A Child's Mummy

Abstract

The new National Museum of Natural History’s exhibition Eternal Life in Ancient Egypt includes a physical anthropological research study of a child’s mummy. To recreate a biological profile of the child, Smithsonian scientists applied modern CT scanning techniques to learn about the child’s sex, age, health, and possible ancestral origins. They also employed facial reconstruction techniques to gain a fuller visual understanding of the child. The museum’s collections records indicate that this child’s mummy was collected from Thebes by John Hamilton Slack in 1856. Sometime after 1860, the mummy was transferred to the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, where it was curated until 1958, when the mummy was transferred to the National Museum of Natural History. An initial visual assessment of the mummy identified various features that could be used for evaluating the remains. For example, the child’s body is dehydrated, the tissues treated with a drying agent evidenced by differential coloration and the remnants of crystalline and resinous material. In the embalming procedure, the body would have been dried by placing it in a mound of natron (a type of salt) for 20-30 days. After that time, the natron would have been removed and the body would have been cleansed with unguents (ointments). A bitumen mixture would have been applied as a sealing layer to the tissue. The child’s chest and abdominal region are collapsed, indicating that no apparent packing of this area was done to fill out the body. The body is not wrapped in linen strips; the lack of evidence of any strip-type wrappings adhering to the body suggests that they had been removed in the past. The body — lying on layers of linen sheets with the head tilted downward and with the chin resting on the upper chest — is typical of burials for common (or lower) social class Egyptians from the very late dynastic and Greco-Roman period. The bodies of even common Egyptians were preserved since mummification was an integral part of the Egyptian religion; there had to be a place for the “ba” spirit to reside. In the early 20 th century, necropsy was regularly performed to study a mummified body, but in the process the dissection severely damaged the mummy. With the advancements in radiographic methods, the internal features of the mummy now can be well illustrated without damage, using plain film radiography and Computer Assisted Tomography (CT) to produce a 3-dimensional image. CT was developed in the 1970s, and, like the x-ray machine,