Originally published August 9 2005
High-tech gear reveals mummy's secrets
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Before an eager audience of academics, Egyptologists, technologists and other onlookers, a 2,000-year-old girl's mummified body was examined using cutting edge technology.
Many mummies have hieroglyphics on their bandages, possibly identifying who they are and where they came from.
But physically peeling back the bandages would destroy the artifact.
So the sphinx discovery is particularly exciting for people who study mummies.
"The Egyptologist was jumping up and down," said Afshad Mistri, head of advanced visualization marketing at Silicon Graphics.
"There are thousands of mummies which have information under these bandages."
The researchers could also clearly see the tree sap resin used to fill the mummy's body, and the gilded chest plate and face mask, which are all that remain of her plaster cartonnage.
They revealed their results on Wednesday during a "virtual unwrapping" of the mummy at Silicon Graphics in Mountain View, California.
The mummy has been stored at the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum and Planetarium in San Jose since 1930, but because the child was only about 4 years old and about 4 feet tall when she died, no one knew her sex until the scientists were able to examine her using new technology.
But with the remarkable images the researchers generated, they determined the mummy was a girl based on the long, curly hair they found preserved beneath the mummifying resin.
In accordance with Egyptian beliefs about the soul, four of the mummy's internal organs (the liver, lung, stomach and intestines) were transferred to canopic jars and placed between her legs.
A perfume maker for stars like Madonna, Mandy Aftel, is planning to re-create the scent, which the scientists determined to be made of frankincense and myrrh.
Radiologists at Stanford University School of Medicine created 60,000 extremely high-resolution 2-D virtual slices (some as thin as 200 microns) of the mummy using an Axiom Siemens scanner.
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