Sunday, October 07, 2007

Three mummies of children from the BM undergo analysis

The Age

The opening paragraph of this piece is a bit strange, but the rest of the article is perfectly coherent. Three mummies, all children, dating to the Graeco-Roman period and stored in the British Museum are undergoing analysis.

Who were these kids and how did they die? How old were they? Were they suffering from disease? Were they related? And were they Egyptians, Greeks or Romans?

It sounds like a job for a "forensic Egyptologist", which is how Janet Davey describes herself.

Ms Davey and a team of colleagues from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine are using modern medical and forensic techniques, including CT scans and DNA testing, to answer the questions. The mummified bodies of the boy and two girls, nicknamed "the angelic one", the "cross one" and the "sad one", had been in the British Museum since the 1870s.

Apart from being identified as coming from the "Graeco-Roman" period (332BC to 395AD) and being X-rayed in the 1960s, they were left alone.



The article describes the first stages of the analysis. No conclusions have yet been reached. See the rest of the two-page story for full details and a photograph of one of the mummies.


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