The mummies from the Deir el-Bahri cache were removed to the Cairo Museum in 1881, and most, but not all, of the mummies found in the tomb of Amenhotep II were brought to Cairo after their discovery. In 1912 Elliot Smith published his Cairo Museum catalogue of the royal mummies, a work which provided anatomical descriptions of the bodies, estimates of their ages at death, as well as lengthy quotations from Gaston Maspero's initial publication of the Deir el-Bahri cache. A mummy is an embalmed or specially preserved dead body. Mummies of the World A mummy, to put it bluntly, is an old dead body. An Egyptian Mummification Mummification is the preservation of a body, either animal or human.
Some mummies are preserved wet, some are frozen, and some are dried.
The ancient Egyptians believed in life after death. Contradictions, however, existed side by side in their belief regarding the afterworld. They thought that the dead lived on in the tomb. At the same time they thought of the dead as having gone to a blessed afterworld in some far-distant place. The secrets of the Pharaonic mummies are revealed by the first Mummification Museum in the world recently set up on the Nile banks in Luxor, Upper Egypt.