A Fantastic Voyage Into Mummies' Inner Space

By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday , December 4, 2000 ; Page A11

Fly in through the left nostril, head straight up for a few inches, then level off to cruising altitude as you pass through the hole that was punched in the skull by ancient embalmers more than 3,000 years ago.

Suddenly, you're in the brain cavity of an Egyptian mummy, which may or may not have been the Pharaoh Ramses I. The time is right; the arms are crossed, indicating royalty; and the corpse's brain has been replaced by liquid resin--too expensive to waste on commoners.

Most important, however, the traveler obtains all this information without dissecting or disturbing the mummy, thanks to computerized tomography and its attendant software, which allows scientists to convert black and white X-rays into three-dimensional, full-color, virtual images capable of being viewed from any angle.

And in a first-ever refinement, an Emory University radiology team used the technique to take "virtual tours" of a mummy's innards. The results were presented last week in a series of spectacular photos and videos at the Radiological Society of North America's annual meeting.

"It's like an endoscopy, a standard medical test in which you put a tube with a tiny camera on the end of it into the body to explore," said Emory Hospital radiologist Heidi Hoffman, the project's lead researcher. "We're able to explore the body cavities of the mummies as though we were flying through."

The researchers examined nine mummies, acquired last year for $2 million by Emory's Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta from the Niagara Falls Museum, which is on the Canadian side of the famous landmark.

Carlos Museum Assistant Curator Betsy Teasley Trope said the Canadians obtained the mummies and their coffins in Egypt in the late 19th century. The mummies included men, women and children, most of whom died about 3,000 years ago or later, Trope said. One mummy, known as "the general," dates from Egypt's Roman peri od--the first or second century A.D.

Beyond that, the museum knows little, and doubts what little it does know, Trope said. The name "the general," for instance, was bestowed by the Canadian museum and signifies nothing except that the mummy--unaccompanied by a coffin--had been a robust individual with red hair and a beard--an aesthetic more Roman than Egyptian.

"Is he a Roman buried in the Egyptian style or an Egyptian adopting Roman customs?" asked Trope. Or neither? The general and his eight associates were "probably purchased in [the artifact-rich zones around] Luxor or Thebes," she said, but their original resting places are a mystery.

With the help of computerized tomography, the museum now knows a lot more. The technique was first used in medicine in the early 1970s as a noninvasive way to examine patients' soft tissues and detect anomalies such as tumors or hemorrhages.

Instead of one camera and a plate, like a standard X-ray, computerized tomography uses multiple mini-cameras and detectors mounted in a tube that surrounds a patient (or mummy) to "scan" the individual from head to toe.

Each picture is a cross-section of the subject, Hoffman said. The data from each image are digitalized in a computer, and the "slices" are then "stacked" electronically to recreate a three-dimensional whole.

"Think of it as a loaf of sliced bread," Hoffman said. The Emory team used as many as 1,100 slices per mummy. Hoffman assigned colors to each component based on tissue density: "There's no science to the color coding," Hoffman said. "I chose colors that demonstrated the superficial structures."

The possible Ramses emerged as a two-toned, flesh and off-white death's head with very white teeth and a pinkish mouth cavity. A small child shows a readily visible depressed skull fracture, perhaps the cause of death. The general looks like a red-haired rendering of Don Quixote.

Once the "bread loaf" is stacked together, it can be peeled, resliced and examined internally and externally in countless ways and conclusions reached based on data never before seen, Hoffman said.

The possible Ramses has a deformed ear and a badly eroded right temporal bone, "suggesting a chronic ear infection" like mastoiditis, she said. "Today this is treated with antibiotics, but 3,000 years ago it could go to the brain and cause meningitis or get into the blood and kill you."

Another mummy, thought at first to be a baby, turned out to be a small child with its legs amputated below the knees: "There's no evidence of bone healing, so it happened immediately before or after death," Hoffman said. "It could have died from the injury, but more likely, if there was a coffin of a certain size, the body was cut to fit."

Hoffman said embalmers often cut a slit in the side of cadavers so they could remove all the organs except the heart, regarded as an individual's source of wisdom and emotion.

Depending on the era or social status of the individual, the organs could be wrapped in linen and reinserted, or simply replaced with sawdust, stones or wads of packing. The possible Ramses's insides are filled with tight linen wraps, readily visible in Hoffman's images.

"After removing the organs, they might put palm wine or something else back inside to get a nice odor," Hoffman said. The embalmers also paid the possible Ramses the ultimate high-status compliment by pushing a hook up his nostril, punching a hole in the bridge of his nose, pulling his brain out and refilling his head with a liquid resin that solidified as it dried.

Using the Emory team's "virtual tour" endoscopy software, almost anyone can follow the embalmers' work up close and shockingly personal. The team accompanied the hook on its way into the possible Ramses's brain, prowled around his ear to ascertain the extent of his deformity and entered the abdominal slit to stand among the linen wraps and look up into his chest cavity.

Once a corpse was emptied and refilled, or, as in the case of the general, simply cleaned up and left with the innards intact, it was stashed for 60 to 70 days in a pile of natron, a naturally occurring salt used as a desiccant. Then the body was wrapped in linens, smeared with resin and tucked away for eternity.

Although there is nothing concrete to indicate that the possible Ramses is the real Ramses, Trope noted that the side slit, organ replacement and cranial fill are all mummification techniques used for nobles and royalty around the 19th dynasty, which Ramses I founded.

Also, while the mummy of Ramses I is undiscovered, those of his son, Seti I, and grandson, Ramses II "the Great," have been found, Trope noted, and the possible Ramses "looks like Seti I and Ramses II--they have very distinctive facial features."