Never in my life would I believe that a clearanced, $3.00 bird could incite such fascination in my house.

We started the process today and in 6 weeks, we'll have a complete mummified bird. But that's not enough for my children.

My son is making plans to build a (wooden) sarcophagus and a pyramid to place the whole thing in. My daugter is searching for the appropriate amulets to sew onto the deceased hen. (She's thinking of making clay corn kernels and painting them gold.)

Now, I'm not sure how I feel about building a shrine in my backyard for a dead poultry...

The things we do for our kids!

Oh, that is so cool!
Kind of disgusting...but cool!

Now that is hands-on learning!!
Neat idea :-)

We made a chicken mummy about 3 years ago, and he is still with us! We named him King Cluck! My husband built the sarcophagus and my oldest daughter drew the heiroglyphics to decorate it.

The key to making this work is keeping the salt mixture changed regularly in the first few days. We changed our every other day the first week, and then twice a week the second week, and then just once a week thereafter.

I made some aromatic oil to annoint the chicken after he was completely hardened, by putting whole cloves in a closed up jar of olive oil. We rubbed the chicken with this before we wrapped him.

For wrapping, we used a white pillowcase that we had torn into strips. We made a mixture of white glue and water and dipped the strips in that, then wrapped the mummy. We put the amulets in the wrapping (not sewed on, just placed where we wanted and then wrapped securely.) It took several layers and we let it dry thoroughly between each layer. The strips should dry nice and hard and keep your chicken mummy well preserved! Ours is sitting in his sarcophagus on top of one of our bookshelves. He makes a great conversation piece!

Good luck!

Amazing! What's the recipe for the salt mixture? Is there a website/book I could check out?

This is sooo cool! where did the idea come from?

K

We did this at the very beginning of the school year. We used cornish hens. Each dc had their own. TutanChickan, AmunHenRa, and ChickHoTep. We used formula #3 at mummytombs.com. It was a lot of fun for the dc and the 3yr.old played Pharoah during the process. He was hilarious. My dd1st whined about the slimy bits and he would say, "Pharoah says no whining!".

Aime

We did this a few years ago when we studied Story of the World Volume 1. We thought it was so cool!