Monday, July 31, 2006

CAT scan of 2000 year old child

http://tinyurl.com/kmkhu (mailonsunday.co.uk)
The mummy of a small child originally found in Hawara by Flinders Petrie has been CT scanned by the MRI unit of the John Radcliffe Hosptial in Oxford: "Doctors carried out the scan on behalf of the nearby Ashmolean Museum in an attempt to discover what lay beneath the mummy's bandages. The CT scan involves taking X-ray images of a patient from different angles, giving a series of cross-sections which can be combined to build up a picture of the inside of the body.
Over 15 minutes, more than 2,500 individual images were taken of the three-foot package in order to build up a 3D picture. The scan established that the mummy did indeed contain human remains - the Egyptians would sometimes substitute cats, dogs or herons to appease the bereaved family if there was a problem with the embalming process.
And the remains were those of a child preserved using traditional methods and carefully wrapped in linen bandages, decorated with gilded studs.
Researchers discovered that it was a young boy aged between four and seven, who was probably killed by pneumonia. Four metal buckles had been placed on the body - on the face and above the heart, stomach and genitals - to keep the bandages in place. "
See the above page for the full article, with a photograph showing the buckles identified in the scan (if you click on the photograph to see the larger image, the buckles are quite clearly visible).

Also covered on the Sunday Mirror (in brief):
http://tinyurl.com/kuca5 (sundaymirror.co.uk)

UPDATED August 1st:
More details added at the oxford.net website:

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