What's Behind the Mummy's Mask?

Museums haven’t unwrapped mummiesfor decades. So how do researchers find out about who’s inside all that linen, resin and gold leaf?

With modern medical technology, natch. Curators from the San Jose Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum & Planetarium recently packed up their youngest mummy in protective foam and drove it, verrrry carefully, to Stanford Hospital. “When you’re 2,000 years old, you’re really pretty fragile and you don’t like to travel in a minivan,” curator Lisa Schwappach-Shirriff told reporters on May 6 about the adventure that began at 4 a.m. that day.

The 3-foot-long, perhaps 4-year-old child was lifted gently onto an examination table, and radiologists took 30,000 snapshots with three different high-resolution CT scanners. “We only had one day because you don’t want to expose a mummy to the elements too much,” explained Rebecca Fahrig, an assistant research professor of radiology.

During the next few months, Stanford doctors, neuromuscular experts, anthropologists, orthopedists and pediatric dentists will pore over three-dimensional images taken with CT scans in an effort to answer a bunch of questions. Was it a boy or a girl? How old was he or she at the time of death? What was the cause of death? What was the child’s name? Are any amulets or precious stones hidden inside the cartonnage mask?

At the National Biocomputation Center on campus, technical director Kevin Montgomery will do a facial construction to see what the child looked like. Around the corner at the Center for Biomedical Computation, bioengineering and mechanical engineering professor Scott Delp may be able to determine if the child walked with a limp, as X-rays from the 1960s suggest. Dentist Paul Brown expects to be able to determine the mummy’s age to within six months.

Back at the San Jose museum, curators will add the Stanford discoveries to the puzzle pieces they already know—that the mummy is probably from a wealthy Egyptian family who lived in the Roman period following the death of Cleopatra VII —and come up with a life story.

“This is bringing her back to life,” says Mistri Afshad of Silicon Graphics Inc., which scanned a 2,800-year-old mummy from the British Museum in 2003 and will process the images taken at Stanford Hospital. “That was the wish 2,000 years ago.”