Medical Visualization: Egyptology in 3D
A revealing high-resolution look at a 2300-year-old mummy
Renderings of the Champollion mummy in VGStudio Max 2.0 reveal the mummy’s physiology through transparentized wrapping layers
Dr. Phillipe Pomar is a professor of maxillofacial prosthetics at the University of Toulouse in southern France. You might think of that as his day job. Pomar also focuses his professional skills on his lifelong passion: the glories of ancient Egypt — its culture, its art, its artifacts, and, of course, its mummies.
“They have always fascinated me,” says Pomar. No doubt. He has degrees in both anthropology and Egyptology and leads a research initiative of the Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique in the study of mummies from the dynastic period.
For Egyptologists like Pomar, the desire to know more about mummies was always frustrated by the careful work of their embalmers. Exposing the mummy did reveal some of its secrets — but at a cost. The intrusion robbed the mummy of its pristine, undisturbed dignity. The juxtaposition of its layers was disturbed, and could not be restored. X-ray images were of only limited help in visualizing the body.
Today mummies are scanned and visualized as three-dimensional models in a non-invasive process that reveals and transparentizes all the layers applied in the mummification ritual as well as all the biological tissues that lie within them. Startling 3D images from mummy scannings have been widely publicized to a fascinated public. But Pomar and his colleagues have taken the visualization of mummies — and of live patients — to a totally new level.
Pomar is one of three co-founders of MAAT3D, a French organization of scientists, doctors, educators, 3D visualization specialists, and PhD students that scan biological objects — typically with a computerized tomography (CT) medical scanner — and create 3D visualizations with a richness of detail that has never been seen before. They do most of their work for museums, scanning mummies to create animated visualizations for presentation to the public. Their work has given them remarkable insight into mummification techniques.
“We’re looking at the ways mummification evolved across the dynasties,” says Pomar. “We want to understand how Egyptian knowledge of anatomy grew over the years. We’re also looking for pathologies, which are revealed by the skeleton.”
This visualization technology, perfected on mummies, is also being applied to the living — patients who need reconstructive facial and dental surgery. It is also proving to be the ultimate medium for medical illustration.
The Mystery Man of Champollion: An Anonymous Celebrity
The most recent anthropology project for the MAAT3D team is the visualization of a mummy belonging to the Henri Martin Museum in Cahols, France. The mummy has been loaned for display to the Champollion Museum in Figeac. Jean-Francois Champollion, for whom the museum is named, would have been delighted with this work: in 1822, he announced to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres that he had identified the alphabet of the phonetic hieroglyphs used in Egyptian inscriptions. His work is considered by many to be the starting point of Egyptological discovery.
The Champollion mummy itself is a mystery wrapped in a mystery. It is clear that it is of a man about 45 years old and 63 inches (1.6 meters) tall who lived between 332 and 30 B.C.E, in the heyday of the Ptolemaic pharaohs. But nobody knows when or where it was discovered or how it found its way to France. The most credible guess is that it was a prize of war, arriving in France aboard a ship of the French fleet with a returning member of Napoleon’s Expedition about 1801. The museum ultimately received it as a gift.
Nor is it known how or why this man died. His identity is a mystery; there are no inscriptions on his funerary wrappings that give us a clue. He was not a royal or even a VIP. But he is receiving royal treatment today from MAAT3D, and is destined to become a celebrity. MAAT3D scanned the mummy with a Phillips MX 8000 CT Scanner at the Figeac Hospital at a resolution of 0.3mm per slice, generating more than 7000 scan slices and a world of detail about the mystery man.
“Other mummies have been scanned,” says MAAT3D co-founder Benjamin Moreno, a 3D imaging specialist. “What sets this project apart is the 3D renderings. Nobody has seen this kind of quality before.”
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Who’s your mummy? Socioeconomics in Dynastic Egypt
The man that became the Champollion mummy cannot have been a royal, because there were no amulets in evidence. The cartonnage — the decorated shell around the mummy — is not lavishly decorated as befits a royal.
But the clincher is the fact that although the mummifiers shaved the body, its internal organs were not removed. Had the Champollion mummy been that of a royal, or even a man of any importance in the community, its brain and entrails would certainly have been ritually removed, replaced with sawdust and resins, and placed beside him or in canopic jars beside his sarcophagus. In short, this mummification was done quickly on the cheap.
“This man was not embalmed as he should have been,” says Moreno. “The ritual approach was to remove internal organs to preserve the body for eternity without letting the process affect its integrity. In the case of the Champollion mummy, the brain and the thoracic organs were left in place.”
From this we learn some important facts about mummification during the Ptolemaic period. First, less-privileged people might not receive the full ritual evisceration and decerebration (removal of brains and thoracic organs). This suggests that the standards of funerary services were slipping. Second, the customary ritual removal of organs provided better preservation of the bodies. Although the corpse of the Champollion mummy was obviously immersed in natron (sodium carbonate, a naturally occurring salt) for the standard 60-day dehydration period, the body did not survive as well as the pampered mummies of the elite.
Rendering of the Mummy
Watch a QuickTime video of the Mummy
Renderings of the mummy in VGStudio Max 2.0 reveal the mummy’s physiology through transparentized wrapping layers