Unwrapping Mummy Mysteries Goes High-Tech

LEMONT, IL — Northwestern University scientists and students are working to unravel the mysteries of a mummy of a 5-year-old girl. According to the university, scientists are studying how her body was prepared 1,900 years ago in Egypt, what items she may have been buried with, the quality of her bones and what material is present in her brain cavity.

The mummy traveled from Evanston to Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont on Nov. 27 for an all-day X-ray scattering experiment. The university said it was the first study of its kind performed on a human mummy.

“This is a unique experiment, a 3-D puzzle,” Stuart Stock, research professor of cell and molecular biology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who led the synchrotron experiment, said in a release. “We have some preliminary findings about the various materials, but it will take days before we tighten down the precise answers to our questions. We have confirmed that the shards in the brain cavity are likely solidified pitch, not a crystalline material.”

According to the university, the Roman-Egyptian mummy — which resides at the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary on Northwestern’s Evanston campus — is one of only approximately 100 portrait mummies in the world. These mummies have an extremely life-like painting of the deceased individual incorporated into the mummy wrappings and placed directly over the person’s face.

This particular mummy is just over three feet long, and the little girl’s body is swaddled in a copious amount of linen, the university said. The outermost wrappings have been arranged in an ornate geometric pattern of overlapping rhomboids and also serve to frame the portrait. The face, painted with beeswax and pigment, gazes serenely outward, her dark hair gathered at the back. She is wearing a crimson tunic and gold jewelry.

“Intact portrait mummies are exceedingly rare, and to have one here on campus was revelatory for the class and exhibition,” Marc Walton, a research professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, said in a release.

The exhibition, “Paint the Eyes Softer” will be held at Northwestern’s Block Museum of Art.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our undergraduate students — and for me — to work at understanding the whole object that is this girl mummy,” Walton said in a release. “Today’s powerful analytical tools allow us to nondestructively do the archaeology scientists couldn’t do 100 years ago.”

The synchrotron experiment at Argonne is a modern-day version of 19th-century England’s “mummy unwrapping” parties, Walton said in a release. The Northwestern team collaborated with scientists at Argonne and used the extremely brilliant high-energy synchrotron X-rays produced by Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source to probe the materials and objects inside the mummy, while leaving the mummy and her wrappings intact.

“From a medical research perspective, I am interested in what we can learn about her bone tissue,” Stock said in a release. “We also are investigating a scarab-shaped object, her teeth and what look like wires near the mummy’s head and feet.”

Prior to the Argonne trip, the university said the mummy has had a CT scan done at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in August, also led by Stock. The scan gave the researchers a 3-D map of the structure of the mummy and enabled them to confirm the girl is 5 years old.

At Argonne, Stock and his team shined the pencil-shaped X-ray beam (about twice the diameter of a human hair) on areas of high-density in the mummy that were identified by the CT scan. They now will use the X-ray diffraction patterns as “fingerprints” to identify each crystalline material, according to the university.

“We’re basically able to go back to an excavation that happened more than 100 years ago and reconstruct it with our contemporary analysis techniques,” Walton said in a release. “All the information we find will help us enrich the entire historic context of this young girl mummy and the Roman period in Egypt.”

Argonne said the X-rays at the APS are one billion times more powerful than the X-rays from a doctor’s office, and could shed light on ancient life.

According to Argonne, the APS is among the most powerful X-ray microscopes across the globe, and about 5,000 researchers from around the world visit the APS every year to conduct experiments. The APS X-ray beams have been used for significant scientific projects across disciplines and areas of research, from the pharmaceutical industry to aviation to batteries. Two Nobel prizes for chemistry have been awarded for work done at the APS.

Photo provided by Argonne National Laboratory. Jonathan Almer, left, a physicist and group leader at Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source, takes measurements at the APS Monday during a study on a mummy from ancient Egypt.