The Field Museum in Chicago has more than a dozen ancient Egyptian mummies in its collection, but one in particular has puzzled researchers for years. Now, the mystery of Madame Chenet’s burial procedure appears to have been solved with the use of a CT scanner.
Madame Chenet lived about 3,000 years ago, during the Third Intermediate Period of Egypt, in the midst of the 22nd Dynasty. Immediately after her death, one of the ways funeral professionals prepared for her afterlife was to construct a cartonnage, a paper mache-like box to hold the dead body. But in Chenet-aa’s case, there were no visible signs of seams, and Egyptologists have wondered for years how the embalmers got her inside the casing. According to Announcement on October 24th A mobile CT scanner from the Field Museum helped finally explain the strategy behind Chenet’s “locked mummy” cartonnage and new physical information at the time of her death.
A computed tomography (CT) scan creates a 3D rendering of a subject by digitally stacking thousands of X-ray scans. Researchers recently spent four days transferring 26 mummies, including Chenet-aa, to a mobile machine parked outside the Field Museum. The resulting images have allowed experts to analyze the cartonnage and its contents at an unprecedented level of detail, including how funeral goers got the chéné-aa into the seemingly seamless case in the first place. I was able to figure it out.
“You begin to see seams and laces tied down the back,” JP Brown, the museum’s senior conservator of anthropology, said in a statement.
CT imaging also revealed new details about Chenet-aa’s final state of health. Researchers say the nobleman died in his late 30s or early 40s, but the cause of death has not been determined. Her teeth were not in the best condition, many of them were missing at the time of her death, and the remaining teeth showed “significant wear,” the museum said in a statement. Experts believe this is due to a diet that is high in “stray grains” that damage enamel.
Images of the mummy’s skull contain bright objects in both eye sockets, despite the apparent lack of organs. These are prosthetic eyes of an unknown material intended to allow Chenet to see after death.
[Related: ‘Screaming woman’ may solve a 3,500-year-old mummy mystery.]
“The ancient Egyptian idea of life after death is similar to our idea of saving for retirement. “I hope it’s true,” Brown explained. “The addition is literal. If you want eyes, you need physical eyes, or at least a physical implication of eyes.”
These are just the beginning of potential insights into some of the Field Museum’s oldest and most delicate ruins. Over the next year, researchers hope to continue examining thousands of CT scans for further clues about death and life in ancient Egypt.
