Rambam hospital journeys back in time scanning 2,500-year-old mummies
Director Yotam Yakir described the experience of attending the scanning as “unbelievable.”
By ROSSELLA TERCATINMummies from the Haifa Museums undergo a CT scanning at the Rambam Health Care Campus on June 29, 2020(photo credit: RAMBAM HEALTH CARE CAMPUS SPOKESPERSON'S OFFICE)
For several decades, two mysterious Egyptian mummies were kept among the treasures in the storage unit of the Haifa Museums. Small in size, about 40 cm. long, very little was known about them, except that they were donated to the museum about 60 years ago, and they dated back to a period between 3,000 and 2,500 years ago.On Monday, the mummies were brought to the Rambam Health Care Campus for a CT scan, which allowed both the museum’s and the hospital’s staff members who poured to the room to travel back in time unveiling the content of the sarcophagi.“We wanted to understand more about the mummies, and we decided to reach out to Rambam,” Haifa Museums director-general Yotam Yakir told The Jerusalem Post. “In spite of the coronavirus emergency, they responded incredibly quickly. The hospital is a very short distance from our museum, so yesterday we carefully transported them there.”Yakir described the experience of attending the scanning as “unbelievable.”“While in the case of one mummy it is still difficult to understand what it conceals, the second was clearly a bird, a falcon,” he said. “Its head appeared to be covered by some form of mask. It was incredibly exciting.”Dr. Marcia Javitt, director of Rambam’s Department of Medical Imaging, told the Post the artifacts underwent both the traditional CT scan and the newer Dual Energy CT scan, which uses a different type of X-ray to extract more information about the tissues’ properties.“In light of the fact that the tissues of the mummies are dehydrated, this technique offered us much more insights,” she said.“In the smallest mummy, we could clearly see the bones, the beak and the spine, which presented some damage, even though at the moment, we can’t say if it occurred before or after the bird died,” she added. “Inside the chest, we spotted something that might be the heart.”Javitt said she took part in the scan of mummies several years ago while working at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington, DC.“The system has become quite popular among researchers because it offers a tool to obtain more information in a noninvasive way,” she said.For the biggest mummy, more enigmas persist because the scientists were not able to identify anything precise.“It could be a child, even though we could not recognize any anatomic feature,” Javitt said. “We will need to do more research.”Only the preliminary results of the test have been analyzed so far. More information could come from a more in-depth look at the findings and from further venues of study, she said.“There are so many questions about these artifacts: Where did they come from? How did these creatures die and why were they mummified? We still have so much to discover,” Javitt said.In the meantime, the two mummies will be put on display in the museum again, together with the images resulting from the CT scan, Yakir said.“We will do it as soon as we get a full report,” he said. “We believe that this is something very unique that we can offer to our visitors.”
