Talking Pyramids

The Brooklyn Museum has an update on the musuem’s animal mummy research project.

In the video Lisa Bruno, head conservator of objects at the Brooklyn Museum, discusses the nature of many of the animal mummies in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. She begins her presentation, however, with the scanning of the human mummy, Demetrios, who was scanned at the North Shore University Hospital in October 2007. Found in Hawara, Egypt, by the 1910 British school of archaeology, he was transported to the Brooklyn Museum in 1911.

He is part of a group of about 14 Roman mummies that are called ‘Red Shroud Mummies’, due the outer cover of linen being painted with red paint. Samples of the paint from six of these mummies were analyzed and they were all found to be painted with a red led paint from a common source, a region in southern Spain. This finding reveals much about the nature of trade routes in ancient times.

Not only did the team find out from the recent CT scanning that he was actually male, not female as originally catelogued, but the age of Demetrious was able to be confirmed as being 59.

Animal Mummies from Brooklyn Museum.

Lisa goes on to describe many of the animal mummies in the collection showing X-rays and pointing out many interesting features. Some of the items discussed include a guilded Ibis mummy, a metal statue of Wadjet-Bast with some surprises inside, cats with long teeth and their relationship with the domestic cat, fake cat mummies, a look at a range of mummified birds including the intricate weaving on human-shaped bird mummies, crocodile mummies and a look at resin used in mummified animals as evidence of trade routes.

Read the full story over with photos at the Brooklyn Museum website: Animal Mummy Update

Photo of the Cat Mummy X-Ray courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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Tags: mummies, museum, technology