title: Death and Burial in Ancient Egypt
author:  Salima Ikram 
description: <P>For ancient Egyptians, death was part of the journey of life.</P> <P>The tombs, mortuary temples and mummies the Egyptians produced were a celebration of life and a means of continuing it for eternity.</P> <P> <I>Death and Burial in Ancient Egypt </I>transports us to a different world, to reveal the religion and funerary beliefs of one of the world's greatest civilizations.</P>
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  ![](0743435621.jpg)  
  
  # **PROLOGUE**
  
  The body was in a state of advanced decomposition. Time, and the various
  insect analogues of Marduk, had worked their way with it, and what was left
  was mostly skeleton with a few bits of clinging tendon and skin. Temu Jin
  would have liked to say it was the worst thing he'd ever seen, but that
  would've been a lie.
  
  He turned over one of the skeletal hands and ran a sensor wand across it. The
  catacomb-like tomb was hot and close, especially with three more team members
  and one of the gigantic Mardukans packed into it with him. The heat on Marduk
  was always bad -- the "temperate" regions were a fairly constant thirty-five
  degrees -- but in the tomb, with the remnant stink of decomposition (not to
  mention the smell of the unwashed assholes he'd arrived with), it was like an
  antechamber to Hell.
  
  One that was already inhabited.
  
  There was no question that its occ