The skin is dry, leathery and rusty-brown in color and adheres closely to the bones. The odor is more like that of old cheese than that of a decomposed body.
There are examples of such bodies in several countries, although originally mummy (derived from an Arabic or Persian world mumia, meaning ‘bitumen’ or ‘pitch’) was only used to describe the artificially preserved bodies from Egypt.
Egyptian believed that, after they died, people would go on a journey to an afterlife where they would be born again. To make sure this second life happened, the Egyptians thought it was essential that the dead person’s body was preserved.
Mummification occurs in bodies buried in shallow graves in the dry, sandy soils of Rajputana, Sind and Baluchistan, where evaporation of the body fluids is more rapid owing to hot, dry winds prevailing in the summer season.
In the Atacama desert of Peru and Chile, natural mummification can be unintentional or intentional and is aided by the extreme environmental conditions of this region, which dehydrate the corpse minimizing decomposition.
Mummifying the dead
