This summer, a 2,500 year-old Egyptian mummy went home. Not to Egypt, but to the San Francisco Legion of Honor, which finally brought back its resident mummy after loaning him out to a Stockton museum for the past 65 years.

Stanford radiology Prof. Rebecca Fahrig helped the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) welcome the mummy by providing computed tomography (CT) scans to put on display in a special homecoming exhibition.

In celebration of the mummy’s return, a new exhibit at the Legion of Honor entitled “Very Postmortem: Mummies and Medicine” opened on Halloween.

The mummy, a minor priest named Irethorrou (meaning “The Eye of Horus is Upon You”), is one of thousands of mummies found at the Middle Egyptian site of Akhmim. He lived during Egypt’s 27th dynasty, in reality a period of Persian rule in Egypt and died in 500 B.C. between the age of 35 and 45.

“The Tut exhibit at [FAMSF] has no actual mummy,” Fahrig explained, “so the Legion of Honor decided that it would be a good time to display one.” FAMSF Curator of Ancient Art Renée Dreyfus considered different ways to approach the exhibition and decided to look into the use of CT scans to examine the mummy.

According to Fahrig, the purposes of the scans were clear from the beginning: to create a forensic facial reconstruction of the mummy using bone structure analysis (in the same way that modern forensic investigators do) and to use the high-resolution 3D imagery to do a completely non-invasive digital “unwrapping” of the mummy.

This is not Fahrig’s first time working with mummified patients — she collaborated with the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum three years ago on scanning the mummy of a five-year-old girl. Although she enjoys the different experience and learning more about mummies and Egyptology, it is a far cry from her usual research at the School of Medicine.

“We used the Siemens artis dTA c-arm imagery system, which can be used to provide real-time video x-ray images as well as to make CT images that you can slice and dice so that you can see details about the inside of the object,” Fahrig said.

The system has applications for living patients, as well, including its potential use to get 3D images of the beating heart, which could be used to guide procedures where a small area of malfunctioning heart tissue (e.g. after a heart attack) is killed on purpose.

The results of the scans of Irethorrou were sent to information technologists at Stanford, who processed them into a visual format and interpreted by Egyptologist Jonathan Elias, Director of the Akhmim Mummy Studies Consortium.

They then were sent to Fovia Inc., a Palo Alto-based software company, which used the radiological data to create a “fly through” movie that guides the viewer through the contents of the mummy, without ever having to unwrap the linens. One can see the 14 disease-curing amulets placed strategically throughout the linen wrappings, as well as high-resolution images of body parts and preserved organs, without ever disturbing the body itself.

“Very Postmortem” features Irethorrou’s still-wrapped mummy, black-and-gilt sarcophagus and his reconstructed bust. Alongside him is the reconstructed bust of his father, Ankhwenefer, whose mummy currently resides at the Washington State Historical Society in Tacoma, Wash.

Viewers can even see which nostril they pulled the brains out of during the mummification process and evidence is visible of a possible contagious disease on the mummy’s back from which he may have been suffering at the time of his death.

“People are very interested in the marriage of art, technology, history, medicine and Egyptian archaeology and art history,” Dreyfus said. “This was a wonderful opportunity to put all those aspects of culture together in one place, as well as utilize the Museum’s collection of Egyptian artifacts related to death, burial and the afterlife.”

Irethorrou came to the United States in 1890 with wealthy San Francisco businessman, politician and explorer Jeremiah Lynch. Lynch kept Irethorrou as a souvenir of his adventures in Egypt until he died in 1917 and his estate donated the mummy to the FAMSF.

“Very Postmortem: Mummies and Medicine” will run through August 15, 2010 at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

Source: The Stanford Daily