Grove School students were a little shocked at the sight of their teacher Mary Ann Claxton (center) touching a partially mummified chicken held by Laura Bell.  Miss Bell was recently a guest speaker in Mrs. Claxton's world history classes.
Grove students get Hands-on
experience making mummies

By DONNA NEWCOMB  Did you ever think the study of ancient Egyptian mummies could  involve a hands-on project? It will for some students at Grove School this year.      Former Grove teacher Laura Bell, who studied Egyptian history at  Oxford University in England, came up with the idea when she bought a  chicken at the grocery store and recreated the mummification process.       "It was successful up to a point," she told students in Mary Ann Claxton's world history class recently.  She rid the bird of its organs and  moisture, wrapped it in linen and sealed it in a coffin. What she had not counted on was the humid summer in West Tennessee. She said a smell started to arise.       Miss Bell has since begun the process with another chicken which  she brought to class for the students to see. To draw out moisture, it was  covered in natron, a naturally occurring mixture of' baking soda and sodium chloride that is

found in abundance along the shores of the Nile River after the floods, recede.  She made her own natron out of salt and baking soda.       After learning about mummification. and funerary customs of the ancient Egyptians, the students will finish the process on the chicken which they've named Fred II.  More important than the steps involved in the process, the students are learning why the ancients did  what they did. For example, the heart was not removed because the Egyptians believed it was responsible for thought, memory, intelligence and feeling.      And while the other organs of the body were put in their own special protective jars to be reunited with the body in the afterlife, the brain was discarded because they didn't  believe it had any real function.      "Ancient Egyptians were preoccupied with death because they loved life so much," Miss Bell explained. "The practice of mummi- fication was a symbol of

the desire to continue living in the next world as lavishly as they had in this world."      A Camden native, Miss Bell has a master's degree in education from Union University. She was a special  intern with the British Museum in London through St. John's College at Oxford, and she helped in the development of the Egyptian Museum at the University of Memphis, Not surprisingly, she also has a background in chemistry. Though her studies in higher education involved world history and art, she said, "My dad was a chemist and I grew up in his laboratory."      For seven years, she ran her own chemical lab in Memphis, inspecting agriculture chemicals to be sent to Third World nations for the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. It was a very successful business, she said, but started slow-ing down about the time of the Gulf War.      Donna Newcomb is a freelance writer and former Post- Intelligencer staff writer.