Science Museum's Mummy A Lot Younger Than Thought
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- Not that it's going to put much spring back into his step, but the mummy on display at the Science Museum of Minnesota is actually more than 1,000 years younger than initially thought.
The museum's Egyptian mummy was originally believed to date back to the 18th dynasty, roughly between 1550 and 1295 B.C.E.
However, new Carbon-14 testing shows that the mummy died somewhere within 100 years of the dividing line between the B.C.E. era and the C.E. era. That would make the mummy at least about 1,200 years younger than the original estimates.
The radiocarbon study was performed on one rib bone sample from the mummy along with four linen samples, the museum reported.
The mummy was purchased by a museum trustee in Cairo in the 1920s.
"We have little context for this mummy, so we have always assumed that he was from the 18th Dynasty based on information provided to Mr. Crosby when he purchased him in the 1920s," Dr. Ed Fleming, curator for archaeology at the Science Museum, said. "This opens up all sorts of new avenues for research and interpretation. Finally, we can definitively place him into time and interpret him according to the politics and society of ancient Egypt from when he lived. ... It's fascinating to be able to more precisely pinpoint what life was like when this individual was alive."
The labels on the mummy display will be updated to reflect these new dates.
