EGYPTIAN mummies age surprisingly gracefully, a new report says. Tissue
from mummies can provide insight into disease and death long ago. But that
assumes the corpse hasn’t changed during its thousands of years of storage. “The
big question is whether the way it looks now is the way it looked way back
then,” says Michael Zimmerman of the University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia.
Zimmerman and his colleagues decided to find out by preparing a mummy of
their own. They dehydrated a man’s body with natron, a mixture of sodium
carbonate and bicarbonate that the Egyptians used to dry out their dead, then
waited for 35 days. The modern mummy looked similar to the ancient kind. For
instance, both had well-preserved spleens and kidneys, but badly degraded
intestines. “This gives us a lot of confidence about what we see in ancient
tissues,” says Zimmerman.
