At the end of the afternoon on Monday, September 23, a very curious patient lies on the table that is about to slide into the scanner at the Lens hospital center (Pas de Calais). On the other side of the glass, in the image acquisition room, an unusual crowd (film crew, journalists, hospital staff) gathers, as if at a spectacle, to observe the examination being prepared. On one of the computer screens, where the images of this three-dimensional x-ray will appear, we read her name: Djedmoutiouefankh Neha. Neha, however, remains invisible.
This almost 3,000-year-old Egyptian is not only covered in wrappings, but his mummy is enclosed in a funerary cardboard, a kind of painted anthropomorphic box. We can only see his feet wrapped in a cloth in good condition, since, in addition to a hole in this place of the cardboard, the base of the latter is missing.
Neha belongs to the Louvre’s collection of Egyptian mummies and usually lives a few kilometers away, in the immense conservation center that the museum inaugurated in Liévin (Pas de Calais), in 2019. It is the first time that one of her mummies appears been scanned. “We are not prepared for this”, explains Hélène Guichard, general curator of the Louvre’s department of Egyptian antiquities. Hence the idea of reaching an agreement with the Lens hospital center to benefit from its medical scanner.
Because we no longer open mummies: “In the 19th centurymy century, traces the Egyptologist, We did not hesitate to open the coffins and boxes, unwrap the mummies and recover the amulets and jewels. Many boxes thus lost their owners, because very often the mummies were destroyed. We don’t do that anymore. Today, non-destructive medical research techniques make it possible to gather information without even seeing the mummy. »
Depicted in loincloth
What do we know about Neha? Hélène Guichard acknowledges few things, to tell the truth: “The mummy is part of what at the Louvre we call “the ancient collection”; but we do not know when and under what circumstances it arrived there, probably in the 19th century.my century. » Therefore, we must comply with what the cardboard says. Contrary to what it seems, this “shell” is not made of wood, but of several layers of linen fabric glued together. As it dries, this wrapper hardens, but is still flexible enough to allow the mummy to be introduced from behind, through an opening sewn with a cord.
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