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Course: The British Museum > Unit 1
Lesson 2: Ancient Egypt- Ancient Egypt
- The tomb-chapel of Nebamun
- Paintings from the Tomb-chapel of Nebamun
- A bottle and a toy: Objects from daily life
- Hunefer, Book of the Dead
- The Rosetta Stone
- History uncovered in conserving the Rosetta Stone
- Egyptian mummy portraits
- Ancient Egyptian coffin prepared for the Book of the Dead exhibition at the British Museum
- Ancient Egyptian coffin mask conserved for the Book of the Dead exhibition at the British Museum
- An ancient Egyptian scribal palette in the Book of the Dead exhibition at the British Museum
- Ancient Egyptian baboon deity conserved for the Book of the Dead exhibition at the British Museum
- Ancient Egyptian papyrus in the Book of the Dead Exhibition
- Ancient Egyptian coffin panel prepared for the Book of the Dead exhibition at the British Museum
- Gebelein Man: virtual autopsy, exploring a natural mummy from early Egypt
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Gebelein Man: virtual autopsy, exploring a natural mummy from early Egypt
This man died more than five thousand years ago and was buried at the site of Gebelein, in Upper Egypt. The reconstruction of his grave illustrates the early Egyptian custom of placing the body in a contracted, foetal position, usually on the left side, with the head to the south, facing the west, the land of the dead where he would be reborn. Around him were all the things he might need for his afterlife, especially pottery to hold and serve food.
Before the pharaohs
In the Predynastic period (4400-3100 B.C.E.), the time before the pharaohs, the dead were buried in shallow graves cut into the desert sand. The graves were often lined with reed mats, making them like a bed, and the body was covered with linen or skins and more mats, like a blanket, before the grave was refilled and perhaps topped by a mound of dirt. Contact with the hot dry sand naturally preserved the bodies because the sand absorbed the water that constitutes approximately 75% by weight of the human body. Bacteria cannot breed without moisture and as a result, the bodies frequently did not decay, but simply dried out. The body of this man is remarkably well-preserved, even down to his finger-nails and hair, which has probably faded with time.
Chance discoveries of these sand-dried mummies (for example, when a grave was disturbed by animals or robbers), may have promoted the belief that physical preservation of the body was necessary for the afterlife. This may have led the later Egyptians to develop means of artificial mummification after the introduction of coffins and deeper graves separated the body from the natural drying effects of the sand.
The objects that surrounded Gebelein Man in his original burial are unknown. On display is a selection of typical grave-goods from other graves of the middle Predynastic period (about 3500 B.C.E.), the time we believe he died. Attempts to date the body using Carbon 14 (the radiocarbon method) have so far been unsuccessful.
He has been in the British Museum collection for over 100 years, but it was not until 2012 that he was CT scanned for the first time. Detailed images created from the CT scans' high resolution X-rays are allowing us to look inside his body and learn about his life and his death in ways never before possible. © Trustees of the British Museum. Created by British Museum.Want to join the conversation?
I am not much of the religious type, but wouldn't it be against Egyptian religion to just throw a mummy in an MRI and have an autopsy on it?(4 votes)
I doubt that they would have much to say about it. This guy was an ordinary person who simply got dried out. He was not royalty of any type such that they would be 'protective' of him in any way.(1 vote)
They traditionally rip the mummies brain out with a stick and out there nostrils. They brune it because in ancient eygpt they belived that the heart functions the whole body and that the brain was useless.(4 votes)
wouldn't the sand preserve the body from decaying?(2 votes)
Yes, this is exactly what has happened! If the body had decayed, everything except perhaps the bones would have disappeared. In this case, his skin, brains and other innards have been preserved.(3 votes)
- Did they find out what the mummy's last meal consisted of ??(3 votes)
I don't think so,his last meal was more than likely digested(3 votes)
i was wondering why we have to do this(1 vote)
Does the Egyptian government ever take issue with British Museum for "owning" and exhibiting their historical gems on foreign soil or are they supportive?(1 vote)
But why soft tissue in the body? the brain not removed. Does that mean he was not preserved maybe just an ordinary man while he was young?(1 vote)- He was 'Dried' In ordinary language, all the moisture left his body, and so he looks shriveled.(1 vote)
- Why aren't more efforts made to carbon date this mummy? After all, it was "discovered" by villagers who handed another handful of mummies to Petrie without the archaeologist himself ever seeing the original grave. The artifacts now on display by the mummy's side in the London museum were not found with it. In these very nebulous circumstances, a proper carbon dating of this mysterious mummy should be in order before we can claim that it is "predynastic".(1 vote)
- It says in the writing under the video that "Attempts to date the body using Carbon 14 (the radiocarbon method) have so far been unsuccessful.(1 vote)
- I wonder why he died at it seemed to be such a young age(1 vote)
He was, supposedly, stabbed in the back by a dagger.(1 vote)
Wouldn't a natural mummy like that smell extremely rancid like Pope Pius XII?
Why would any ancient coroners not care?(1 vote)
It is hard to believe, but the body was just completely dried out, due to the heat and dry air where it was buried.
The written text beneath this video's screen explains it in a great way:
"Contact with the hot dry sand naturally preserved the bodies because the sand absorbed the water that constitutes approximately 75% by weight of the human body. Bacteria cannot breed without moisture and as a result, the bodies frequently did not decay, but simply dried out."(1 vote)
Video transcript
In September 2012, the British Museum's most
famous natural mummy was taken out of the building for the first time in over a hundred years One of the museum's oldest humans was about to be examined with the newest technology And the results would be a revelation Gebelein man is one of a small group six or seven bodies of this kind which are in the British Museum All of these came from the site of Gebelein
in the 1890's Gebelein man himself was put on display straight away and he's always attracted tremendous attention We are about to take Gebelein man to the common hospital to have him CT scanned and we hope to find out a lot more about his
past biology his past health, how old he was when he died to get a better understanding of what it was like to live and die in pre-dynastic Egypt His preservation is entirely due to natural
processes You would call a body like this a natural
mummy This is the area where you can see the scapular because there is a dent in it And I'm not sure what's happening here so that would be an area to have a closer
look I won't have to talk to him and I won't have to ask him questions and won't have to give an injection and also he won't hopefully feel claustrophobic As far as I am aware pre-dynastic mummies
have never been CT scanned before Is it possible to look at the left scapular We found out that most of his bones appear
to have just fused the head of his humerus and the head of his
femur both of which suggest he's just finished growing and he probably died between the ages of 18
and 21 In the more traditional Egyptian mummy all the internal organs have been taken out
during embalming sometimes put back in after they were preserved But you will not ever see the brain because
they didn't keep that In the case of Gebelein man we would hope to see all of these organs preserved just
by drying We have teams excavating in Egypt and in Northern
Sudan every year for months at a time excavating both the towns people lived in and also the places they buried their dead There's a real focus at the moment into trying to investigate what life was like for
the ordinary Egyptians This looks structural to me, see the way there's
that line there So much of the study of ancient Egypt has been about the temples and the tombs of
kings and the gold masks you had on the burials
of pharaohs and so on but that really was the very small part of
the population maybe less than 1% what about all the ordinary people, the farmers
that lived along the Nile What was their health like? What was their life like? A month later the British Museum team has come to the Natural History Museum to see the first results of the scans of Gebelein
Man Thanks very much for coming over this was originally going to be a very quiet
little tête a tête sort of scientists to scientists sort of thing but it's sort of grown a little bit which
is great and we are very pleased that you could all
make it here Ground-breaking real time visualisation technology pioneered in Sweden is now installed on a new autopsy table which can be used by the public Now if we actually take a slice from this
direction now look down inside the body we'll see a lot of the soft tissue Well I think it will be a fantastic tool to
bring into the galleries Our visitors will be able to explore this
mummy who's been known in our galleries for over
a century And as we all learn at school the Egyptians took the brain out through the
nose as part of that artificial mummification process so this fantastic tool which is like a virtual
surgeon's knife taking away the dome of the skull and then the ability to see inside and the
preservation of a brain which is what over five thousand years old? Six thousand Based on the way he's been treated he should date to about 3600 BC maybe 3700 so he's old and it's so neat to apply this
new technology to something just this old and to get these
results to see potentially what he might have eaten
on his last day I mean it's really very exciting But what did happen on Gebelein's last day? He was young and robust, so what or who killed
him? The skeleton and soft tissue now revealed
with digital technology provide evidence for how this man died thousands
of years ago We did notice that a lot of the rips had been
broken all down kind of a line We can see that the one below this area is
quite interesting the fact that you got fragments which are still floating in soft tissue This shoulder bone had a big indentation in it the rib immediately below also looks like
it's been punctured shattered into fragments which have embedded themselves into the muscle tissue and they're still embedded there today The fracture pattern suggests that this was
done when the bone was fresh all of which points to him being stabbed in
the back It's very likely that what we've had on display in the galleries for many many years was the victim of a murder and it's only now that we're truly finding
out who this person was