4 FEATURE

December 10-11, 2016 theaustralian.com.au/reviewAUSE01Z01AR - V1

priest from nearby Akhmim) with the scroll of abutton. Take Tamut: a virtual zoom through hergold, red and blue cartonnage case reveals awoman who, being bald, wore a wig, has protec-tive amulets placed on her skin — a wingedmetal deity at her throat, stones over her eyes tohelp to see in the afterlife — and four wax figu-rines, each containing an organ, buried insideher chest cavity. Her nails are covered with thinlayers of metal, probably gold. Another zoom, apeeling back of the skin, and we see calcifiedplaque in Tamut’s right thigh bone; like toomany people in the modern world, Tamut suf-fered from high cholesterol.

“Tamut is fantastically preserved,” Antoineenthuses. “She provides us with many insightsabout what it would be like to live in that period,both from a religious point of view and also abiological one. We’re building a greater idea ofcardiovascular disease in antiquity; it seems tohave been particularly prevalent among thewealthy of the Nile valley, or at least in thosewho could afford mummification.”

One floor above us, most of the museum’s120 mummies are on permanent display (minusthe six en route to Australia), along with theircoffins and other tomb artefacts. So too is a de-scription of mummification by the Greek histo-rian Herodotus, who records that this heavilyritualised process took 70 days, and involved re-moving perishable organs, which were thendried, wrapped and either placed in canopic jarsor back inside the salt-dried body. The brainwas removed through the nose with a hook.

In 2012 the museum premiered its virtual au-topsy table, a medical visualisation tool that al-lowed visitors to explore the “natural” mummyknown as Gebelein Man, who was buried in adry, sandy cemetery in Upper Egypt with hisknees drawn up to his chest and a deep stabwound in his back. The popular success of thetable — “It is in use 95 per cent of the time” —led to the creation of 2014 exhibition and now,with different mummies and superior scanningtechnology afforded by London’s Royal Bromp-ton Hospital, to Egyptian Mummies: ExploringAncient Lives.

“For Sydney we used dual-energy CT scan-ners, or two X-ray machines on different set-tings that bombarded every part of themummy,” Antoine says. “We’ve captured thetexture of the skin and thicker areas such asbones and objects made of stone. And we’reusing the sort of software Formula One mightuse to scan an engine’s brake pads, so they cansee what is happening inside.”

Processing the resulting data involves inten-sive work: “Marie and I and a colleague in Parissat down for thousands of hours so we could getas close to the truth as science allows us to get.We will never deceive the viewer,” he says. “Aprocess called segmentation allows us to ‘re-move’ objects and put them in a 3-D printer, so

we can then hold in our hands exact replicas ofwhat are still on the bodies of the mummies. Allwithout ever having to unwrap them.”

A far cry, then, from the early 20th century,when Egyptology was a new academic disci-pline and public “unrollings” were all the rage.Fetching an old exhibition catalogue, Vanden-beusch shows me a black-and-white photo-graph taken in 1908 at the Manchester Museumof several scholars standing over the skeleton ofa freshly unravelled mummy: a 12th-dynastyman named Khnum-Nakht. More than 500people had gathered to watch pioneering arche-ologist Margaret Murray reveal his mysteries;Murray and her team look triumphant.Khnum-Nakht seems vulnerable, exposed.

No ancient Egyptians would be harmed inthis way today. So did Murray suffer any super-natural wrath? Did anyone involved fall prey tothe mummy’s curse, as whipped up by HowardCarter’s 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun’stomb and dramatised by Boris Karloff in the1932 film The Mummy? Antoine and Vanden-beusch roll their eyes.

It was Roman, not Egyptian, mummies whohad their arms wrapped separately (all the bet-ter for coming back to life and grabbing youwith), Antoine tells me later. For now both cura-tors reiterate the due care taken with their char-ges: data is presented, not interpreted, they say.

“We don’t do facial representations,” Anto-ine adds. “We are creating visualisations ofwhat is underneath the wrapping, including theembalmer’s reconstructive padding of lips, noseand cheeks. The embalming varies, of course.“Each embalmer had their own style.”

The mummies, largely untouched, are treat-ed as precious cargo; the trucks that took themto the hospital to be scanned were fitted with airsuspension. The team that brought them toAustralia is highly trained in packing and trans-portation. Both curators are delighted the exhi-bition space in Sydney can accommodate thelarge coffins and several statues, along with 200objects exploring themes such as gods, goddess-es, health, medicine and childhood (one of themummies is two-year-old boy from the Romanperiod, wrapped inside a gilded cartonnage).

Neither Antoine or Vandenbeusch wishes tocomment on the controversy surrounding thePowerhouse Museum’s mooted move from Ul-timo to Parramatta in western Sydney. The in-itiative is the subject of a parliamentary inquiry.As long as the mummies are handled with care,approached with respect and regarded as indi-viduals, it arguably doesn’t matter what side ofSydney they occupy.

Nestawedjat has come into her own, restingin her correct coffin after some forensic CSI-style sleuthing from Vandenbeusch (“Therewere three coffins with her name on them, butthe inner coffin closest to her had a black stainwhich matched the substance on her shoul-der”), and reassigned her correct gender.

“When the mummies in the collection wereX-rayed back in the 1960s it was thought thatthis was the mummy of a man,” says Vanden-beusch. “It was only after the CT scan was done”— and the embalmer’s extra padding revealed— “that Antoine realised Nestawedjat was actu-ally a woman.”

Antoine flashes a grin. “It’s a privilege to beable to stare in the face of the distant past. I’malways reminded that these are the remains of aperson who once lived and had family andfriends and took part in community activities,”he says. “Their name, if we know it, is so import-ant. It is important for them.

“By repeating the name of Nestawedjat, weare helping her live forever.”

Egyptian Mummies: Exploring Ancient Lives runs until April 25 at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum.

Cartonnage case containing Tamut’s mummy, main; the mummy of a young man from Egypt during the Roman era, left

UNDER WRAPSAt a new Sydney exhibition, technology allows us to look through the ancient covering at the Egyptian individuals inside, writes Jane Cornwell

tled yellow-brown bandages butshe was once a real person likeyou and me. Married, wealthy,just over 153cm tall, Nestawedjatlived east of the Nile in Thebes,now Luxor, then the most bling-ing city in ancient Egypt. For along time, under wraps, she wasthought to be a man.

Thanks to the latest non-in-vasive CT technology we knowall this without having to crackopen Nestawedjat’s carapace ordisturb her eternal slumber — acarefully regulated return flightfrom London to Sydney notwith-standing. Along with five othermummies from the collection atthe British Museum, all of whomlived in Egypt between 1800 and3000 years ago, Nestawedjat starsin the world premiere of EgyptianMummies: Exploring Ancient Livesat Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum.

While the exhibition is under-pinned by science, by detailed andunprecedented analysis of what liesbeneath the coffins and bandages, themummies as individuals, not as ob-jects, are the main focus. The BritishMuseum took a similar tack in 2014with its popular smaller exhibition, An-cient Lives, New Discoveries: Eight Mum-mies, Eight Stories. Visitors who pouredthrough the Greek revival-style en-trance of this long-time London land-mark (founded in 1753 under Enlight-enment principles) were informed that“the museum is committed to caring forhuman remains with respect and dignity”.

Daniel Antoine, the curator of physicalanthropology with responsibility for theBritish Museum’s human remains, andone of the people behind both exhibitions,nods vigorously. “We are very aware ofthe importance of preserving the collec-tion,” says this suave French doctor of ar-cheology, who has met me by theinformation desk in the museum’s cavern-ous inner courtyard and led the way up aprivate spiral staircase to the first floor of-fices he shares with colleague Marie Van-denbeusch, a project curator in thedepartment of ancient Egypt and Sudan.

“We want these mummies to be aroundfor a thousand more years,” Antoine contin-ues. “We’re lucky that none of our predeces-sors decided to unwrap our mummies; itwould be so easy to misplace wrappings andobjects unless you record everything ex-tremely carefully.”

It’s a delicate topic. While the mummies inthe museum’s collection were all legally ac-quired in the 19th century by the likes of En-glish Egyptologist EA Wallis Budge, theywere purchased during the time of empire.Besides, documents were lost and coffinsswapped: “In the 19th century and even inancient times the best preserved mummywas often put into the best preserved cof-fin,” sighs the Swiss-born Vandenbeusch.“We’ve done a lot of double-checking.”

As visitors to the Powerhouse will dis-cover, today we can dress and undressNestawedjat and her fellow travellersTamut (a female temple singer from The-bes) and Irthorru (a dentally challenged

Nestawedjat. Try say-ing her name outloud. Roll the sylla-bles around on yourtongue: Nest-a-wed-

jat. She might be old — like, 2500years old — and swaddled in mot-