Egypt

CT scan yields secrets of Vassar College's mummy

Times Herald-Record (Jeremiah Horrigan)

I'm not quite sure how poor Shem-en-Min would have responded to being referred to as "the guy", or whether or not the Akhmim Mummy Studies Consortium will enjoy being referred to as CSI Egypt, but here's an extract from an upbeat piece re the CT scan of another mummy:

The guy's name was Shem. He's a mummy from ancient Egypt and, boy, was he quiet — all wrapped up in himself.

Down beneath those linen sheets — nothing but skin and bone.

An Egyptologist was going to send him through a CT scanner to see what he could see.

Call it CSI: Egypt.

Budda boom, said the hills.

Though he had nothing directly to say about his strange predicament, Shem-en-Min, priest of the fertility god Min, who's resided for a sliver of his existence in a wooden coffin at Vassar College, held the rapt attention of a roomful of reporters, academics and medical staff — modern supplicants — eager to see and hear the evidence of his life, as filtered through 21st century technology.

In a perfect mixture of modern and ancient ways, Egyptologist Jonathan Elias used a Somaton Sensation 4 CT scanner to read the bones of the ancient body.

Elias is the director of the Akhmim Mummy Studies Consortium.

Here's a less colourful version on the Poughkeepsie Journal site (Jenny Lee):

The patient in the sarcophagus was gently lifted onto a stretcher outside Vassar Brothers Medical Mall.

The mummy named Shep-(en)-min, a male priest who might have died around 300 B.C., went in Tuesday for a CT scan so the Akhmim Mummy Studies Consortium staff could study its skeleton, age, birth defects, funeral preparation patterns and other characteristics.

Vassar Brothers medical staff buzzed around the scanned images of the mummy's skeleton because it was the first time staff had conducted a CT scan of a mummy.

It was also the first time in this country an X-ray had been done of a mummy related to another mummy, according to Jonathan Elias, the consortium's director.

Last year, the consortium did a CT scan done of Shep-(en)-min's father, Pahat, in Massachusetts. Researchers knew the two were related by reading the hieroglyphics on each mummy's coffin, Elias said.

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Egypt