Modern Equipment Sees Beneath Mummy Rags

A T L A N T A, Nov. 29 -- Researchers at Emory University are using thesame technology to find and diagnose disease in the living and todiscover the secrets of the dead.

Using computer tomography, or CT, scans of 19 Egyptian mummiesacquired by the Michael C. Carlos Museum in 1999, the scientistsare gathering information that could not otherwise be obtainedwithout destroying or unwrapping the bodies.

One of the mummies might be Ramses I, founder of Egypt’s 19thdynasty and ruler between 1292-1290 B.C.

“We put the mummy just like a patient on the table and into theCT machine,” said Heidi Hoffman, a resident in radiology at Emoryand one of the authors of a report on the research.

Computer Puts Picture Together

The machine generates a number of cross-sectional images, orvisual slices, of the mummies. The images are then fed into acomputer program that creates three-dimensional images of themummified bodies and allows for what Hoffman calls a“fly-through,” or the creation in the viewer of the impression ofgoing inside the mummy itself.

Although she had no background in Egyptology or archaeology,Hoffman said she leapt at the opportunity to research the mummies.

“My standard as a doctor has been a normal human body, so whenI first looked at these CT scans I said, ‘What the heck am Ilooking at?’” she said by phone from Chicago, where she presenteda paper on the findings at the convention of the RadiologicalSociety of North America.

Among their conclusions, Hoffman and her colleagues say theappearance and posture of one of the bodies and the embalmingmethods used could mean it is that of Ramses I, grandfather ofRamses II or Ramses the Great.

Uncanny Resemblance

If it is, said James Harris, a retired professor of orthodontiaat the University of Michigan who has studied the royal mummies inCairo since the 1960s, it would be a “huge contribution” to thefield of Egyptology.

“Right now we have a gap after the end of the 18th dynasty,”he said. “We have for example the mummy of Tutankhamen, but thennothing until Seti I, who was the son of Ramses I.”