FOR nearly 40 years, no one at the British Museum was sure what the strange object on the head of Nesperennub’s mummy could be. They are now. And it’s all thanks to a 3D imaging technology that is set to change the way we use museums.
Nesperennub was an important Egyptian priest who died in about 800 BC. The museum acquired his mummy in 1899 and its cartonnage—a papyrus-based papier mâché case—has never been disturbed. In the 1960s, the mummy was X-rayed and a strange curved object appeared on the priest’s head, something that had not been found in any other Egyptian mummies.
Egyptologists decided the object was most likely the priest’s placenta. They suspected that keeping someone’s placenta and burying it with them might have been in vogue for a short time during that part of Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period.
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But it wasn’t a placenta. New imaging technology has revealed the bump for what it is: simply an unfired clay bowl.
Now a mummy has been turned into a 3D virtual exhibit for museum visitors to explore from head to toe—the first time this has been done. Other mummies have had only part of their bodies transformed into 3D images, or they haven’t offered much in the way of interaction for visitors.
Detailed scanning made it possible to identify the object on its head. First, the mummy had a CT scan at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, close to the British Museum. A CT scanner takes many cross-sectional X-rays of an object and then, via a computer, integrates them to form a complete image. A total of 1500 cross-sectional images of the mummy were taken, each with a resolution of 512 by 512 pixels, making 750 megabytes of data in total.
The cross-sections of the mummy were fed into a Silicon Graphics supercomputer running “volumiser” software that converted the slices into a 3D image you can view from any perspective. Such software is normally used in oil and gas exploration, where it highlights promising rock formations in 3D.
It was only when Silicon Graphics engineers switched on the software’s virtual lighting feature that the mummy’s strange headgear finally came into view. The lighting revealed the bumps and scratches on the surface of the bowl in such detail that researchers could see from its texture that it was made of unfired clay.
Also revealed was a hole in the mummy’s skull, on the left temple, that no one knew was there. “It was really exciting to be able to see such detail, so vividly, and it will help enormously to advance our knowledge,” says John Taylor, assistant keeper in the department of Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum. He’d now like to figure out what the bowl was used for.
When the interactive exhibit goes on display in the museum in a few months’ time, visitors will probably spend little time worrying about that and concentrate on whooshing through the mummy’s body with the 3D “fly-through” technology. Using VR headsets or polarised glasses, they will be able to zoom in on the mummy’s wrappings or even look out through the mummy’s eyes.
