicine. So wash your hands, set out your tools and prep for surgery. Grim and Mild presents, Bedside Manners is available now. Find Grim and Mild presents wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more at grimandmild.com. That kept the body from like caving in on itself, basically maintaining a little bit of shape. And then here is the key. This is the key to mummification. And as a matter of fact, I was going to 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 for mummifying a chicken using the Egyptian method. And it calls for natrin. Right? Yeah, that's the key. Natrin 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. You mix the two together and it becomes this perfect preservant. So they would put natrin powder, which is like this just accelerated the technique of mummification like by light years. And they would cover the body with this stuff and leave it. And it would just completely dry the body out, right? Yeah, this took about 40 days. They had to guard the body while this was going on, obviously, because they didn't want vultures

digging through the natrin for what lies beneath. After the 40 days, they moved the body then to the wabet, which is the house of purification. Yank all that incense and the stuffing out, refill it with the natrin, resin soaked linen and other materials again, whatever these mysterious things are. Then they would sell all the incisions up, cover the skin with resin, and then say, hey, it's time to wrap this puppy. Yeah, and this is where we get the idea for the mummy, our modern idea of a mummy always wearing like bandages. They're always coming off. Yeah, you can just see the eyes, maybe some teeth or something. So this is where we're at. They're at the bandaging procedure. That 35 or 40 days while the natrin powder was doing its work,

wicking away all of the basically acting as the desiccant. The family of the deceased was going around town going, do you have any linens we can have forever? Yeah. Do you have some linens we can have? Could you like your linens to spend eternity in the heavens above? With our dad. They collected about 4,000 square feet, just top of my head. That's about how much they gathered there. Of linen and would bring it to the embalmers and the embalmers would say, hey, we like this piece. That piece is horrible. You're really going to bury your dad in this and they would take 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 wrapping, which would take a little while, right? Yeah,

it takes a week or two, I guess, probably depending on how big the body is. It's 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 little toe, everything's wrapped. And then once everything's wrapped individually, they do a whole body wrap, applying new layers, coating the linen with, again, the hot resin to keep everything in place, uttering spells. 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. And then presto changio, you are a mummy. And before we go further, the process we've just

described, this really ornate, wonderful, lengthy process, 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, and have always gotten special treatment. 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 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. They'd stop up all your orifices first so it wouldn't leak out.

Thank you. So I don't know how they did that. I guess with other materials. 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. So even this many thousands of years ago, you get what you pay 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. That's the way to go. They thought, you know what, let's think of a cheaper way to do this for you folks. Let's just fill you up with oil,

stop up your orifices and give you a good shake. Yeah. So you're prepared, you're all wrapped, however they got your organs out, you're bandaged and you're 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 to hold your body together for a while. Right. 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. Yeah. And these were extremely important because they directed the spirit, the ca to the right body afterward. So it was in a person's visage or possibly that of a God, but the spirit would be in on what to look for. They would know that. That's how they knew

who was who. Sure. This guy is supposed to either look like Josh or Anubis. Either way, I think that's him right over there. Right. So let's grab him. And speaking of Anubis, you would be committed to your tomb following a funeral procession where you were carried in your suet, right? Yeah. That's what you think of with King Tut. That's the casket that looks like a person, like the gold casket in the shape of a human. 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 Jack O 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. Right. And now certain things had to be

restored. 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 senses. 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? 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. Probably because it was easier to just walk up right out of there. 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. It's sure little help, which is far less secure than just laying it down on the floor. 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 your set, your tomb 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 bring his neck as a bird's as a standard mummy curse. Yeah. A mummy curse on

the tomb. Yeah. People became in the 1920s. Howard Carter dug up King Tut's tomb and people were just crazy for mummies at the time. Yeah. 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 Gotthard Kramer or Crommer 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 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. Well, unearth the tomb, then you die. Certainly there's something weird about the Carter expedition who unearthed King

Tut's tomb in 1922 because 11 of the people who were involved, not necessarily present, but involved died within seven years. And 11 people in a canary. His canary died like right when they entered the tomb, a cobra ate it. That'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. They loved it. 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 not what you do with a dead body. It's desecration. It's bad luck too. 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. No. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, the oldest mummies actually on the planet are from Northern Chile, the Chinchoro people. Chinchoro. Let's go Chinchoro. Okay. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil answer for that. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

Standing at eight feet two inches tall, Charles Byrne was the tallest man in the world. In fact, it earned him the nickname the Irish giant. And when Charles arrived in London in 1782, he caused quite a stir. But by May the following year, death came calling for Charles in the form of tuberculosis. And while most people were ready to mourn his passing, one man was plotting with gleeful excitement for a chance to dissect the Irish giant's remains. This January, Grim and Mild Presents will shift focus from the great wide world around us to the universe inside us all in a journey that will span thousands of years and countless borders we plan to unpack the dark and twisted history of healing medicine. So wash your hands, set out

your tools and prep for surgery. Grim and Mild Presents Bedside Manners is available now. Find Grim and Mild Presents wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more at GrimandMild.com slash presents. They started doing this about 2000 years before the Egyptians, but they were not very much like the Egyptians. They basically dismembered and disemboweled the body, put it back together again, sewed it up, and then covered it with black mud. Well, they put it back together with straw and sticks. That's what they had. It was like they made cupidalls out of these bodies. Basically, covered it with black mud and shaped it into a human form.

But they believed 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 around a little longer. Which is very sweet. Because they saw evidence of retouching of the paint, signs of wear and tear. Basically, they were kept in the households for a little while, they think. Basically, it's statues, freaky freaky statues. And that was 5000 BC, which is 2000 years before the Egyptians came on to the scene at all. That's right. And the, would you say, the Chinchorro people? Yeah, they were churro. Which you said along. I think I went with Chinchorro. But someone will point that out if I'm wrong.

They're not the only ones in South America who got into modification either. The Incas, very famously did as well. They had a little habit of sacrificing children to their gods. Churchs. And they, cultural relativism church. And they would, through this process, the child and the child's family were just treated like royalty for this. 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 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. You're jerks. But the, there's a very famous mummy called the maiden who's a 15 year old girl and she was sacrificed as a thanks to the gods for a really good corn harvest by the Incas and Peru 500 years ago. Did you see that picture I sent you? Oh yeah, it was at her. It's like looking at a girl who's sleeping, but she's been dead for 500 years. Yeah. Like you, you, if you've been to South America as I know you have or Central America, like she looks just like one of those girls you might see down there, like a Central American indigenous person. She's probably short then. She looks kind of short. Yeah. That'd be funny if she was like six, two, 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. Wano Wanto, Mexico has a mummy museum and they have the world's smallest mummy. I think it might have been a fetus really, but it, they were all naturally mummified to the great surprise of the 19th century townspeople who had to move a graveyard and found like, okay, there's a lot of mummies. How big was it? It was very small. Give me an object. Coffee cup. Coffee cup. Okay. Standard coffee cup size. Gotcha. But then there's like people, they're still wearing their suits and it's, it's really amazing. You walk into this little Mexican building and there's just dead people everywhere just behind this glass. It's very neat. If you ever go to Wano Wanto, Mexico, you have to go to the mummy museum. I think I should. Yeah. Lady Cheng,

China, Chinese were, they were lousy with mummies. Yeah. They loved to mummify people. She was an aristocrat from about 2000 years ago and she is believed to be about the best preserved ancient mummy so far. Did you see her picture? Yeah. So their tongue sticking out. Pretty well mummified. Yeah. And 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 add something to do with it. 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 1000 BC, before 1000 BC. They found some people

of Indo-Iranian descent. They linked them to like basically Mesopotamia through tattoos and like other implements that they had. And the shape of their face, the way they looked. Yep. And they figured out like, wait a minute, these people were like Indo-European traders. What are they doing here? They just made their way to settle in the deserts of China before the Han dynasty ever showed up. Yeah. So that kind of changed things a little bit. 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 in Russia. And they said, you know what? Let's preserve Lenin and display them in the Kremlin. So that's

exactly what they did. And we do not know exactly how because it's an ancient Russian secret. Not 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. And he wears a waterproof suit. That's right. And if you've ever seen pictures of Lenin or Eva Perone, they look pretty lifelike. Yeah. But hers was, hers was 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. There's also incorruptible corpses of the Catholic faith. What's that? It's basically a person who is so pure on earth that they, their body just didn't, didn't rot. And there's examples of, there's one,

he's like a prince. He's like a child prince. I think he died in like, he died more than a thousand years ago or about a thousand years ago. And his, 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. It's a miracle. How can a courts be incorruptible? We need to keep in track of these awesome ideas. Incorruptible. Where's our person? Where's our boy Charlie? Or no, our boy Friday. Okay. Charlie. And then Josh, finally, we have in the 1970s, some scientists discovered something called plastinization. And that is when all of the water and lipids in 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. Or for bodies world or bodies, the exhibit. Have you been? No, I've never been, but that's how they do it. 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 those coming off the spinal cord are the major nerves of the central nervous system. And that's it. And it's just laid out perfectly and really kind

of surprising. I'm shocked that I haven't been to that yet. That's pretty cool. It's definitely worth going to. I did the dialogue in the dark thing. I have not been there. That's next door. Yeah. That was that kid. You know, I was a little disappointed. Yeah. Not in the exhibit itself, but the way, 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 want to take you 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 if they wanted to kill. You're in the dark weather. You could just like kick her in the shin and run away. We should mention Bob, Dr. Bob Breyer real quick though. He is a Egyptologist

who in 1994 said, you know what? I want to try and replicate the Egyptian technique. And he did it with the chicken. Yeah, with the chicken. And he did. It was pretty successful at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. And one of the things he learned from doing this that the way the body ends up looking as a result of the mummification process, not the fact that it's been in the ground for thousands and thousands of years. Like the shriveled wrinkled look. Yeah. Yeah. So that's one thing you 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 50 years, has it? Not that I know of. I know, Geraldo didn't find squat. No, he didn't. No, that wasn't Geraldo. Geraldo looks for

Capone's ball. Oh, that's right. I watched that one. That was fun. I was a youngster and I was so excited. Yeah, but so disappointed when it happened. It's just a total disaster. Yeah, for Geraldo. Well, that's it for mummies. Right, Chuck? You got any more? Are you mummied out? Yep. All right. If you want to learn more about mummies, check out M-U-M-M-I-E-S in the handy search bar howstuffworks.com. You can learn how to mummify a chicken on WikiHow. And what else? I think there might be a website for the mummies of Wano Wanto. That's, I think, G-U-A-N-A-J-U-A-T-O, maybe? Sounds good to me. Does it? You know, I think Matt and Rachel from Cool Stuff on the Planet did a thing on the Egyptian mummy museum. Oh, yeah? Or not Egyptian mummy museum, the mummy museum.

Wano Wanto mummy museum? Yeah. Yes, Cool Stuff on the Planet. Check it out. That is definitely worth watching as well. Worth watching anyway. And I said handy search bar somewhere in there, which means I guess time for Listener Man. Hi, Chuck and Josh and Jerry. My name is Matty. I'm 12 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. That's cool, man. It's fun. I was wondering if you'd 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. That is awesome. House trained chicken. So please give Lewis, I'm sorry, Casey a shout and Lewis while we're at it. 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 12 and some of them are inappropriate. 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 his parents listen to the rest. And also a suggestion. The infamous story of that French queen who said let them eat cake. I don't remember her name. Marie Antoinette. That was Kirsten Dunst. And

remember, I do not have Facebook, so please answer me by email, she says. Oh, is it a she? Is it DD or TT? It's DD. Oh, okay. And then her signature is potato in a mushroom for Maggie. I don't even know what that means. All the kids are saying this these days. Really? Yeah. All right. Potato in a mushroom, everybody. You said Maggie. It's Maddie, right? Maddie. Okay, Maddie. Thanks for that email, Maddie. Did we give a shout out to Lewis and Casey? Well, Casey, we hope you're feeling better, but I'm sorry to hear about that and hope you're up and around before you know it. Take care of Lewis. Yes. If you're an Egyptologist and you have some good mummy stories, we want to hear it. Yeah. 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 stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more How Stuff Works? Check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app,

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