Thursday, February 19, 2009

Video: Meresamun

Discovery News

See the above page for the video.

The face of Meresamun, a priestess who sang in the temples of Ancient Egypt hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, has been revealed to the world for the first time thanks to a X-ray with a light ten billion times brighter than the sun.

Known as Joint Engineering, Environmental and Processing beamline or Jeep, the cutting edge technology uses intense radiation known as synchrotron light to see through solid objects.

The Jeep beamline showed astonishing 3D images of the a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy, still wrapped in her linen bandages.

According to an inscription on the casket, Meresamun (whose name means “She Lives for Amun”) served as a “Singer in the Interior of the Temple of Amun”. She was in her late twenties or early thirties when she died.

An exhibition featuring the mummy is running at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute Museum ("The Life of Meresamun: A Temple Singer in Ancient Egypt”, until December 6, 2009)

Here is a video showing the virtual unwrapping of the mummy. One roughly oval-shaped amulet covers each of Meresamun's eyes. Her eyeballs are shrunken but intact.

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