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An Egyptian mummy which was decorated with a portrait of a woman contained a surprise: the body of a child who was only 5 years old when he died. Now, scientists have learned more about the mysterious girl and her burial, thanks to the high-resolution scans and X-ray “microbeams” targeting very small regions in the intact artifact.
X-ray computed tomography. Scans (CT) of the mummy’s teeth and femur confirmed the girl’s age, although they showed no signs of trauma to her bones that could suggest the cause of her death.
The targeted, high-intensity X-rays also revealed a mysterious object that had been placed on the baby’s abdomen, scientists said in a new study.
Related: Image Gallery: The Faces of Egyptian Mummies Revealed
Scans performed on the mummy about two decades ago were low-contrast and many details were difficult to see. For the new analysis, the researchers conducted new CT scans to visualize the mummy’s structure in its entirety. They then focused on specific regions using X-ray diffraction, where a tightly concentrated X-ray beam bounces off the atoms in crystalline structures; variations in diffraction patterns reveal the type of material the object is made of.
This is the first time that X-ray diffraction has been used on an intact mummy, said study lead author Stuart Stock, research professor of cell and developmental biology at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago. .
The mummy, known as “Hawara Portrait Mummy No. 4”, is in the collection of the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. It was excavated between 1910 and 1911 from ancient egyptian site of Hawara, and dates back to the 1st century AD, when Egypt was under Roman rule.
“During the Roman era in Egypt, they started creating mummies with portraits attached to the front surface,” Stock told Live Science. “Many thousands have been made, but most of the portraits have been removed from the mummies we have – maybe only 100 to 150 still have the portrait attached to the mummy,” he said.
Even if the portrait of the mother n. 4 showed an adult woman, the mummy’s small size suggested otherwise, and scans confirmed the mummy was a child, still so young that none of her permanent teeth had emerged. His body measured 37 inches (937 millimeters) from the top of the skull to the soles of his feet, and the casings added another 2 inches (50 mm), according to the study.
The researchers also found 36 needle-like structures in the case: 11 around the head and neck, 20 near the feet and five near the torso. X-ray diffraction determined that these were modern metal wires or pins that may have been added to stabilize the artifact during the last century.
A surprising finding was an uneven layer of sediment in the mummy’s casings, possibly mud that had been used by the priests present to secure the mummy’s bandages, Stock suggested. Another puzzling discovery was a small elliptical object about 7mm long, which the researchers found in the mummy’s casings above the abdomen, dubbing the object “F inclusion.”
X-ray diffraction showed it was calcite, but what was it? One possibility is that it could be an amulet included because the baby’s body was damaged during the mummification, Stock said. After such an incident, priests often placed an amulet like a scarab on the damaged body part to protect the person in the afterlife, and the calcite “blob” found was about the right size and in the right position for it to be a scarab. protective, explained Stock.
However, the resolution of the CT scan wasn’t high enough to show the details carved into the object, so it’s impossible to say for sure what it might be, he added.
“Every time you walk into a studio like this, you get good answers. But then you raise other questions,” said Stock.
The results were published online November 25 on Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
Originally published on LiveScience.
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