IELTS Reading 199: The Art of Not Decaying — Reading an Egyptian Mummy

Adapted from AJNR / Journal of Radiology / KV40 study (2018–2024). IELTS Reading Section 3 difficulty, approximately 1,050 words. Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9543951/

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Reading Passage

A. To an ancient Egyptian, death was not the end of the person but a passage into another kind of life, and that life depended on the body remaining recognisable. The soul, it was believed, would need to return to its home and to know it; a skeleton crumbled to dust was a house without a door. The dead were therefore buried with food, tools and possessions for the journey, and the house itself was stocked so that the returning spirit would find it as it had been in life. This conviction drove one of the most sustained and sophisticated preservation projects in human history. The techniques it demanded were passed down within families and guilds of embalmers, guarded as trade secrets for thousands of years. Over millennia, embalmers refined a set of techniques that could keep a human body intact for thousands of years in a desert climate that, left to itself, would rather dry and scatter it. The result — the mummy — has long fascinated the modern imagination as a monument to superstition, but recent science has shown it to be, in equal measure, a remarkable exercise in practical anatomy and chemistry, refined by generations of trial and error.

B. The standard procedure is well known from ancient accounts and from the bodies themselves, and it followed a rough timetable of about seventy days. Embalmers first emptied the torso of the organs most prone to rot. The liver, lungs, stomach and intestines were removed through an incision usually made in the left side of the abdomen, cured in preservative and stored in their own containers near the coffin. The heart, by contrast, was deliberately left in place, for it was regarded as the seat of thought and memory and was required in the judgement of the dead, where it would be weighed against the feather of truth. The body was then packed and covered with natron, a naturally occurring salt that drew water from the tissues and halted bacterial decay, leaving the skin leathery but intact. After weeks of drying, it was washed, anointed with oils and wrapped in hundreds of metres of linen, amulets tucked between the layers to ward off harm. What survives, in this accounting, is a corpse prepared like a ship for a long voyage.

C. The strangest step concerns the brain, and it was one the Egyptians themselves thought least worth saving. With a slender hooked tool passed up through the nose, the embalmer broke through the thin bone at the base of the skull and pulled the brain out in fragments, which were then discarded; the empty cavity was stuffed with linen and resins. The procedure was rough by design, and it often broke the delicate bone behind the nose in the process. To a modern neurologist the practice seems perverse, but the Egyptians did not credit the brain with thought at all, and saw it as little more than filler inside the head. Remarkably, modern imaging shows the practice was not universal. Scans of the earliest royal mummies, such as several pharaohs of the early Eighteenth Dynasty, reveal an intact skull with the brain still inside, suggesting that the nasal extraction technique was refined only later, over many centuries, rather than handed down fully formed from a single master. Even among later examples, the route and force of the operation varied from one burial to the next.

D. For most of its history, studying a mummy meant unwrapping it — a destructive act that destroyed irreplaceable evidence for the sake of a glance. Victorian collectors would cut a mummy open at a public evening, scatter its contents and throw away the wrappings. That changed with medical imaging. The first computed-tomography scan of a mummy was performed in 1976, and since then CT has become the standard tool: it sees through linen without disturbing it, slicing the body into cross-sections that reveal the embalmer's handiwork. A scan can show the torn ethmoid bone where the hook entered, the linen plugs inside the skull, and even the gaps left when organs were removed, distinguishing a skilled operation from a botched one. It can also read the mummy's biography — the age at death, the disease the person suffered, the broken bones and dental decay — all without cutting a single bandage. In famous cases, CT has even settled long-running disputes over whether a damaged royal mummy was murdered or died of illness. What was once an object to be unwrapped has become one to be read.

E. The deeper lesson is that mummification was neither magic nor fixed ritual but an evolving craft, improved by trial and error across dynasties. The excavators of tomb KV40 in the Valley of the Kings, scanning dozens of New Kingdom bodies, found that routes and tools varied from burial to burial, hinting at schools of embalmers rather than a single national manual. Some bodies show careful, repeated attempts at preservation, while others look hurried and cheap — a reminder that like any craft, the work was priced and graded. Combined with evidence of disease, profession and diet, these technical details let modern researchers reconstruct not just how Egyptians died but how they lived, how they were treated in illness and how the living honoured the dead. A mummy, read this way, is less a relic of a vanished superstition than a document written in bandages, salt and bone — and the best readers of it today are machines, not morticians. Each scan that resolves a long-dead person's cause of death also quietly resolves a question about how their society understood the body it prepared for eternity. The mummy, once a curiosity for collectors, has become a document of science.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. The standard embalming procedure ii. Why Egyptians feared death iii. The brain they threw away — and who kept theirs iv. Reading the body without unwrapping it v. Mummification as an evolving craft vi. How to build a natron furnace vii. The business of mummy unwrapping

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. According to the writer, why did Egyptians preserve the body? A. To make the body invulnerable to thieves. B. Because the returning soul needed to recognise its own body. C. To trade mummies as luxury goods. D. Because they believed bodies would rot into dust.

6. Why was the heart left inside the body? A. It was too difficult to remove. B. The embalmers forgot it. C. It was believed to be the seat of thought and required after death. D. It was stored in a separate container.

7. What is unusual about the earliest royal mummies when scanned? A. They show more brain removal than later ones. B. Their skulls are intact with the brain still inside. C. They contain no linen at all. D. They are always wrapped in gold.

8. Why is CT scanning described as transformative? A. It replaces the need to wrap mummies. B. It reveals details without unwrapping and destroying the body. C. It proves that mummies are fakes. D. It can bring the dead back to life.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Natron is a salt that draws water from the tissues and stops decay.
10. The Egyptians regarded the brain as the seat of thought and kept it inside.
11. The first CT scan of a mummy was performed in 1976.
12. The nasal extraction technique was used identically from the very beginning.
13. Most ancient Egyptians could afford a full mummification.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

Embalmers removed the abdominal organs through an incision on the left side, left the (14) __________ in place, and dried the body with natron salt before wrapping it in (15) __________.

Answers & Explanations

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