Quick questions on Death, burial and funerary texts in New Kingdom Egypt (HSC Ancient History Section II)

Mummification aimed to preserve a recognisable body for the ka. Embalmers first removed the brain through the nostril with a hooked instrument (excerebration) and normally discarded it, since the heart, not the brain, was considered the seat of intelligence and emotion. The liver, lungs, stomach and intestines were removed through an incision in the flank, dried and treated separately, then placed in four canopic jars, each guarded by one of the Four Sons of Horus and a protecting goddess: Imsety (human-headed, liver, protected by Isis), Hapy (baboon-headed, lungs, Nephthys), Duamutef (jackal-headed, stomach, Neith) and Qebehsenuef (falcon-headed, intestines, Selket). The heart was left in the body.

By the New Kingdom, funerary texts once reserved for kings (the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts) and then more widely available (the Middle Kingdom Coffin Texts) had developed into two distinct traditions.

Middle Kingdom kings had still built pyramid tombs, highly visible monuments that had proved easy for robbers to locate and plunder. Early Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs, beginning with Thutmose I (c. 1504-1492 BC), instead had their tombs cut in secret, deep into the limestone cliffs of a remote valley on Thebes' west bank, later known as the Valley of the Kings. The architect Ineni, who supervised Thutmose I's tomb, recorded in his own tomb autobiography that he oversaw the work "no one seeing, no one hearing," a rare contemporary statement that concealment, not display, was now the design goal.