They placed the visceral organs in jars filled with a naturally occurring salt called natron. It was difficult to remove the lungs without damaging the heart, but because the heart was believed to be the seat of the soul, they treated it with special care. So the priests removed the lungs and abdominal organs first. The liver, stomach and intestines contain digestive enzymes and bacteria, which, upon death, start eating the corpse from the inside. Brains may decay first, but decaying guts are much worse.
Neurons die quickly, so brains were a lost cause to Ancient Egyptian mummifiers, which is why, according to Greek historian Herodotus, they started the process by hammering a spike into the skull, mashing up the brain, flushing it out the nose and pouring tree resins into the skull to prevent further decomposition. So anyone looking to preserve a body needed to get ahead of those enzymes before the tissues began to rot. But what happens when someone dies? Their dead cells are no longer able to renew themselves, but the enzymes keep breaking everything down. Specialized enzymes decompose old structures, and the raw materials are used to build new ones. So, how successful were they? Living cells constantly renew themselves. Death and taxes are famously inevitable, but what about decomposition? As anyone who’s seen a mummy knows, ancient Egyptians went to a lot of trouble to evade decomposition.
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