This talk was delivered at the Irish Linen Centre & Lisburn Museum as part of a suite of events associated with A British Museum Touring Exhibition Egyptian hieroglyphs: unlock the mystery, 28 June -12 October 2023.
For more information see: https://www.lisburnmuseum.com/events/talk-hieroglyphs-unlocking-ancient-egypt-with-dr-ilona-regulski-curator-of-egyptian-written-culture-at-the-british-museum/
About:
Within Northern Ireland Takabuti needs no introduction. Since her arrival in Belfast in 1834, the mummified remains of this young, upper-class Egyptian woman from the tumultuous 25th Dynasty, around 600 BC, has instilled a fascination with the incredible culture of ancient Egypt. The talk will provide an overview of the research that was undertaken on Takabuti when she was initially unwrapped in 1835. It will also bring her story up to date and outline how the combination of archaeological, inscriptional and historical evidence with multidisciplinary scientific techniques has provided huge insights about the nature of her life, the cause of her death and how she was mummified and prepared for burial.
#Lisburn #Linen #Museum #hieroglyphs
Okay. Well, firstly, thank you very much to Ciaran and Paul and the museum staff who’ve invited me here this evening. And thank you all for coming as well. I must admit I do love talking about Takabuti and I mean since Takabuti arrived in
In Northern Ireland, like now, she doesn’t need any introduction and she’s instilled a real fascination in the incredible culture of ancient Egypt. And she’s inspired countless youngsters, including myself, many decades ago, to go on and study archeology.
So just as a matter of interest, I had a group of school kids in here earlier, and I asked them, how many of you been to the Ulster Museum to see Takabuti? And quite a number of them had. So what about you guys? How many of you’ve all. Most of the room. Brilliant.
So you are definitely on the same wavelength as myself. So Takabuti. So she was a young upper class woman who lived in Egypt in the 25th Dynasty. So we’re talking about sort of 755 to 656 BC. She died when she was quite young, so she was in her late 20s to early 30s.
Her body was mummified and then she was most probably buried in the vicinity of the great religious center of Thebes, which would be modern Luxor. So her mummy and coffin were acquired by a man called Mr. Thomas Gregg.
So he was a wealthy young man from Hollywood in County Down, and he seems to have visited Egypt in 1834. And this may have been part of what was known as the grand tour. So this would have been a common educational experience for upper class individuals to go
Off and explore, you know, far flung countries and particularly Europe. But after the Napoleonic Wars, Egypt was a really highly desired location. Now, mummified remains would have been prized souvenirs and many Egyptian tombs would have been robbed for the benefit of these wealthy European travellers.
Because you can see the mummy vendor here and it’s quite a shocking image to us. But you have to remember that these guys would have been quite separated from the ancient religions because at that time Egypt would have been a predominantly Muslim
Country. So there were probably just trying to eke out an existence and make a living. And, you know, their antiquities were probably one of the ways that they could do this. Now, thankfully for us, Gregg was, you know, he didn’t just go out and get the mummy
For his own sort of personal family and personal sort of talking point. He he donated the mummy and the coffin to the Belfast Natural History Society and thus began Takabuti connection with Northern Ireland. Now, this is Ballymenoch house in Hollywood in County Down. And it’s got quite an interesting story in itself.
So the owner the first owners were Hamilton’s then home Holmes then Gregg’s, and it was sold to Sir Daniel Dickson in 1863. But it was burnt to the ground in 1914, and it’s thought it was actually suffragettes who did this, and it had just been under caretakers at that time.
So I thought that was quite, quite interesting. And Thomas Gregg was the son of Cunningham Gregg, who was the high sheriff of Antrim in 1828. And he himself then took on this role in 1840. And there’s there’s a bit more about the Gregg family and their connections to Lisburn
In the exhibition down at the back of the room. So. Like I said, Thomas Gregg was quite a forward thinking individual and he actually he seems to have deliberately acquired Takabuti so that he could donate her to the Belfast Natural History Society and the very young Belfast Museum, which was established
In the 1820s. So we have a letter. Oops. So this is the letter that the society actually wrote to Thomas Gregg to basically thank them. And it was read out at at a meeting in 1834 when basically it seems that
They were trying to just announce to their membership that they had had been given this amazing present of an Egyptian mummy. And in the letter, they say, you know, we want to communicate to you and unwavering vote of thanks for your highly valuable present of an Egyptian mummy and passed at
The meeting held in the museum on Wednesday the 15th of October. So this is kind of late in 1834 and takabuti then she seems to have arrived on the island around this time. So after a lot of anticipation, she arrived in the island in late 1834 and she eventually
Was unrolled or unwrapped on the 27th of January, 1835. And at that time, an in-depth analysis was undertaken of both her body and her coffin by some of the greatest academic minds of that day. And I’ll tell you a little bit more about that in a minute.
But since that time, she’s very much been part of Belfast’s culture and the story of Belfast, and she’s been a highlight in a number of museums over the years. So her her first home was this one here, so the Belfast Museum. So this was the base of the Belfast Natural History Society.
So this is down in College Square north just beside Inst. And she was curated in there and was was kind of one of the main showpieces until 1910 now. So I suppose as fortunes waned and as museum collections became more expensive to
Keep them, the Belfast Natural Historical Society, they gifted their collections to the city of Belfast and then Takabuti was moved to here, which you may recognize. So this was Belfast Free Public Library, Art Gallery and Museum on Royal Avenue. And obviously today we know it as Belfast Central Library.
We’ve got a couple of nice hogg photographs from around 1917. So you can see here this is the curator of the time and he’s giving a talk to some young charges here on natural history. But if you look carefully over in the background, you can see the upper part of Takabuti sarcophagus.
And it’s quite interesting the way they chose to display her, because I think elsewhere in that room, Takabuti herself was on display in her open casket because it looks like it’s the same type of cabinets. And this is another iconic piece from the Ulster Museum that you may recognize down in
The foyer. You know, the big replica high cross. So basically after this so she she stayed in the Royal Avenue site until about 1929, and then she moved to the newly opened Belfast Museum, Municipal Museum and Art Gallery.
And this is where she’s been associated with ever since because now we know this site as the Ulster Museum. So Takabuti is one of these museum, I don’t like to say objects or artifacts because she
Is a person, but she is part of, you know, she is part of the curated collection in the museum. But like I say, you know, she she’s instilled a lot of emotions and feelings in people. And she inspired painting and poetry when she was unwrapped. So you can see, oops, wrong, wrong way.
This painting up at the top by Mr. John Campbell, who is a teacher of painting and you can see the original version is down at the back of this room on loan from the Ulster Museum. So we’re really lucky that this this painting was done just before Takabuti was unwrapped.
So it shows us what her bandaging was like. And we’ve got other paintings, so this is a bit more modern. This was one it was actually the story of how it came to light. It was quite interesting because it was it was after a news piece that occurred a few
Years ago and somebody in England watching, watching the news piece thought, Gosh, that mummy looks a bit like the one we’ve got a picture of up in our attic. And it turns out that that this this woman who was watching was a relative of William
Darragh who was the son of the curator of the Belfast Museum of the same name. And it dates back to about 1880. So the painting is still over in England, but I think it’s going to be bequested to the
She’s inspired poetry and at the time of her unwrapping Francis Davis, who’s the Irish Weaver poet and also known as the Belfast Man and who was a librarian in Cork, and he’s buried, I think it’s in Milltown Cemetery. He he produced a pamphlet with this lovely poem about Takabuti, you know, and there’s
Phrases like, you know, now in the chilly North, you stay unconscious, wanderer of Earth. And travellers can scarcely say where stood the city of thy birth. So there was a real mystique and kind of wonder about Takabuti.
And I think he must have been very taken with her because that poems from her unwrapping. But, you know, nearly 30 years later on he wrote another poem and this poem goes on for pages and pages. I think it’s like 13 pages long. So he really did think a lot about Takabuti.
And she’s also appeared in modern fiction. So I don’t know if any of you’ve read The Undead of Belfast. I read it. It’s quite fun by Tim Hodgkinson in 2017 and it features Takabuti and I think she falls out of her sarcophagus on top of somebody else or somebody else, some murder
Victims put into her sarcophagus, but she’s very much part of the story. And also there’s a short story collection by Brendan Mclaverty and Takabuti features in that as well. So like I say, she’s very much part of of our world.
You know, people in Northern Ireland, most, you know, a lot of people know about Takabuti and she’s featured in these kind of these cultural outpourings. So I suppose in over the past 50 or even more years ago, teams throughout the world have undertaken multidisciplinary investigations of mummies.
So some of the more high profile ones are in relation to royal mummies, you know, undertaken in Egypt itself by Egyptian scientists and archaeologists. But really it was with this kind of idea of sharing information about Takabuti and, you
Know, studying her and being able to tell her story, you know, both to researchers and to the wider public, that we initiated the Takabuti research project and we used, you know, because we’re dealing with a person, I’m dealing with human remains.
You know, we followed all of our sort of ethical procedures and and scientific standards. So we wanted to know about Takabuti during life, you know, what was her life like? What was she like herself? What could we say about that? We wanted to know what happened to her body once she died.
And then we wanted to learn more about, you know, the story about her experience as a sort of part of part of a museum collection. So if you want to call it call her an artefact. You know, it’s in that sort of context that she’s a person, but she’s part of a museum
Collection and she’s in a museum environment. So our Takabuti project had two main phases of activity. So one was about just over a decade ago in 2007 to 2009, and then more recently we were fortunate to be able to study her again. So this was in 2018 to 2020.
So in the rest of the lecture, I’m going to give you an overview of some of the key findings from these different phases of the project. But I’m going to start with the antiquarian explorations, because one of the things that
I’ve always been quite struck by is the fact that, you know, the questions that we’ve been posing of Takabuti and in our research really mirrored those that were posed by the people who unwrapped her back in 1835 So I’m going to summarize the 19th century findings, and then we’re going to
Move forward to the 21st century findings. Oh, and just this. We’ve got some artistic artists. Reconstructions of Takabuti. These are. These are from our book. And they were done by our illustrator in Queens, Libby Mulqueen, who’s a lovely
Artist, but in Takabuti stands out in all of them because she has her own hair and it’s red and curled. So whenever you see a picture like this, Takabuti is the one with the curly red hair. Okay. So in terms of the unwrapping, we mostly rely on newspaper reports and accounts
Of the actual unwrapping itself. And I spend quite a lot of time down in the public records office, you know, reading through the old newspaper accounts. And thankfully for us, they were very, very detailed. So it gives us a really good impression of what actually happened.
And it seems to have been very much a big sort of media event. You know, they had their their artists, their poets. It says that they are appointed 11:00 on Tuesday the 27th, and this is January. About 130 gentlemen attended to witness this highly interesting event.
And the most intense curiosity was depicted on the countenances of all present when the president had taken the chair and the mummy enclosed in its case was laid upon the table. So this is from the newsletter sort of reporting back.
But they also had, you know, announcements, you know, saying and sort of building up the excitement about Takabuti unrolling or unwrapping. And so the unwrapping itself was overseen by this man up here, the Reverend Edward Hincks. So he he had a very strong academic pedigree. His father, Dr.
Thomas Dix Hincks, was one of the early members of the Belfast Natural Historical Society, and he was also a classical master at the Belfast Academical Institution. And he himself was an expert in Hebrew and other Oriental languages. Now, his son was an even more gifted linguist.
He spoke, I think, about 15 different languages, and he had a worldwide reputation as an Orientalist. Now, there are some who would say he’s been written out of history a bit. And, you know, he he apparently had quite an abrasive personality and quite strong political views.
So he was sidelined by a lot of his peers who didn’t necessarily want to be working with him. But what he what the work he did was amazing because he was based in a little rectory over in Killyleagh.
You know, he wasn’t in London or, you know, any of these kind of like Paris. He wasn’t working with amazing resources. He was working in his little rectory. So this is an excerpt from a letter written on the 5th of May 1958 by Egyptian Egyptologist Dr.
Cyril Aldred of the Royal Scottish Museum, and he was writing to the keeper of antiquities in the Ulster Museum. If Hincks could read the name of Kabuti. So that’s what they originally called her and then or Takabuti in 1835.
And to do so, he would have would have to be able to read the entire inscription so as to pick the name out in its proper context. He must have had a mighty profound knowledge of hieroglyphs for the time as much as
Champollion himself, who had died three years earlier when the bulk of his papers still awaited publication. Only the celebrated letter dacier and an expanded form of it had been published by 1824. If Hincks on the strength of these had been able to decipher the inscription on your
Coffin, he would have been at least as great a genius as Champ. So he really was like an incredible scholar. And you can see he’s got his blue plaque, very deservedly so, up in Killyleagh. So this is just a nice general picture of Takabuti and her sarcophagus. So, Reverend Dr.
Hincks, his role was to translate the hieroglyphs. And he basically this is what the newspaper tells us. Reverend, Dr. Hincks gave an explanation of the hieroglyphics and inscriptions. It appears that the inmate of the present one had been at a period of at least 2000 or
2500 years ago called Kabuti, that she’d been a daughter of the of the priest of Amun, that her father and mother were both dead at the period of her deceased. And again, this is another bit of piece from an Aldred correspondence.
Thanks for your letter of May Day and the remarkable photos of your mummy case. This is undoubtedly of a woman and the name is given in several places as Takabuti. And it’s quite nice. There you can see the little hieroglyphs for her name.
And these these are repeated over and over again on on the sarcophagus. And she has no other title than House Mistress, which shows that she was married. But they don’t talk about her husband. It’s more about her parentage. That’s that’s written on the sarcophagus.
Her father is described as an ordinary priest of Amunre nes Pre he who belongs to the Sun-god, the name of her mother, is given in one place. So at the left hand side of the second horizontal band of inscription as the house
Mistress Tasenirit a name, which means the open, the open eye or the eye opener. Now, there’s been some interesting speculation about the name Tasenirit and Rosalie David, who I worked with, was of the opinion that it wasn’t necessarily an
Egyptian name, which kind of suggests which sort of adds to the speculation about Takabuti mother’s origin, which I’ll be talking about a little bit later on in the lecture. So this is the Egypt room. This is where Takabuti was unwrapped.
So you can see it’s a bit like this room with its lovely balcony. And you can just imagine you know, all the people kind of crowding around and trying to get a good view of Takabuti being unwrapped.
And so the newspapers tell us that there was very sort of a detailed sort of explanation about her bandaging. And they focused in on things like the insect damage. And if you even if you look at Takabuti face, you can see there’s a lot of pock marks and that’s down to insect damage.
And it’s quite interesting some of the sort of the learned journals of the day. There’s almost like a bit of a battle going on between some of the entomologists because one school of thought was that the insects were contemporary with Takabuti and maybe happened maybe were sort of included whenever she was embalmed.
And then another school of thought at the time was that they were due to poor conservation and the fact that they found one live insects makes me think the latter, that it was kind of modern insects in the 19th century.
And it also tells us things that the inner bandaging were very sort of glued together with resin. And they had to they had to cut them off takabuti and that there was material, sort of like linen material stuck sort of underneath her arms and her legs to
Kind of, you know, just prevent movement. Also said some interesting things about her hair, says the hair was an excellent preservation being very fine about 3.5in long forming ringlets like those of children and of a deep auburn shade with not the slightest appearance of wool.
So you’ll see. We’ll talk a bit more about Takabuti hair in a minute. The eyes are replaced by balls of cotton. The teeth were white, regular and very pretty and proved the age of the body at death not to have been less than 20 or more than 30.
So these are the sorts of bits of information that the reporters were picking up on. This guy here is it’s myself and David Tosh, and David’s from the NMNI, and he was very instrumental in facilitating the second phase of research. So I’m very, very grateful to David.
So so they looked at the linen bandages, for example, and they had great scientific debates about the bandages because, you know, at that time Belfast was was a seat of linen production. You know, as, as we know very well from from this center as well.
And they did a lot of scientific tests to check whether the bandages were cotton or linen and they were able to determine that they were linen. And one of the sort of sciences, if you like, that they put a lot of faith in, but
Which now we know is is really a pseudoscience was phrenology. And the Phrenologists said the phrenological development proved it. So the skull the head to have belonged to a person of much firmness and caution of character and of a high degree of intellectual capacity, but little or no
Taste. So I always quite like that poor old takabuti. And it also there’s a lengthier account that says, you know, she liked children and she liked animals. But obviously we don’t know. That’s just a bit of bit of nonsense, really, but fun.
So then they they actually sort of autopsied the body, if you like. So they removed the sternum, so the breastbone at the front and took away a portion of the ribs. And they said it came away readily because of the insect activity.
And the body was then found to be full of like a mixture of powders is how they described it. Probably pounded spices of a very heavy aromatic odor and quite dry in the upper part. And then they sort of went back to being a bit more emotional and said the
Foot was particularly small and beautifully shaped. And they measured the body and said it was about five. Five feet in one inch long. So about my height. And that’s what we found as well, you know, from using our fancy equations that she’s about five foot one in height.
Okay. So moving on then from the 19th century, so in autumn 2007. Ian Duggan So this, this guy here who sadly passed away in 2018, he he, like myself, you know, he had been very taken with Takabuti when he was a child and he initiated a chain
Of events that would see his childhood wish, of seeing the face of Takabuti become a reality. So the museum had closed for a period in 2006 so it could be refurbished. And Ian then sort of seized the opportunity to go and ask if he could get get this research undertaken in Takabuti.
And this culminated then in this one hour documentary which some of you may have seen Show Me The Mummy, The Face of Takabuti. And this aired in October 2009, and I think it’s still available online. And they’ve even put extended bits, you know, showing more interviews and different things in the online version.
So Ian, to his credit, he did a really good job of gathering together experts because he wanted to sort of get as much information about Takabuti as possible. And he included organisations like the Ulster Museum, Queen’s University, University of Manchester, University of Cardiff and University of Dundee, and fortunately a lot
Of the individuals involved in that initial period of research were able to then get involved again in 2018, so they were able to update their research findings. So the 2007 2009 research, it involved a lot of radiocarbon dating and stable isotope analysis here in Queen’s University, Belfast.
So this was led by Professor Paula Reimer, but I’m going to talk about that a bit more in a minute because a lot of this work has been updated more recently. So one of the sort of the main components of the research was actually imaging takabuti,
And this involved her being put in the back of a lorry, as you can see here. And there’s Winifred Glover, her long time curator, you know, carefully overseeing this so that no damage would come to to Takabuti.
So she was put into a lorry and then she was brought by boat over to Manchester Royal Infirmary. And this is where the imaging took place under the guide of the late Professor Judith Adams. So this is her about to go into a CT machine. And then over here she’s being X-rayed.
Now, some of the things that Judy identified, you know, she couldn’t identify a cause of death. She concluded that the brain hadn’t been extracted through her nose. And she also included concluded that she’d probably been eviscerated through her
Perennial region because at that time, you know, even though it’s not that long ago, the imaging analysis software wasn’t that great. So a lot of the information we’ve got now from the same images is just because technology has moved on.
And one of the things we were very interested in was this mysterious package up in the top left of Takabuti chest. And at the time we interpreted that as the bandaged remains of her heart because the heart was an essential part of a person’s success in progressing through the afterlife,
And it was needed for the final judgment. So we’ve got this section from the Book of the Dead, owned by the scribe Ani. So you can see, here’s here’s the deceased being led by Anubis, the God of the dead and God of mummification.
And you can see here we’ve got a set of scales on this side. You’ve got the feather of truth. And over here you’ve got the deceased’s heart. So if their heart was the same weight or lighter than the feather, that meant they
Were a good person and they were then allowed to proceed before the God Osiris, who you can see here. And this was one of the final trials they had to do before they were able to proceed into the afterlife.
Now, if you were a bad person, your heart would be heavier than the feather. And this guy here, the devourer or the God Ammit was waiting to consume you. So you can see he’s got a crocodile face, sort of top part of a lion and then his lower bits from a hippopotamus.
So you didn’t want that to happen. So the heart was really important to enable that process to happen. So the interpretation that the package was her heart did seem feasible, but it was really in the more recent studies that we made proper sense of what was going on.
And this has involved a complete reinterpretation of the package. But I’ll tell you about that in a minute. So one of the things that we did in the first period of study was to look at Takabuti hair, and this work was undertaken by Dr.
Natalie Mccreesh as part of her PhD over in the University of Manchester. So her work was able to show that Takabuti s hair was this natural auburn color. And we’re really fortunate to have this little clip of hair that was cut off whenever
She was unwrapped, but it was stored in a more stable environment. So it meant that this her hair didn’t lose its natural color, whereas you can see that the hair on her head has definitely bleached over the course of time.
So Natalie also did things like look at a piece of hair under a scanning electron microscope and you can see the edge is very sharp. So that showed it had been cut sort of around the time when Takabuti died. And Natalie’s work also showed that it had been artificially curled.
And we know the Egyptians had like heated tongs that they would have used to curl their hair. And it had been set with like a fatty sort of hair gel made from camphor. So it’s quite unusual to have kept your hair so Takabuti hair must have been a very
Important part of her identity because most people at that time would have had shaven heads and then they would have wore the more stereotypical black wig. So when I asked the kids today, they were able to say yes, if having a bald head, you
Know, protected you from the heat and also the discomfort of having head lice because most people would have had lots of parasites at the at the time. Now, when Natalie was looking at the sort of little samples of hair, she did find one possible head lice.
So Takabuti may indeed have had had lice, but then that would have been the norm, unfortunately for people. So yes. So another aspect then of the 2007, 2009 phase of the project was, as I said, Ian Duggan’s childhood wish because he wanted to see what Takabuti may have looked like when
She was alive. So the television programme and a lot of the research really did focus around doing a facial reconstruction based on Takabuti skull. And this was undertaken by Caroline Wilkinson and Sarah Shrimpton from University of Dundee. And whenever the Ulster Museum reopened its doors in October 2009, the
Facial reconstruction was displayed in the Egypt Gallery alongside Takabuti. So it’s just you can see it there in the cabinet behind. Now, at the time we were quite excited and quite happy about it. And I think you can see like the dimensions of the chin and everything on her nose and
All are are good. But there were some issues and the more there’s a more modern now rendering of the facial reconstruction, which doesn’t wear a wig because after what I’ve just said about Takabuti and her hair being important to her, putting a wig on her probably wasn’t the best idea.
And there’s also issues with her skin tone, but I’ll return to that a little bit a bit later on. So as I said then, in 2018, it was a project that lay dormant and we all were really wanting to get back and study Takabuti, but the opportunity
Didn’t really arise. And that’s why it took somebody like David Tosh, who was really also could see the potential and could see there were a lot of loose ends about Takabuti and to really make it happen. So the second phase commenced in 2018 and like I said, some members of the original
Team were reunited while others joined, like Dave. So the remit of the work was very clear. We wanted to tie up some of the loose ends from the original programme of work, so we wanted to know what was the mysterious package in her chest? Was it her heart?
Was there signs of disease in Takabudi’s body that might account for why she died quite young even though she was elite? Was there any evidence of her cause of death and because ancient DNA studies had moved on as well so much, we were now hopeful that we could find out information about her
Ancestry. So members of the team then basically turn Takabuti Gallery into like something from CSI or forensic science, and it was turned into a lab. And this happened on Monday, the 8th of October in 2018, when the museum was closed. So there was an intensive day of study and sampling.
Now, I should say the samples that were taken were like less than a gram, so very teeny weeny samples. And again, it’s because of all the modern advances in science that we’re able to get a huge amount of information from very small samples.
So Takabuti was taken out of her glass case, and some of the aspects of this work were funded by the Friends of the Ulster Museum. This guy here is Mark Regan, and he’s from Kingsbridge Private Hospital up the Lisburn
Road. And like myself, he was also very influenced by Takabuti when he was a child, and he ended up working in the medical profession and I ended up working in archaeology, but he was able to bring equipment from the hospital, so he brought
This x ray machine, a C, a C arm x ray machine, and was able to put it up over her coffin. And this guy here is Dr. Robert Loynes. So he was a retired consultant over in Manchester, and he’d done his PhD in Egyptology and Mummification and was part of Rosalie David’s team.
So his job was to take a tiny sample from underneath the bandages of Takabuti. And he used this sort of needle biopsy, which would have been something he would have used on modern patients. But now he’s using them on mummies. So it was to be minimally destructive.
And you can see Mark is pointing at the needle it went into right in between some of the vertebrae. And the idea was to try to get a tissue sample as well as a sample of the packing material. And because they wanted to do DNA as well, this is he’s just posing here.
But whenever the sampling was done, they all had to kind of wear their sort of forensic suits and their masks and different things. And they also as well took a sample because if you ever notice, Takabuti, his head kind
Of lolls to one side and that’s because she’s got a quite a thick resin collar around her neck. So they took a little bit of the resin to see if they could find out more about the actual content of that.
And they also took a tiny sample of her hair because we wanted to undertake what’s called incremental isotope analysis. And that was to sort of look at her diet in the six months running up to her death just to see if she had been ill.
So over the following year, the researchers all sort of worked away behind the scenes processing their samples. There was a major kind of milestone in the project, if you like, on Monday, the 27th of January. So this was the 185th anniversary of Takabuti unwrapping.
And some of the more sort of sensational finds were revealed to the public. And new display panels were launched in her gallery, which I’ve always been very happy about because it tells a story about Takabuti and she’s not sort of sitting there anonymous anymore.
So there was a lot of media interest in this discovery because it revealed that Takabuti, you know, contrary to opinion for the last 185 years, she hadn’t died peacefully, but she’d actually been killed by somebody else. So yeah, so you can see just some of the sort of press associated with this.
Here’s Dr. Gray Ramsey, one of the archaeology curators in the Ulster Museum. You know what happened to Takabuti? So we were able to answer that question. So I’ll talk a bit more about that in a minute.
So we sort of were hoping we’d have got the book out by the 186th anniversary of her unwrapping, but we just missed it by a few months. But all of the findings from both periods of research have been summarized in this book.
As Paul was saying and you can see Takbutis name features on the cover and the newer facial reconstruction as well. And we were able to get funding from the engaged research fund in Queens, which meant that we could get sell the book at £9.99 because we really wanted to get the
Information out to the public. And I always imagined, you know, as a kid, if there’d been a book like that available when I was going to see Takabuti, I’d have been torturing my mum to buy it.
So we wanted if kids did want the book, they could go and their parents could afford to buy it for them. So now I’m going to give you an overview of the latest findings. So as well as sort of scientifically looking at Takabuti, we wanted to further explore the
Context in which she lived in ancient Egypt. So she lived at a time of great political uncertainty and upheaval in the eighth century BC. So a couple of centuries earlier, a new power had emerged in Kush. So this is a region situated just beyond Egypt’s southern border.
So it would be sort of northern Sudan in a modern sense. And these guys considered themselves to be the heirs of the Egyptian kings who had ruled this area in the 18th dynasty. So, you know, almost a thousand years earlier, and they had adopted a lot of aspects of Egyptian civilization.
You know, they had their own pyramids and they promoted a local form of the Egyptian God Amun. So the Kushite rulers, they moved north basically in their conquest of Egypt and they finally achieved control of Egypt at around the time of Takabuti life.
So in the 25th Dynasty and Shabaka established himself as the first king of this dynasty. So there was a period of sort of great cultural change, a lot of recovery after the sort of conflicts. And there was a lot of building of religious foundations.
But they do seem to have kind of continued in the Egyptian artistic style. And there’s even examples of what we call archaism. So that’s kind of copying old styles and then using them in the contemporary time. And a lot of the temples would have contained their own traditional elements.
Now, while this kind of activity from the South was going on, The Assyrians, you can see the the scope of the Assyrian empire. They were emerging from their homeland, which would have been sort of modern day Iraq. And they were a powerful adversary to the kushites because they had a very powerful
Military force. They had compulsory military service and very advanced weaponry. So at the start, the relations between the Egypt and the Assyria would have been cordial. But Egypt had a policy of assisting its client states in Syria and Palestine against the Assyrians.
So this led on then to two sort of confrontations between the Egyptian pharaohs and the Assyrian rulers. And then the first Assyrian invasion actually happened in 671 BC and they’d taken the the territory within a decade. And this sort of marks the decline or the end of the 25th dynasty.
So Takabuti would have been alive when all of this was going on. Now we got a sense, you know, the fact that she’s got a lovely sarcophagus. She’s been, well, mummified. And it gives us an indication that Takabuti would have had a privileged background.
And if you recall what was said by Hincks in the from the hieroglyphs, you know, she was a noble woman and she was the lady of the house. So she was married. Her parents were dead, and she was the daughter of a priest of Amun.
So she probably would have lived in a temple. So maybe the Temple of Karnak or in the vicinity of this. And her people would have brought their offerings to the temple for the priests. So Takabuti probably had a very good diet, you know, compared to a lot of people living in ancient Egypt.
So multidisciplinary studies like this, they can give us a really good opportunity to find out more about an ancient person. But sometimes we do get contradictory results, which makes things a bit complicated. So and you obviously have to work through this and sort of come to the the most solid interpretation.
So in 1835, the Reverend Dr. Hincks had dated Takabuti Coffin. You know, just from looking at the stylistic features to about 2000, 2500 years ago, and this has been confirmed then by sort of modern analysis of her sarcophagus by Dr. John Taylor of the British Museum.
And he firmly placed Takabuti sarcophagus in the 25th Dynasty. But I mentioned earlier that we’d had a lot of radiocarbon dating undertaken in our Chronos Centre under the lead of Professor Paula Rymer and then Dr. Jennifer Metcalf from the University of Manchester. And radiocarbon dating has thrown
Up problems for Egyptology because sometimes you get unexpected dates and sometimes you get, you know, old material being curated and then put in into a burial with somebody. And this has happened with things like linen. You know, it looked like sometimes old linen has been used to wrap a more recent body.
And you can see from this is a profile of all the samples that were dated. So there are pieces of hair and bits of resin and then the coffin itself. So the resin and the hair and the piece of textile there weren’t too badly in There were
Pretty, pretty similar in many ways, but the coffin was a bit of an outlier. And, and it’s thought that any of these problems are to do with sort of conservation techniques. And, you know, they had a tendency of painting what’s it called? I think it’s been bhandarkhal.
They used to paint bones that were found in antiquarian excavations. And I think Takabuti coffin may have been treated as well. So the fact that the coffin would threw up this anomalous date, you know, made us kind of go, Oh my goodness, maybe this isn’t Takabuti coffin.
Maybe she’s a body that’s just been put into this coffin. But we had to then review all of the scientific and the archaeological evidence, and we concluded that this was unlikely. It was more more likely that we’ve got a problematic date from the wood and Takabuti the body fits perfectly into the coffin.
It’s the right sort of profile for the age of Takabuti. So we think that it’s genuinely Takabuti sarcophagus and the Takabuti lived and died in the 25th Dynasty. So Paula and Jennifer, then they also looked at Takabuti carbon and nitrogen stable
Isotopes. So this is a technique that we can use to determine diet so the carbon aspect can tell us about plant foods that they were eating. And then the nitrogen has more to do with proteins. So here you can see Michelle in our radiocarbon lab and she’s sampling a strand
Of Takabuti hair so that we can kind of work out, you know, almost like her monthly diet, you know, in the run up to her death. And basically we were a bit disappointed because it showed that her diet had been
Constant. So she hadn’t, you know, if she’d been ill, maybe she’d have been fed something differently. But there was nothing like that. It was all the same. So because of her status when Takabuti was a child, she’d have enjoyed like a rich and varied food diet.
Because of her father’s job and because of the offerings people were bringing to the temple and as an adult, the isotope signatures. So you can see the star here tend to suggest that her diet probably was quite varied and she’d have eaten fruits, vegetables and foods and cereal, cereal based bread made
From wheat and barley. And because she was living so close to the River Nile, no doubt freshwater fish would have been available. And also meat And this this maybe wouldn’t have been components of everybody’s diet. But if you were amongst the elite, you know, it’s sort of not
Surprising. Now, a lot of ancient Egyptians have pretty, pretty bad teeth because a lot of what they ate would have had sand included in it as well. So you get very worn down teeth and then that causes kind of tooth decay and infections and different things.
But Takabuti teeth were quite unusual in this sense. So this is her lower jaw taken out from a CT scan and you can see there’s very little wear on her molars. So so that was quite a surprising thing. And if you remember, the Antiquarians commented on her pretty teeth.
So it just suggests that her diet wasn’t as coarse as a lot of ordinary sort of members of society in Egypt. So one of the things we were interested in as well was our health. And this was a part Bob, Judith and myself looked at.
So we looked at her skeleton and we just found a few small anomalies. So we found lumbarisation. So that’s basically when the sacrum at the sort of the lower most part of the spine basically has sort of become part of it and sort of not fully developed.
And it’s become part of the lumbar vertebrae which sort of are higher up in the spine than it. So it’s just a genetic anomaly and wouldn’t probably have caused her any bother. She also had an extra incisor and this was something quite unusual.
So you can see there should be four little teeth at the front, but she’s got one, two, three, four, five, and it’s perfectly formed. So that was just a little quirk as well. And you can see here she’s got one carious lesion, so that’s tooth decay.
But again, it’s quite small compared to what a lot of other Egyptians of the time would have had. So just this little hole here. And if you remember, we took tissue samples from deep inside Takabuti near her spine. And the idea of this was to do proteomics research.
So this was Professor Tony Fremont looked at this because this is another really new technique in archaeological science. And you can get a lot of information about diseases and a person’s health status. So he was able to get a piece of skeletal muscle tissue and there was no sign of
Disease, but there were elevated enzymes, which seemed to suggest that Takabuti had been very active at her point of death. So, you know, we can’t say for certainty, but maybe she was running away from the assailant who killed her. And perhaps that’s what’s showing up in her proteins.
And you can see you can just see her her teeth here. Now, the antiquarians, they must have prised open her mouth to be able to see her teeth. And some of the CT images show her mouth has a big it’s a big void and the tongue is very
Pressed down. So it looks like there was maybe something in her mouth originally that the Antiquarians have kind of fished out. So the genetics and that was another aspect of the modern work. And this was done by Constantino Dirceu, who you can see here in the hazmat suit.
So this was very interesting because they were they focused on the mitochondrial DNA. So that tells us about about his mother’s line, so her maternal DNA. And they found that she had this unusual haplotype, which previously hadn’t been found in any other ancient Egyptian person, but it has been identified in prehistoric
Individuals from the Canary Islands, Germany and Bulgaria. So it suggests that Takabuti. S mother came from much further north than ancient Egypt. So it was published in scientific reports. And this was interesting because it kind of fits with takabuti hair, you know, in the
Cross section of her hair suggested it was more European than African, and the mother’s name was considered to be a bit unusual. And then the haplotype of of the mother. Now, we don’t have the father’s DNA yet, but that’s something I would hope will come in
The future. And again, you know, we shouldn’t really be surprised at this because if you remember what I said about Egypt being quite tumultuous at this time and having quite a mixed population, you know, it’s not really surprising. We find mummified people who are of sort of mixed descent.
So I said as well that we updated the facial reconstruction. So it was again, Caroline and Sarah. So facial reconstruction, the idea is to create an empathy between the audience and the individual, and it’s to try to sort of bring the person to life.
So you can see this is the 2008 reconstruction and then the 2020. So you can see that it’s based on the same data. So the features are very similar. But the new reconstruction it has takabuti’s natural hair. And also you can see it’s in gray, gray skin tones.
And the reason for that now Rosalia and I weren’t weren’t very pleased at the start with this because we wanted her to, to look realistic. But we were told it’s not ethical to assume a person’s skin color. And the fact that we know Takabuti is potentially of mixed race that was considered
To be appropriate. So she’s just got gray scale skin tone until we get further information, hopefully in the future. But I think the modern version is a lot more realistic. You know, she she looks I can imagine her looking like this.
This one, I was always slightly not 100% satisfied, shall we say, whereas I think this one’s a lot more natural. So her cause of death then. So, as I said, the software for reading all the imagery that we had taken back in 2008 had greatly improved in the intervening ten years.
So Bob Loynes was really able to focus in on the injuries and on how she’d been mummified. Mummified. So some of the things he found was that she had a massive sharp force wound in her on her left shoulder that had been dealt from behind.
And you can see so there’s what it should look like. And then you can see this big gash. So it looks like it was made with a curvilinear weapon. And these would have been the main weapons that they would have used. So we think it was potentially a battle axe.
And it looks like somebody came up from behind and whacked her, you know, down right down through her shoulder. And interestingly, in this area as well, you’ve got the package that had caught our attention back in 2008. So you can see it very clearly here.
And here’s a side view and you can see it’s made up of linen. So this injury would have been catastrophic. It would have caused her to basically bleed out and her lung would have collapsed. So was this packing basically to try and staunch the bleeding and as part of part of
The wound? Or was it that they wanted to try to make her body whole again and not have like a big hole in her back and the people mummifying her put this in to sort of try to make sure that she’d be whole in the afterlife.
So you remember I said we thought that potentially that the package was the heart. Well, Bob was able to identify the heart right in the middle of her chest. And it’s amazing that it hadn’t been destroyed, you know, when the antiquarians
Unrolled her. But I’ll show you a picture in a minute and you can just see this very sort of dense material. You can see cracks in it. So this is the packing that was put inside her, her abdomen, and then that sort of dark
Material there is the resin collar, which kind of supports her head, which, as I said, lolls to one side. So these are some more images that help us with interpreting the the mummification processes. So you can see that the bones here in the top of her sort of nasal region
Are complete. So this is what we knew this in 2008. So it meant that Takabuti brain hadn’t been kind of pulled out with a crochet hook out through her nose, but we weren’t sure how it had been taken out and.
She’s got quite a lot of variation from the sort of typical mummification practices. And we don’t know if it’s because she was elite or maybe because she met an untimely death, that they treated her a bit differently.
But it seems that they actually took off her skull and then took the brain out through this hole here, the foramen magnum, which is at the base of the skull and took the brain out and then poured resin back inside the skull.
So you can see this kind of material and then tried to sort of support the head on the body with the resin collar. Here’s the heart. So that’s the top of the sternum and there’s the heart. And you can see some of the chambers really clearly.
And what was interesting as well was that Bob was able to say that they had actually wrapped the heart in linen. And he’s only seen that in a minority of cases. And in terms of how she was sort of eviscerated, he came to the conclusion that
There was probably an abdominal incision and they probably took out her organs through it. And then they sort of packed her body with this kind of sawdust and mud and aromatic substances, both through the incision and then also from her sort of perineum.
So they kind of were going like this sort of, you know, down through her abdomen and then up through her sort of backside area. And he said they they made some mistakes because some of the stuffing was kind of coming out of her kind of her backside.
So it was almost as if they kind of overstuffed from the top. So it’s I mean, if you think about it like it’s pretty gruesome and pretty horrible and being a priest who undertook mummification and embalming, although it was like a sacred
Job, it probably was pretty smelly and pretty pretty messy and nasty. So we also then looked at the packing material. So this was led by Keith White in Manchester, who you can see here. He’s a geoscientist, and Bart Van Dongen and Sharon Fraser.
So they were interested to find out what is this material inside Takabuti is sort of complete torso and this is it under magnification. And they found it’s largely sawdust from the cedar tree and liquefied pine resin. So so these are the materials that would have caused the very aromatic smells that the
Antiquarians commented on. And I’ve seen some unwrapped mummies in museum stores and you can get a really strong smell, a very sort of aromatic smell from them. So nearly finished. So when we set out to compile the book, we wanted to share the story of Takabuti.
And we wanted so that people who visited the Ulster Museum, they could read the panels in the gallery, but then they could go and get the book and learn more about Takabuti because for a long time we didn’t know her story and she just she was, you know, a
Person out of her own time. And we just didn’t know very much about her. And she did often provoke a very human response in those who visited her. And I love this picture. So this is from 1961, and it’s a picture that’s in the Ulster Museum’s archives.
And somebody anonymously just left a lovely bouquet of flowers on top of Takabuti case. And it really does remind us, you know, that this is this was a young woman, you know, she may be, you know, have been alive thousands of years ago, but she’s still still was a person just like ourselves.
Now, the ancient Egyptians, they obviously went to great lengths to protect their tombs and to ensure that they had a successful journey into the afterlife. But, you know, we don’t know exactly where Takabuti is. Tomb was. We don’t know what artifacts she may have had.
Presumably she would have had Canopic jars, but these are gone as well because she was brought to a mummy market and sold. And so so basically all those kind of protective things that would have been put in place to try to make sure that Takabuti had a successful afterlife, you know, were gone.
But one of the things that the Egyptians did, because they knew a lot of the tombs were at risk of being ransacked and they had a strong belief that you had to keep a person’s name alive. And there’s even an ancient funerary text which asks the living to say my name and I
Shall live. And I always think, you know, the Takabuti. She holds a special place in the hearts of people of Northern Ireland. And, you know, by doing our our work and by all the people who visit the Ulster Museum
And who are fascinated by her, you know, we are keeping her name alive and, you know, you could say it’s almost like a modern way of fulfilling, you know, the ancient Egyptian wish, you know, to have a person’s name said over and over again, you know, to guarantee their success in the afterlife.
So just want to finish with the acknowledgement slide because obviously, you know, it was a huge team effort. One person wouldn’t have all this expertise. And these are just, you know, some of the main characters who were involved and did all the research on different specialist aspects of Takabuti.
And they all feature in the book, you know, they’ve all got their own sections and write about their own areas of expertise. But it was a wonderful project and a complete joy to work with Professor Rosalie David And if any of you are interested in Egyptology, I’m sure you’ve read some of her,
Her books. You know, she’s she’s probably the doyen of sort of biomedical Egyptology and has written a huge amount about ancient medicine and mummification. So it was a real privilege to to work with her. So I’ll leave it at that. Okay. Oh, sorry.
Now, I’m no expert on these things, but is it the case that it’s impossible to remove A mummy from its sarcophagus. Is it too fragile. Is it worthwhile doing? Would you expect to find anything that isn’t obvious from the frontage? Does that make sense? So we’re actually taking her out of her sarcophagus.
We don’t need to because of our imaging techniques now. So the CT scan is like if a modern person goes in and they can look at, you know, you can look down the ways through the person or you can slice it so you don’t need to.
And I don’t know if any of you noticed like Takabuti, the base of her sarcophagus is actually it’s now got a plastic sort of mount because I think she has been damaged in the past. And in the CT scans, we could see, you know, almost like cracks in the middle of
Her and in her hands. And it looks like people had lifted her by the head and the feet. And she had started then to collapse in the middle. So I think it’s probably safer not to take them, certainly Takabuti not to take her out of the base part. So they weren’t like.
Subsequent. Where you, Someone of status would have had things buried with them. You know, if you think, for example, about tribal lords in later history, you know, and they would be buried with swords and all sorts of stuff. But that’s not the case with the Egyptians. They didn’t put anything into the sarcophagus.
Oh, well, they would have wrapped amulets. So the, the bandaging, that’s where they would have sort of hidden amulets and spells and protective things. But it’s interesting, when Takabuti was wrapped, there’s no sort of account of any amulets. Now there’s the blue beads were found sort of scattered in her sarcophagus,
But they wouldn’t have put grave goods the way you’re talking about, you know, in inside the coffin with the person. But but wrapped in the bandaging, they would have these little small objects. Okay. Thank you. Is it possible that there is a connection between the rushed/ abnormal mummification
And the fact that she was murdered? Or would that be purely speculative? It is speculative, but it’s something we’ve wondered, you know, because she was murdered. Was it that maybe maybe her body had started to decompose, maybe they didn’t find her? You know, she’d been she’d lay somewhere.
So they needed to kind of maybe maybe it was easier just to take her head off and mummified that way. Or maybe it is some sort of atypical treatment because she had a sort of a violent death. So we’re kind of speculating, but there has to be some sort of explanation.
You know, so those are as good as any. Do you know what Takabutis name actually means? Because to me, it seems. Like you were talking about how her mother has seems like to have an unusual name, but to me, Takabuti seems more of an unusual name for an Egyptian woman than her mother’s.
We have a translation, but I cannot remember what it is. So it’ll be in the book in Rosalie’s chapter, but I don’t think it was considered to be unusual. I think it’s considered to be an Egyptian name, but I just can’t remember its exact, you know, its translation at the minute.
But I think it’s interesting that, you know, there was that sort of confusion about the translation, you know, and there’s even photographs from the 1970s, you know, where she was displayed in the Ulster Museum and she’s still called Kabuti. And whereas even in the 50s, Cyril Aldridge was saying it was Takabuti.
So I’m not answering your question because I can’t remember. But, you know, I think there wasn’t too much concern about her name. It was more Tasenirit that caused the questions. I also heard that there was actually some controversy about the DNA, that there was
Accusations that since this haplogroup is usually found, like in more European populations, that there was an accusation that the the researchers were sort of trying to prove that Egyptians were actually white when like to me it seemed a bit stupid
Because like, they live in an area which has been a trade hub for like 3000 odd years. Absolutely. No, honestly, Constantina just took the sample, did her thing on it and got the result. You know, there was no kind of Machiavellian thought process that went on.
But sometimes people like to be raised controversy, you know, and talking about people imposing, you know, color on other race on other people, but not in this case. It was definitely it was the science. You know, So no, but I mean, I for one, would really like to know her father’s
Ancestry. And if he was Egyptian, which is what we sort of assume. But no, I don’t know. I haven’t even read about that controversy. That’s quite interesting. It’s on the Wikipedia page. Oh, is it? Oh, right. Okay. I must go and have a look.
People do. Ancient DNA can be very controversial and divisive, and especially if it doesn’t necessarily fit theories. You know, that people have believed for a long period of time something new comes along through the DNA. It can be because I know some of the work we’ve done on ancient Irish populations have
Been quite controversial as well. You know, about people in Newgrange and their connections and things around megalithic tombs. So yeah, but sure, that gets people talking about it and raises the profile of archaeology and gets people thinking. So it’s not all a bad thing. You know.
I just wanted to ask just about the father. Can you give us like an update on on where you are with the DNA on that? And then also just on the fact that she was murdered, like can we do some sort of like
Investigation to like, are there many other mummies that have been murdered? Like, I mean, it seems pretty unusual and like about, you know, the fact that she was with a battle axe in the back while running away seems really visceral. Yeah. No, no, absolutely.
So in terms of the father’s DNA, I think we’d need to get another sample so it’ll be in the future. Maybe the museum will will allow, you know, further study in Takabuti. But it’s like a ten year cycle. Maybe we’ll have to wait ten years.
I don’t know. Maybe techniques will have evolved so much that we just need like a tiny little scraping or something and you get royal mummies that have been killed in battle, you know, But these would be, you know, pharaohs.
And we kind of know kind of expect that they were involved in lots of conflict. I think Takabuti she is quite unusual because she is I mean, I kind of feel like she was running away. And that’s what the proteomics is hinting at. So it does it is an unusual story.
And I suppose it depends, like probably other mummies have died in a similar way, but maybe they haven’t had the same level of study and the same, you know, modern imaging sort of analysis done on them. But it is very visceral.
And, you know, as somebody who’s kind of been aware of Takabuti since it was about six, you know, it was such a shock, you know. I’m a wee bit shocked to learn this girl was actually murdered. Such a beautiful girl with lovely teeth and beautiful hair. But who would actually murder?
Who’s responsible for murdering her? You see this? This is where we don’t know. I mean, but like I was saying, she lived in a time of turmoil. You know, there was a lot of warfare going on and rival factions and, you know, people trying to overthrow.
So maybe there was lawlessness, a degree of lawlessness. She was elite. So maybe she had wealth, you know, and she was just a target then. Just we just don’t know. And you asked as well, could we do anything more really to sort of reconstruct what happened to her? But we can’t really.
We’ve done the forensic analysis. We’ve got the injury. We have an idea of the weapon that made it. But that’s about all we can do scientifically, you know, because we can’t go back and see. We can speculate, we can imagine, but we can’t necessarily say anything definitive.
Hi. Thanks for the talk, by the way. It was really interesting. But I have two questions. There’s one about the did you say your skull was removed like her head was removed from her neck to remove the brain? Has that ever been seen before in other mummifications?
I think Robert Loynes, because his his PhD was looking at mummification and he has seen it in others. But it’s again, it’s not a very common practice. The common version is what we all hear as kids in school. You know, that they put the hook up the nose and took the brain out.
So so it is a bit unusual. And whether it is something to do with her state of decomposition, you know, we don’t. Know. So you couldn’t tell from the scans and results you did whether or not or had had been maybe damaged during her death or whether it was actually removed during the
Mummification process. There was nothing to suggest that it had been damaged. You know, as or during her death, it was more it looked like it was a deliberate thing that they did during mummification. But then there was that resin collar. So that could have obscured things in around the neck area.
You know, and I know you said at the start of the talk that she lived in modern Luxor or what is modern Luxor now? How do you know that? Was that in the writings on her coffin or was it just deduced
It’s a sort of a a sort of deduction because her father was a priest of Amun and they would have been predominantly in around that temple of Karnak I showed. So so that’s a bit of a supposition. That’s what we’re sort of assuming.
And there would have been a lot of the rock cut tombs for the elite in the sort of that sort of area. So that’s what we presume, you know, And the fact that she was a yeah, it’s sort of it’s a bit hazy.
We know where she was found and where she was actually bought, but we’ve kind of gone with what the sort of the norm is, you know, for for other mummies. So it’s not ideal, but it’s kind of the best we’ve got, you know? Yeah.
Is there any sort of belief that we might eventually find your tomb? Because if this sort of mummy vendors were finding them, they couldn’t have been too like impossible to reach. And if we were able to, what sort of things we’d be looking for to try and identify like,
Oh, this is where like Takabuti was. This isn’t just another sort of woman. I don’t. Think. I don’t think she was important enough to have had, you know, really big tomb with her name all over it. So I don’t I don’t know.
I don’t think we would we’d be able to find that, especially after 185 years. You know, I mean, these tombs were just being plundered and even the antiquarians were plundering and blowing up tombs and destroying, you know, as they found, you know, found new tombs. So I it would be amazing.
But I just I don’t think it’ll happen, you know. And if any of you saw the documentary from 2008, Rosalie and Winifred Glover, they went out to Egypt and they were you know, Zahi Hawass was showing them other mummies, you know, that would have been contemporary to Takabuti.
So, you know, we think she’s very precious and very special because she’s our only mummy. But in Egypt, you know, she’s just she would just be another mummy, you know, not, not particularly spectacular or, you know, not a royal mummy or anything like that
But because she’s our one mummy you know, she’s very special and she’s very like I said she’s very much entwined with sort of the history of science in Belfast and our culture. So I don’t think we’ll find out anything more about her, unfortunately, from a context.
A lot of your research was using imaging techniques. Obviously, you’re not constrained by patient safety that you’d have in the NHS. Were you able to obtain a lot more information that because you didn’t have these constraints. Using multiple techniques and different techniques? Um, I think so.
Obviously they weren’t concerned about safety so that she was able to be scanned as long as needed, you know, and X-rayed without sort of time worries or anything like that. Um. But I think there’s kind of a formula for how mummies are treated, and that’s sort of
What would have been done to her. But I think it would be very different to what would be done to a modern person, you know, be more maybe more intensive imaging if that answers your question. Kind of. I don’t really I don’t really, because I don’t really know what way modern
People would be imaged. So I don’t quite know what the differences are. But I think if it’s an archaeological person, we kind of we can do what we need to to get the information we need. Whereas, you know, as as you’re alluding to, you know, exposure to x rays and stuff, you
Can only do certain length of time for modern people so you don’t injure them. On the death slide it looked like a multi-mode imaging, you had color in there as well. Which i thought was interesting. Which one was that? Let’s see if I can go back. University of Manchester One.
Yeah. So I mean these are a lot of these images are from whatever software Bob was able to use, you know, in 2018. So a lot of the images we would have got back in 2008 were much more sort of there were less detail and there were black and white.
So I think this is why I sort of think a lot of the enhancements in visualization have really helped. And also the fact that Bob is a specialist, you know, in manipulating the images. You know, he knows exactly what to do to to be able to bring out the bits, the depths and
Different things that he was looking for. Whereas Judith was a clinician who had an interest in mummies. So that could be part of the differences as well, you know, just differences of approach. Did we know or could we ever find out if Takabuti had any children?
And this was something we did wonder about. Like there was there was no evidence on her body. But then maybe what we need wasn’t well enough preserved. So I don’t I, I think they possibly would have mentioned children on her sarcophagus as well if she’d had any.
So I know they don’t mention husbands, but we suspect she had one. But you would think there might have been mention of children, although it could be wrong about that. But we don’t know, unfortunately. But this is we can only really take the evidence so far, you know, which is a bit
Frustrating at times. Why did why did we research Takabuti so much and not another mummy? Because she’s our mummy in Belfast and we’re so lucky to have her. And like I say, there was this, you know, there was a lot of interest in Takabuti from
People like, you know, people who’d been interested in her as from their childhood. So like Ian Duggan, myself, you know, Mark Regan, you know, so it just was a confluence of events. But do you not think she deserved it? You do good.
So was it only middle class people who were mummified, or was it typical that everybody would be mummified at the time? I think the elites would have been mummified in this kind of artificial way. A lot of mummification started off in Egypt with people just being buried out in the
Desert sands and then they naturally mummified. So I think the lower class is probably that probably continued, whereas it’s more the elites had all the sort of royal treatment, you know, and the tombs and the artifacts And all, Everything else that goes along with the mummification.
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I am distantly related to Takabuti, my mother's bloodline is Mito H4a1a3, which is downstream from the ancestor H4a1. My mother's line is from Wales but the interesting point to make about Haplogroup H4 is that it is very rare and mostly found in Europe today.