Let's start a small journey into the world of the culture of Ancient Egypt. In recent years, speaking the word, sarcophagus, our compatriots do not recall the Egyptian sarcophagus, but rather the Chernobyl one, at the sixth reactor of the nuclear power plant, which is located not far from the city of Pripyat. A sarcophagus was built here to protect it from radiation.
Everyone knows that a special protective covering was built around the ill-fated reactor, and the name sarcophagus, it apparently received, for a reason. But today's topic refers to the original meaning of the word, which the Egyptians gave it.
The etymology of the word has Greek roots, and has a rather unexpected meaning - “meat eater”. The Egyptians presumably chose this word because of the body of the deceased, which was placed in the sarcophagus, after a while only bones remain. The second version of the choice of this word is that according to the beliefs of ancient people, there was a mysterious "magic" stone that could eat meat, and coffins made from it could eat away at human flesh.
An integral part of the funeral ceremonies of the great people of Ancient Egypt, such as pharaohs and priests, rich and noble people, were sarcophagi, they were in direct contact with mummies. At rich ceremonial burials, several sarcophagi were used. They fit one into the other, like a nesting doll. The first sarcophagi were made of wood, and the embalmed body was directly placed in it. In later times, they even began to make it out of cardboard. The second or outer sarcophagus was usually made of stone, sometimes metal or an alloy of metals. The ancient Greeks called the mysterious alloy “Electrum”.
Unfortunately, many burials of the ancient Egyptians have not survived to this day, however, like sarcophagi. The main reason, far from the time, but the marauders and robbers, who stole and ravaged the graves in the dark Middle Ages, when Europeans walked across the countries with crusades. Those burials, which miraculously managed to survive in the age of prosperity of looting, are of great value for science and culture, historians and Egyptologists, and even esotericists interested in the ancient Egyptian civilization. One of the most famous such burials is the burial of the Pharaoh of Egypt Tutankhamun, who died at an early age, before he was twenty years old. It was found by the famous archaeologist from England, Howard Carter, in the first half of the twentieth century, in 1922.
The sarcophagus of Tutankhamun was made of pure gold, which corresponds to the high status of the buried, because the pharaoh cannot enter the afterlife from a wooden, stone or metal sarcophagus.
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In fact, the burial of Tutankhamun, the only one that has survived to this day in its original form. The museums of Cairo now house a sarcophagus, an Egyptian priest of supposedly high rank. This is evidenced by its form. The sarcophagus combines the shape of Horus (Egyptian god, falcon) and the shape of a human body. Similar sarcophagi, from the inside and outside, are covered with mysterious hieroglyphs, mysterious formulas and magic signs, the meaning of which, to this day, has not been solved by scientists. However, they do not abandon attempts to understand their meaning and the purpose of the Egyptian burial sarcophagi.
According to one of the theories, the Egyptian sarcophagus played the role of a boat on which the soul of the deceased floats to the afterlife. The next theory says that the sarcophagus is needed to help the soul get rid of the corruptible body, which holds the soul, which must fly away for judgment to the god Osiris. The Egyptians' ideas about the afterlife and the journey into it were quite detailed and kind of romantic. However, these are all just theories, and the exact answer to the question of why a sarcophagus is needed is still not known to the scientific world and, probably, we will not recognize it, unless some scientist-physicist comes up with a time machine. Only then will there be an opportunity to go back in time 5000 years ago and talk to an Egyptian priest or pharaoh and learn all the secrets of Egyptian civilization.