The same machines used to diagnose a broken rib are helping researchers peer inside the dusty remains of a 2000-year-old Egyptian mummy. That’s essentially what’s happening as researchers turn hospital-grade CT scanners on ancient Egyptian mummies, allowing them to peel back the layers of delicate wrappings and fragile remains without physically disturbing any of it, according to a press release.
I have to get to this detail straightaway because it’s easily the most entertaining of the bunch: the researchers at the museum made clear in their press release that the “examination of the mummy remains was conducted outside of patient examination hours, at night.” Imagine sitting in a hospital waiting room for a routine scan while a 2,300-year-old mummy gets wheeled in next to you. I think you would question whether that was the right hospital for you, given the state of this guy.
This is all happening at the Semmelweis University Medical Imaging Center in Budapest, where scientists are using advanced CT (computed tomography) scanners equipped with photon-counting detectors. These machines generate highly detailed 2D and 3D images, allowing researchers to look inside ancient Egyptian mummies.
They can see so deeply that they can identify diseases and even study mummification techniques, all without physically opening the remains.
What Scientists Found Inside Egyptian Mummies Without Unwrapping Them
This is, of course, a huge shift from older methods that risked damaging fragile specimens. Now, researchers can use CT scans to tell if a mummy had osteoporosis or if it was suffering from tooth decay. It can analyze skull structures, allowing scientists to get a fairly precise estimate of the person’s age or even clues about whether they had health issues like arthritis or anemia.
In one case, the researchers say that an eye test of a particularly mysterious mummified bundle appeared to be either a severed head or maybe even a bird. A CT scan revealed it was neither. It was a mummified human foot. Gross, but at least they didn’t have to pry it open to figure that out.
The scans also reveal how ancient embalming methods worked. They revealed that the ancient Egyptian embalmers would layer the classic mummy cloth we’re all used to seeing in our Universal Monster Boris Karloff-style mummy, and, between layers, they would work in objects like amulets within the wrap.
The most impressive part of all this is that the technology is turning museums into giant forensic labs. Everything that was too fragile to examine closely can now be examined without fear of disruption, and can be observed at higher resolutions than ever before and with a level of precision that was unthinkable even just a couple of decades ago.
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