Mannheim, Germany - An exhibition of 70 mummies from round the globe is to open Sunday at a German museum, complete with three- dimensional X-ray pictures to reveal probable causes of death. The bodies, some naturally mummified and other embalmed, were given computer tomography (CT) scans by university hospital doctors to reveal symptoms of tuberculosis, arthritic joints and tumours.
The Reiss-Engelhorn Museum in the south-western city of Mannheim says the show, till March 24, is the biggest ever devoted to ancient preserved bodies and follows the chilling discovery that the museum had 19 mummies in its own store.
The museum had lost track of several of the mummies, which were wrapped in brown paper or packed in cartons 100 years ago, and wrongly assumed they had been destroyed by Second World War bombs.
The rest of the exhibits have been borrowed from science institutes and other museums.
They include bodies embalmed in ancient Egypt and South America, examples from Asia and naturally preserved bodies discovered in bogs or in the crypt of a church at Vac, Hungary.
All will be displayed in simple glass cases in low light in rooms painted dark blue "to preserve the dignity of the dead," said museum chief Alfred Wieczorek.
"We don't want to be sensationalist," he added in an unstated reference to Gunther von Hagens, a German anatomist who preserves bodies with plastic and has taken his Body Worlds exhibition of posed corpses round the globe.
The Mannheim show includes a woman whose hair and brain are clearly visible, a father, mother and child from Vac in sitting positions and a shaggy dog from a bog.
Also shown is the Windeby Girl, a teenager found in a northern German bog in 1952. It was later discovered by a DNA test that the body was of a boy, but the name has stuck.
The CT scans of the mummies are shown on adjacent flat screens.
The Mannheim medical checks led to the first proof that embalming was practised in South America. The doctors noticed a yellow patch on the mummy of a girl and found it was an embalming chemical.
Curator Wilfried Rosendahl said mummification was still practised in some places, for example by a small sect in the US state of Utah. Elsewhere people paid to have their bodies deep frozen in liquid nitrogen.
