Online Activities: Ancient Egypt
The Faces of Djed: A CT-scan of a ROM Mummy Illuminates a Life from Ancient Egypt
By Lee-Anne Jack
Amid images of pyramids glowing against the luminous desert sky and gold treasures reflecting the mysteries of a land of winged gods and mighty Pharaohs, it's difficult to imagine that in ancient Egypt there also lived men and women who went about ordinary daily tasks, who lived, loved, and suffered.
Some three millennia ago, in the middle of the 9th century BC in Thebes, just such a middle-class young woman named Djedmaatesankh lived with her husband Paankhntof on the east bank of the river Nile. They were well-off, pious, and respectable, although as a double-income couple without children in ancient Egypt they would have been somewhat unusual.
Djedmaatesankh was a musician at the great Temple of Amun-Re at nearby Karnak where her husband was a temple doorkeeper. These mildly prestigious- roles may have provided the couple with some comfort as part of the deity's household as well as small wages to supplement their main income from a parcel of fertile Nile land on which they may have grown crops of barley, sesame, or dates.
Although Thebes had become the seat of power for all Egypt by the 22nd Dynasty, political times were turbulent, and Djedmaatesankh may have worried about the Libyan mercenaries who had overthrown Egypt's royalty and were now ruling as kings. She may have grieved for her inability to bear children. And certainly, as she approached her thirties, she must have worried for her health.
Seen now, 2800 years later, behind a glass display in the Royal Ontario Museum, where she arrived at the beginning of this century in her fragile mummy case, Djedmaatesankh seems distant, to be appreciated more as a work of art than as a woman whose fortunes were once determined by the same natural laws as our own. The symbols and stories painted on her linen and-glue cartonnage in still startlingly vivid oranges, reds, and golds tell only part of her tale. But researchers were loath to tamper with the beautiful case, one of the best preserved of its period, to find out more about her.
Mummy-case of Djedmaatesankh, a musician from the temple of Amun-re at Thebes. Egyptian, Late Period, 850 BC. Mummy-case of moulded linen with plaster, paint and gold leaf. L:165 cm.
CT-scan of Djedmaatesankh. X-ray of Djedmaatesankh showing profile of mummy inside cartonnage coffin.
CT-scan of Djedmaatesankh. X-ray of torso of Djedmaatesankh showing artifacts on the body inside the linen wrappings - a large winged amulet, a scarab and a plate over the embalmer's incision.
