The results obtained with this protocol provided important anthropologic and paleopathologic information that would have been impossible to obtain by other noninvasive techniques. Moreover, this method has great potential for studies of conservation, anthropology, and paleopathology of other Egyptian and ancient human remains. Multidisciplinary cooperation among anthropologists, paleopathologists, Egyptologists, and radiologists is essential.
Our multidisciplinary cooperative study produced a model of the face of an individual who lived nearly 3,000 years ago, which would not previously have been possible unless we unwrapped, destroyed, and altered the conservation of the bandages and the mummy.
Philippe Charlier and a multidisciplinary team explain how they confirmed an embalmed head to be that of the French king Henry IV using a combination of anthropological, paleopathological, radiological, forensic, and genetic techniques
A whole-body examination was performed with multidetector computed tomography (CT) of a completely wrapped Egyptian mummy from the collection at the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy. The mummy dates from the Eighteenth Dynasty. Although embalmment of the deceased man should have included evisceration in accordance with his social rank, no canopic jars containing internal organs had been found at the discovery of his tomb, and at CT, all the organs were found to have desiccated inside the body. Numerous calcified stones that were incidentally identified in the gallbladder had attenuation characteristics indicative of a predominant bile pigment content. This case demonstrates the superior capabilities of multidetector CT for the noninvasive study of embalmed bodies. The intrinsic capacity of CT for depicting the density of materials allowed not only the identification of the gallbladder stones but also their characterization.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.