In the Lab: Mummy scans at Stanford

"This was a mummy we weren’t allowed to touch," Paul Brown, a biocomputing expert at Stanford, told Ivanhoe.

Biocomputing experts -- who study biological applications of computers -- and medical physicists got a detailed look at a priest who died 2,600 years ago in ancient Egypt and had been stored in a museum for decades. The scan produced thousands of high-resolution, three-dimensional pictures.

"It's a high contrast CT scan, which is an experimental CT scan -- perfect for the mummy since the mummy doesn’t have any soft tissue," Brown said.

Graphic artists use images to put the mummy back together-piece by piece. The scans reveal the most detailed images of a mummy to date. This priest died in his 20s.

"You can see the calcification, and that’s one predictor of age," Brown said.

He was laid to rest with an amulet on his forehead, representing eternal life. His organs were placed in linen pouches and set inside his torso. Another scan of a child reveals even more mysteries.

"We think it’s a little girl," Brown said. "We could see the trauma. We could see a tooth that was cracked. We looked at every single bone in her body, and we didn’t find anything unusual. They think she was weaned late, and once she left her mothers milk, she probably died."