Mummies have stirred the imagination since they were first discovered. Now the Israel Museum presents to the public the only mummy in Israel, revealing surprising new details about life and death in ancient Egypt.
The 2, 200 year old mummy was given to the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jerusalem in the 1930’s by the Jesuits in Alexandria, and is on loan to the Israel Museum for display and further study.
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According to inscriptions found on the coffin, the deceased was a man named Iret-hor-r-u, meaning the “Protective Eye of Horus, ” and served as a high ranking priest from the ancient city of Akhmim.
Ahead of the exhibition, The Israel Museum, in collaboration with leading Israeli researchers and scientists, performed CT scans showing that the deceased suffered from osteoporosis (previously thought to be a 20th century disease), as well as receding gums and dental caries.
These and other findings suggest a sedentary lifestyle out of the sun and a diet based mainly on carbohydrates, concerns still relevant today. The mummy is in excellent condition; bones, teeth, hair, and even some blood vessels are still intact.
In addition to the mummy and his elaborately decorated coffin, the exhibition includes an embalmed ibis, presented to Israel at the peace agreements of 1979 as a gift from Egypt.
According to AP, the Israel Museum teamed up with the Carmel Medical Center in Haifa and scientists from Tel Aviv University to get a better understanding of who Iret-hor-iru was, how he lived, and how he died. Contrary to what the priests at the institute thought, he wasn’t a teenage boy, nor did he live in the 4th century BCE, around the time Egypt fell to Alexander the Great.
Ap rports the radiocarbon dating of his linen wrappings found he died in the 2nd century BCE, and CT scans found he lived into his late 30s or early 40s, no small feat when infant mortality was rampant and a year-old child was expected to live until 40. He stood 5’5″ when he was alive — taller than average — but the desiccating embalming procedure left him a few inches shorter as the centuries passed.
Other related artifacts from the Museum’s collections will be on view, including burial amulets, canopic jars, statuettes deposited in tombs as offerings, funerary portraits and masks, and hieroglyphic texts from the Book of the Dead, a collection of spells meant to protect the deceased on route to eternal life.
