EMBABE. or EMBAB1L. See BOULAe. EMBALMING, the art of preserving animal bodies from decay after death.
Nature, to make way for her successive generations, has decreed, that the cessation of life shall be followed by the resolution of material substances into invisible fluids. This is accomplished by putrefaction ; and no sooner has life departed than its operation begins, quickly reducing the most beautiful works of the crea tion to a loathsome and corrupted mass ; subsequent changes ensue, and, by final decomposition, the inani mate matter totally disappears. Mankind, reluctant to part with beloved or venerated objects, and actuated by religious principles relative to the welfare of the soul, have devised various methods of counteracting the pro gress of nature, by preserving their bodies from decay. On remounting to periods of high antiquity, we find the Egyptians, one of the earliest nations whose history has been transmitted to our own times, embalming the bodies of their dead, which were then consigned to appropri ate cemeteries, or retained in their dwellings, where they might be the subject of pious contemplation.
The preservation of the dead in the dwellings of the living, and their interment v ithin its walls, was not pe culiar to the Egyptians. In scripture it is said, that Sa muel was buried in his house at Ramat ; and of Joab, that " Benaiah, the son of J•hoiada, went up and fell up on him, and slew him, and he was buried in his own house in the wilderness." Nor are examples of this waiting in modern history, as the Chinese are said to keep the bodies of their relatives long unburied beside them ; and some barbarous nations on the coast of Africa inter a deceased relative in the hut which he inhabited.
Embalming, as an art, was carried to great perfection by the Egyptians : it was conducted by persons specially initiated in it, and performed at a costly charge to the survivors. So long as the body remained entire and un disturbed, they believed that the spirit would reanimate it after the lapse of thousands of years; and in another respect it was no less important, for a son might pledge the body for his own debt, but it was declared infamous not to redeem it. History even relates, that the bodies
of ancestors were exposed to the view of strangers, or produced on ceremonious occasions by posterity ; and it has been inferred from a passage of Lucian, that he sat at table along with the corpse of an Egyptian.
There were different modes in which embalming was performed, as Herodotus and Diodorus, who both tra velled in Egypt at different periods, relate, and they seem actually to have witnessed the fact. According to the former, the decease of any person of distinction was followed by great lamentations of the women ; and the men expressed similar symptoms of grief, while they religiously abstained from all pleasures and enjoyments. After these emotions subsided, the body was delivered to the professors of the art, to be prepared according to a fixed price, proportioned to the quality of the deceased. The operator first proceeded to extract the brain through the nostrils by means of a crooked instrument, and filled up the cavity with balsamic ingredients. He next laid open the abdomen, and the intestines being removed, were cleansed with wine and odoriferous substances, and then returned; or they were perhaps thrown into the Nile. The cavity was filled with aromatic matter, and sewed up again. After this the body was deposited 70 days in nitre, and having been removed when these elapsed, it was washed once more, and swathed in fine linen besmeared with gum. The process was now com pleted after the most expensive method. In another method, a quantity of oil of cedar being injected, and the body laid 70 days as before in nitre, the oil on ex pulsion brought away the intestines, and the nitre con suming the flesh, left nothing but the skin and bones, whereby embalming was also completed. By a mode still more economical than either, the abdomen was merely washed with certain lotions, and the body then dried 70 clays with salt. Diodorus differs from this au thor, in limiting the period of preparation to 30 days.