| Carnegie Child Human Mummy | |
| |
| Biographical Information | |
|---|---|
| Name(s) | Unknown |
| Age | 3 |
| Sex | m |
| Status | high |
| Height | 2' 4" |
| Source | |
| Culture | Egyptian |
| Date(s) | 380–250 B.C. |
| Site | Abydos |
| Current Location | |
| Location | Carnegie Museum of Natural History |
| Catalog # | |
Carnegie Museum of Natural History purchased the 2,000-year-old mummy from Swiss Egyptologist Henri Edouard Naville in 1912. It had been unearthed from the only intact tomb left in an Abydos cemetery. The tomb’s contents included seven adult mummies in limestone sarcophagi, and five child mummies in wooden coffins. Inside each coffin, each mummy was elaborately decorated with a mask, a breastplate, three panels over the legs, and a foot covering. Housed in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Walton Hall of Ancient Egypt, a child mummy, the cause of death is unknown.
Studies[]
In May 2007 CT scans of the mummy were performed by Jeffrey Towers, chief of musculoskeletal radiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
Since wraps for children were uncommon, the wrap the child mummy was apparently made from one designed for a women. It was cut and pieced together in order to fit.
Pathology[]
The child mummy had been x-rayed in the 1940s and again in 1986. Originally it was thought X-rays indicated that the child’s cranium appears enlarged, which may be a sign of a medical problem. Based upon wrist development, the child was determined to be around 8 or 9 years old.
The 2007 CT scans, however, found that the child, a male; was only about 3 years old, determined through three-dimensional dental scans. The head of a 3-year-old is typically disproportionately larger than a still-growing body, so the head size of the child was, in fact, fairly normal.
Scans of the boy’s cranium, showed a delayed closure of the anterior fontanel (“soft spot”). The skull itself was found to be smaller than average, and it was suggested that his small size, smaller-than-average cranium, and still-prevalent soft spot could be signs of a condition called hypothyroidism, or severe thyroid deficiency.