Secrets of Egypt's Golden Boy

CT scans offer researchers a virtual look deep inside a mummy's coffin

- BENJAMIN LEONARD

DURING A VISIT TO the vast basement storerooms of Cairo's Egyptian Museum, while searching for ancient objects, such as jars and coffins, that had never been opened, Cairo University radiologist Sahar Saleem found a plain wooden coffin with an arched lid. The museum's records contained scant information about the coffin, which held one of the thousands of mummies excavated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that have never been displayed or studied. The only detail Saleem was able to discover in the archives was that the coffin had been excavated in 1916 at Nag el-Hassaya, a cemetery seven miles south of the ancient city of Edfu in southern Egypt. This necropolis was the burial site for the city's residents during the Ptolemaic period (304-30 B.C.), when a dynasty of Macedonian royals named for their first pharaoh, Ptolemy I (reigned 304-284 B.C.), ruled Egypt. No further information about the coffin's original context is known, and there are no records of other objects having been found alongside it, or even in the same section of the cemetery. "When we removed the lid of the coffin, it was probably the first time it had been opened in 2.300 years." Saleem says. "Inside was a beautiful gilded wood inner coffin. After we removed that, a wrapped mummy with a golden mask appeared."