July 10, 2009

Brooklyn (USA). Workers of Brooklyn Museum change plate by one of Egyptian mummies

During several decades an Egyptian mummy from the Brooklyn Museum was known as Lady Hor or Pasebakhaienipet but recently it surprised the museum workers very much. On Tuesday, scientists conducted a computer tomography scan and found out that historians had been wrong all along – in front of them there was a man lying, not a woman.

The mummy was found by archeologists seventy years ago at the Thebes. It was believed to be a woman, since there were no decorations or ornamentations on the coffin, which would indicate the burial of a male.

The sudden discovery was made by physicians from North Shore University Hospital who scanned four mummies and found out that Lady Hor has a penis and a scrotum.

“It is definitely a male. Physiologically speaking, everything is very clear. Because there was no special ornamentation on the coffin we since 1937 believed the mummy was a female. I never even had a second thought if it was in fact so or not. This discovery changes our concept of how to determine the gender of the mummies,” said Edward Bleiberg, an overseer of the Department of Egyptian Art in the Brooklyn Museum.

But in the course of the research the scientists made more than just this one sensational discovery. During the scanning they also found in the esophagus of the mummy a stalk of reed 12-13 centimeters long. “I never saw it before. Such things can be found only during a detailed scanning, that is why nobody could guess what was inside the mummy. With the help of this equipment we receive high-quality pictures. In this way scientists find things they could not even think of before,” said Bleiberg.

When all the results of the scanning have been analyzed by specialists, scientists will be able to increase their knowledge about mummies, and will acquire more medical information. “We are able to know the reason of death, to determine the gender of each mummy, and our medical information will be almost as exact as it would be if we dealt with living patients,” pointed out Amgad Makaryus, the Head of the Department of computer tomography in the North Shore Hospital. “We also can create a 3-D reconstruction of facial tissues and find out how these people looked like while they were alive,” added Jesse Chusid, a radiologist who helped with the scanning.

Bleiberg hopes that these researches will help expand the information visitors receive in exhibition halls. “From my point of view, we will find out in this way about certain human features in famous ancient Egyptians. We begin to realize that Egyptians are human beings just as we are,” pointed out Bleiberg.

In 2007, the museum’s workers already conducted a scanning of a mummy and found out that the man was thirty years older than it had been believed before and died as a result of infection originated by a stone in the gall bladder.