The University of Michigan Mummy at the Kelsey Museum of Archeology

I think we have a fascination with mummification and with the individuals that are there. We do have this sort of fear thing associated with them, I guess. Probably harkens back to when people began to discover these tombs, especially in the early part of the 20th century and the end of the 19th century. So we have several mummies in our collection. Most of them are animal mummies. And then we also do have a mummy of a child. They all come from Egypt. The heart is left in the body because the Egyptians understood that the heart was the seat of someone's knowledge and personality, and you would need that in the afterlife when you were judged. They would pack your body with natron, which would help to draw the moisture out of your body. They would treat the body and make it easier to then wrap the individual in linen. And in these linen wrappings, they would also add some prayers, write the person's name. We have tried to recreate the tomb that the child may have been buried in, so with some grave goods, and we have a display here with some toys too. We did have a CT scan done of the mummy. So there was a student who was doing research here who wanted to know more about our child mummy. The student arranged for the mummy to undergo a CT scan at the university hospital. As the story has been told to me, it was a dark and stormy night. When are you going to do CT scans of a mummy? It's going to be when the living people don't need the scanner, so the appointment was somewhere around midnight. And in the state of Michigan, the only way you can move human remains from one place to another is either in an ambulance or a hearse. So the student made arrangements for a hearse to come collect the mummy and bring it to the hospital. So we learned quite a bit. We learned that this was a small child, probably two or three years old. We discovered that the mummy has six fingers on its left hand and had a broken leg which was beginning to heal, so it may not have been what caused death. So we collected the CT scan and then the student was able to make a 3D resin model from the skull, the images of the skull of the mummy. Please come visit us. We are open Tuesday through Sunday. We are free. We do have public tours every Saturday at 2 o'clock. Happy Halloween! Go Blue!