THE PHARAOHS.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1618, 9 December 1912, Page 9

THE PHARAOHS.

BRINGING. THEM BACK TO LIFE. The Human remnants of Egypf s _great-ness-practically-all that ; is left of the Pharaohs and their queens—lie in the Cairo Museum. This series of royal mummies contains fifty, specimens. While (Professor G. Elliott Smith, the. British anatomist, was teaching in the Medical School of. Cairo, the Director of the Department of Antiquities at the Museum, Sir Gaston Maspero, induced him to make a thorough examination of these mummies, in' order that'they might be catalogued in 1 a scientific manner. The result of this work has recently been issued. The. catalogue contains .much of general -as well as medical interest. Except for the fact that the royal relics are numbered like convicts, they have received at the hands of .the Museum ..authorities' :the, respectful treatment.due to their, past . greatness. Professor Smith; hbwever;"treats them, so far as their extremely, dessicated condition permits, as ordinary anatomical material from which it is' desired to reconstruct a picture of the-original man—just as he would in fact, study'the "remains of a slave or a parish dog. The mummies, he says, are ■simply '"Historical"' documents," deriving their value from the" fact that they hafe been preserved to us from a period antedating written history!-. The first mummy of the catalomie is identified as the body of Saquourni, last of the seventeenth dynasty kings (about 2090 8.C.). His head being badly smashed, his body battered, and the embalming being plainly" a hasty'job, the inference naturally follows that ho died a violent death by murder. The mummy of. the son of Seti I, Siphtah was found to' have a club-foot. The jaws of Amenothes 111 were\riddled with' abscesses. . Caries of the teeth was common in the royal households.,' ."

Here, by way of example, is a portion. of Dr. Smith's description of Menephtah,' the Pharaoh of the Exodus. A somewhat corpulent old man, almost completely bald, with a.narrow fringe of white hair on teinples and occiput. His arteries were hard, and the aorta contained "large, bonelike patches" of calcareous degeneration. There were indications of certain curious physical deformities during life, and portions of the body had. been removed sinw''mummification. His face somewhat resembled that of Pamesis 11. his father. He Had the prominent ' highbridged nose, of the latter, but a shorter and broader head. Ho was s'feet 7.5 inches in height. ... The. studies of mummies by biologists, and particularly by pathologists, has of late years been .carried to a point calculated somewhat to strain one's credulity. They are already asserting that the day is not far distant when it will be possible to diagnose "retrospectively" the exact cause of death of the Ptolcmys. Ruffer claims to have identified pneumococci in the lungs of mummies, and has also found nlague bacilli, and the' colon bacillus. Furthermore, extracts of mummy tissue have been used with success in making some of the modern serum tests. The next achievement may be the actual resurrection of one of the Pharaohs, by the use, perhaps,"of organic extracts and the pulmotor— New York 'Tost."