Ancient Egyptian Mummies Embalmed With Unusual Recipes : Discovery News

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Ancient Egyptian Mummies Embalmed With Unusual Recipes

Aug 7, 2015 04:04 PM ET // by Rossella Lorenzi

Above shows the digital X-ray imaging process of the mummy of Kha.
Frank Rühli/PLOS ONE

Mummies'Faces,Hairdos,Revealedin3D:Photos

The high tech process, involving CT scanning and multiple scientific disciplines, recreates what the three individuals looked like as they were laid to rest nearly 2,000 years ago. Here, a mummy is set to go into a CT scanner.

Nicolas Morin, McGill University

Mummies of a young male, a young female and an older woman were virtually unwrapped using CT scanning. Models of their bone structure were then created. Barbara Lawson, a curator at the Redpath Museum who also worked on the project, added that all three mummies were scanned at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital as part of Western University's IMPACT Radiological Mummy Database Project.

Forensic artist Victoria Lywood undertook the actual reconstruction work, which was based on the 3-D high-resolution images along with ultrasonic images and anthropological research. A step in the process involved sketching what the individuals would have looked like. Some have detected a facial resemblance, at least from the front profile, with the late pop star Michael Jackson. Jackson was, in fact, very interested in Egyptian history, which might have influenced some of his personal style.

Victoria Lywood, John Abbott College; Redpath Museum, McGill University

The Theban male died between the ages of 20-30. His mummy was purchased in Thebes, his likely place of death. The young man was "relatively short in stature," according to Wade.

Victoria Lywood, John Abbott College; Redpath Museum, McGill University

Lywood is one of the world's leading experts on such recreations. "I reconstruct modern-day skulls, archaeological remains and fragmentary skulls," she told Discovery News. "The oldest I have constructed was from 6,000 years ago found in Israel. While there were people of all sizes throughout the ages, my experience is that skull size was much smaller than modern populations."

Victoria Lywood, John Abbott College; Redpath Museum, McGill University

 

This Ptolemaic female was a "late adolescent girl or young woman of average height and elite status," Wade said. "Her age at death is estimated at between 18 and 24 years." Her mummy was found "in a tomb pit in the solid rock near Hawara el-Makta in Fayum (Lower Egypt) and acquired in Egypt towards the end of the 19th century and donated to the Redpath Museum in 1895," Lawson said.

Victoria Lywood, John Abbott College; Redpath Museum, McGill University

Clearly ancient Egyptians prized fashionable coifs, given the complexity of the young woman's hairstyle. Her hair must have been fixed before mummification, perhaps in hopes of sending her off to the next life looking her best.

Victoria Lywood, John Abbott College; Redpath Museum, McGill University

The hairdo of a young ancient Egyptian female was reconstructed on a modern woman.

Victoria Lywood, John Abbott College; Redpath Museum, McGill University

The reconstructed young woman is shown here without her wig. Clearly her hair was a big part of her look.

Victoria Lywood, John Abbott College; Redpath Museum, McGill University

The oldest individual of the three was this woman -- likely a tall, upper middle-class adult between the ages of 30 and 50 years old. If she were alive today, this woman (at least based on her physical appearance) would probably fit right in with modern society. As Wade said, "Humans have been physically pretty much the same for the last 2,000 years...That's not to say that evolution has stopped working on us, but the time frame of 2,000 years is just a drop in the bucket for noticeable physical changes and we've reduced the need for physical changes by adapting culturally." The three ancient Egyptian people died at somewhat different times and never knew each other. But, as reconstructions, the early Egyptians will spend even more time together, because they will star in a new display in the Redpath Museum's World Cultures gallery starting in February.

Victoria Lywood, John Abbott College; Redpath Museum, McGill University

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Unusual embalming recipes have been identified on two ancient Egyptian mummies, according to new international research.

The study investigated the 18th Dynasty mummies of the royal architect Kha and his wife Merit, a couple who were believed to have undergone a short and poor mummification -- if no mummification at all -- despite their relative wealth at death.

Indeed, their internal organs were not removed and placed in canopic jars, as generally occurs in classical royal 18th Dynasty artificial mummification.

Surprisingly, the researchers discovered that all internal organs – brain, thoracic and abdominal organs, eyeballs as well as ocular muscles and nerves -- were in excellent state of preservation after some 3,500 years.

"Both individuals underwent a relatively high quality of mummification, fundamentally contradicting previous understanding," Frank Rühli, Stephen Buckley, Joann Fletcher, Raffaella Bianucci, Michael Habicht, Eleni Vassilika and colleagues wrote in the journal PLOS ONE.

"Elucidated ‘recipes,’ whose components had anti-bacterial and anti-insecticidal properties, were used to treat their bodies," the researchers added.

Discovered by the Italian Egyptologist Ernesto Schiaparelli in 1906 on the cliffs surrounding the ancient village of Deir el Medina, the tomb of Kha and Merit is the most intact non-royal tomb from the New Kingdom.

Two large wooden sarcophagi containing the mummies of the architect and his wife were recovered along with over 500 hundred items, which included food, five nested coffins, full sets of linen clothing, monogrammed underwear and two of the earliest known examples of the Book of the Dead.

The mummies and almost all their belongings are now kept at the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy.

Kha was the chief architect of three 18th Dynasty Kings: Amenhotep II (1424–1398 BC), Thutmose IV (1398–1388 BC) and Amenhotep III (1388–1348 BC). He died of unknown causes in his fifties to sixties, under the reign of Amenhotep III, Tutankhamun's grandfather.

Merit died at about 25 to 35 years old, long before her husband. Her own coffin was not finished, and so she was buried in Kha’s anthropomorphic coffin. Since she was much shorter than her husband, some of Kha’s monogrammed linen fabric was used to pad out the space and accomodate her corpse inside the large coffin.

The researchers used new generation X-ray imaging and chemical microanalyses to better understand the type of mummification used to embalm the couple.

Besides the presence of the internal organs, X-rays revealed that both mummies were richly decorated with jewellery, with Kha wearing funerary amulets. Analysis on tiny samples from both individuals' outer wrappings shed light on the mummification process.

“They were mummified using a natron salt solution, as were the royals in the 18th Dynasty, but unlike the wealthier royals, their internal organs were not removed,” Stephen Buckley, an archaeological chemist at the University of York in England, told Discovery News.

According to Buckley, the salt solution would have reduced the need for evisceration, but the end result, though reasonable, shows why removal of the internal organs, followed by packing the body cavities, was preferable.

“There is evidence that Kha's mummy may have been inflated by gases resulting from some bodily decay, before deflating as desiccation took place post-natron bath,” Buckley said.

He noted that Merit's mummy has disarticulated bones within the wrappings, which may be due to some, if limited, putrefaction of the internal organs left in place.

Nevertheless, the presence of shrunken internal organs and relatively well-preserved bodies suggests that significant efforts were made to embalm Kha and Merit.