The mummy that was buried with a “heart of gold” 2,300 years ago in Egypt

Tutankhamun has come up with a competitor. It is about another teenager who belonged to the upper class of the old Egypt and who was mummified with a heart of gold 2,300 years ago.

The body of the young man, who is estimated to have died between the ages of 14 and 15, was found in 1916. However, the remains remained for more than a century storedalong with dozens more, in the deposits of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, without having been thoroughly examined by experts.

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However, this changed when a team led by Dr. Sahar Saleem, from Cairo University, decided to examine the mummy, using a CT scanner.

The images obtained revealed that the body of the deceased carried 49 amulets of 21 different types, many of them made of gold and, for this reason, the mummy has been baptized as the “golden boy”, Saleem announced in an article published in Frontiers in Medicine journal.

The discovery has landed the mummy a room in the Egyptian Museum where it will be displayed.

hidden treasure

The scans made it possible to determine that the young man was from the upper class, since “he had healthy teeth and bones, with no evidence of malnutrition or disease” and because his remains were subjected to a “high-quality” mummification process, which included the removal of the brain and of the viscera”.

A team of Egyptian researchers used a CT scanner to examine a 2,300-year-old mummy that had been stored in the Cairo Museum for more than a century. (COURTESY SN SALEEM, SA SEDDIK, M. EL-HALWAGY).

The images showed that under the shrouds that covered the young man’s body there was a two-finger-length object next to uncircumcised penis of the deceased, a golden tongue inside the mouth and a heart-shaped beetle also made of the precious material that was under the chest cavity.

Saleem recalled that the ancient Egyptians placed amulets on the corpses of their deceased for the purpose of “protect and give vitality” to these in the afterlife. “The golden tongue inside the mouth sought to guarantee that the deceased could speak in the afterlife,” explained the expert.

The images also showed that the body of the young man was dressed in sandals and garlands of ferns.

The mummy, which is estimated to date from the late Ptolemaic period (c. 332-30 BC), was found in Edfu, in the south of the country, in 1916; six years before an expedition led by the British Howard Carter found the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings.

The remains of the boy were protected by two sarcophagi, on the outside there was an inscription in Greek and the interior was made of wood. The corpse had on its head a golden mask.

investigate without destroying

Saleem considered that this finding is just a preview of others to come.

The studies to which the boy’s mummy has been subjected have made it possible to determine that the deceased was a member of the upper class of ancient Egypt. (SN SALEEM, SA SEDDIK, M. EL-HALWAGY).

“Egypt witnessed extensive excavations in the 19th and early 20th centuries that resulted in the exhumation of thousands of preserved ancient bodies, many still wrapped and inside their coffins,” he said.

“Since its opening in 1835, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo has served as a repository for these finds and its basement it is packed with many of these mummies that have been locked up for decades without being studied or displayed“, he added.

In the past, bandages were removed from mummies and bodies were subjected to invasive dissection for research and entertainment purposes, the academic said.

But now, the use of computed tomography can become a great tool to investigate many of these remains without damaging them, something that will allow us to delve into “more about the health, beliefs and abilities of humans in ancient times,” said the expert. .

“Computed tomography represents a significant advance in radiology. Instead of using a single image, hundreds of projections of thin sections (slices) of the body can be combined to create a complete three-dimensional model,” he concluded.

Source: Elcomercio