A pair of Egyptian mummies belonging to a royal architect and his wife have been found with their internal organs, including their brains, intact and well-preserved roughly about 3,500 years after their deaths, according to a recently-published PLOS One study.
Previously, experts believed that the architect, Kha, and his wife Merit had undergone what the folks at Discovery News called “a short and poor mummification,” despite the fact that they were relatively wealthy at the time of their death. The new study found that this is not the case, even if their abdominal organs, eyeballs and other body parts had not been removed.
Unlike other 18th Dynasty mummies, Kha and Merit’s organs had not been removed and placed in canopic jars. However, the researchers found that their bodies had been treated with both anti-bacterial and anti-insecticidal compounds – a discovery made using advanced X-ray imaging and chemical microanalysis to better understand techniques used to embalm the duo.
Kha was the chief architect for three 18th Dynasty Kings who died of unknown causes while in his fifties or sixties, according to Discovery News, while his wife had died much earlier, between the ages of 25 and 35. Her coffin was unfinished, so she was buried in her husband’s, and since she was shorter, special monogrammed linen was used to pad the extra space.
Both bodies received different, but quality, treatment
The mummies, which are now kept with their belongings at the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy, were found to have been mummified using natron salt solution, the same solution used for royals during the 18th Dynasty, University of York archaeological chemist Stephen Buckley said to the website. This solution would have reduced the need for their organs to be removed.
However, such evisceration would have been preferable, Buckley explained, as there is evidence that Kha’s mummy “may have been inflated by gases resulting from some bodily decay” prior to “deflating as desiccation took place post-natron bath.” He added some of the bones from Merit’s mummy had become disarticulated, possibly due to putrefaction of the internal organs.
Kha’s external wrappings showed evidence of animal fat and plant oil mixed with trace amounts of balsam, a plant gum and a coniferous resin, which the researchers explained would have given the mummy anti-bacterial and anti-insecticidal properties. Merit was embalmed using a mixture of an unusual fix oil mixed with balsam extract, plant gum, conifer resin and beeswax.
Additional chemical analysis of a fragment of Merit’s red linen shroud revealed that this same fish oil was mixed with traces of conifer resin, beeswax, and Pistacia resin, the website added. The resin, and perhaps the balsam, would have had to have been imported and indicate that the mummies received “a reasonable degree of care,” York Egyptologist Joann Fletcher said.
“Significant effort was clearly involved in their mummification, even if it did not produce the same high level of bodily preservation as the higher elite and royals at this time,” she added.
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Feature Image: Taking a digital scan of the Kha mummy. (Credit: Frank Rühli/PLOS ONE)
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