NARRATOR: The objects in this room are from a Middle Kingdom cemetery in the town of Meir, halfway between Luxor and Cairo. The mummies were part of a five-month study in 1998 led by Doctor David Mininberg, a volunteer in the Department of Egyptian Art.

DAVID MININBERG: The ancient Egyptians believed that in the afterlife an individual would have an idealized version of the life he had enjoyed here on earth. It is for this reason that they preserved the physical body as a mummy. The Persians, thinking the preservation used bitumen, named these bodies mumia, their word for bitumen. The process of mummification was essentially one of desiccation, as removal of the water and other body fluids enhances tissue preservation. Most of the internal organs were removed, the body packed in natron, a salt mixture of sodium bicarbonate, sodium carbonate and sodium sulfate naturally occurring in Egypt. Including the attendant religious rites, the process took seventy days in all during the New Kingdom and likely took the same time in the Middle Kingdom.

Our team from The New York Hospital has performed CAT scans on the thirteen mummies here at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This radiographic technique shows the details of the entire mummy—the layers of linen wrapping, any amulets or jewelry, and the body itself. In fact, it allows unwrapping the mummy without manually disturbing it—a virtual unwrapping.

We were able to determine their age, plus or minus five years, the sex (with one exception), their height, and in two instances the presumptive cause of death: one had trauma from a vehicular accident, the other overwhelming infection from an abscess). Based on so few examples, no broad generalizations can be made. However, we can say that the average height was 5’6" and the life span 35-45 years in The Metropolitan Museum of Art mummies.