First, the antiseptic treatment of domestic corpses:
1, archaeological discovery
1972, when Mrs. Xin Zhui of Mawangdui Han Tomb reappeared in front of the world after spending more than 2,000 years underground, the whole world was in awe of China's exquisite anti-corrosion technology in ancient times. With her fresh face and elastic skin, Mrs. Xin Zhui made the world understand the subtlety of wet corpse preservation.
2. Records in ancient books
Ancient aristocrats not only emphasized the making of coffins, but also demanded materials such as camphor wood, pine and cypress, paulownia, etc., which had aromatic insect-proof function, and also had certain depth requirements for tombs, which was nothing more than delaying or avoiding the process of corpse corruption. The ancients thought that "golden jade breeds cold", and burying a corpse with golden jade can make it not bad. There is a saying in the Biography of Han Yang Wang Sunzhuan that "the mouth contains jade, which can't be changed, and the depression is dry wax", so there is a saying of jade clothes and jade coffins.
What is the antiseptic effect of today? The king of Chu died in the jade coffin, but it was just a pile of bones; Mr. and Mrs. Liu Sheng saved themselves with only a few decayed teeth; Emperor Wanli of Ming Shenzong was even naked. The decomposition of bacteria is the main cause of corpse corruption in tombs. Bacteria are divided into aerobic bacteria and anaerobic bacteria. To inhibit the activity of aerobic bacteria, in addition to sterilization, the body must be sealed to prevent air from entering. In this respect, China people reached a fairly high level in the Western Han Dynasty.
3, the specific process
Before the funeral, the deceased should bathe the body with fragrant soup and then scrub it with wine. Xiao Zongbo, the official in charge of the sacrificial ceremony of the Zhou royal family, has two kinds of servants. The former cooks soup with tulip grass and makes wine with black millet, while the latter bathes the body with fragrant soup and millet wine. This not only makes the corpse "fragrant and beautiful", but also has a certain disinfection effect. The spraying of wine is more conducive to accelerating the oxygen consumption in the coffin after sealing and establishing anoxic conditions. Tightly binding the corpse with clean underwear and quilt can also help isolate the air and inhibit the early corruption of the corpse. The coffins used in Han Dynasty are of high quality. The walls, top and bottom of the coffin are all made of one piece of material. The inside and outside of the coffin are painted, and the lid of the inner coffin is sealed with sticky paint, which makes the coffin have good air tightness. In addition, there was a custom of using mercury and arsenic to prevent corrosion in ancient China. After chemical identification, Mawangdui female corpse has two obvious characteristics: one is mercury treatment, and the other is soaking. The sediment of coffin liquid (formed by the infiltration of external water vapor) contains a lot of mercury sulfide, ethanol, acetic acid and other components, which plays a role in fixing the cells of the corpse and becomes the key factor for the body discovered not to rot.
4. Funeral customs
Feudal nobles attached great importance to deep burial and regarded thick soil as the best shelter. Their graves are deep and big and they are not allowed to breathe. In such an environment, the tomb can be effectively isolated from the outside air, maintaining a constant temperature and not affected by climate change. Let's see how the closed mausoleum has changed in the long two thousand years. At the beginning of burial, the environment of the tomb allowed spoilage bacteria to grow and reproduce, but the oxygen in the tomb was rapidly consumed by a large number of organic substances such as birds, fish, meat and eggs in the funerary objects, and because the inner coffin and the tomb were sealed, an anoxic environment was formed in the tomb, which inhibited aerobic bacteria. At this time, only anaerobic bacteria played a role in the process of corruption, but it could not be popularized, because protein, fat and organic acids produced by the decomposition of silk buried in the corpse gradually turned the environment in the coffin into acidity, which led to the inadaptability of anaerobic bacteria and eventually died, thus finally stopping the process of corpse corruption.
Second, foreign countries take ancient Egypt as an example to illustrate the embalming of corpses:
In BC 10 century, when mummification technology was the most mature, first-class embalmers gathered together to make mummies according to the following steps:
First, a 10 cm long incision was made on the left side of the abdomen of the corpse with a flint knife, and other internal organs except the heart were taken out. One by one, they were washed with wine and spices containing myrrh and cinnamon, and then put into a ritual burial bottle. The ritual burial bottle is carved with alabaster, the lid of the bottle is carved into a jackal shape to put the stomach, the baboon head bottle puts the lungs, and the falcon head puts the intestines and the head-shaped liver. This kind of bottle is a souvenir of today. Because people thought that the heart was the root of feelings at that time, they stayed in place. The embalmer also washed the abdominal cavity of the corpse with aromatic asphalt to decompose the residual soft tissue. Then he took away the brain. He used a hooked tool to pierce the skull from the nostril of the deceased, hooked out the brain marrow inside, and then poured fragrant tar and spices to flush out the remaining tissue in the skull. Finally, the resin is poured into the skull cavity through the nostril to prevent the skull from being deformed during accidental extrusion.
After thoroughly cleaning the corpse, the embalmer buried all the organs and corpses in the powder pile soaked in alkali (a mixture of sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate, equivalent to the components of today's alkali washing and baking powder) and drained the water. Bodies and organs should be buried in alkaline powder for about a month. After taking out, each part should be washed with perfume and spices. The embalmer must carefully wrap all parts of the body from the trunk to each finger from the beginning to avoid damage or loss of nails and other small parts.
Then the antiseptic wrapped the dry viscera one by one with linen, put them back into the abdominal cavity, filled them with sawdust, linen, tar or mud, and sewed up the incision.
Because the hair is inevitably damaged, we need to mend some wigs; Put an artificial eye in the eye socket, have a whole body facelift, and bring the dead back to life. This job is the most time-consuming.
In the plastic surgery, the antiseptic carefully cut many small mouths in various parts of the body and filled the linen filler from the skin. Of course, the face and neck of the corpse should be the same as before, and the mouth should be covered with linen to make the cheeks full. Finally, the embalmer will dye the face and body of the deceased with ochre dye (red for male and yellow for female). You can wrap your body after dyeing. The body was tightly wrapped in linen coated with rosin. Archaeologists opened the cloth and found that the total length was more than two kilometers. Amulets and scarabs (or scarabs) are usually placed on mummies and bandages. In particular, a statue of dung beetles should be placed on the chest, engraved with prayers, begging the deceased to receive a fair trial in the underworld.
It takes about 70 days for the embalmer to wrap the body and mummify it.