Hi, I'm Daniel Antoine the acting keeper of the department of Egypt and Sudan at
the British Museum and the curator of by Bioarchaeology and I’m Marie
Vandenbeusch curator in the department of Egypt and Sudan. Welcome to our corner.
So actually we know relatively little about mummification. The textbooks tend to focus on
the same case studies and some of the work we're trying to do here is looking at how the process
of mummification has evolved over time how it may have varied between regions and by
periods. We're also trying to determine how old they were when they died but also their state
of health at death. At the British Museum we've been using a very powerful new CT scan and that
allows us to capture both the thin elements the delicate skin and textiles equally as well as the
more dense elements such as the skeleton. If you compare it to the data we captured 10 years ago
really we're getting unprecedented details that was never captured before. So this is the mummy of
a small child. He was around four years old when he died, he lived during the first century AD and
was buried in a cemetery at Hawara in this necropolis which is south of Cairo and we know
that he was found with other mummified individuals including a boy, a girl, and two women.
We decided to re-examine the remains of that child and try to understand a bit more how he lived and
how he died. The first clue we had about him was actually what we can see when we look at this
mummy there is this wonderful portrait showing a young boy with long hair at the back and a small
fringe at the front and if you really look at this beautiful portrait we really already have
an insight about who was that child. One of the details I particularly like on this lower shroud
is a detail at the side where you actually can see the child himself and he's all gilded
showing that he became divine himself and is led by different gods in front of the goddess Iris
and look in particular at the side lock that he has at the side of his head and it shows that
he's a child and is depicted as a child in the afterlife. But what we actually can't see is the
side of that shroud because there is a layer of a sort of brown substance completely covering the
sides. But using the CT scan we actually managed to reveal all the decoration which is hidden
on the sides and you can see a quite complex decoration showing the goddess Isis on one side
and Nephthys on the other one and they are spreading their wings around the face of the child
as a sort of protective measure they are there to protect him and to protect his head and his face
for eternity. So one of the things that we discovered when looking at the CT data is this
child actually had four amulets that were placed on his body. They were placed directly on his skin
just underneath the layers of wrappings, and they were made of wax and I actually think that
they're probably gilded. What the CT scan shows us are his teeth are still growing inside his jaw
which allows us to give a relatively precise age of death, most probably between three and five
years. But also the mummification is interesting because it doesn't really differ too much from
that of adults. The brain was removed by the nose but unlike many mummies some resin was poured
inside that cavity after the brain was removed and some of it has seeped down the spinal column.
The organs are likely to have been removed but the chest and the abdomen are very compressed
and it's unclear from the scan whether these were fully removed or not. So the child the
mummification of the child follows a lot of the tradition which had developed over time that had
occurred and been used for previous mummies. So the last decade we've been able to CT scan
dozens of mummies and what's becoming clear is that between the Old Kingdom Middle Kingdom and
New Kingdom and later periods there is a process of evolution where the embalmers are learning
different methods and techniques. The methods used in the Old Kingdom are very experimental and we
can see that they improve over time certainly leading up to the the pinnacle of mummification
just before this period, the Roman period where they've really mastered the skill of
preserving the body but also preserving the likeness of a person. So what we also realize
that the variation in terms of mummification changes throughout time but also depends on
the different places where the person would have been mummified and even within this same area
you can see variations. This young child had his brain removed for example while the other
boy didn't and when you start looking at all this kind of variation you can see the multitude of
techniques that were used by embalmers. So the insights gain are not representative of the
whole ancient Egyptian populations but for example we're discovering that some of the diseases they
suffered from terrible dental diseases with tooth decay, dental abscesses, gum disease but also
we're able to image the arteries that have been left behind by the embalmers and inside
these arteries we can see hardened plaque which is basically hardened cholesterol and this is
clearly visible affecting the arteries in the neck around the heart in the legs and arms and this
is basically a disease that we think is a very modern disease; arthrosclerosis which leads to
strokes and heart attack, and the more we CT scan mummified individuals, the greater the data set,
the more we realize that that condition affected many ancient Egyptians and what we think of as a
modern disease actually goes back far in time. Why were these individuals affected by cardiovascular
disease? Maybe because they were elite they had access to a diet rich in animal fat and rich
food. Other insights in terms of their state of health we're finding is that some of them suffer
from cancer, again a disease that we think of as a modern condition so really these are transforming
understanding of how far these diseases go back in time and providing unique insights and a deep time
perspective on diseases which we think are very modern but appear to be affected humans including
humans from the Nile valley for thousands of years. Before the roman period there are few
mummies of children, during the roman period we have far more of mummification of children
and that really allows us to get a better understanding of this part of the population
that we had little access before and we don't know if it's a change in terms of beliefs in
terms of perception of the afterlife or if it's actually because there are much more individuals
who had access to mummification at that time. So maybe it's an accident of archaeology
where greater numbers of sites from the Roman period have been excavated which means that we
found a greater number of Roman children. Before research that we're doing and other institutions
around the world are doing, we had a very limited database, very few individuals have been studied
very few had been X-rayed or CT scanned and now we're really starting to appreciate
how complex embalming was in the past and how it varied by time and by region and by period
and of course it's an opportunity for us to share our findings with colleagues around the
world including our colleagues in Egypt who are leading the way with the study of royal mummies
and together by pooling our research and our data we can gain a
clearer sense of what ancient Egyptian mummification meant to the ancient Egyptians.