The UQAM Mummy – The Use of Non-Destructive Imaging to Reconstruct an Ancient Osteobiography and to Document Modern Malfeasance

An Egyptian mummy and her coffin dating to the 26th Dynasty were donated to the École de Beaux Arts in Montreal in 1927. This mummy has been in the collection of the Université du Québec à Montréal since 1967. Inscriptions on the elaborate coffin identify the individual as Hetep-Bastet. In 1969, the mummy was attacked by a protester, who caused extensive damage. The mummy was scanned once over a decade ago. However, computed tomography (CT) technology has advanced a great deal since that time, and some conclusions reached were somewhat suspect (e.g. that she suffered from a large dental abscess caused by “drinking too much beer”). Thus, when Hetep-Bastet was transported to Gatineau in the fall of 2008 to be part of the “Tombs for Eternity” exhibit at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, we took the opportunity to rescan her. The specific goals of our study were: to assess the damage done by the protester in 1969 to investigate the specific details of how she was mummified as part of an ongoing study of variability in mummification practice to gather osteological and paleopathological data in order to reconstruct her osteobiography to segment the skull from the CT data in order to create a facial reconstruction to examine her coffin as part of an ongoing study of the use of CT scans to characterize different materials associated with Egyptian mummies Damag