Adel Allam at Cairo’s Al Azhar University, for example, used CT scans of 4,000-year-old mummies to discover that heart disease was prevalent in ancient Egypt and not solely a disease of modern society. Museum guests learn how state-of-the-art tools and technologies teach scientists and scholars about ancient cultures.īesides CT scans, scientists use isotopic testing and DNA analysis on mummies to learn about an individual’s health and diet, disease and epidemics, family relationships and connections to modern populations.Įgyptian scholars also rely on the latest technology. This sculpture portrays the “Gilded Lady” as she may have looked during her life in ancient Egypt. The researchers used the 3-D printed images from the scans to recreate her skull, which French sculptor Elisabeth Daynès then used to forensically reconstruct a life-size statue of the preserved woman. Researchers at the Field Museum used noninvasive computerized tomography (CT) scans to view layer after layer of skin and bone as they carefully revealed the mummy.īesides the gender of the person and the age at which she died (around 40), scientists learned that the remains were of someone who had curly hair and a slight overbite and who probably died of tuberculosis - a prevalent disease of the time. Seeing inside Computerized tomography (CT) scanners take hundreds of X-ray images with each rotation. Yet scientists could not examine the mummy without harming the remains. Named “gilded” because of its gold-covered headdress, the lady is one of the most well-preserved mummies in the museum’s collection. It remained relatively undisturbed at Chicago’s Field Museum until recently. American William Ayres legally purchased the mummy in Egypt in 1893 and brought it to Chicago in 1894.

The mummy blue gold