By Pierre Barthélémy
An examination at Le Centre Hospitalier de Lens in northern France has revealed more about a scribe who died almost 3,000 years ago.
On the late afternoon of Monday, September 23, a rather unusual patient was lying on the table at the hospital in Lens (Pas-de-Calais, northern France), about to undergo an X-ray scan. On the other side of the glass in the image acquisition room, an unusual crowd of film crews, journalists and hospital staff gathered – as if at a show – to observe the forthcoming examination. On one of the computer screens where the images of this three-dimensional X-ray would appear, a name could be seen. Djedmoutiouefankh Neha. But Neha remained invisible.
This Egyptian, who lived almost 3,000 years ago, is not only wrapped in linen bandages but his mummy is also enclosed in a funerary cartonnage, a kind of painted anthropomorphic box. Only his feet, wrapped in cloth in good condition, are visible, as – in addition to a hole in this part of the cartonnage – the base is missing.
Neha belongs to the Louvre’s collection of Egyptian mummies and usually resides a few kilometers away in the huge conservation center that the museum inaugurated in Liévin (Pas-de-Calais) in 2019. This is the first time one of its mummies has been scanned. “We’re not equipped for this,” explained Hélène Guichard, general curator at the Louvre’s Department of Egyptian Antiquities. Hence the idea of signing an agreement with the Centre Hospitalier de Lens to benefit from their medical scanner.
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