He set about gathering the materials needed. One colleague manufactured Egyptian canopic jars, another flaked obsidian to make knives and cutting tools that may have been used to make the abdominal incision and remove the internal organs, and Brier himself visited the Wadi Natron to collect over 400 lbs. of natron in which to dry his mummy.
Brier also constructed a preparation table matching specifications of a table found in the early 20th Century that was apparently part of an ancient embalmer's cache. Almost everything was ready, but as any good 7th grader will know, you can't just walk into the local store and buy a body with which to make a mummy. I was guilty in 7th grade of proposing to my teacher that I make a mummy for my science project. What she didn't tell me was that unless I meant the dried up variety typically found in mousetraps, I was out of luck.
Brier was not. His purpose was far more formal and scientific than my 7th grade science project. Brier and his colleagues determined that in order for the experiment work and for the mummification process to match that performed by the ancient Egyptians as closely as possible they needed someone who was relattively healthy at the time of death. The body they finally decided upon was an elderly man, about 70 years old at the time of his death, who had died of a stroke and donated his body to science.
(NOTE: There has been some controversy over Brier's use of a body donated to science to conduct this experiment. Many people evidently feel this was not what the donor had in mind when he signed his remains away. They believe it is somehow wrong to mummify this man, to check him for signs of decay periodically and to keep him on display. However, many scientific findings have come out of this experiment. You see, modern embalming methods only intend to preserve a body temporarily, the process of mummification intends to preserve a body for all eternity. They now know how long it takes to dry the body, when the body has to be positioned and they were able to observe the stages the body went through in the mummification process. Knowledge of this process could now be useful to authorities or officials in identifying remains of people they find in various states of decay or mummified by nature. Anyway, I am certainly not a scientist, but can see the value of the experiment. Now back to our story.)
