Un caso di mummia-mania: le indagini scientifiche risolvono un enigma

Egyptian mummies is a very important source of fascination and curiosity. In the pre-radiologic era the only approach for mummies investigation was a destructive one with loss of integrity of the specimens and consequently severe damage of cultural heritage that this find represent. Several non medical uses of Computed Tomography (CT) has been reported in literature, such as non-invasive investigation of artistic heritage. The CT scan has been used in the study of Egyptian finds since 1977, when Lewin PK and Harwood-Nash DC evaluated, for the first time, the ancient Egyptian brain of a weaver. The evolution of CT scanners allowed to easily study several mummies anatomical details not demonstrable with conventional plain X-ray. However, it should be noted, that not all of the collected mummies were authentic, indeed several fake specimens across the different heritage collection of the world has been reported. These fake objects were reported in literature since the eighteenth-century; one of them was described in 1809 by Jomard E., a member of the Institut d'Égypte founded by Napoleon, who commented the find of falsified mummies with these words: “removed the exterior bandages remained only a pile of bones, bitumen and dried leafy branches without any form”. These mummies were also called pseudo-mummies and are classified in: Pharaonic-Roman reliable source and modern age ones. The Egyptian section of Vatican Museum, Vatican State, Rome, Italy, houses several authentic mummies and coffins of the Ancient Egypt; among these, there are also two little mummy-shaped objects, called in their inventory “child-mummy n° 57852 and 57853”, whose authenticity was not clearly revealed. The aim of our study is to investigate the surface and the content of the two Vatican Museums “childmummies” and to assess the material used for their assembly, by using an approach based on computed tomography (CT) thin-slice scan and on other techniques.