SGI unwraps 3,000-year-old mummy SGI unwraps 3,000-year-old mummy (July 23, 2004)

Secrets revealed in high-tech search

By David Herbert

Mountain View-based visual graphics company SGI and the British Museum recently teamed up to take a look inside a 3,000-year-old mummy while keeping the ancient corpse under wraps.

Researchers from the British Museum gathered over 1,500 images of the mummy, an Egyptian priest named Nesperennub, from CAT scans and 3-D laser scans performed in England and Scotland. They turned over the information to SGI, which used powerful graphics supercomputers to convert the images into a single 3-D dataset that could be interactively explored.

"We have been able to take a journey of exploration in real-time deep within the wrappings, to examine in fine detail skin, bone, teeth and also amulets traditionally placed within the mummy," said Dr. John Taylor, assistant keeper in the department of ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum, according to a press release from SGI.

With SGI's technology, researchers found a mysterious cavity in the mummy, likely the result of a disease. The mummy also had a severe abscess on his tooth and his molars were worn down.

Also of interest was a clay bowl with tree sap affixed to the mummy's skull. Its embalmers seem to have accidentally glued it to the top of Nesperennub's head.

The 3-D imagery of the mummy has been turned into a 22-minute show, narrated by Sir Ian McKellen, and is now on display at the British Museum in London. The film, in which the mummy's wraps are peeled away, is being shown in a 112-seat, SGI-designed "Reality Theater" with a 42-foot wide, 12-foot tall curved screen, one of nearly 700 such theaters SGI has sold in the past decade.

A future application of the SGI technology may include performing autopsies without actually touching the corpses.

E-mail David Herbert at dherbert@mv-voice.com

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