The Champollion Museum's egyptian mummy
The most recent anthropology project for the MAAT3D team is the visualization of a mummy belonging to the Henri Martin Museum in Cahors, 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.
3D volumetric renderings of
the Champollion Museum's egyptian mummy.
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.
The Champollion Museum's
egyptian mummy going through the MDCT.
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.”
To learn more about
this project go to the Apple Science Profile
article.