So little is known about her that the museum still wasn’t positive that she was a woman, or how ancient she was. Even her name is an invention. “This mummy is known historically as Hatason,” said Jonathan Elias, PhD, director of the Akhmim Mummy Studies Consortium. “That is not her name. That is a corruption, we believe, of the name of a famous queen, Hatshepsut.” Private collectors of the 1890s liked to think they were purchasing royal mummies. Salesman likely named the mummy Hatason to make her sound like a queen.

Was she the same age as the coffin she has been stored in? Or could it have been from an earlier or later period? As the scanner’s long arms whirred and spun around the mummy, the roomful of radiology and mummy experts stared intently at the images coming up on several computer displays for clues about who she was. The shape of her skull and hips could reveal her sex, and the way she was wrapped and the presence of amulets might say something about her status.

Inside the skull

As the crowd in the room jammed together behind a protective wall, the scanning began at Hatason’s head. When the first images of her skull appeared on the screen, Elias, who had flown all the way out from Pennsylvania to view the scans, expressed surprise. He pointed out that Hatason’s brain was still inside her skull, but it was resting atop a pile of dark matter he said was probably sediment. “It’s some form of material added into the brain case while the brain was left inside,” he said. “We have not seen that particular pattern before.”

The bones of her nose were intact, indicating that no one had even tried to remove her brain. Elias said the sediment was likely injected into her skull on purpose. But why? A thousand years later, he said, it would have been standard to remove the brain. In Hatason’s time, mummy experts seemed to have been experimenting with preservation techniques.