JERUSALEM — Israel’s national museum is set to display a 2,200-year-old Egyptian mummy of a man who was afflicted with some modern-day illnesses such as osteoporosis and tooth decay, the museum said Tuesday.
The illnesses, discovered using a CT scan, indicate that during his lifetime, the man was largely sedentary, avoided manual labor in the sun and probably ate a carbohydrate-heavy diet.
The mummy, the only such relic in Israel, is named the Protective Eye of Horus, after a pharaonic deity. It was kept for decades at a Jesuit institute in Jerusalem before it was loaned to the Israel Museum. Wednesday was the first day that it was displayed in a museum setting.
The research on the mummy builds on international studies that have shown that people in ancient Egyptian times also had some of the diseases we deal with today.
“Osteoporosis is a disease that is characteristic of the 20th century, when people don’t work so hard. We are glued to screens,” said Galit Bennett, who curated the mummy exhibit. “We were very surprised that there were people who didn’t do physical work and that it affected their bodies like this man here.”
The museum said that thanks to Egyptian embalming processes and Jerusalem’s dry climate, the mummy’s bones, teeth and remnants of blood vessels were found largely intact, assisting them in their research. The mummy was also found to have had cavities in its teeth.
Researchers studied the mummy’s remains earlier this year using a CT scanner, technology that allowed them to discover the diseases and determine the mummy was a man who lived to what was at the time a relatively old age of 30 to 40 years. He was originally 5 foot 6, but either in his lifetime or afterward, he shrunk to 5 foot 1. His apparently sedentary lifestyle, as well as inscriptions on his coffin, indicates he was a priest, the museum said.
The museum said the mummy is originally from Akhmim, some 300 miles south of present-day Cairo. It was given as a gift in the late 1920s to the Jesuit Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jerusalem by Jesuits in Alexandria, Egypt. The mummy, nicknamed Alex, was encased in a gold and black coffin and wrapped in strands of linen, and a gold mask was placed atop his concealed skull.
