My visit to the British Museum last week was an eye-opening experience. Ancient Mummies have fascinated the world for a long time and  to learn who they were and how they lived it was necessary to unwrap them.
Now with the latest CT-scanning technology, which was used by the British Museum in this exhibition, we can see the coffins, beautifully decorated and painted, and next to it the CT scanned images peeling away layer after layer exposing the Mummy inside.

This is the Mummy of a young child

The CT scanning technology also allows to know the sex of the Mummy, if the person was healthy, the cause of death, and the age when he or she died. And this is just a short list of data that can be collected with CT Scanning.

Whenever I visited the Cairo Museum, where the Mummies of the Pharaoh Ramses II and Queen Hatshepsut among others, can be seen, I felt like an intruder. Looking at the exposed bodies, just covered by a linen sheet, I wondered what gave us the right to take away their dignity by unwrapping them and exposing their remains to the world?

Hopefully now with this new methods of looking and examining Mummies, they can sleep in peace for eternity.

More from Egypt soon

Brigitte