Ancient Egyptians who wanted to enjoy the afterlife needed the services of a skilled embalmer. But even if your relatives hired the best, that didn’t guarantee you would reach the next world suitably intact. Evidence from surviving mummies suggests some Egyptians made their final journey with a leg, a liver or other vital part missing, while others had added extras – a probe, a swab or bits of someone else’s body. Turning a corpse into a mummy fit for everlasting life took 10 weeks, and in Egypt’s climate even an embalmer with a strong stomach might be tempted to rush the job, or steal away for some fresh air at a crucial moment. If he made a few mistakes, who would know?
The embalmers who prepared the body of Nesperennub, a priest at the Temple of Khons in Karnak, were at the top of their profession. Yet even with so illustrious a client, they bungled. And no one would have been any the wiser if the British Museum hadn’t chosen Nesperennub for a ground-breaking experiment in “virtually unwrapping” a mummy.
NESPERENNUB, Beloved of the God, Opener of the Doors of Heaven, Libationer of Khons: if a dead priest needed references when he reached the place of judgement then the inscriptions on Nesperennub’s beautifully painted mummy case should see him safely into the next world. To ensure he enjoyed his new life to the full, his body was mummified, wrapped in fine linen and enclosed in a painted linen-and-plaster case, which in turn was placed in a wooden coffin before interment in his burial chamber.
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Diggers discovered Nesperennub’s tomb in the 1890s, and in 1899 the British Museum bought his intact coffin complete with unopened mummy case. Nesperennub is one of the finest of the museum’s mummies. He died at a time when the embalmer’s art had reached near perfection, and inscriptions on the coffin and at Karnak tell us exactly who he was.
Nesperennub was born in the 9th century BC into a family of Theban priests. He performed his priestly duties at the temple of the god Khons at the great religious complex at Karnak. Each morning he opened the doors of the god’s shrine to mark the start of the day’s rituals. During religious festivals, when an image of Khons was carried in procession, he walked at the god’s right hand, bearing an ostrich-feather fan.
The museum staff resisted the temptation to unwrap him to find out more, but in the 1960s Nesperennub was X-rayed and found to be a mature adult. The plates also showed a strange cap-like object tucked behind his head. Some experts suggested it might be Nesperennub’s placenta, a revered organ saved since his birth, but others were dubious. X-rays couldn’t solve the mystery: bones, organs packed in linen, and copious amounts of resin lie one over the other, making details hard to distinguish.
Two years ago, the museum finally began to unwrap its mummy – not physically but virtually, without even opening the mummy case. John Taylor, assistant keeper in the department of ancient Egypt and Sudan, teamed up with David Hughes, a specialist in visualisation technology at the UK office of Silicon Graphics (SGI) in Reading, to create a three-dimensional image of Nesperennub.
The first step was to put Nesperennub through a CT scanner at the nearby National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. At SGI, the data from 1500 images, each a slice through the mummy from chest to spine, were fed into a supercomputer and reassembled into a three-dimensional whole (New Scientist, 9 March 2002, p 20). “This allows us to cut through the block of data at any angle, not just the angle the image was captured at by the original scan,” says Hughes.
In another groundbreaking innovation, SGI developed technology that allows archaeologists to explore the mummy at will, turning the body around to look from below, for instance, or fading away certain features to reveal what’s beneath. “We can selectively take off the bandages,” says Hughes. “And we can illuminate different bits of data with artificial lighting, almost as if we have a torch and are shining it on different parts of the body. It’s just as if you were handling a physical object.”
Returning again and again to SGI’s Reality Centre theatre and donning 3D stereo glasses, Taylor and a string of experts have been piecing together a picture of Nesperennub’s life and death. The sutures of the skull, wear on the teeth and traces of arthritis in the spine suggest the priest was between 40 and 50 when he died. There is no obvious cause of death. The skull has a small round hole over the eye, perhaps the result of TB, but it was unlikely to have killed him.
For Taylor, the most extraordinary discovery concerns the mysterious cap – the alleged placenta – and it says more about the embalmers than the Priest of Khons. “Nesperennub was a high-status priest, so you would expect him to have the best treatment and be treated with respect. But clearly once they got him inside the embalming tent and all his relatives had gone, they grew careless.”
Nesperennub’s embalmers followed the standard procedure of the time, removing his brain by breaking the bones at the top of the nose and probing inside the skull with a metal rod. They removed internal organs through an incision in the abdomen, discarding some and preserving and wrapping others before replacing them inside the body. The heart – the seat of the soul, which would be weighed at the moment of reckoning – was usually left undisturbed. In Nesperennub’s case the embalmers failed to take good care of it. “It’s either missing or an unrecognisable shrivelled blob,” Taylor says. “Either they did a bad job or they pulled it out altogether.”
The body itself was dried by heaping on natron – a natural mix of sodium salts – and leaving it for 40 days. Finally it was coated with aromatic resin, which would help to preserve it, and wrapped in several layers of linen bandages and sheets. Among Nesperennub’s bandages were the usual charms: a scarab to protect the heart, a winged metal ornament across the chest, and a group of small amulets at his throat. On his forehead was something Taylor had never seen before – a small squiggly serpent made of a material less dense than metal but denser than flesh. Taylor suspects it is wax, a material with magical properties.
And then there was the mysterious “cap”. From the first CT images, it was obvious that this was not a placenta but an object made of clay. “It was a very crude sort of thing. You could see bits of grit embedded in it,” says Taylor. “Then with the 3D images, it hit you immediately. It was recognisably a bowl.” So what was it doing there? “It was too rough to be a religious object put there deliberately,” he says. He began to suspect it was part of the embalmers’ equipment.
“By adjusting the settings, we could see under the bowl – and saw something attaching it to the head that we’d not seen before. From its density it appears to be resin. Then we turned and looked at the back of the head and could see a large gunky mass of resin.”
The embalmers had clearly had trouble with their resin. It had to be liquid to paint over the dried mummy, but this resin was too runny. It trickled down the sides of Nesperennub’s face and ran off the back of his head. Rather than waste such expensive material, the embalmers decided to catch the surplus in a bowl. “We think they might have made the bowl then and there,” says Taylor. “It was moulded by hand. You can see five finger marks on it.”
A re-enactment with a replica bowl, an actor and some honey to mimic resin suggests Taylor was on the right track. With the actor lying down and the bowl placed exactly as it is on the mummy, it caught the dripping honey perfectly. But why was it still there?
Another viewing provided the answer. Turning Nesperennub around to view the back of his head, Taylor spotted a big hole in the skin. The embalmers, it seemed, had left it too late to retrieve their bowl: the resin had started to solidify. “When they saw the bowl was stuck to the head they must have tried to prise it off,” says Taylor. “Then they tore off a lump of skin and decided it was safer to leave it and wrap him up, bowl and all.”