Death is universal for all humans. Everyone who is born will someday die or have already passed. The fear of death and avoidance of its causes is ingrained in our DNA.
We will all experience death, directly and indirectly, throughout our lives. Many cultures have built around this shared concept the same way they made around the weather, agriculture, and everything else familiar in the world.
They worshiped it and created practices around it. One of the most famous practices surrounding death is mummification.
Mummies, corpses that have undergone selective desiccation and drying to prevent rot or decay, have been found in cultures worldwide. They exist as attempts to keep a body in the state it was in before it died.
Almost every culture has believed that doing this allows the soul to remain pure or in the form of who they were before death, as a rotting corpse is much less appealing to look at than a dead but peaceful, looking person.
This practice was even done in China as early as the year 200 BC. Their techniques far exceeded their ancient contemporaries, as exampled by the famously excavated mummy of the noble Lady Dai.
10 /10 Dai, Not Diana
Lady Dai was the wife of Li Kang, whose title was the Marquis of Dai. He was the chancellor of the Western Han dynasty in the Changsha Kingdom.
Her given name was Xhin Zhui, and she lived the life of an extravagant noblewoman.
She had her instruments, such as the horizontal Chinese harp the Qin, ate expensive Imperial foods, wore fine silk and costly makeup. She was very much a princess of her time.
9 /10 Tomb Raiders
Lady Dai’s tomb was found not by an archaeology team or people who knew that royalty was underfoot in the region but by workers digging out space for an air-raid shelter.
They lit up a cigarette near a draft and caused a “ghost fire” when they ignited ancient crypt gases.
They investigated and employed 1,500 local high school students to excavate the entire site in 1972. That was where they found the most well-preserved corpse on the planet.