Haifa’s Carmel Medical Center earlier this month admitted in its CT facility an unusually elderly patient — a 2,400-year-old Egyptian mummy nicknamed Alex, who has been living in Jerusalem for the past 100 years, since the 1930s, when it was given as a gift to the Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem from the Patriarch of Alexandria — hence its name. The mummy was delivered by the staff of the Israel Museum in a padded coffin to be scanned by Prof. Nathan Peled, Director of imaging at Carmel, who is an expert on scanning archeological relics.
“The CT scan allows us to examine the mummy in a variety of positions without having to unwrap its shrouds, and we’re able to find out a great deal of detail without risking damage to the relic,” Prof. Peled explained.
Israel Museum’s exhibition curator Gilat Bennett, who supervised Alex’s hospital visit, said that only rich and affluent Egyptians merited mummy-embalming, which was a complex and expensive procedure. The embalmers removed the departed person’s internal organs, replacing them with large quantities of salt, then covering the body with oil and natural tar and wrapping it with strips of linen. The Egyptian dry air also helped in the preservation process, and the bodies were kept for thousands of years.
The CT scanning process enables seeing through the body’s covers, revealing a stunning, perfect image of the mummy. For one thing, the Israel Museum people had been told by the Greek Church in Jerusalem that the mummy was a 17-year-old man. But Prof. Peled had news for them: “Our CT scan showed a man of age 50 to 60, who probably didn’t spend the bulk of his time out in the sun,” he concluded.
Alex was probably a senior government official, who suffered from osteoporosis and receding gums and missing teeth, suggesting he ate a diet rich in sugar, as befitted a man of his stature. After 2,400 years, his skeleton, to the great surprise of the researchers, remained perfectly whole, as well as his skin, ears, fingernails, hair and blood vessels. He was 153 cm (5′ 2″) tall, and he spent the last 2,400 years lying on his back with his hands folded across his chest.
The Carmel Medical Center has a long history of scanning a variety of archeological and anthropological artifacts, some of them quite rare. Prof. Peled often collaborates with Prof. Israel Moskowitz of the Tel Aviv University Dept. of Medicine, who is one of the most outstanding anthropologists in Israel and the world. For the past 15 years they have scanned skeleton remains from prehistoric, biblical, and later periods.
“The CT scan of ancient skeletons allows us to learn about the health and nutrition, occupation and illnesses of people along human history based on evolutionary models,” Prof. Peled explained. “We discovered, for instance, that the jaws of early men were massive compared with modern man, because their chewing required much more effort. The state of people’s teeth changed according to their nutrition.”
By the end of the day, Alex was returned to his coffin and taken back, under guard, to the Israel Museum, where he is part of the new exhibition which began this month and will run through October: Pharaoh in Canaan: The Untold Story.