 William Joseph Myers, to whom the College owes its internationally renowned Egyptological collection, was a man with a rare eye for beauty—with the result that, within Eton’s holdings, a number of the less aesthetically pleasing areas of pharaonic culture are quite poorly represented. One long-felt gap in the collection has been mummies—those quintessentially Egyptian bundles of artificially preserved skin and bone which all visitors nowadays expect to encounter in the displays of an Egyptological collection. It is a gap which, against all the odds (for mummies are rare, valuable and no longer exported), it has now been possible to fill—thanks to the gift from Ms Anne Trotter of a small group of mummified fragments which promises to be of the greatest importance in teaching and research.
Ms Trotter’s mummy remains were collected many years ago in England by an Egyptological enthusiast named Horace Owen (1911-1993), who left them and other objects to her in his will. Owen, by trade an optical technician, lived in West Hampstead and began his wide-ranging collection as early as the 1920s when a good deal of material brought to England during the Victorian era was readily available to those few who took an interest. Owen has, indeed, been described as the last of the Victorian collectors—a collector from whose magpie spirit the Myers Museum is now able gratefully to benefit. With Ms Trotter’s magnanimous gift, Eton’s existing mummy representation (a couple of odd hands, the precise origins of which are shrouded in mystery) is now augmented by four magnificent mummified heads, three further mummified hands and a single mummified finger—this last preserving still a rare metal ‘stall’ or covering of a type found only on corpses of the highest-ranking Egyptian dead.
Gruesome though this collection may at first appear, recent advances in the scientific examination and evaluation of ancient anatomical materials have been profound, and from such remains much important and often unexpected light is now being shed on a whole range of aspects of life and death in the Nile valley. Besides allowing us the fascination of gazing upon the faces of individuals who were actually alive in ancient Egypt, Eton’s new arrivals represent a resource of incomparable scientific value which, thanks to the anthropological expertise of Joyce Filer of the British Museum and the radiographic skills of Margot Rintoul of London’s Princess Grace Hospital, the Myers Museum is now beginning to tap into. Read on for the first, tentative results …
Nicholas Reeves
The collection of human remains in the Myers Museum comprises four mummified heads, several hands and a single detached finger. The heads are clearly the most important items in the group, and their external appearance may be described as follows:
ECM 2306—a mummified head encased in dark resinous material, which has the appearance of belonging to a relatively young individual. The pieces of gold leaf adhered to the head would suggest that it dates to the Roman period—that is, after 30 BC;
ECM 2307—a well-wrapped, seemingly adult, head;
ECM 2308—a head similarly encased in linen, with the ears wrapped proud. The facial features (eyes and eyebrows) are highlighted in black paint, a style of presentation seen during the Roman period and viewed as `archaising`—that is, harking back to the mummification styles of the Old Kingdom, around 2500 BC;
ECM 2309—a wrapped head still contained in its Victorian bell-jar display.
A preliminary visual inspection of the material at Eton suggested that it was sufficiently stable to allow it to be transported to a hospital for non-destructive radiographic examination—a far more appropriate means of examination than the ‘unwrapping’ or ‘unrolling’ which was regularly practised before the discovery of x-rays by Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895. Since Roentgen, radiography has played an increasingly useful role in such examinations owing to its non-invasive and non-destructive nature. Development of the technique known as computerised tomography scanning (CT scanning), invented in the 1970s, has permitted an even greater depth of information to be obtained, again without compromising the integrity of the material under study. In a CT examination the x-ray film and the source of the rays are moved synchronously and equally in opposing directions to record an object, in often spectacular detail. The scanner records in x-ray `slices` of varying thickness according to the depth of information required.
CT scanning offers a great advance on radiographic techniques previously available for research into ancient human remains, particularly mummified remains. In earlier, conventional radiographic examinations it was found that the x-rays could not easily see through the resins commonly applied to some ancient Egyptian mummies. Not so in the case of the CT scanner, which has little difficulty in penetrating a wide variety of materials: bone, soft tissue, wood, metal and, of course, resin. But more than this: with the CT scan, the two-dimensional x-ray images obtained may be formatted to create three-dimensional views, with the further possibility of transferring the obtained data to a milling machine to create a free-standing model of what exists beneath the obscuring wrappings.
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The venue for the examination of Eton’s mummified human material was the Princess Grace Hospital, London, to the staff and authorities of which I am very much indebted. The machine utilised was a G.E. Lightspeed multi-slice 16 CT scanner—the latest and most advanced machine available at present. All of the material was successfully CT scanned in the course of a few hours, with between 125 and 390 images obtained for each item.
The information obtained has yet to be exhaustively analysed, but initial indications are that the human remains from Horace Owen’s collection will provide significant insights into the health of individual ancient Egyptians and add to our knowledge of the mummification process and of the techniques employed in the preparation of human corpses after death. The four heads possess particular scientific potential, and a preliminary analysis of the CT scans reveals the following interesting detail:
ECM 2306 is clearly the head of a sub-adult individual. Despite the adolescent age this individual has retained a metopic suture (descending midline on the frontal bone), a feature which normally disappears by the age of two years. Often the retention of the metopic suture is genetic and not clinically significant, but the fact that this sub-adult skull appears to be somewhat hydrocephalic is interesting and demands further investigation. This individual further presents overshot upper incisors, commonly known as buckteeth. In addition, the top right central incisor is poorly aligned. The scans show that the hair, in some abundance, has survived beneath the linen wrappings and resin. Another interesting feature of this head is that the skull is set at an odd angle relative to the neck. The indications are that the cervical vertebrae were pushed deliberately upwards and damaged, presumably during the embalming process.
ECM 2307 is the head of an adult, probably female, who has retained a full set of teeth which are in excellent condition and show a moderate amount of attrition. The scans show too that the ethmoid bone and cribriform plate have suffered damage, a result of the method used by the ancient embalmers to evacuate the brain through the nose. A particularly interesting feature of this mummified head is that a quantity of resinous material was introduced into the skull cavity, and now resides at the posterior part of the skull, inclining mostly to the left-hand side of the cavity. Strangely, the material does not lie in a smooth, solid block but presents sharp and thick spicules of material pointing towards the inner part of the cavity. This might suggest that the resin was not allowed to settle as the individual was manipulated during the embalming process. A piece of bone, broken off during the preparation of the body, lies firmly embedded in the resin.
ECM 2308 is the head of a mature adult. The teeth are in fairly good condition presenting a moderate amount of attrition. Initial indications are that the eye sockets and nostrils were filled with a packing material, possibly linen, which accounts for the rather bulbous external appearance of the eyes and nose. A particularly interesting feature of this individual is the presence of a hole on the left parietal bone at a midline point near the sagittal suture. Two possible causes present themselves immediately: head injury and trepanation; these, together with other possible causes will be investigated further.
ECM 2309 (which remained sealed within its Victorian-era bell jar during the examination) is the head of a young, nearly adult male. The teeth are in good condition. The scans show a round depression on the left parietal bone in a posterior position towards the lambdoid suture, perhaps a healed injury or possibly the remains of some infectious condition. An interesting discovery is a length of wood visible within the skull extending from the top down to the neck area. This initially suggested that the embalmers might have reattached the head to the body during the preparation of the mummy—a well-attested form of embalmer’s ‘restoration’—but on reflection seems more likely here to have formed part of the Victorian mounting process!
The preliminary remarks offered above clearly demonstrate the value of using CT scanning in the examination of ancient Egyptian mummified remains, where the technique’s non-invasive nature allows material to be examined without any damage to the sample. This particular CT examination has shown that the individuals concerned enjoyed relatively good dental health, contrary to the findings in many other ancient Egyptian remains; while the fact that three of the mummified heads appear to present pathological findings—hydrocephalus and head trauma—is clearly of great interest and warrants closer study.
Joyce Filer
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CT scan of a mummified head of a mature adult, encased in linen with the ears wrapped proud. Roman period, after 30 BC. Myers Museum (ECM 2308)
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