thank you um as Elizabeth was saying I'd like to tell you about a research project something something I did a few years ago but it's an ongo ongoing project and you'll see it it's going to go on for many years in the future we hope um let me just do this there almost everything we know about ancient Egypt comes from their belief in life after death um it may surprise you you know you you've all seen temples you've all seen the tombs we don't have cities the ancient Egyptian cities weren't meant to last forever they they really believe that you're going to go on forever so why not put your money in your tombs and your temples which are for eternity so their houses only had to last one generation so we don't have ancient Egyptian cities just temples tombs and artifacts from those tombs now the only reason we have coffins is because they wanted to protect the body for eternity now the notion that they had was Resurrection the Egyptians believed not in reincarnation as some new agers say but in Resurrection they believe that the body was literally going to get up and go again in the next World and that's why you had to preserve it so it was the ultimate thing to preserve your body now if one coffin won't work you could have plans B and C right if one is damaged then you go to another one now I think the origin of this belief that that the body doesn't have to perish comes from their earliest burials you are looking at a burial of a man that's approximately 5,000 years old probably older it's a natural mummification nothing has been done to preserve this body it has simply been buried in the hot Egyptian sand you can also see from the grave Goods there's some belief in immortality at this stage perhaps he needs some of these things in the next World so he's buried with some of his possessions this is a natural mummy nothing done to preserve it at all this is an artificial mummy this is one that is preserved intentionally now why do an intentional mummification if the natural mummification works so well the answer is when you bury somebody in a a sand pit it dehydrates the body quickly and that's the key to preservation if you can get rid of the moisture in a body quickly it won't Decay because bacteria need moisture this is why for example you know when when you have these cereals with blueberries in them you know these dehydrated blueberries it's really The Mummy of a blueberry right it's been dehydrated and and and and it's preserved that way cuz bacteria won't act upon it now eventually though these sand pit burials the sand would blow away and animals could get at the body so the Egyptians decided we need something better that's when they started cutting tombs in the rock beneath the sand but that removes the sand from the body and the body started to Decay because the hot sand didn't dehydrate it quickly so then they had to go to artificial mummification and this is an artificial mummy it's Ramsay the great right um the amazing thing about mummies and I think part of the thing that fascinates people with mummies is that they're recognizable human beings if you knew Ramsay's the great 3,500 years ago you'd recognize him I mean he still looks like Ramsay's the great so artificial mummification is the way that the Egyptians decided to preserve their bodies now the Curious Thing is that Egyptians were a nation of accountants they wrote down everything I mean everything they wrote down how many people they killed in battles they wrote down laundry lists we have I can tell you the names of Ramsay's horses right the names of the two horses that pulled his Chariot to the Battle of cadesh right mood is content and victory and thieves is their names um so I can tell you almost everything about the Egyptians from what they wrote down but they never wrote down how to mummify a human cadav never it was probably a trade secret so so if you're going to try to figure out how they mummified there are there are various ways to go at it but you're not going to find that Papyrus that says do this do this do that one of the things see I became interested in mummification when I started reading I started reading books about mumification ancient egyp by written by egyptologists and I knew they were wrong they just didn't sound right the way they said it but even more important there were questions that were never answered for example think about this if you're going to dehydrate a body quickly do you drain the blood nobody ever talks about that um they used as you know many of you know they used natrin a naturally occurring compound of sodium carbonate sodium bicarbonate and sodium chloride baking soda and salt that's really a mixture how much do you need to preserve a human body nobody ever asked so there were a lot of unanswered questions and certain things that didn't seem right and eventually I decided the only way we're going to answer these questions is to actually do a mummification so almost 14 years ago now I decided we were going to mummify a human cadaver now I wanted as much information as I could get before doing the mummification and the kinds of things I looked at were tomb paintings there's there there's only two tombs that show a mummy in the process of not necessarily the physical mummification but something else what you're looking at is is the tomb of hoy qy and he was an EMB bomber and on his tomb wall he did a painting of his EMB bomber's Workshop now it doesn't show the actual mummification it shows the wrapping but it's instructive there there's a couple of things that really make sense and and I thought were quite interesting for example if you look carefully it's not on a table The Mummy isn't on a table it's on blocks now the reason for that and anybody who's worked with cadavers and knows if if you're doing wrapping you don't want to have to lift it off the table all the time that you pass a bandage underneath so if you've got it on blocks you can simply pass your bandage around the mummy and so that rang true I'm looking at this painting and saying this guy knew what he was talking about this is realistic now another thing that people you know certainly every sixth grader knows that the brain was removed through the nose right and and very often they poured resin into the cranium through the nasal passages well what Hoy is showing us on his tomb painting are the tools that they used for example this it's in a funny perspective but what it is is a ceramic vessel with two tubes and they would put that in the nostrils and pour the resin in through that so we're looking at ancient Egyptian bombing tub now here is a pan in which they would put the heated resin and they'd put a little on a cup and and one of the men is bending over and he's got a cup and he's brushing the resin on the bandages to make them stick so one of the things I looked at was tomb paintings to see what I could get now another thing I looked at was Herodotus who was a Greek tourist around 450 BC in Egypt who went to Egypt he never saw a mummification never saw one but he was told how they did it and he has details he says they removed the brain with an iron hook right he also says they made an incision on the Left Flank right um so all of this is background for what I'm going to do now this is a is is not a mummification it's the last ritual performed before the mummy is put in the Tomb it's called the opening of the mouth ceremony now the official right who's on the left he's actually the son of the deceased actually acting as a priest has an Implement it's an ads it's it's a woodworking tool and he's touching it to the mouth of the deceased and he's saying a prayer he going to say you are young again you live again you are young again you live again forever now by doing this the mummy when it resurrects in the next World will be able to speak and have Breath Right and live again and the it's interesting the the hieroglyphs over there talk about the opening of the mouth ceremony it says for the Osirus and the man's name cifer now this is a Papyrus it's a book of the dead and this is what every egyp wanted to be buried with it's your instructions for how to get to the next world it's magical spells it's not a book in the sense of having a beginning a middle and an end it's just a bunch of magical spells to have power in your legs to have this to have that and what you've got here is the deceased and his wife are in a in a in a position of adoration and they're standing in front of Osiris the god of the dead and they are asking him admit me into the next World now where is the next World it's in the west the reason it's in the west is because the Sun dies in the West every day and is reborn in the East so the West became associated with the dead so for example when you died you know they had all kinds of euphemisms just like we do today we don't talk about the deceased we say he's dearly departed right like he's going on a trip the dearly departed um they called the dead people westerners right and when somebody died they said he went West right but this is a book of the dead and this is a recreation of what a mummification must have looked like uh this is these are my these are our students in our drama department at Long Island University um it's interesting we have one guy who plays Anubis the the jackal-headed god he's got an Anubis mask on and the reason he got that part was he didn't want to shave his head right for the for the thing um priests shaved their heads and he just didn't want to do it so we put the mask on him uh the Jackal was the god of EMB bombing Anubis and there's a reason for that jackals have unusual digestive systems they can't digest freshh meat they prefer pre-digested protein rotted meat so they used to prowl cemeteries and then they became associated with the cemetery and the dead so the Jackal becomes the god of mummification there he is now when we decided to do a mummification we agreed we would do everything in the ancient Egyptian way we would do nothing modern at all and the first thing is to gather your ingredients and your tools and everything and let me emphasize this it took a very large team working behind me to get this project done under way um we had tool makers we had I mean all kinds of people helped on this thing and it started here this doesn't look like Egypt do you I know but this is in Egypt and it's a place called The W natrun the the the Valley of the natrin now natrin is the substance that all Egyptians used to dehydrate the body right as I say it's basically baking soda and table salt it occurs naturally in the soil and the white stuff that you see around the the the shore of the lake that's the Natron and that's where the ancient Egyptians got their nrin and that's where I went to dig my nrin now I've got a little baggie here I'm getting a little baggie of it just because I want to do a chemical analysis to make sure I'm getting the right stuff right so I took the baggie and we had analys and sure enough it's natrin um so then I had to bring the naton back to the United States and probably the hardest part of my entire research project here was bringing 400 pounds of an unidentified white powder through JFK I got I got lucky I really did National Geographic was doing a documentary on this and they had all their camera equipment you know 22 Silver boxes you know with all the camera gear and I just stuck my naturon in with their stuff and it went through uh so I get any grief now one of the things we had to do was replicate the tools now heraus said heraus said they used a stone knife a stone knife now why a stone knife they had they had bronze tools in in Egypt why a stone knife my feeling was it was part of her ancient ritual in the old days when they didn't have metal tools they use stone or something like that I was wrong dead wrong that's where you learn things this is somebody in Arizona who's skilled at flaking obsidian volcanic glass right and what we did we had him flake blades for us this is one of his to sort of this is a fancy one with little Notch and stuff where he's sort of doing look what I can do um it's serrated this is the real thing that you use it's a simple obsidian flake and it is very very sharp Now by very very sharp I mean that the obsidian Edge is one six the thickness of a surgical scalpel it is better than surgical steel far better and as a matter of fact now we we used this in our surgery I was amazed I'm used to scalpel you know regular surgical scalpel when I used this thing it cut so quickly I had a relearn touch just because I go right through the thing so this is fabulous and and it does much less damage in surgery you don't get these serrated tears um and now surgeons are using obsidian scalpel they're much better than than surgical steel so we use this so I was wrong when I thought the reason they use Stone was they just archaic reason you know some some religious ritual no it's the best possible tool you could use so I was going to operate do do the surgery with obsidian now this is an important tool egyptologists had written about this nearly a century they had found them in tombs and it was called by one egyptologist the necrot the death knife now the thought was this when you remove the internal organs it's done through a slit that's only about 4 inch long and if you're working in a slit you know you're getting the stomach the liver the intestines you're reaching in and you can only work with one hand you can only get one hand inside how are you going to get you know real taught get it taught enough to cut so some people thought that these knives must be EMB bomber's knives that this Notch that you see they would hook it around an organ and pull tightly and and that way free it we tried this it doesn't work at all not at all um they this is this is actually some other tool but it isn't for EMB bombing but we made them this is when we made a repca to use these are other replica tools copper bronze they don't work either no we tried it doesn't work it was obsidian that was the key but we had all these tools made and and our tools were made in the ancient I way it's the same formula 88% copper 12% tin beaten not poured you can't pour a copper mold and get a sharp edge you have to beat it folding it over and over like a samurai sword um so we did all of that um but we didn't need that this is a tool that was useful because if you're going in with one hand getting out organs you might want to reach high up get out the lungs you know things like that if you can't get your arm all the way up so we're using this another tool I'll show you the most important though this one heraus said they took out the brain with a hooked iron tool right and this is what we were going to use now the way that everybody said the brain comes out is as follows the body is lying on its back you go in through the nasal passage breaking past a bone called a copor plate and you're into the cranium rather easily right it's it's on a larger bone called The ethoid Bone now ethoid is Greek for Civ right ethos it's a Civ because it's honeycombed and what happens is you go into the into the cranial cavity and with this hook at the end you pull out a little bit of the brain each time and you keep doing that till the brain comes out completely doesn't work we tried it um when we went down I did this at the University of Maryland Medical School I I was given some cadavers to practice on actually severed heads um when you know when when when a body is given to a medical school you want to get the most possible use out of the out of the cadaver you want to really put it to good use so for example often the bodies are sexual and orthopedic surgeons will get the knees plastic surgeons will get the heads and they'll work out different techniques on cavers rather than on patients you know it's it's better that way so I was given two severed heads on which the plastic surgeons had worked that were kind of a little distorted but um they had the brain intact and you cannot get a brain out this way you cannot I'll tell you how you did it later but but this was the tool we used to remove the brain this is the tool we would use and these are all replicas of tools that we' found in tombs to to break through the ethoid bone to go through the nasal passages and break through we had it it was kind of interesting as I started doing this project everybody sensed it was a bit of History nobody had mummified a cadaver in 2,000 years and everybody wanted to participate so I was almost forced to find jobs for people you know so they could participate like my students for example the Ceramics department at the University created these wonderful pots which are exact replicas of ancient Egyptian pots so we had the right pots now this is an interesting story Herod says that once they cleaned out once they evacuated the the abdominal cavity now remember you have two cavities you have your abdominal cavity a diaphragm and above it is the thoracic right once they they Evacuate the abdominal cavity what they did was they washed it with palm wine now that makes sense you're using an alcohol right you know to to to clean it out and the only place we could get Palm wine was in Nigeria right um and this is strange stuff let me show you the if you look at it first we we saw it said Delta Palm wine and there's a little pyramid on the front so we took that as a good omen you know sort of Egyptian or whatever but then if you read the label it says under the Palm wine it says shake well for full nutritional value right this stuff had all kinds of things in it floating U so no one drank it but we used it to you know clean out the abdominal cavity now let me see if now let me show you one other thing back if you look at that little jar that's the little jar that we're going to pour the wine into the abdominal cavity with and on it we've put the hieroglyphs for wine now that those hieroglyphs are pronounced and I think it's an animat poetic the Egyptians liked words that sounded like they were for example the word for donkey in ancient Egyptian is EA the word for cat is Mia right and the word for wine is her right like a burp I think it's an aaap poetic I mean I think intentionally but so we have the the wine jar we have our Palm wine we're about ready to start now we also need our spices and the Egyptians used frankincense and myrrh now the the frankincense and myrrh had an important function I think it masks the smells when you're working with an unom bombed caver eventually it's going to smell perhaps so you have this frankincense in myrrh which will rehydrate with the body fluids and and it will cover some some of the smell so we got our frankincense in myrr the same place that the ancient Egyptians did it came from Yemen right from and on the right is the myrrh the bigger chunks is the myrrh on the left is the frankincense just so you see what it is so we got ours there too we used pure linen the Egyptians did not have cotton the ancient Egyptians didn't have cotton so we had to get pure white linen untreated linen right that was hard by the way most linen you get in America or anywhere is treated so we had to go to Ireland to get 100 yards of linen untreated and then my students put the magical spells these are these are ancient Egyptian magical spells that we've written on the bandages real spells that have been found on mummy bandages so we're preparing everything for the mummification then again like I said we had to create jobs the ancient Egyptians when they were buried wanted to be buried with 365 little statues to serve them in the next world they're called usapi statue usapi is an ancient Egyptian word it means answerer when you're called to do work in the next World this guy will answer for you right usapi statues so on the top you can see 365 of these little usapi statues that the Ceramics department has done and they've done a rather nice job they're really quite good um so good that I made sure that they didn't glaze the back because I didn't want them showing up on the Antiquities Market 100 years from now um and also we have canopic jars the ancient Egyptians stored the internal organs after you remove the organs you don't throw them out you keep them because you're literally going to get it all together again in the next World and resurrect so these are the four canopic jars and then those are the storage jars on either side so we've got all the Ceramics you need for mummification we've got the bronze tools obsidian tools we've got the linen we've got the Palm wine we've got frankincense and M and we need one more thing an Embers board the Egyptians when they mummified had a kind of board we've only found one by the way only one it was found by the Metropol Museum of Art in 1926 I think it was when lock the excavator and we made an exact copy now we did it with hand tools same way the Egyptians did it and one of the things that nobody ever understood about this embalmer board is why does it have these almost railroad tie like big big planks going across it we figured out why I'll tell you tell you in a minute so we're building this Embers board and it snaps together with pegs because the Egyptians didn't have nails so I'm putting the Embers board back together and the mummy is going to rest on that Embers board when we work now we are ready finally to mummify now the people that you see here in in this this image is the National Geographic film crew they were doing this documentary as I said on the on the project and they were very nice people right very nice people but I wouldn't do it again with them um they they sort of didn't get it that you can only do it once you know we so like can we do that again no he only has one brain you know you only take out one brain once and you can only do that um and I was a little worried also about the cameraman um this this is the producer actually here the cameraman's behind um this is the producer and the cameraman is behind her um I was worried that he would be a he hadn't seen I asked him had you been ever at an anatomical dissection have you seen any surgery no um and I asked him are you going to be okay in the in the O room when I work on this thing and he said yes because he's looking through a camera and it sort of gives you a distance and he was right I mean had no problem at all but it makes it different um you become a viewer rather than a participant perhaps so anyway they were very nice people but they didn't fully understand what was going on anyway um I'm about to break in through the nose right we have our our our cadaver is draped just like in surgery only the nose is is revealed there and I've got that long Harpoon like thing and I'm going to tap it to go right through the copor plate past the ethoid and into the cranium right that was easy now we're about to take out the brain I've got that long hook like thing in the nose and this is where we realized actually we realized from the two separate heads that I worked on that you just don't pull it out the brain doesn't come out it's not solid enough it's it's not viscous enough um what we realized was we had to put the instrument inside through the through the nasal passage but then we rotated it like a whisk like a kitchen whisk and liquefied the Brain then we inverted the caver and the Brain runs out kind of like a strawberry milkshake I mean it comes out like that so that's that's how they did it I'm sure and you know this also explains why nobody's ever found the remains of brain it doesn't come out in any condition you can keep it it's it's just a liquid so it was it was discarded um which which by the way isn't totally crazy you know the Egyptians didn't believe that you thought with your brain the Egyptians beli that you thought with your heart because when you get excited it's your heart that beats quickly not your brain right I mean so it's not counterintuitive at all to think no the brain do isn't what you think with you think with your heart this is why in the Bible for example we get phrases like Pharaoh's heart was hardened right or on Valentine's Day you know you send little chocolate Hearts right but you should be selling little chocolate brains right right I mean if you're talking about your feelings your thoughts um but anyway we're going to remove the brain this way we rotate it like a whisk invert it now how do we know when we've got all the brain out we have to evacuate the cranial cavity completely we have to get all the brain out what we figured was we would after we invert the cadaver we would take linen strips and force them with the tool through the nasal passage into the cranial cavity and use it like a swab and then we'll pull it out it'll come out with some blood with some body fluids on it some gray matter and you keep replacing the the linen until it comes out clean and then you know you've got an all the brain out that must be how they did it so we did that I mean this is so this is you can see I've got the the linen coming out right and and then eventually you keep doing it till you get a clean right so now we've got the brain out the hard part right what we think is the hard part at this point we said let let's break for lunch and and the National Geographic creu would have looked you know and and this's this great place two blocks away from the medical school which which has crab cakes Maryland crab cakes right um and so we went there you know it's kind of like a hole in the wall place but was really good crab cakes and and and all the National Geographic team ordered salad it was really funny everyone whated salad but anyway um so we came back to finish the mummification now the next next thing we did was remove the internal organs now Herodotus again gives us some nice details that we don't have anywhere else heraus said a man called the slitter the slitter right the surgeon so to speak comes and marks a red line on the body which is where to cut and then he comes with his obsidian tool makes the slit and then they say and then he ran away because they threw stones at him now this is a ritual but what it is is anybody who defiles a human body is doing something wrong now of course he's trying to help preserve the body so this is just a ritual they would take Pebbles and throw them at him and he would run away after he's done his slitting right so we did the this is the red mark on the left's flank you know and remember we've looked at lots of mummies we've seen what the incision looks like we know where it goes we're also going from Herodotus tomb paintings and actual mummies so we're about to do the abdominal cavity there you can see it's only 3 in now I wondered can you get a liver which is the largest organ in your body right the liver is the largest internal organ the largest organ is your skin right the skin is an organ but the largest internal organ is the liver and it's big it's bigger than most people realize like your livers an average healthy liver will fill your two hands more than that more than that it's quite quite large can you get a liver out out of a three three you know can you do it well we're going to learn so I'm making the incision right now I've got my obsidian tool just a piece of leather around it so I don't cut myself it's very sharp and I make a little gentle incision and I'm down to the level of the adapost tissue we got a little bit of fat right that's you're looking at a little white little fat and then one more swipe and I'm in the abdominal cavity now that is the first organ that comes out one of the things we wanted to find out was in what organ you know what organs come out first you know what's the order in which the organs come out um anybody here can identify that organ what is it nope good it looks a little like a kidney but no spleen spleen it's a spleen the spleen it's it's a dark dark red color that'll help you the spleen is basically a bag of blood it purifies the blood right so the spleen that's the spleen that was the first organ that came out we are trying to learn as much as we can about surgical procedures what organs come out first about the tools used which are the best tools about the use of natrin all of this is is towards answering questions about these areas so we know now the spleen comes out first and that's the spleen a a a much neglected organ I feel right when everybody ask ask people to name organs they're going to go with stomach liver kidneys intestines nobody mentions now we are now working on the intestines we're taking out the intestines now my cooworker here is Ron Wade Ron Wade is the um director of the state Anatomy board for Maryland and Ron was a perfect perfect coworker the guy is a great anatomist knows more Anatomy than I would have know but even more important you know because we all know where the liver is the kidney is this he's small Ron has small hands and he could get in places where my big clumsy hands couldn't and he was really very good at getting way up and getting the the you know get getting the lungs out things like that he did the harder of of the of the surgical techniques so that's Ron Wade and we're taking out the intestines right now our cadaver had died in the hospital after a stroke and he had been on the IV for a few days so his lower GI tra was pretty much empty so we we got lucky we didn't have a messy thing but we still tied off the internal organ you know the you know the intestines and took them out that way and now we're putting the organs inside jars preserving them right and I'm putting natrin on top of the organs to dehydrate them right now how much natrin does it take the answer is 400 lb for a single mummification of an ordinary sized man it took 400 pound of nin now that gives you an idea of how expensive it was to mummify in the ancient Egyptian way now we're doing it topof the line we're not sparing any expense we are mummifying the way a pharaoh would have been mummified but still 400 lb we are now purifying the abdominal cavity with the the wine right and then following what we've seen with mummies we have little packets of nrin we have taken the the the sodium carbonate bicarbonate and chloride right the the baking soda and table salt and put them in a little packets of of of n of linen making kind of like a sachche and we are going to pack the abdominal and thoracic cavities with natrin we are going to dehydrate the body both from the inside and the outside side simultaneously right now it took 22 packets of nin right to go all the way up we've cut the diaphragm we've gone all the way up we've taken out the we've taken out the lungs stomach liver spleen kidneys intestines right pancreas gallbladder and by the way you know a lot of people think because the Egyptians did mummification that they had a great great knowledge of anatomy wrong you don't learn Anatomy by sticking your hand in a little and pulling out an organ no way most of the anatomy the Egyptians knew they learned from animals that they slaughtered which isn't the same as a human um as a matter of fact for example there is no ancient Egyptian word for gallbladder I don't think they knew you had one they just didn't see it I didn't see it when I was doing the mummification I'm taking things out I'm I'm I'm I'm operating right and I know a little anatomy and I'm pulling it out and I said to Ron Ron where's the gallbladder and Ron my my cooworker Ron said oh it came out with the mesentary it came out with the intestines I didn't see it it was just lost in that tangle of tubes that looks like your intestines so they didn't have a great knowledge of anatomy they didn't so we're packing everything with natrin we're going to dehydrate it from the inside and the outside this is our Embers board if you'll remember and this is where we found out why the railroad ties are there when you die the only only thing that affects where the blood is in your body is gravity your heart has stopped beating it is no longer circulating the blood this is why for example in a cadav when you cut a cadaver it doesn't bleed a lot because there's nothing pumping the blood so for example if you stood a body a murder victim up in a closet the blood would go to the legs if he's lying down it's going to go to the larger muscle groups your gluteus Maxima your butt your quadric steps right all of that so what we figured out was since all the blood is going to go to the bottom of the cadaver that's lying on the board that's where you need the natrin to absorb the moisture right we didn't drain the body we figured we could do it without so when we filled up the board with natrin those railroad ties you can see are keeping the natrin in place it's giving you a lot of nin under the body it doesn't squirt out and then the body's going to go on top of that now we are working inside a tent now the reason we're working inside a tent is because the Egyptians mummified in a tent one of the names for Anubis the mmif fire god is he who is in his tent another name for Anubis is he who was upon his Hill and we believe the Egyptians mummified Outdoors on a hill so the smells would be blown away by the wind now we couldn't do that Outdoors we're doing it the medical school but we built a little tomb like sort of tent like we'd actually built a tent there's a tent and we kept the the temperature at 105° so we are working at 105° with 22% humidity like Egypt right like Egypt and we are filling with natrin the board and the body is on the board now I think you can make out the foot just to orient you the internal organs are in the jars around the mummification table and in the back that little circular thing is telling us the humidity and temperature so we are going to leave the body our unbaled cadaver on this mummification board covered in Natan for for 70 well for 35 days we're going to start with 35 days because that's what some texts talk about 35 days so we're going to leave him there and see what happens we didn't Peak we decided to just close the door walk away and hope it works right we've removed the organs we've done everything Egyptian way but we didn't know if this would work nobody had done it in 2,000 years is and we could have been stuck with a rotting Cav and we just didn't know after about a week we were pretty sure we were okay because a rotting cafa really smells it purifies and we didn't get a bad smell we really didn't so I thought we were okay but we weren't sure after 35 days we go back and that's what it looks like the natrin is no longer powdery it's congealed it's almost as hard as cement but it comes off you know you can hit it a little bit and it comes off that's the mummy's head right you can you can see where it is nose is there ey so what was curious was another thing we wanted to know why does a mummy look like it does is it the result of 3,000 years or is it the result of the mummification process the answer is the mummification process after 35 days our mummy look like a mummy look like an Egyptian mummy there's the mummy hand sounds like a a mummy movie right the mummy's hand is emerging we're dusting it off we're getting rid of the Natron now this is the mummy the head looking from the head and you can see there's some yellow there that's lipids fats there was it's it's it's very interesting what happened to our mummy after 35 days and this is where we learned so much after 35 days let me give you one more view of our mummy here we're we're now checking him out we're brushing him off looks like an Egyptian mummy with one difference one difference there's still a little bit of liquid in them we could feel it in the larger muscle groups the gluteus Max the butt the legs we could feel a little bit of softness now we didn't know what to do was our mummy going to Decay because there was moisture in it should we put more natrin on and dehydrate it more or should we put it back in the Tomb the the little tent and see what happens right now we before we decided we weighed our mummy now the mummy went in weighing 180 lbs it came out weighing about 60 PBS so as you know you're mostly water and when you remove the organs too you're really lightning so so it came out at about 60 pounds right still there was some moisture in there still quite a bit of moisture but we decided and these are the organs this is what the organs look like after 35 days there's your kidneys in the middle the kidneys are right in the middle um we decided to wrap him just a kind of preliminary wrapping and put him back in the Tomb for another three months just to see what would happen we'd learn more so he's wrapped now that's not blood that you see those stains on the on the bandages that's resin tree sap that we used just as the Egyptians did to adhere the bandages so you want to stick the bandages on so I'm using tree resin here and I'm wrapping them just kind of preliminarily put him back for 3 months and let's see if he decays or if he comes out lighter and there we're this is what he looks like after another three months he's lighter he weighs now about 38 pounds so the rest of the moisture's gone and this is where we really learned it didn't happen the way we thought we believed that the whole goal of mummification is to get rid of all the moisture fast and we thought we had failed perhaps because after 35 days we still had moisture in our body right no here's what happened we had decided to bury our Pharaoh like I'm sorry bury our mummy like a pharaoh we were going to put his arms on his chest you know like Tu tank Aman and when we tried to do that after three months we couldn't he was too brittle we would have broken the arms now if we had done it after 35 days we could have done that there's a little bit of moisture left so the reason the Egyptians said 35 days was it's just long enough that enough moisture is gone that it won't Decay and there's still enough moisture in it that you can have flexibility and bandage it any way you want so we couldn't do that because we put it back for another three months what we did was we B buried the arms in this position with with the hands down by the pubis and that way you know we we could we could bandage them pretty pretty pretty nice nicely so we're wrapping him now and that's our mummy wrapped this is what he looks like all wrapped like a pharaoh now we are about to CAT scan him and let me emphasize that this is an ongoing project and why we did it first remember I said we wanted to learn about tools that were used we learned a lot about that we learned about the embalming board we learned why there were railroad ties we learned about the stone implement the knife that why they use the stone knife we learned all kinds of things about that and that was very successful we learned about the nron we learned that you put the packets inside and outside 400 pounds that dehydrates the body and we even learned that you can put it in for 35 days and that's just right to keep a little moisture in and to dehydrate most of the body so we did a lot of that now the other thing we wanted to do is scan our mummy to get a set of CAT scans of our mummy now why our mummy is the only ancient Egyptian mummy about whom we know everything that was done to it we know we went in bilaterally through both nostrils we know how the brain was removed we know that Natron packets were put inside the thoracic and abdominal cavities we know all of this so now when anybody finds an ancient Egyptian mummy a real ancient Egyptian mummy our mummy is The Benchmark they can compare our x-rays CAT scans with Theirs to see oh yes that's like the that's like their Mummy at Maryland they they did that with the two things ours looks just like that nope ours doesn't look like that they didn't do it that way way so ours is a bit of a kind of yard stick against which other mummies can be compared so we we CAT scan them and there we are looking at the scans I tell you an interesting thing though I don't know if anybody knows this here's a here's a mummy trivia question for you you can cat scan a mummy you can x-ray a mummy but you can't do an MRI of a mummy does anybody know why is any radiologist in the it's a tricky question you got to know how how MRIs work okay it's not blood it's there's no moisture see an MRI Works off of the hydrogen off of the hydrogen in the water molecules you need water in a in a in a subject to do an MRI if you took our mummy and put him in an MRI you'd get no signal at all you would get nothing as if nothing's there so you can't do an MRI of a mummy but we did the CAT scans so we have all of that now as I mentioned at the very beginning of the talk this is an ongoing project it is not let me show you just one more here there he is going in now do you see that we've had have a foot open there's a foot unwrapped we've unwrapped it later this is a later scan we we want to take tissue samples periodically to see if our mummy is is is decaying every two years or so we go back we take tissue samples we culture it we look to see if there's any bacteria fungi so far it seems to to be stable it's nothing's nothing's growing on our mummy inside or out um we put endoscopes in we look to see what's going on um we think we got it right but you know you have to wait a while a couple thousand years to see if it's right but this is our foot just so so we can take samples if we want and this is what the mummy looks like today right after each time we we unwrap we look and it it it is in room temperature it's at room temperature and it has been for 14 years and so far there's no signs of Decay now as I was going to say you know it's an ongoing project we are asked very often for samples of tissue by other scientists doing work with mummies but maybe more important we are doing DNA studies on our mummy right now and and you mentioned Elizabeth there's an IMAX film I forget what it was called was it secrets of the mummies yeah secrets of the pharohs um this was an IMAX I don't know if any of you saw it it was an IMAX about our research with this mummy and it it and what it is is an honest film it tells you that so far nobody has been able to get any DNA out of an ancient Egyptian mummy it's all hype on television it's not true when they say oh the DNA is going to reveal that this is Queen hatch up suit no we have not been able to get a long sequence of DNA from any Egyptian mummy and we're not sure why is it 3,000 years is it the mummification process is it this is it that so what we are doing now right now and and we'll know within a few months is we are sequencing DNA from our mummy now if we can get a long chain of DNA from our mummy we will know it's the 3,000 years that's the problem and not the mummification so we're using our mummy to this day in important research and we hope for the next you know several centuries if we if if the University of Maryland goes that long or whatever that it'll it'll be available to scientists for other for other other procedures um it won't be at the University of Maryland much longer though because Ron Wade my cooworker who who works there is retiring and we figure we have to have a better place for it where somebody really cares about mummies so we're going to give it to the Museum of Man in San Diego an anthropology Museum which has all kinds of human Cav things like that and they'll they'll certainly be able to care for it and take care of it so it'll move to San Diego um next year there's going to be a big mummy Congress in all the mummy experts are getting together in San Diego next year and then we'll have the mummy there for them to see and do that so that's when it's you know going to move but then we hope it'll be used for a future research but that is the mummy project um and I'll be happy to answer any questions you have thank you you