Lady Udjarenes, an Egyptian with royal pretensions but unproven pedigree came home last month to Chicago after an extensive medical exam at the University of Iowa showed the Lady was no lady at all.
Udjarenes is one of the 30 Egyptian mummies at the Field Museum of Natural History. In 1894, a dealer in Cairo sold the then-brand new museum the coffin of Lady Udjarenes, a 26th dynasty noblewoman who lived and died about 600 B.C.
Ever since, the mummy that was inside the coffin has been known as Lady Udjarenes (“Udja” for short). The coffin, a beautiful, house-shaped wooden case covered with painted bands of hieroglyphics, has long been a mainstay of the museum’s permanent Egyptian display.
The mummy, a less interesting bundle of white linen turned tobacco brown through the ages, has spent much of its time in storage.
But, because the Lady Udjarenes mummy had never been unwrapped, the University of Iowa Medical School museum borrowed it for a 13-month exhibition of modern medical imaging last year. The exhibition used the mummy to show off recent technological advances in X-rays and CAT scans (computed axial tomography).
Anthropologists and medical researchers for the last several years have been teaming up to apply modern diagnostic and research technology to mummified “patients.” The results have been rewriting history in far greater detail than ever before possible, and they have been giving insights into age-old diseases and how to treat them in modern times.
Without disturbing even a thread of the bandages, the Iowa X-rays and CAT scan pierced the mummy to the core. They provided three-dimensional pictures of the body, bones and internal organs, allowing a glimpse of a face unseen since a long-ago mortician wound linen strips around it.
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The images showed the 5-foot 5-inch mummy was 30 to 40 years old at the time of its death, though there were no apparent clues to the cause of death.
While alive, the mummy had impacted molars, arthritis in the big toes and a very bad set of worn down teeth, a common condition in Pharoanic Egypt caused by bits of gravel left in milled flour.
But most revealing of all was the complete body scan of the mummy by the CAT scan. There, plain for all to see, was “Lady” Udjarenes’ penis.
“This thing happened all the time in the 19th Century antique markets in Egypt,” said Frank Yurco, the Field’s Egyptologist.
“Dealers would find a beautiful coffin or sarcaphogous, but the mummy inside would be badly deteriorated or missing. To make it a better package, they’d discard the damaged mummy and scrounge around for one in better condition, and place that inside, instead.”
The cavalier attitude toward the mummies by the museum’s Cairo dealer, unfortunately, has been typical throughout history. Once there were literally millions of mummies lying around Egypt.
The mummification process was used in Pharaonic Egypt for about 4,500 years. By the time of Christ, when Egypt had a population of 7.5 million, everybody who died was mummified, including commoners, who paid for their mummification on an installment plan during their working lives.
From the Middle Ages to this century, they have been carted off from the catacombs where they were stored. They were torn apart by dealers and souvenir hunters, ground up for medicine, burned up as fuel on peasant hearths and 19th Century steam trains.
In this century, that attitude has changed. In recent years, medical researchers have joined anthropologists in treasuring mummies as priceless time capsules of biological and historical information waiting to be tapped.
Robert Pickering, an anthropologist at the Denver Museum of Natural History, said the Iowa “undressing” of the Udjarenes mummy is a measure of the new respect science has accorded mummies.
“In years past, if you wanted to know about this mummy,” said Pickering, “you would have unwrapped it and done an autopsy of it.
“You would cut into its muscle and organs, and look for blood vessels. At the end, you would have a pile of debris you couldn’t display any longer at your museum.”
Pickering next month will be the chairman of a meeting of the American Paleopathology Association, where anthropologists and medical researchers will discuss use of modern medical technology on mummies.
“CAT scans allow us to gain a tremendous amount of information without damage to the mummy. We can count the layers of wrapping, see the smallest anatomical details.
“Best of all, the mummy is left untouched and intact, there for future generations of researchers and even more sophisticated research tools.”
Beyond X-rays and CAT scans, scientists already are using a wide array of other research tools and techniques.
They include microsurgery, in which tiny incisions are made on the body to recover cells of dried blood, soft tissue, stomach contents, even fecal matter. The cells are rehydrated for various analytical tests, including DNA.
Dr. Arthur Aufderheide, a pathologist at the University of Minnesota Medical School in Duluth, has been working with mummified remains for two decades.
“There is biological information in mummies,” said Aufderheide, “that is applicable to modern medical information and that is unique because we can’t get it from any other source.”
Aufderheide said among modern tools he has been using is atomic absorption spectroscopy, to identify trace elements. This can detect, for example, strontium, which is stored in bones. Strontium is a product of vegetable diets, not of meat, so if it is found in quantity, it tells a lot about early diets.
Investigations Aufderheide has participated in already have had some payoffs. One has shown that, contrary to previous belief, tuberculosis was present in Native Americans before the arrival of Europeans.
More practically, studies of leprosy and tuberculosis in mummies have established that, when humans lived in rural areas, leprosy was highly contagious. When they moved to urban settlements, leprosy contagion was suppressed while tuberculosis contagion became rampant.
Researchers believe that the human immune response to TB is what historically suppressed leprosy.
“We can reproduce the immune response with a harmless vaccine for TB,” Aufderheide said, “and use mass vaccination programs as a highly effective protection against leprosy where it still exists.”
Robert Brier, an Egyptologist and chairman of the philosophy department at Long Island University, has been tracking current areas of research with mummies.
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“People are looking for AIDS in mummies, on the theory it may not be a new virus, but an old one that just mutated recently into some harmful form,” he said.
“I’m looking for Alzheimer’s in the ancient world. The brains usually were taken out during mummification, but some were not, and if you get a brain from an older person, you can look for plaque on the brain that causes Alzheimer’s.
“It might indicate it isn’t from modern pollutants, stress, or whatever people suspect now causes it. Ancient Egyptians had hardening of arteries like we do, and certainly it was not due to the diet or the modern stress we now attribute hardening of the arteries to.
“There are lots of examples (demonstrating) that the better we understand a disease, the more options we have to find a way of preventing it or restoring health.”