Amenhotep I was laid bare, without being undressed, and it earned him this sudden notoriety. Tuesday, December 28, two researchers from Cairo published the results of their autopsy of the mummy. An autopsy by tomography, without having to remove the strips that surround the remains. Moreover, among the exhumed pharaohs, that of Amenhotep was one of the few to have never been opened, cut, incised, hacked. In 1902, the French director of Egyptian antiquities, Gaston Maspero, decided so, because the linen which covers the body is arranged and tightened in a perfect way, and it is necessary to preserve the magnificent death mask, as well as the garlands of flowers. blue, yellow and red surrounding it.
The photos, thanks to this 3D medical imaging technique, which can be found on the website of the English newspaper Frontiers in medicine, are spectacular. What the researchers learned was that the sovereign was 1m69 tall, was circumcised, had curly hair and good teeth, slightly protruding teeth, which he looked like his father Ahmosis with, with whom he shared a narrow nose and chin. Amenhotep died at 35, we do not yet know what.
This digital autopsy also revealed a mystery: Amenhotep was embalmed twice. What scanners had shown but where the first study concluded that dishonest priests and jewelry thieves were disguising their crime, the tomography proved the opposite: the priests, on the contrary, 300 years after the death of the pharaoh, repaired the damage caused by grave robbers.
Amenhotep still wears on him, under his bandages, a belt of pearls and gold, about thirty jewels and amulets like an earthenware scarab or a clay serpent’s head. It is moreover the second mystery of ancient Egypt that this digital undressing raises. The technique has already been used in 2012 to help solve the assassination of Ramses III, slain on the order of one of his wives wanting to place his son on the throne.
Amenhotep I, we still learn, is the first pharaoh to be mummified with his arms crossed, but also the last to whom the brain was not removed during embalming. While Ramses II and Tutankhamun, far more famous than Amenhotep I, no longer had brains in the sarcophagus.