Mummy's Manchester Road Trip

preparing to CT scan the sarcophagus lid

On 6 June 2013 I had the great adventure of accompanying Perth Museum’s ancient Egyptian Mummy on a trip to Manchester. As the curator of the Museum’s archaeology collections the Mummy is one of the fantastic treasures I am responsible for looking after.

She has been in the collections since 1936 but we do not know a huge amount about her. She was given to the Museum by the Alloa Society of Natural History and Archaeology who closed their Museum in 1936. They had purchased her in the 1890s, from the Government Museum in Cairo, Egypt.  At the time she was said to have been found around 1890 and estimated to be approximately 2,800 years old. She lies in an elaborate, decorated sarcophagus, the painted head of which wears a vulture head-dress indicating that the mummy was either a priestess or a princess.

X-raying the sarcophagus lid

As a long-time favourite item with Museum visitors we have long wanted to try and find out more about her. The chance came when we became supporting partners in the Manchester University ‘Ancient Egyptian Animal Bio-Bank Project’, a development from an earlier project to establish an ancient Egyptian Mummy tissue bank. The main aim of the project is to record as many examples of human and animal mummies in UK museum collections as possible. The main recording mechanism is a combination of conventional x-rays and CT scans.

Such radiographic images are a non-destructive way of exploring a number of questions:

The condition and extent of the surviving skeleton
Estimation of age and confirmation of sex
Evidence of pathological conditions or diseases
Evidence to suggest cause of death
Presence or absence of viscera or brain matter (evisceration)
Presence of extraneous objects or inclusions i.e. Amulets, false eyes, vegetable matter, stones/sand.
Evidence for packing of the body cavities / subcutaneous areas
Evaluation of state of preservation
Preparing to CT scan the Mummy
Preparing to CT scan the Mummy

Wheeling through the Mummy
to the radiography suite

Generous grant aid from Manchester University to the project, which is based in the KNH Centre for Biomedical Archaeology at the University, enabled our Mummy to travel down to Manchester in a specially built case and moved by collections transport specialist Constantine. The KNH Centre website now has a special page for the Perth Mummy: The radiography took place at the Manchester Children’s Hospital and was arranged at a specially timed slot on the Thursday evening so as to have no impact on the treatment of the Hospital’s first priority, poorly children (several of whom were very excited about the Mummy being in the same hospital).

The Mummy was packed up in her special container early on Thursday morning, watched by the eager eyes and cameras of the press, television and radio news teams. Several hours later she arrived safely at the hospital in Manchester and, joined by another Mummy from Manchester Museum, the radiography began, accompanied by further TV coverage.

Preparing to CT scan the Mummy

The whole process took around three hours and it was very exciting to watch the images appear on the monitors but quite a shock too because they revealed that the skeleton although seemingly intact was also badly damaged. This made it difficult to confirm the sex as female but hopefully this is something we can confirm at a later date after full analysis of the images. What the x-rays and scans also clearly showed that there was a foreign object, an item that was not part of the skeleton, lying in the area of the abdomen. Full analysis will hopefully be able to determine what this is.

Further excitement was generated by the scanning and examination of the elaborate sarcophagus she lies in.

Scanning the coffin is a non-destructive method of capturing information about the construction of the coffin, including the carpentry and painting of the wood. In addition, Egyptologist colleagues from Manchester Museum were able to cast their expert eyes over both Mummy and sarcophagus and pass on much useful advice on her conservation and the decoration and hieroglyphics of the coffin. We have the prospect of being able to learn the name of the Mummy and something about her origins, from an accurate translation of the hieroglyphics on the sarcophagus lid.

Examining the hieroglyphics on the sarcophagus lid

The Mummy spent the night in a secure room at the hospital and then travelled back to Perth on 7 June, again in the expert care of Constantine. She enjoyed her trip away but we were glad to welcome her safely back home.