Before the Ancient Egyptians could mummify a body they had to take out some of the soft internal organs. These contain a lot of water and the body would putrefy (start to decompose) very quickly if they were not removed.
The Ancient Egyptians believed that we thought with our heart, and that our heart stored the memory of our good and bad deeds. We of course are much cleverer than them: unlike them we know that we think with our brain, and that we store our memories of the things we have seen and heard and done in our brain. Actually, most of us know this only because we have been told it: it is not at all obvious.
Our heart pumps the blood round our body. In a healthy young adult it usually beats about 70 times a minute, or faster for children: the younger you are the faster your heart beats. If we are running around and using a lot of enegy it beats faster than this.
Our heart also beats faster if we are very excited, or happy, or sad, or if we are doing something we ought not to be doing, or if we are with someone we love, or for lots of other reasons. Our thoughts and emotions affect our heart rate: we can actually feel our heart beating faster. We may say that people who believe that we think with our heart are mistaken, but I do not think we can say that they are stupid.The heart was very important to the dead person because it was weighed against the feather of truth in the Judgement Hall. If the heart was missing the soul could not be judged and so could not enter the Afterlife. In Ancient Egypt one of the worst punishments was to be thrown into a pool of crocodiles: if you were eaten by a crocodile your heart was destroyed.
The heart was very seldom removed from the body, and the body was almost always mummified with the heart still inside the chest. If it was accidentally cut out when the lungs were being removed it was sewn back in with gold wire - X-rays of his mummy show that Ramesses ii's heart was sewn back in the wrong way round!
Very rarely the heart was removed and mummified and then put back inside the chest.
If the heart really was missing it was replaced with a hard stone carved into the shape of a scarab engraved with a special spell - a heart scarab. A heart scarab was also usually put onto the chest even if the heart was inside the body. The base of the heart scarab was engraved with a special spell from the list of spells which we call The Book of the Dead because the spells are found with mummified (dead) bodies, but which the Ancient Egyptians themselves called The Book of the Coming Forth by Day.
“O my heart which I had from my mother! O my heart which I had upon Earth! O my heart of the different ages! Do not stand up in witness against me, do not be opposed to me in the tribunal, do not be hostile to me in the presence of the Keeper of the Balance.”
These were removed and put into special containers which we call canopic jars, although the Ancient Egyptians themselved called them qebu en wet, or jars of embalming. Sometimes but not always the stoppers for the jars were shaped like the heads of the four Sons of Horus.
Imsety had the
head of a human and guarded the liver
Duamutef
had the head of a jackal and guarded the stomach
Hapy had the head of a baboon and guarded the lungs
Qebhsenuf had the head of a falcon and guarded the intestines
The Ancient Egyptians would of course have written these names in hieroglyphs: you may see them transliterated (written in English letters to show how they should be pronounced) in different ways.
Although Tutankhamen's
canopic jar stoppers were all in the shape of a human
head the hieroglyphs on the jars still referred to the four Sons of Horus. Whatever some books may say the face on these stoppers is not Tutankhamen's face - this is one of the reasons why we think that he was buried in a hurry. For more about the burial of Tutankhamen please click here 
The kidneys were very difficult to remove and so were usually left inside the body.
The Ancient Egyptians did not understand what the brain was for: they thought the skull was filled with a substance whose only purpose was to produce the stuff that sometimes runs out of your nose ("snot")! So they made a small hole inside the left nostril and took the brain out through it and then just threw it away - the only part of the body they did not keep. To do this they used a special copper tool with a hook on the end - we know what it looked like because we have found a mummy with one still inside the skull!
, but there are many other sites on mummies, some good and some very bad - here is another good site site © Barry Gray June 2008
