world of the living to that of the dead and to place each individual before the gods of the dead who would judge the merits of each personÆs soul and so admit him or her into eternity or banish them into endless and unrequited wanderings.
Burying the dead was of religious concern in Egypt, and Egyptian funerary rituals and equipment eventually became the most elaborate the world has ever known û for even in Egypt the rituals of the dead had humble beginnings. The high civilization of the Egyptians lasted for centuries, and so it should not come as a surprise that rituals of all sorts changed dramatically over these hundreds of years.
The Predynastic Cultures of Ancient Egypt, for example, were relatively simple in their material possessions, including their grave goods, although these cultures seemed to enjoy a substantial degree of prosperity compared to the peoples around them and a relatively constant level of prosperity. As early as about 4000 B.C., some people were being buried with a relatively high number of grave goods compared to others, indicating that a complex society with a number of different social ranks had already evolved and was well enough established for people to want it to be reflected through eternity. The bodies of this time do not bear the elaborate preparations that they would by the New Kingdom thousands of years later, but they do bear signs of an attempt to preserve them against the elements, including the wrapping of the body in cloth and at least sometimes the treating of the body with preservative chemicals û sometimes by simply immersing or coating the body with these chemicals, sometimes by infusing the cloth wrappings with these chemicals. Except for the simplicity of this treatment, it resembles in essential ways later mummification techniques. The grace good of this era û that is to say, the objects included in the grave meant to accompany and serve a person in the next world û were of goo...