Mummies Tell Their Tales From The Crypt

A team of Victorian forensic experts is peeling layers of mystery from three mummified children, reports Liz Porter.

EVEN for a forensic expert its a tough case. Three children die in Egypt around the time of Christ … about 1870, their mummified bodies are stored in the British Museum … now, after 2000 years, give or take a century, people are seriously looking for answers.

Who were these kids and how did they die? How old were they? Were they suffering from disease? Were they related? And were they Egyptians, Greeks or Romans?

It sounds like a job for a "forensic Egyptologist", which is how Janet Davey describes herself.

Ms Davey and a team of colleagues from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine are using modern medical and forensic techniques, including CT scans and DNA testing, to answer the questions. The mummified bodies of the boy and two girls, nicknamed "the angelic one", the "cross one" and the "sad one", had been in the British Museum since the 1870s.

Apart from being identified as coming from the "Graeco-Roman" period (332BC to 395AD) and being X-rayed in the 1960s, they were left alone.

Ms Davey found out about the three in the late 1990s when she was doing research at the British Museum for a course in Egyptology at the University of Manchester, which is renowned for mummy research.

She then suggested the three mummies as a research study for the Melbourne Mummy Project, whose members include forensic odontologist Dr Pam Craig, forensic pathologist Dr David Ranson, forensic radiologist Dr Chris ODonnell and forensic sculptor Ronn Taylor.

The former schoolteacher began her own mummy research with a study of two child mummies owned by Melbournes Australian Institute of Archaeology. One was a four-year-old, the other the head of a seven-year-old from Akhmin, in middle Egypt.

Dr Craig, a lecturer at Melbourne University School of Dental Science, had also examined the seven-year-olds head — and made a momentous discovery.

Besides documenting dental decay, she noted that the child had had two of its baby teeth extracted, along with one permanent tooth. The childs mouth was crowded with teeth, and so it appeared that these teeth had been removed to alleviate the crowding. It was the first-known example of this kind of "cosmetic dentistry" in the Graeco-Roman period. Dr Craig also concluded, from the lack of healing evident in the childs tooth sockets, that the infection that set in after the operation had probably been the cause of its death.

Meanwhile, forensic pathologist Dr David Ranson had examined damage to the childs facial skin and was able to tell Ms Davey that the damage had happened after death — possibly during the drying of the body after burial.

The Melbourne Mummy Projects research into the background of the three British Museum child mummies began late last year when Ms Davey arranged for them to be taken to Londons Blackheath Hospital for CT scanning.

She has already examined scans of the childrens teeth and estimates "the angelic one"to be 7½, "the cross one" to be 5, and " the sad one" to be 6½. The mummies hair, fair on top and brown at the back, will also be tested for dyes.

Ms Davey is arranging for tissue samples from the mummies to be DNA-tested to see whether the children were related to each other and to discover their ethnic origin. "The Greeks ruled Egypt at that time; the Romans were there. They may be Egyptian — or Libyan. Because they were mummified they had to be from a wealthy family," she said.

Although the mummies arrived at the British Museum stripped of their traditional cloth bindings, small fragments of linen left under one bodys chin are of fine quality. The tissue will also be subjected to histological analysis — a microscopic study of cells which may reveal the signs of disease.

"We hope to find out what they died of," Ms Davey says. "One of them has a dislocated jaw. Did that happen before or after death? If the bones were broken before death there will be evidence of healing."

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