X-rays reveal an ancient amulet hidden for millennia inside the Egyptian mummy of a little girl

Exceptional new discovery on a mummy. X-rays reveal the presence of an ancient and unknown amulet

He is about to end up run over, his mother saves him

X-ray scans of an ancient Egyptian mummy offer a surprising discovery. In spite of the external representation, which portrays a woman, it is a girl of just 5 years who kept a mysterious amulet.

An Egyptian sarcophagus decorated with the portrait of a woman contained a surprise: the body of a little girl who was only 5 years old when she died. Now, scientists have discovered much more about the mysterious young woman and her burial, thanks to high-resolution and X-ray scans that have managed to capture unprecedented detail and very small portions of the artifact.

Computed tomography scans of the mummy's teeth and femur confirmed the girl's age, although they did not show signs of trauma to her bones to provide information on the cause of her death. Targeted, high-intensity X-rays also revealed a mysterious object placed on the abdomen of the baby.

The mummy, known as "Hawara Portrait Mummy No. 4," is part of the collection of the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. It was found between 1910 and 1911 in the ancient Egyptian site of Hawara and dates back to the XNUMXst century AD, when Egypt was under Roman rule.

Scans performed on the mummy about two decades ago were low-contrast and many details were difficult to see. For the new analysis, however, the researchers conducted new CT scans to visualize the structure of the mummy in its entirety. They then focused on specific regions using X-ray diffraction, in which a highly concentrated X-ray beam bounces off atoms in crystal structures, revealing the type of material the object is made of.

"This is the first time that X-ray diffraction has been used on an intact mummy",

said study lead author Stuart Stock, a research professor of cellular and developmental biology at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

"During the Roman era in Egypt, mummies began to be made with portraits attached to the front surface," said Stock. "Many thousands have been made, but most of the portraits have been removed from the mummies we have - perhaps only 100 to 150 still have the portrait attached to the mummy."

Although the portrait showed an adult woman, the small size of the mummy suggests that it is a small child, still without permanent teeth. Her body measured 93,7cm from the top of her skull to the soles of her feet. The researchers also found 36 needle-like structures, 11 around the head and neck, 20 near the feet and 5 near the torso. X-ray diffraction determined that these were "modern" metal wires or pins that may have been added to stabilize the artifact during the last century.

X-rays reveal an ancient amulet hidden for millennia inside the Egyptian mummy of a little girl

Another discovery left scientists speechless: a small elliptical object about 7 mm long it was placed on the abdomen of the little girl. X-ray diffraction showed it was made of calcite. Pending further analysis, the authors of the discovery speculated that it could be a amulet placed on the body of the child damaged during mummification.

After such an incident, the priests often placed an amulet like a scarab on the damaged body part to protect the person in the afterlife, and the calcite object was about the right size and was in the right position for it to be a protective beetle.

The findings were published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Sources of reference: ScienceAlert, Journal of the Royal Society Interface