True, the practice of preserving dead bodies with chemicals, decorating them with paint and powder, and arranging them for a public showing has its origin in antiquity—but not in Judaeo-Christian antiquity. This incongruous behavior towards the human dead originated with the pagan Egyptians and reached its high point in the second millennium B.C. Thereafter, embalming suffered a decline from which it did not recover until it was made part of the standard funeral service in twentieth-century America.

While the actual mode of preservation and the materials used in ancient Egypt differed from those used in contemporary America, there are many striking similarities in the kind of care lavished upon the dead. There, as here, the goal was to outmaneuver the Grim Reaper as far as possible.

The Egyptian method of embalming as described by Herodotus sounds like a rather crude exercise in human taxidermy. The entrails and brain were removed, the body scoured with palm wine and purified with spices. After being soaked for seventy days in a saline solution, the corpse was washed and wrapped in strips of fine linen, then placed in a “wooden case of human shape” which in turn was put in a sepulchral chamber.

Restorative art was by no means unknown in ancient Egypt. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote: “Having treated [the corpse], they restore it to the relatives with every member of the body preserved so perfectly that even the eyelashes and eyebrows remain, the whole appearance of the body being unchangeable, and the cast of the features recognizable…. They present an example of a kind of inverted necromancy.” The Egyptians had no Post Mortem Restoration Bra; instead, they stuffed and modeled the breasts, refashioning the nipples from copper buttons. They fixed the body while still plastic in the desired attitude; they painted it with red ochre for men and yellow for women; they emphasized the details of the face with paint; they supplemented the natural hair with a wig; they tinted the nails with henna. A mummy of the XVIIIth Dynasty has even been found wearing some practical burial footwear—sandals made of mud, with metal soles and gilded straps.

Egyptian preoccupation with preservation of the body after death stemmed from the belief that the departed spirit would one day return to inhabit the earthly body; that if the body perished, the soul would eventually perish too. Yet although embalming was available to all who could pay the price, it was by no means so universally employed in ancient Egypt as it is today in the USA. The ordinary peasant was not embalmed at all; yet, curiously enough, his corpse comes down to us through the ages as well preserved as those of his disemboweled and richly aromatic betters, for it has been established that the unusually dry climate and the absence of bacteria in the sand and air, rather than the materials used in embalming, are what account for the Egyptian mummies’ marvelous state of preservation. The Greeks, knowing the uses of both, were no more likely to occupy themselves with the preservation of dead flesh than they were to bury good wine for the comfort of dead bodies. They cremated their dead, for the most part, believing in the power of flame to set free the soul. The glorious period that conventional historians call the Golden Age of Greece is for historians of embalming the beginning of the Dark Ages.

The Jews frowned upon embalming, as did the early Christians, who regarded it as a pagan custom. Saint Anthony, in the third century, denounced the practice as sinful. His impassioned plea, recorded by Athanasius, might well be echoed by the American of today who would like to avoid being transformed by the embalmer’s art and displayed in a funeral home:

Mummification of the dead in Egypt was gradually abandoned after a large part of the population was converted to Christianity.

The eclipse of embalming was never quite total, however. The death of a monarch, since it is the occasion for a transfer of power, calls for demonstration, and it has throughout history been found politically expedient to provide visible evidence of death by exposing the body to public view. So embalming, of sorts, was used in Rome, and later throughout Europe, but only for the great and near-great, and by the very rich as a form of pretentiousness.

Alexander the Great is said to have been preserved in wax and honey; Charlemagne was embalmed and, dressed in imperial robes, placed in a sitting position in his tomb. Canute, too, was embalmed, and after him many an English monarch. Lord Nelson, as befits a hero, was returned to England from Trafalgar in a barrel of brandy. Queen Elizabeth, by her own wish, was not embalmed. Developments beyond her control caused her sealed, lead-lined coffin to lie in Whitehall for an unconscionable thirty-four days before interment. During this time, reports one of the ladies-in-waiting who sat as watchers, the body “burst with such a crack that it splitted the wood, lead, and cerecloth; whereupon the next day she was fain to be new trimmed up.”

Although embalming as a trade or cult was not resumed until this century, there prospered in every age charlatans and eccentrics who claimed to have rediscovered the lost art of the Egyptians or who offered new and improved pickling methods of their own invention. These were joined, in the eighteenth century, by French and English experimenters spurred by a quite different motive—the need for more efficient methods of preserving cadavers for anatomical studies.

The physicians, surgeons, chemists, and apothecaries who engaged in anatomical research were from time to time sought out by private necrophiles who enlisted their services to preserve dead friends and relations. There are many examples of this curious practice, of which perhaps the most interesting is the task performed by Dr. William Hunter, the celebrated eighteenth-century anatomist. Dr. Hunter was anyway something of a card. He once explained his aversion to contradiction by pointing out that, being accustomed to the “passive submission of dead bodies,” he could no longer easily tolerate having his will crossed; a sentiment echoed by Evelyn Waugh’s mortuary cosmetician: “I was just glad to serve people that couldn’t talk back.” In 1775 Dr. Hunter and a colleague embalmed the wife of Martin Van Butchell, quack doctor and “super dentist,” the point being that Mrs. Van Butchell’s marriage settlement stipulated that her husband should have control of her fortune “as long as she remained above ground.” The embalming was a great success. The “preserved lady” (as curious sightseers came to call her) was dressed in a fine linen gown, placed in a glass-topped case and kept in the drawing room, where Van Butchell introduced her to all comers as his “Dear Departed.” So popular was the preserved lady that Van Butchell was obliged to insert a newspaper notice limiting her visiting hours to “any day between Nine and One, Sundays excepted.” When Van Butchell remarried several years later, his new wife raised strong objections to the presence of the Dear Departed in her front parlor and insisted upon her removal. Thereafter the Dear Departed was housed in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. [16]