The accompanying title to the major interactive exhibition at the British Museum: Ancient lives, new discoveries.
What secrets lie beneath the wrappings of an ancient Egyptian mummy?
In recent years, British Museum curators have collaborated with scientists and medical experts to find new ways of studying ancient Egyptian mummies. New non- invasive scanning techniques have produced astonishing results, allowing us to understand more clearly how people lived and died in the ancient Nile Valley.
Eight significant mummies are ‘explored’, each carefully selected to tell a different story. They include a young female temple singer, an unknown man of high status, and a child from the Roman era.
CT scans have revealed a wealth of information, such as the health problems that the individual must have suffered during life, age at death and sometimes cause of death, the manner of mummification and on occasion irregularities in the process.
Funerary objects are also highlighted for context: for example, contents of canopic jars; analyses of embalming substances, and identification of wood species and pigment types used in coffins. The majority of the material is drawn from the British Museum’s extensive Egypt and Sudan collections.
With over 200 specially commissioned photographs, Ancient lives, new discoveries is a thorough and informative read.
John H. Taylor is a curator at the British Museum specializing in ancient Egyptian funerary archaeology. He is the author of numerous books including Journey through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, Mummy: the Inside Story, Spells for Eternity and Egyptian Mummies.
Daniel Antoine is responsible for the Museum’s human remains collection. His areas of expertise include the anatomy of the human skeleton, ancient diseases and hard tissue biology.