The Mystery Of The Sealed Coffin | Mummy Forensics | Timeline

somebody here wants this lady to suffer we may have a crime here but we've got no body possibly suggest something little sinister there's so many suspicious elements to this story it's really giving me a cause for concern it would just be a world [Music] [Music] mummification the preservation of dead bodies became more than a science in ancient Egypt it developed into a sacred ritual no other people in history devoted so much time and expense to ensuring a safe passage into the eternal afterlife with their body intact the skill that Egypt's master embalmers was phenomenal thousands of years ago they worked to hope the ravages of time on lifeless corpses today forensic technology can unlock that person's secrets to reveal the intimate story of their life and death over 2,000 miles from Egypt in a museum in the north of England lies the beautifully preserved coffin of an Egyptian mummy but the body inside remains a mystery the workmanship and sophistication of this coffin suggests that it would have taken weeks if not months to create to be worthy of this top-of-the-range casket its owner must surely of be her VIP dr. Joanne Fletcher is a renowned Egyptologist who's done excavation work and mummy investigations around the world she's been called in to try and unlock the secrets of a given mummy we came into this country couple hundred years ago and rather than going to the British Museum or another major institution that came up here to Newcastle well it's obviously an Egyptian when we covering it's obviously female from the from the exterior at least so I'd be quite interested to sort of try and find out more about this individual inside so I'm really looking forward to sort of seeing them on me I'm afraid we can't do that we really can't open this up and because we're worried about damaging was beautiful object so is she completely sealed yes she is there's no small openings that we could take any samples or anything no it's completely yes yeah yes but this is going to be quite a challenge I think first and foremost what I'd really like to do is take a series of photographs from every angle pretty much so I can then go back to talk with the team in York and try and plan some sort of strategy see what techniques we can bring to bear to study this is very enigmatic fascinating moving they're sealed coffin maybe an exquisite work of art but it's also an ancient mystery thousands of years in the making Joanne's already nicknamed the hidden mummy the lady and piece-by-piece she and the team will have to fill in all the details of who she was where she's from and how she met her end this case will be a massive challenge for the mummy investigation team given the coffin it's sealed and they will never be able to see or touch the mummy within the team are among the best in their field but even for them the task would probably be impossible except for one thing two years ago for conservation purposes the museum at the money CT scan computed axial tomography is an advanced form of the conventional x-ray instead of revealing the outline of bones and organs the CT scan forms a full three-dimensional computer model of the human body this medical blueprint of the lady will allow the team to analyze specific areas of the body in great detail the forensic data will be a priceless tool for the team as they try to uncover how this woman lived and how she died dr. Stephen Buckley has an international reputation for his chemical analysis of mummified bodies his unique experience may unlock a vital clue on this mysterious coffee well from the chemistry is certainly possible that some sort of concealment was going on Egyptologist Jill Scott specialist knowledge in ancient human remains will be crucial in unraveling the real story of how this mummy died injuries like that I would expect to be noticed already is very quiet and Duncan Lee's who offers forensic support to criminal investigations all over the UK is going to bring modern detective techniques to the case of this Egyptian mummy it's just Rosetta 2,000 years old doesn't mean that we can't apply modern forensics and come up with good answers the lady like every case begins with a team briefing here in the incident room at the University of York Joanne begins with the bad news we aren't allowed to take this covering off we aren't allowed to do any physical sampling with this there is no way into this mummy the team gets straight into analyzing the CT scan data what interests me here is this this sort of package which guessing is part of the embalming process the mummification internal organs wrapped in there that there is a lot that we can do I mean using technology that Steven will be applying as well that looks through the coffin looks into the interior and builds up still three-dimensional information that will be a good starting point for us to create a virtual reality person the whole premise with this one is it's a completely you know hands-off zone we're not allowed to touch but using this technology to penetrate through the wrappings through the coffee and we can hopefully then you know really bring this woman back to life the team have state-of-the-art forensic technology like a CT scan at their disposal but if they're going to unlock four secrets of this sealed coffin they'll have to do so with absolutely no access to the body within to get things started they're going back to basics Jill Scott is hard at work she's already unearthed the museum's acquisition records and has discovered that back in the 1820s when the coffin of this mummy first came into the country it was opened at the base by the feet the damage that was done during this operation is one reason why the museum insists the coffin must now remain sealed further analysis of the records reveals details that will help them build a profile of the mummy what we appear to have is a mummy dating from the 21st 22nd dynasty so we're looking around 1070 to 900 BC as a sort of rough date there the record state that the name of this mummy is backed or not which means servant of Horus the strong which makes sense as a name for an Egyptian female and what we also have is a location we haven't mentioned here that she was found in a tomb at Gerner and themes which is a really interesting place set along both sides of the river nile near the modern city of Luxor lies the ancient city of Thebes it was for a while prominent as a royal residence the capital city and the religious heart of Egypt it contained the necropolis in the valley of the kings and numerous funerary temples such as the ramesseum built by ramses ii but for all its architectural splendor thieves was at the center of a bitter rivalry that had split ancient egypt into the south around thebes is entirely controlled by the priests so you've got these elite priests kings these powerful powerful dynasts that control the whole area so whoever our lady was she was very much under the thumb of these priests both on a religious and I'd say a political level and I think the thing that interests me most is this Mona Lisa type smile - really enigmatic and it kind of makes you wonder what's actually going on underneath this coffin lay you know what is she hiding in order to find out more about the lady the team need to establish what she looked like in life but with her body sealed in a coffin this won't be easy they've brought in an expert in cranial facial identification step baby Joe uses her expertise on criminal investigations and archeological cases taking the data from the CT scan her computerized reconstruction model will reveal this woman's face for the first time in thousands of years this is a virtual 3d model of her skull rather than showing you how she would have looked now I can show you what she would have looked like at the end of her life Steph has identified a number of changes to the woman's facial structure caused by the process of magnification her jaw had been rotated into an open position and her nasal bones had been broken likely when they removed her brain okay so I rotated the mandible back into its natural position and I've taken the nasal bones a bit like pieces of a puzzle I was able to rotate them back into where they would have been using standard tissue depth markers Steph is able to accurately recreate the thickness of the skin all over the mummy's face the next stage of the process is to add eyes these rocks are quite important to the final appearance of the face all the pieces are beginning to click into place as the face of the mummy is slowly building began to add skin essentially I've built a grid using the tissue depths and the muscles to build the outer features of the face is this a generic sort of mesh that you've attached to the head or does this built up as a sort of bespoke dataset for this individual I make it bespoke each time especially in in regions such as the eyes and the lips it's very personal to the skull beneath with the face almost complete Steph starts to add the finishing touches there's an image rendered of what she looks like without hair very beautiful I'm very striking these are very strong features to build an accurate picture of her hairstyle Steph has modeled it on the painting of the lady's hair on the outside of the coffin and there she is eyes extraordinary this is how she would have appeared on the day that she died I faced over 3,000 year old mummy the ability to accurately rebuild the face of this Egyptian woman as it was the day she died almost 3,000 years ago is an astonishing achievement for the mummy investigation team especially as they've managed to do it without even opening the coffin now that you've finished the reconstruction and spent so long working on it what clues are hidden away in their face that you've managed to draw out well you can see she was a quite striking looking woman and you can see here she's got quite an extensive overbite and based on her overbite we can say with some confidence that she was likely of high status this has been shown in various research how puts an overbite is the vertical overlapping of the upper teeth over the lower teeth it's a classic facial feature of Egyptian royalty a physical characteristic dating back to the lineage of pharaohs like Tutankhamun in the 18th dynasty this important discovery backs up the theory that the mummy was a high-status Egyptian female The Mummy investigation team are among the first people to lay eyes on the ladies facial features in almost three millennia using museum records the team has also confirmed her position at the top of Egyptian society probably originating from the city of Thebes during the 21st to 22nd dynasty but they are still no closer to working out exactly who she was or how she died Joanne is hoping that the hieroglyphs on the coffin could provide a vital lead this ancient writing system contains a combination of symbols and alphabetic elements hieroglyphs were an essential component of mummification as all Egyptian coffins had to correctly display the name of the person inside to ensure a safe passage into the afterlife [Music] they were first deciphered in 1822 by French scholar Jean Francois Champollion who realized that the rosetta stone was inscribed with the same text in both Greek and hieroglyphs an event that gave birth to the science of Egyptology Allen files specializes in deciphering this ancient Egyptian writing and his knowledge could unlock the secrets of this sealed coffin in his analysis of the hieroglyphs Allen has noticed a series of anomalies ever since she was brought to Britain she's been known as back torn act which means servant of Horace the strong but that's not what is actually written on the coffee I've gotta kick ya then we've got a very horrid water sign it says for it is very old if not done a zigzag like which I'm sure would have been theirs easiest enough to write the water sign as it is to do that line so we have back Ed's and for which translates are simply servant of Horace then I see nakta buckets n or not the word nacht meaning strong is separated from back 10 Hall by the equivalent of a full stop this means the name actually reads us-backed and for full stop adding an act seems to be a mistake by whoever transcribed it for the museum for over 200 years this mummy has been given the wrong name servant of forests strong instead of her true name servant of Horace remembering the names of the Dead was sacred to ancient Egyptians they probably valued the afterlife more than any other culture in history they believed that death was simply a temporary interruption and that eternal life could be ensured by preservation of the physical form through mummification the pharaohs in particular was so obsessed with the afterlife that they ordered the construction of vast and complex Tunes to protect their bodies for this journey into the next world the nineteenth-century mistranslation of the name is one thing but the original scribe also seems to have made a mistake everything else does well and then we come to the major part of the inscription and suddenly we send the wrong person so we can't say with any certainty the name of deflating exactly which means chicken the description of the lady's status a vital insignia for the afterlife contains what must be a deliberate error this woman is called lord of the house and she's a lady of the house she's not a man she's a woman so at the top they've got the sex wrong which is pretty fundamental maximum to hurt isn't it's the maximum kind of thing you can do to this lady to affect it was totally misrepresented she was in life a gut instinct would be that somebody didn't want this person to live in the next world an error so obvious is that and somebody wanted to do mischief I think so crucial is a name a thing that was going to take you and get you allow you into the next world a thing that you couldn't live without now it's a major major error or does it mean them for a reason the deliberate misrepresentation of the mummies title has thrown the case wide open leading Joanne and Alan to consider who would have wanted to sabotage the ladies passage into the afterlife over a number of suspects sounding so if we list the subjects we can actually have a look at them just a family yeah this describes I'm just a priesthood could have been any of the three that's amazing what percent some Egyptians could read and write in this pair exactly me to provide 1% per sentence or a scribe could get away with that yes without 98% of people even 100 wouldn't know what the scribe had written that makes the question what's going on inside this card socially symbolic damage was done to the inscription on the lady's coffin the team now needs to establish whether any physical harm was done to her body since they will never see inside the coffin duncan has decided to use the images from the CT scan to create a precise model of the Mummy's head facial reconstruction established what this woman looked like while alive now he wants to know what she looks like today sealed inside her coffin 3d design specialist David Moore will take data from the CT scan to form a replica model of the mummy's head commonly known as rapid prototyping this state-of-the-art technique will allow the team to turn the digital data into a 3d physical reality we have a fundamental problem with this this object with this body David in that we can't actually see her we've got this cat scan beta but we really need a visualization when you really need to sort of look her in the eye if we're going to solve the case well I see the problem we've got here is 3000 year old mommy ins a lot of those tissues of sort of absorbed into each other and become attached to the skull and things so that's what what we're really gonna have to do is push the boundaries of the software slightly and try and really pick out just the material that what you want three-dimensional printers build up the specific design by printing thousands of successive layers the model is then created by alternating layers of glue and chalk powder the 3d result is a dimensionally accurate head based on the source data from the CT scan if you're observing a real mummy you have to be so delicate you know contamination or everything that goes with that what you've got here is an exact representation of what's lying within the casket yet you don't have to be delicate with it you can slice it in half see what's inside in a way you haven't actually got a body here you're looking at data [Music] continuing to build the profile of the lady Joanne Fletcher is trying to gain clues from one of the oldest forms of forensic ID that exists teeth dr. Ian McLeod is a leading dental radiologist who specializes in the analysis of Egyptian mummies one of the things we see straight away she's got a full set of teeth including importantly her wisdom teeth or third molars and in most people the third molar rots in your mouth and around the age of about eighteen and it takes another sort of three years for the roots to completely form so if you look careful we can see these roots are fully formed so automatically we can say this lady's over the age of twenty-one but with a look at this lady's teeth you can see that this is the first molar this erupts around the age of six the second molar erupts around the age of twelve and as we've served the third wall about eighteen once the teeth are in the mouth they start to wear in ancient Egypt in fact they they probably wore their teeth quite rapidly and if we look at the top of the teeth there we can see that's worn quite a lot this is a little less one and this one's worn but not to a huge degree so putting these sort of facts together in fact it gives us an age of around thirty a death life was hard for most people living in ancient Egypt and the average life expectancy was low a woman in her mid forties would be considered elderly so the fact that the lady was around 30 years old when she died makes it unlikely that she died of old age meanwhile the 3d visualization of the mummy is almost ready without even laying a finger on the coffin duncan is about to see exactly what the lady's head looks like the models fantastic isn't it this is one-to-one scale data so you're not reduced or changed in any way the dimensions so she has a very delicate small hand doesn't she seem credible to be looking into her face and yeah I wouldn't do the last person she was looking at what [Music] thousands of years after her death The Mummy investigation team are trying to piece together how and why this Egyptian woman died so far they know her name her date of origin and where she lived and even though she remains sealed in a coffin the team now has an extraordinary image of what the lady wants looked like there now reconvening to try to work out their next step what we have isn't just a confusion with the name there's certainly confusion with this woman's job titled the job description we've got clear evidence of misspelling because these signs should read and they're bet pay which means lady of the house and quite categorically that's not what he says when you look carefully they've purposefully missed out the feminine tea sign so so they're basically calling her a him exactly exactly and this is categorically wrong and that's completely contradicting their ancient Egyptian belief systems so far we've had a good step forward as well with the with the data from the the cloud mapping from the point cloud data that we've derived from the CT scan and this is going to be the only chance I think we get to look at her in real life and she is Stephen is a world authority on mummification techniques he immediately notices a glaring discrepancy what concerns me and I notice is the difference between the fine decorated Carta nosh and the state of the the face you see the sort of undulation here as almost like is listed as amazing Egyptian embalmers were highly sophisticated chemists who developed their art over thousands of years a good embalmer would have preserved facial features to an incredibly high standard but the 3d model has revealed the opposite it's certainly not what you would expect of a decent Obama hmm at this time there is definitely an inconsistency here right I think I think that's something that needs working here where I would go now with it is to look at the body and to see whether you see a little the evidence for foul play is building up the team now need to find a cause of death for the lady using a printout of the CT scan Duncan is consulting surgeon commander Mike Edwards who serves with the British forces he's seen practically every kind of injury to the human body armed with the CT scan data he may be able to tell what has happened to the lady's body after careful analysis Mike is able to answer the question that has remained unknown for 3,000 years how this woman died if we look on the CT scan here we can see that there is a massive incision or stab wound whatever you want to score it is major and it's not regular at all it's ragged and irregular and extends very deeply we're not talking about the the mummification room the embalmers incision there no we're not because this is more likely to be the embalming incision because it's in the left loin and left hypochondria churches and it's very and it's very neat yeah the large wound identified is completely separate from the standard embalming incision which is also visible on the CT scan this presents the team with a dramatic development I suspect the wound is here okay and this extends if if a knife were placed through the abdomen it would have gone through this small bowel here large bowel here maybe even into the liver here and the large vessels at the back of the abdomen why do we think this is a wound from a stabbing rather than say damage from impaling yourself for falling on something as you know that sort of thing well I think I think I'll go further than that I think this is an assassination I think the site of the wound tells us and the size of the way if we're imagining that I'm attacking you from the front yeah if I'm coming in and I'm trying to stab you hear that beep your asses are gonna be all over the place I'm gonna be trying stabbing you here here and here it's certainly not up and under and under and there's liable to be cuts on the arms and which which we don't see we don't see right we see a large irregular wound in the right hypochondria region our assassin would approach from behind right I step from the rear hand over the mouth hand goes up i toast my body in Nice rams up then spinning it around and moving it around as much as possible to do the maximum amount of damage before pulling the blade out and making a run for it [Music] the violence of the stab wound would have caused extreme trauma to the liver leaving the lady in unbearable pain reason it still be so nasty with the liver is incredibly vascular organs right so many blood vessels going through it to do the job that it does in the body now here's our weapon now you can imagine that if this is penetrating through the abdominal wall goes up into the liver and lacerates here and he rattles it around and he does as much damage as he possibly can and you can see just how vascular this liver is and all these little wild up tear and blood vessels this would have been pumping out blood you know the rate of knots incredibly messy then I mean a lot of obvious saw a lot a lot of blood and guts the guts that have been prolapsing out the wound there have been enormous amount of blood so we have this this graphic evidence for this vicious and violent and terminal that assault on this 30 year old woman how long you know how long would it have been before she died what would have been that sequence do you think I would think it would just have been a matter of minutes if the the knife had penetrated even deeper and and maybe taken out the major vessels right the back death would have been you know in under a minute through her mind must have been passing all of that family and relations and what's happened and why is it happened and just amazing fear I would have think it would just be a world of pain with the shocking revelation that this mummy was violently murdered the team now need to work out why someone would have wanted to kill the lady in a search for more clues Joanne and Jill are trawling through the Egyptian archives at the literary and philosophical society library in Newcastle it has an extensive historical collection of books periodicals and newspaper reports charting the birth of Egyptology as a science in the early 19th century the society hosted a public exhibition of the mummy when it first arrived in the country almost 200 years ago in 1821 lots of treats for us - the hairpin I've come across this on which actually looked quite interesting it's the reports papers and catalogues of the literary and philosophical society from newcastle upon tyne 1822 1821 so that's coinciding with our dates but if we have a look through it's quite a strange book in its nature it's more like a scrapbook actually and I think if we just oh yes all right yeah very beautiful handwriting but then you've got small articles like newspapers like newspaper clippings but the book contains more than just newspaper articles it's about to reveal a very big clue okay that's interesting a specimen of the cloth and card taken from the mummy at the literary and philosophical Society Newcastle on time I'll let you do the honors I became very very careful what a result that's incredible look at that they've kept it in a book that's fabulous that's 100 years I still really does they're easier let's close it up that is oh I've just breathe to activate nice what a discovery I usually make archaeological discoveries in a library from the start at the investigation the team had no access to the mummy or interior of the coffin so the finding of these linen samples is a huge breakthrough tiny fragments of the linen wrappings are cut off to be taken away for chemical analysis in Stephens lab the entire embalming process would take around 70 days and was performed by priests and embalmers who had a detailed knowledge of the human anatomy some organs would be removed to avoid decay the body cavity was then packed with linen and spices before the body was finally wrapped in many layers of linen cloth it's these linen wrappings that Stephen is analyzing for their chemical fingerprint through GCMs gas chromatography mass spectrometry he will be able to identify the chemical compounds present on the linen sample the technique works on a principle of every chemical turns to a gas at a specific temperature by gradually heating the microscopic samples taken from the linen it should reveal than many hundreds of compounds it contains by examining the point at which they turn to gas this will provide a chemical fingerprint of each of the components used to embalm the mummy no surely expect a few more exotic commodities given the status of this woman that sounds rather like a collection of somewhat mundane ingredients that does seem to be a contradiction between the tales you policy the carton - we see so I suppose that the question we should think about is is why but you see here the combustion markers which we see if something has been very strongly heated so suggest that someone was in a rush rather than doing a good job the GCMs test has not only identified that relatively cheap materials were used in this embalming but also that the materials used had been severely overheated this correlates with the results from the three-dimensional print of the Mummy's head displaying large amounts of decomposition also indicating an incompetent and rushed embalming this is highly suspicious as the mummification of members of egyptian high society was a precise and delicate art it just doesn't add up the way she was mummified the ingredients on what one would expect no apparent status so what's going on I'm not quite sure and possibly suggest something a little sinister the results of the chemical analysis indicate that the violent stabbing of baktun [ __ ] was just the first of a series of heinous crimes to be committed against this egyptian woman professor dong Bravo has been conducting further analysis he's a leading physical anthropologist who specializes in paleo pathology and in analyzing anomalies in the human anatomy using the three-dimensional data from the CT scan he's identified a shocking new development in looking through this area of the head and neck so if we get these CT scans and move through from the face back into the throat ear in there first of all you can see the tongue in the jaw and as you move back towards the neck region we've slipped under the tongue remove the windpipe himself cleaned it up and then inserted a large wardrobe I would think then it I mean my feeling is that that was a decision which they took or some carefully thought out reason and it might have in fact the you know infringed the usual policies in terms of environment so you're saying this was a premeditated role for part of their technique which is something I've never seen it wasn't a fantasy well it is here of all the human organs required after death the threat is one of the most important ancient Egyptians according to their belief system the deceased had to be able to speak his or her own name to the god Osiris lord of the afterlife to then be judged upon entry into the eternal paradise for the soul in the eyes of ancient Egyptians removal at the throat during mummification would prevent this sacred ritual from taking place why take out the throat the Voicebox the very organs that are required we know to breathe again in the next world to speak your name in the next world when she's there before the God she physically cannot speak her name before them she can't identify herself the carton ash can't identify us so it does give me some some cause for concern from the very beginning this case of the sealed coffin looked almost impossible as the mummy investigation team were denied any kind of access to the body against all odds and through a combination of forensic excellence and old-fashioned detective work they've built an incredible picture of who this woman was and how she died based on her overbite we can say with some confidence that she was likely of high status well from the chemistry it's certainly possible that some sort of concealment was going on I'll go further than that I think this is an assassination just a family this describes I'm just a priesthood but it could have been any of the three without even laying a finger on the body the mummy investigation team has discovered that this woman was murdered by a savage knife attack to the abdomen she was robbed of her life and even worse in Egyptian eyes robbed of her passage into the next world this was sabotage by a hurried embalming the removal of her throat and the incorrect inscription of her title on the coffin she was murdered in real life and in the afterlife it's been very gratifying for me that we've actually been out to make this person live again in a physical sense when we've had absolutely no access to the body [Music] I think what was interesting for me was the chemistry is it really pointed to a rush job [Music] for several centuries she's been called back to an act when actually what she really was called is back to home merely saying that is to revive their soul one thing is clear someone with huge power and influence hated her so much she really did live in this world of pain for the north a few seconds of Washington they killed her twice [Music] [Music] you

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Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, ancient egypt, history channel, history channel documentary, mummy forensics, ancient history, history of the world, national geographic, nat geo, Dr Joann Fletcher

Id: wPYLy_EFZtA

Length: 46min 49sec (2809 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 28 2019