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Delta. They also may have procured some salt from Mediterranean trade. They clearly obtained salt from African trade, especially from Libya and Ethiopia. But they also had their own desert of dried salt lakes and salt deposits. It is known that they had a number of varieties of salt, including a table salt called “Northern salt” and another called “red salt,” which may have come from a lake near Memphis.
Long before seventeenth- and eighteenth-century chemists began identifying and naming the elements of different salts, ancient alchemists, healers, and cooks were aware that different salts existed, with different tastes and chemical properties that made them suitable for different tasks. The Chinese had invented gunpowder by isolating saltpeter, potassium nitrate. The Egyptians found a salt that, though they could not have expressed it in these terms, is a mixture of sodium bicarbonate and sodium carbonate with a small amount of sodium chloride. They found this salt in nature in a wadi, an Arab word for a dry riverbed, some forty miles northwest of Cairo. The spot was called Natrun, and they named the salt netjry, or natron, after the wadi. Natron is found in “white” and “red,” though white natron is usually gray and red natron is pink. The ancient Egyptians referred to natron as “the divine salt.”
The culminating ritual of the lengthy Egyptian funeral was known as “the opening of the mouth,” in which a symbolic cutting of the umbilical cord freed the corpse to eat in the afterlife, just as cutting a newborn baby’s cord is the prelude to its taking earthly nourishment. In 1352 B.C. , the child pharoah Tutankhamen died at the age of eighteen, and his tomb, discovered in 1922, is the most elaborate and well preserved ever found. The tomb was furnished with a bronze knife for the symbolic cutting of the cord, surrounded by four shrines, each containing cups filled with the two vital ingredients for preserving mummies: resin and natron.
Investigators argue about whether sodium chloride was used in mummification. It is difficult to know, since natron contains a small amount of sodium chloride that leaves traces of common salt in all mummies. Sodium chloride appears to have been used instead of natron in some burials of less affluent people.
Herodotus, though writing more than two millennia after the practice began, offered a description in gruesome detail of ancient Egyptian mummification, which, with a few exceptions, such as his confusion of juniper oil for cedar oil, has stood up to the examination and chemical analysis of modern archaeology. The techniques bear remarkable similarity to the Egyptian practice of preserving birds and fish through disembowelment and salting:
The most perfect process is as follows: As much as possible of the brain is removed via the nostrils with an iron hook, and what cannot be reached with the hook is washed out with drugs; next, the flank is opened with a flint knife and the whole contents of the abdomen removed; the cavity is then thoroughly cleaned and washed out, firstly with palm wine and again with an infusion of ground spices. After that, it is filled with pure myrrh, cassia and every other aromatic substance, excepting frankincense, and sewn up again, after which the body is placed in natron, covered entirely over, for seventy days—never longer. When this period is over, the body is washed and then wrapped from head to foot in linen cut into strips and smeared on the underside with gum, which is commonly used by the Egyptians instead of glue. In this condition the body is given back to the family, who have a wooden case made, shaped like a human figure, into which it is put.
He then gave a less expensive method and finally the discount technique:
The third method, used for embalming the bodies of the poor, is simply to wash out the intestines, and keep the body for seventy days in natron.
The parallels between preserving food and preserving mummies were