STANFORD, CALIFORNIA—A 3,200-year-old Egyptian mummy currently housed at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco was transported to the Stanford University School of Medicine for a computed tomography (CT) scan. The mummy, known as Hatason, was brought to the United States in the late nineteenth century in a wooden coffin that depicts a woman wearing everyday clothing. “When mummies came into the collections of most museums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were dated and sexed based upon the coffin the mummy was found in. We now know that rampant reuse of coffins means these assumptions may be wrong,” Stanford Egyptologist Anne Austin told the Stanford Medicine News Center. The scans revealed the mummy’s brain had been left intact. The researchers also saw that the body had disintegrated within the wrappings. The size of the skull, however, suggests that this was indeed a young woman. Jonathan Elias, director of the Akhmim Mummy Studies Consortium, thinks this mummy dates to the New Kingdom period, between the sixteenth and eleventh centuries B.C. “In mummies manufactured after a certain time, there is excerebration almost 100 percent of the time. But we have no excerebration,” he explained. To read more about CT scanning and other investigations of mummies, go to "Heart Attack of the Mummies."
