Momias del antiguo Egipto,
pertenecientes a dos niños, son escanedas en en hospital St. Bernwars, de
Hildesheim, para detectar sus peculiaridades. Por Sarah Griffiths
From hidden amulets to signs of
violence and disease, the secret lives of the ancient Egyptians have been
unveiled using CT scans to see inside mummies´ bandages. An ancient Egyptian child mummy
is undergoing the investigative but non-invasive process at St Bernward hospital
in Hildesheim, Germany. The hospital will examine two
child mummies from Roemer und Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim to any detect
peculiarities. Such abnormalities could
contribute to a better understanding of the ancient Egyptian mummification
tradition.
Last year, the British Museum
used the technology in an exhibition to allow visitors to peer inside mummy
cases and examine the bodies beneath the wrappings, bringing them face to face
with eight people who lived in the Nile Valley thousands of years ago.
Dr John Taylor, Egyptian
archaeology curator at the British Museum, told The Telegraph: ´With this
technology we can go inside the body and put flesh on the bones or take it away
as we wish.´
Experts can take individual
´slices´ through the body which can be used to build 3D models of mummies and
reveal never-before-seen details. For example, scans revealed
Tamut, a female adult singer from Thebes who was mummified in 900BC, was laid to
rest in a beautifully decorated casket with amulets placed on her body.
The CT scan data allowed
experts to print 3D replicas of the previously unseen amulets, which included a
figure of a goddess with its wings spread protectively across her throat and
beeswax figurines of gods placed inside her chest to protect the internal organs
in the afterlife. It also revealed the singer,
who died in her 30s or 40s, had calcified plaque inside her arteries — a sign of
a fatty diet, and high social status. She may well have died from a heart attack
or stroke.
Embalmers were generally
exceptionally skilled, extracting the brain of the deceased through the nose,
although they sometimes made mistakes. The museum´s scientists were
thrilled to discover a spatula-like probe still inside one man´s skull, along
with a blob of brain. ´The tool at the back of the
skull was quite a revelation, because embalmers´ tools are something that we
don´t know much about, Dr Taylor said. ´To find one actually inside a
mummy is an enormous advance.´ This detail would have gone
unnoticed if it wasn´t for CT scanning technology. Dr Taylor said: ´The clarity of
the images is advancing very rapidly. ´As the technology advances, we
have hopes that we may be able to read even hieroglyphic inscriptions on objects
inside mummies.´
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