Awesome History: Egypt

 At last!  I We got to mummify a chicken!  Another thing checked off the bucket list!  It's for the children's education!

Actually, we decided to do a Cornish Game Hen on the theory that it was smaller and would dry more quickly and completely.

Have I ever mentioned how disappointed I was when I discovered that a Cornish Game Hen is really just a small chicken? Scarring.

We rinsed off the hen with water, then alcohol (rubbing, instead of the more authentic wine).

Then we packed it with our salt mixture.  We used roughly equal parts baking soda, baking powder, and table salt.   Surprisingly, these are all the salts present in natron (the salt the Egyptians were using) except for sodium sulfide (and really, do we want to add stinky sulfur compounds?).

We threw some old spices into the salt mixture for scent, and we also soaked some in oil so we would have scented oil later in the process.

And that's it! Except for changing the salt every few days as it gets wet...

So it was on to the art project.  I had gotten some papyrus, hieroglyph stamps, and stencils off of Amazon.  I usually am more of a "crafts with things you find around the house" type, but between Choclo's enduring interest in all things Egyptian, and our large rubber stamp collection, I thought this was totally worth it.


And, honestly, it came out really well!

It's the sort of project where younger kids do it quickly and it looks good, and older kids get creative, and it looks fantastic!

Generally they were using the hieroglyphs to spell their names, although we had some secret message stuff going on, too.

And we did toilet paper mummies, because, you know.




Who can resist a toilet paper mummy?



Oh, yes, snacks!  I whipped up some mummy cookies.  Yum!

If you're keeping track, this was Story of the World chapters 2-4: Early Egyptians and first writing.