Egyptian Mummies Virtually Unwrapped In Australia 

Sydney: The hidden secrets of Egyptian mummies up to 3,000 years old have been virtually unwrapped and reconstructed for the first time using cutting-edge scanning technology in a joint British-Australian exhibition.

Three-dimensional images of six mummies aged between 900 BC and 140-180 AD from ancient Egypt, which have been held at the British Museum but never physically unwrapped, give an insight into what it was like to live along the Nile river thousands of years ago.

Two of the travelling mummies were previously exhibited at the British Museum in 2014, with the other four being revealed to the world for the first time in the Sydney show that opens on Saturday.

He believes the mummies can be rescanned in a decade's time using the latest technology to find out more about their state of health, what diseases they were suffering from and the nature of their deaths.

We hope in the future to image the soft tissues at the cellular level to look at whether there's any changes or to find evidence, for example, of cardiovascular diseases but also things like cancer.

The scans found that one of mummies, Tamut, a priest's daughter from about 900 BC, had plaque in her arteries. Three-dimensional printing was also used to recreate amulets found during scans of her mummified remains. The earliest evidence of mummification in Egypt suggests that the practice of wrapping bodies to preserve them after death dates back as far as 4500 BC.

The mummies are due to travel to Asia next year.

(AFP)