[MUSIC] We're now in the Upper Egyptian Gallery at the Penn Museum. And I thought would be a good idea to relook at one of the figures we've seen before. It's the statue right here of Ramses II, and it was actually excavated by Penn. It shows the king with the crown and the costume of the god Osiris. And I wanted to talk about his role in the funerary religion. Since it is clear that at some point, early in the culture, the myth of Osiris developed and became associated with this process of mummification. While the myth of Osiris is intimately involved with the stories of creation, it also had a role in the concept of kingship. Since it focuses on the succession and legitimization of the new king in the form of the son of Osiris, the god Horus. It is he who would succeed his father Osiris and become the new king. Part of the myth focuses on the dismemberment of Osiris by his evil brother, Seth, and the subsequent dispersal of the body parts by this individual. It relates further that the goddesses Isis and Nepthys collected all of these pieces, and then sewed them together, and then wrap them in bandages to make the former king, Osiris, whole again, so he could rule as king in the afterlife. In other words, the linen bandages are necessary for the regeneration process, and have validity within the process of the myth itself. Certainly by the end of the old kingdom, all mummies probably were to be identified with Osiris, when royalty had the pyramid texts that referred to the king as Osiris inscribed on the walls of the pyramid chambers. Soon, even the deceased elite were referred to as Osiris. Is this a form of democratization? Is it that the idea that first the king's had this privilege, and then it filters down to others, lower down in the society. Or was it just decorum in earlier times that prevented the individual from visibly identifying as Osiris? Another point to mention is that Osiris is the only god to be treated in such a manner. In the myth, Osiris was originally a king on earth, and was provided with eternal existence as ruler of the underworld, only after regeneration through the process of mummification. While standard in its concept, mummification had alterations and innovations to the process at different times. For example, plaster infused wrappings and plaster coated head and bodies were used for a short period of time. As I mentioned earlier, the coffin types changed occasionally as well. So, at first, we had square small coffins, and we had longer rectangular coffins. And then anthropoid ones, and many of these we have right here in the Penn Museum. Sometimes the deceased was not shown in funeral coverings on the sarcophagus, but in garments of the type worn in life. After its introduction late in the old kingdom, mummy masks often became part of the burial equipment, placed over the head and shoulders of the mummy, it added another layer of protection. A variety of types developed over the centuries. Perhaps the most famous of these masks was the golden mask of Tutankhamun. The process, according to the major source of information, Herodotus, a Greek historian who lived in the 5th century BCE, took approximately 70 days from start to finish. There is a question as to whether this was hearsay evidence, for it is not even certain that Herodotus actually went to Egypt, and whether his informant was reliable or not. But for the Egyptian sources, we have representations of funerals in several different tombs, but no actual data verifies this time span. We do, however, have a much earlier inscription in the tomb of the Fourth Dynasty. It belonged to Queen Meresankh III, and it states that the process took 270 days. Is it a coincidence that the time span is the same as the term of a pregnancy? Egyptian months had 30 days, and nine of them would amount to 270 days. Was this time span mentioned in the text indicative of a connection between actual birth and symbolic rebirth? Given the symbolism that we find in various aspects of the Egyptian religion, it would seem a possibility.