Italian hospital uses CT scan on an Egyptian mummy

This ancient Egyptian mummy underwent a CT scan

so researchers could discover more about its life and death

Location: Milan, Italy

(SOUNDBITE) (English) DIRECTOR OF MUMMY PROJECT RESEARCH, SABINA MALGORA, SAYING:"It's a sort of virtual autopsy. We can do a sort of fly through inside the mummy so we can study the mummy, we can reconstruct the life and the death of this person, we can also be sure about the sex because we can study the pelvis, we can measure him so we can understand how high he was and then we will do also some chemical and physical analyses to understand which kind of products were used to mummify the body and also we can do the radiocarbon dating so we can be sure at that time what he is saying to be."

In April, a CT scan of a mummy in Warsaw yielded surprising results

Researchers thought they were scanning the remains of a male priest

but the embalmed body was revealed to be a pregnant woman in her twenties

This particular sarcophagus dates back to between 900-800 B.C.

and was donated by an Italian ambassador who was living in Egypt

(SOUNDBITE) (English) DIRECTOR OF MUMMY PROJECT RESEARCH, SABINA MALGORA, SAYING: "The mummies are practically a biological museum, they are like a capsule of time and this is something that we understood, Egyptologists and researchers, we understood in the last ten years. Before, Egyptologists were more interested to archaeological items, sherbets, jewellery, papyrus, inscription and everything like that.