It's all part of a webcast series in conjunction with the Revealing Bodies exhibit. The webcast will be shown to a live audience at the Exploratorium and online viewers. The mummy, loaned by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, is mysterious and has never been examined with sophisticated imaging tools. That would date the mummy back some 3,500 years. Slices will be combined to make three-dimensional images of the head and torso, letting viewers look at the flesh, tissues and bone.
Experts can also examine different slides of the mummy to investigate any curiosities that arise.
These are just some of the things that might be discovered during the webcast. While Goldberg will guide viewers through the CT scan and helps assess the condition of the mummy before and after death, Fine Arts Museum conservator Lesley Bone will discuss her preparations of the mummy for imaging and what she knows of its history. At points throughout the CT scan and program, email questions will be taken from the Web audience. From the Exploratorium, Stanford graduate student Gilbert Barrego will discuss his research with mummies, including his imaging study of a mummy from the Stanford Museum. He will explain how ancient funeral directors prepared a body for burial and explore the attitudes that Egyptians had about the body and why it was so important to carefully preserve it for eternity.