Exhibition: A mummy of a tale

Canada.com

Surrey Museum's current exhibit Egypt: Gift of the Nile, on loan from the Royal Ontario Museum, reveals secrets about at least one mummy.

The exhibit includes a reproduction of a cartonnage -- a shell-like coffin of linen and glue that housed the mummy of a middle-class Egyptian woman named Djedmaatesankh, who died some 500 years after King Tutankhamen's death. It is inscribed with pictures of gods and protective entities and with Djedmaatesankh's image in gold.

These images tell a story of her life.

Djedmaatesankh's cartonnage surfaced at the Royal Ontario Museum sometime in the early 1900s. Recently, secrets about her life and death were revealed using a CT scanner and computer system that turns the scans into three-dimensional pictures. Without disturbing Djedmaatesankh's mummy, technicians peeled away layers, revealing the structure of the cartonnage, then the linens in which the mummy was wrapped, then her skin and bones, and finally the embalmed and packaged internal organs.