FBI cracks its oldest mystery – a mummified head
UNITED STATES: The crime scene contained a disembodied head, evidence of a burglary, and some signs that the thieves had tried to set the place alight to cover their tracks.
None of this would make FBI forensic scientists blink, except for a few details. The head they were being asked to identify was that of a mummified Egyptian who lived about 4000 years ago. It was their oldest, coldest case yet.
Now, with the aid of archaeologists, geneticists and doctors, the agency has cracked it.
In a paper published this month, Odile Loreille, the FBI scientist who led the investigation, declares that the head belongs to Djehutynakht, the governor of a province in Upper Egypt who was buried with his wife in great splendour in a cliff overlooking the Nile Valley. Their grave was plundered, and when archaeologists opened their tomb in 1915, they were greeted by the calm, blank-eyed stare of a disembodied head on one of the coffins.
Was it the governor, or was it his wife? There was also a headless, limbless torso in one corner of the tomb, but this was lost – and the gender of the head, which passed into the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, remained unknown.
Both the governor and his wife were named Djehutynakht, said Rita Freed, a curator at the museum.
‘‘Usually from the shape of the face and from the depths of the cheek muscles, you can at least make a guess’’ about gender, she said. But those muscles had been removed, apparently as part of an ‘‘opening of the mouth’’ ceremony, a ritual performed to allow the deceased to eat, drink and breathe in the afterlife.
Paul Chapman, a neurosurgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital who examined the head, was amazed at the skill with which this operation had been done. He and a colleague demonstrated how it may have been done with ancient tools on two cadavers, using a chisel and a mallet.
‘‘The ancient Egyptian method was possibly superior to the method we use to correct things like lockjaw,’’ Freed said.
Doctors and museum staff decided their best chance of finding DNA would be to extract one of the teeth. Using borrowed tools, a biologist named Fabio Nunez reached into the back of the mummy’s head, through the neck, and pulled a molar.
‘‘He said it was one of the most unnerving things he had done, and one of the most difficult,’’ Freed said. ‘‘They are used to working with live people. And he was aware of the preciousness of the object.’’
The tooth went to a government research laboratory, and came eventually to Loreille, a forensic scientist who had extracted genetic material from a prehistoric bear and identified a child from the Titanic disaster before she started working for the FBI.
She went to work on the mummy’s genes, taking a sample from the tooth’s core and using a technique to amplify the sample until it could be read by computer software. This showed that the DNA came from a man.
Freed was delighted. ‘‘It’s a win for science, it’s a win for the museum, and it’s a win for Djehutynakht. The ancient Egyptians’ desire was to live forever and have people remember their names.’’ – The Times