Hello there.

Welcome to this lesson.

I'm Ms. Roberts, and I'll be guiding you through this history lesson today.

Together we are going to be learning about some of the religious beliefs that were important to the ancient Egyptians.

In particular, beliefs to do with what happened when a person died in ancient Egypt.

This lesson is building on all the things you already know about what life was like in the ancient Egyptian civilization.

You are going to hear many unusual words today, but don't worry, I will be guiding you through this lesson step by step, and I will explain anything new along the way.

Let's make a start together.

By the end of the lesson today, you will be able to explain how some aspects of the way Egyptians treated dead bodies changed, whilst others stayed the same.

That's very intriguing.

I'd like to start by showing you five keywords that you will be hearing a lot in this lesson.

At the end of this lesson, you'll be able to use those words yourself to talk about some aspects of the religious beliefs of the ancient Egyptians.

Listen carefully to each keyword and repeat them after me.

Then we'll look at the meanings together.

Our first word is afterlife.

Can you try that one? Good job.

Our next word is soul.

Can you have a try? Nice.

Now, this is a small and unusual word.

It's ba.

Can you say ba? Excellent.

Ba is actually a word that comes from ancient Egyptian.

The next word is quite a bit longer.

A few more syllables here.

This is mummification.

Can you repeat that one? Good job.

And the last word.

This is actually two words which together describe a noun, and it's a canopic jar.

Can you say canopic jars? Good.

Well done.

Okay, I'm going to look at the meanings of those with you now, but we will find out a lot more about them as we go through the lesson.

Ancient Egyptians believed that there was life after death, and they called this the afterlife.

Ancient Egyptians believed that the soul is part of a human, that it's separate from the body, and that is where your feelings and thoughts come from, the soul.

The ancient Egyptians used the word ba for the soul.

So when we talk about the ba in ancient Egypt, the ba was the soul.

Preserving a dead body through embalming and cloth wrapping is known as mummification.

We'll find out a lot more about that later in the lesson.

The ancient Egyptians placed a dead person's organs inside canopic jars during the mummification process.

We will look in some more detail at what that means a little later in the lesson.

For now, canopic jars are a piece of equipment that the ancient Egyptians used for mummification.

Okay, there's going to be two parts to this lesson today.

First, we're going to think about what the ancient Egyptian beliefs about death were, and then we are going to think about what the ancient Egyptians did when a person died.

So let's begin with the first half of our lesson and investigate more about the ancient Egyptian beliefs about death.

In ancient Egypt, religion was one of the most important aspects of society.

The entire Egyptian civilization was centred around their beliefs.

The ancient Egyptian people believed in many different gods and goddesses, and they spent their days trying to please them.

Most groups of people, such as those who did different jobs, for example, also had their own special gods as well.

For example, Thoth was the god of the scribes.

You may know that scribes were the only people in ancient Egypt that could understand and write using symbols called hieroglyphs.

This is a picture of the god Thoth, the god of the scribes.

Statues and pictures of ancient Egyptian gods often show them with a mix of animal and human body parts.

You can see in this picture that Thoth has a human body, but he has the head of a bird called an ibis.

Ancient Egyptians had a belief in something called the afterlife.

They believed that if a person had pleased their gods and goddesses during their human lifetime, then they would go to the afterlife when they died.

This is why it was so important for the ancient Egyptians to have those religious beliefs.

Now, the most important person at any time in ancient Egypt was always the pharaoh.

This was not only because they were the ruler, but also because they were believed to be the human form of the greatest of the gods.

To please a pharaoh in ancient Egypt was to please a god.

The ancient Egyptians believed that if they succeeded in pleasing the gods, then they would be guaranteed to go to the afterlife when they died.

Lucas has recalled that the pharaoh's tombs were full of treasures so they could take everything with them to the afterlife.

Let's have a quick stop here and just check on our learning so far.

I'm going to read you a question and three possible answers.

I want you to decide which answer you think is correct.

Where did the ancient Egyptians believe people went after they died? Was it A, heaven; B, the afterlife; or C, nowhere? Have you made a choice? Did you choose option B? Great stuff, well done.

It was the afterlife that the ancient Egyptians believed in.

This was one part of their religious beliefs.

Let's find out some more about those ancient Egyptian beliefs now.

Ancient Egyptians also believed that when a person died, their human body was no longer alive but their soul would live on.

They believed that the soul was made of what a human thinks and feels and what they thought.

They believed that the soul was able to leave the body and go to the afterlife.

So as Laura points out, the ancient Egyptians had beliefs in two separate things, a human body that was no longer living with a separate soul that could go on to the afterlife.

If you look here, this is an illustration of how the Egyptians thought of the soul, or ba.

This is a hieroglyph that represented ba.

The ancients Egyptians called the soul ba, and the hieroglyph for ba is a bird with a human head.

Ba was shown as a bird because the ancient Egyptians believed that the soul could fly from the body to the afterlife just like a bird could fly through the sky.

The ancient Egyptians believed that another god, called Anubis, would guide the souls of the dead on that journey to the afterlife.

Anubis was one of the most important gods for the ancient Egyptians.

They really wanted to please him above others so that he would be more likely to come to their bodies and guide their souls to the afterlife.

In the picture, you can see Anubis is shown with a human body and the head of a jackal, which is a type of wild dog.

Let's pause here and try some activities about what you have discovered.

This is another multiple choice question for you, but the answers here are all pictures.

I want to know which of these did the ancient Egyptians believe would lead souls to the afterlife? Was it Anubis, A? Was it Thoth, B? Or was it ba, C? Have you chosen? Hands up for Anubis.

Correct.

Well done.

Anubis was the god that would come to the bodies to help to guide the soul on the journey to the afterlife.

The god Thoth there in the middle for answer B was the god of the scribes.

You can see that he is holding a type of pen.

And at the end there we have ba, which is the bird with the human head that represented the soul of each human that could fly to the afterlife.

Well done.

Now Aisha and Jacob are here and they're talking about ancient Egyptian beliefs.

Listen to what they say and have a think about who you agree with.

Aisha says that ba was a very important ancient Egyptian god that took souls to the afterlife.

Jacob says that ba was the ancient Egyptian word for the soul.

Anubis was the god that took souls to the afterlife.

Hmm.

Who do you agree with? Aisha or Jacob? Have you chosen? Do you think Aisha is correct? I'm not sure that Aisha's correct.

I think Jacob is correct.

That's right, ba wasn't an ancient Egyptian god.

Ba was the soul in ancient Egypt, the human soul.

It was Anubis who was the god.

So Aisha had just got those two mixed up.

You've heard a lot already about ancient Egyptian beliefs and lots of new words, so let's put that knowledge to use to help us complete a puzzle.

There are six clues here.

You need to solve the clues and then complete the word puzzle.

If you don't know the answer to a clue straight away, try to complete some other words first, because the letters of the words you do know can help you to work out the clues that you are less certain of.

I'll read the clues for you now.

Listen closely.

Clue one is an Egyptian word represented by a hieroglyph of a bird with a human head.

Clue two, a very important Egyptian god.

Some might say this god was the most important.

Clue three, ancient Egyptians believed that this person was the human form of a god.

Clue four, a part of a human that we cannot see.

Clue five, where the Egyptians believed that people went when they died.

And clue six, this creature was the head of the god in clue three.

So which animal was the head of the god that you answer in clue three? Pause the video now while you complete the activity, and when you resume, we'll go through the answers together.

Good job.

Now let's quickly check those answers together.

Here we go.

Clue one, the Egyptian word was ba.

Clue two, the important god is Anubis.

Clue three, the human that was the form of a god is the pharaoh.

The soul is the part of the human body that we cannot see.

The afterlife is where the ancient Egyptians believed people went after they died.

And clue six, a jackal was the head of the god Anubis.

So any pictures that we see of Anubis represent him with a human body and the head of a wild dog called a jackal.

Now we're going to go to the second part of our lesson and we're going to think about how things were changing over time.

Now, the ancient Egyptian civilization existed for nearly 3000 years, which is a very long time.

So over that period, things did change about how they treated dead bodies.

We're going to look at that some more together now.

Look at the picture.

Here you can see the god Anubis with the head of the jackal that we were just talking about, and Anubis is there at the coffin of someone quite likely to be a pharaoh, and he's there to help to guide the soul of that person to the afterlife.

We know what the ancient Egyptians believed about the soul and the afterlife, but what did the ancient Egyptians do with the bodies of people that had died? The ancient Egyptians believed that after death, the human body was still directly attached to the ba, or the soul, even when the ba went to the afterlife, because they believed that each night the ba would return and come back to its human body.

So the ancient Egyptians wanted to try to preserve human bodies in good condition so that ba could return to them.

The ancient Egyptians did not want the bodies to decay and disappear.

They wanted to preserve them so that ba could return at nighttime.

They tried many different ways of preserving the bodies of the dead.

The earliest ancient Egyptians in the Old Kingdom tried wrapping the dead bodies in linen cloths and then drying them out using hot desert sand.

However, this did not work, and so for many hundreds of years they continued working on finding different ways of keeping dead bodies in as good a condition as possible.

As Alex points out, bodies that are not well protected can decay very quickly, and preserving them tries to slow this down or stop the decay.

Before we think about how they did that, let's have a quick check on what we know so far.

Now we've got a multiple choice question with pictures again here.

They're the same pictures that you saw before, but be careful, this isn't the same question.

I now want to know from these three pictures, which of them did the ancient Egyptians believe left the body and returned to it at night? Was it A, Anubis; B, Thoth; or C, ba? Have you chosen one? Excellent.

Anyone choosing A this time? No.

How about B? No.

That must mean you chose C.

Well done.

The ba was the human soul.

It left the body to go to the afterlife, returning to the human body at nighttime.

Now look at this picture.

This picture is something called a mummy.

By the end of the Old Kingdom, a process called mummification had been developed by the ancient Egyptians.

Mummification was the best way to preserve the dead bodies.

They were still wrapping them in linen cloth, but by this time, the body went through several other important steps first.

The body you can see in the photo is a mummified body that is now on display at a museum in Spain.

Let's have a look at what was involved in this process of mummification.

It began by removing the internal organs.

Now, they're things like the liver and the lungs.

They would be taken out from the body and they would be placed in those special jars called canopic jars.

This way, the internal parts of the body could be preserved separately from the outside parts of the body, and this would delay the process of decay.

The ancient Egyptians did, however, leave one internal organ behind, and that was the heart because they believed that this was where people got their intelligence from.

After the organs had been removed, the body was then treated very carefully for a very long time with a mix of salts and herbs and oils, and then it would be wrapped in the linen cloths.

Those treatments were to help the body to start to dry out, and this stopped it from decaying.

This process is known as embalming.

Ancient Egyptians were one of the first ancient civilizations to develop the process of embalming.

Dead bodies that have been preserved this way, as the ancient Egyptians did, are called mummies.

That's right, Izzy.

Well done.

Mummification really was the best way to preserve and protect dead bodies.

We know this because so many mummies have been discovered by archaeologists, including the mummy of the famous pharaoh Tutankhamun.

An archaeologist called Howard Carter found Tutankhamun's mummy inside the tomb he discovered in the Valley of the Kings in 1922.

Today, just like the one in the photograph earlier, we can see mummies on display in museums all around the world.

So although over the course of 3000 years ancient Egyptian treatments changed in the way they treated the dead bodies, their beliefs stayed the same.

Let's use everything we've discovered to try some activities.

First, have a look at this, an ordering task.

I want you to number the sentences to show the correct order of what happened when somebody died according to the ancient Egyptian beliefs and practises.

The first step has been identified for you, and that began when a person died.

What happened next? Pause the video now while you complete the activity.

Ready? Let's have a look together.

So first, a person dies in ancient Egypt.

When a person died, their internal organs would be placed inside canopic jars.

The body would then be embalmed with salts, oils, and herbs.

After that, the body is wrapped in linen cloths.

Then the god Anubis comes and helps the ba to leave the body and go to the afterlife.

At night, ba returns to the body of the human that it left.

Well done.

It was a bit tricky to make sure you got those in the correct order, wasn't it? Let's try another activity now.

This is an activity about mummification and how the process developed over time in ancient Egypt.

Some of these things happened in the Old Kingdom when the ancient Egyptians first knew about mummification, and some of these things happened later when the process was more developed.

You decide which is which and put a tick in the correct column.

Pause the video now to complete the activity.

All done? Good job.

Let's look at the answers together.

So, treating a body with salt, oil, and herbs, was that done by the early ancient Egyptians or was that done later in the New Kingdom? That process was established in the New Kingdom.

Drying a body out with hot desert sand.

That was one of the very first things that the ancient Egyptians tried, and that was in the Old Kingdom.

Removing internal organs and putting them in canopic jars.

This was something that happened later as the mummification process was developed.

Finally, wrapping the body in linen cloths.

Hmm, I'm not sure about this one.

They definitely did it in the Old Kingdom, and I think they did it in the New Kingdom too.

Yes, that's right.

This happened in both kingdoms. It was constant.

The ancient Egyptians always wrapped their dead bodies in linen cloths.

Well done.

This has brought us to the end of our lesson today, and we've learned a lot about the religious beliefs of the ancient Egyptians.

Let's review everything we've covered.

We now know that the ancient Egyptians believed in many gods.

One of these gods was Anubis.

Anubis guided the souls of the dead who had pleased the gods to the afterlife.

We know that when an ancient Egyptian person died, they believed that their soul, the ba, left their body and then returned to it again at night.

So they wanted to preserve the dead bodies as much as possible.

The process of mummification was developed to preserve the dead bodies.

This process changed over time as the ancient Egyptians tried new and better ways to preserve them.

By the end of the Old Kingdom and the start of the New Kingdom, they had began to embalm and mummify the dead bodies and put the organs inside canopic jars.

I hope you found it interesting to learn all those things today, and I'm looking forward to seeing you again for another history lesson about ancient Egypt.

Goodbye for now.