His digital autopsy revealed with a powerful scanner allows virtually ‘unwrapping’ the mummy of the Egyptian pharaoh embalmed twice more than three millennia ago
Since its discovery in 1881, the mummy of Pharaoh Amenhotep I had not been unwrapped. But 140 years later, technology has revealed many of its secrets. And it is that the remains of the pharaoh, also known as Amenophis I and embalmed twice, have been virtually revealed thanks to powerful scanners. It is the first time in three millennia that this legendary mummy has been ‘opened’ thanks to a digital autopsy reported in the journal ‘Frontiers in Medicine’.
No curse weighed on the only mummy of Egyptian royalty that kept its wrapping intact among the many found in the 19th and 20th centuries. A shroud of bandages that scientists from the University of Cairo have removed thanks to Computed Axial Tomography (CT), a technique that allows us to see what is under the shroud of the mummy, beautifully wrapped, decorated with garlands of flowers and with the face and face. the neck under a delicate mask of great realism inlaid with colored stones.
We now know that the pharaoh died at the age of 35, although no wound, trauma or injury has been found that could be the cause of his death. Scientists have found that Amenophis I was 1.69 meters tall, had good teeth and was circumcised. Among his mortuary clothes he carried 30 valuable amulets and a gold sash, according to Sahar Saleem, a professor at the University of Cairo, a radiologist with the Egyptian Mummies Project and author of the forensic study together with the famous Egyptologist Zahi Hawass. “He had a narrow chin, a small and fine nose, curly hair and slightly protruding upper teeth,” says Saleem, confirming that Amenophis bore a certain physical resemblance to his father, Amosis or Ahmose I.
The face of the pharaoh obtained in the tomography. /
Previous X-ray studies had revealed that Amenhotep I had been embalmed by the high priests of Amun for the second time more than 400 years after being buried, in a kind of funeral home ITV that took place in the 11th century BC. This re-embalming was thought to have been after grave robbers looted the sarcophagus, but hieroglyphs reveal that during the last dynasty priests restored and reburied royal mummies without robbery. Sahar Saleem herself, once held the thesis that the priests took the opportunity to steal the most precious jewels from the pharaoh’s corpse, but now she has found that the jewels were still in the sarcophagus.
Amenhotep I, whose name means ‘Amun is satisfied’, was the second pharaoh of the 18th dynasty. He ruled Egypt from 1,525 BC to 1,504, in a safe and prosperous time known as the New Kingdom. He was the son of Amosis I who expelled the Hyksos, invaders from the north, and reunified Egypt.
Funerary furnishings of Amenophis that wrapped the mummy. /
After Amenophis’s death, he and his mother, Amosis Nefertari, were worshiped as gods. His mummy was discovered in 1881 by a French Egyptologist, among others reburied at the site of Deir el Bahari, in southern Egypt. Twenty-two royal mummies, including that of Amenophis I, were moved last April to the new museum in Cairo, near the pyramids, and the mask on his sarcophagus was the image of the spectacular ‘Parade of the royal golden mummies’ held on 3 March in the Egyptian capital.
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