How did this mysterious Egyptian die? Polish researchers have now investigated further.
It was a small sensation when the researcher Wojciech Ejsmond and his team made their research public last year: A mummy from the 1st century BC. Chr. in the collection of the University of Warsaw was considered a man for decades – but now the scientists had found a mummified embryo in her abdomen. So it was not a priest from Thebes, but a woman from the Egyptian upper class.
Since then, the Polish researchers have continued to examine the woman’s body and have now come across the probable cause of death.
Anthropologist and archaeologist Marzena Ozarek-Szilke from the Medical University of Warsaw examined the mummy’s skull more closely. She noticed unusual marks on the bones under the eyes. The researchers suspect that the Egyptian woman may have died of nasopharyngeal cancer. The analysis of the tissue should provide further information about this. The scientists want to compare them with the finds in other mummies. They hope that analyzing the molecular structure of the tissue could reveal new clues about the evolution of cancer cells.
Cancer is considered a modern disease – it was not widespread among the ancient Egyptians, according to Egyptologists. Nevertheless, cancer was already present back then: Researchers only discovered breast cancer in 2018 using CT scans in a mummy more than 4000 years old. Evidence of blood cancer was also found in a 3,800-year-old mummy. According to the researchers, the mummified, like the woman now being examined, came from the Egyptian upper class.
Sources: The standard Archeology Online Warsaw Mummy Project