It's a boy! Mummy delivers after 2000 years

LIKE an expectant father, Michael Turner paced anxiously yesterday.

A few metres away the mummy of an Egyptian child who died, aged about seven, 2000 years ago was undergoing one of the most thorough examinations modern medicine can provide.

For the senior curator at the University of Sydney's Nicholson Museum, the answer to a mystery was about to be revealed. "Is it a boy?" Mr Turner wondered aloud. "Is it a girl?"

Collected in the 1850s by Sir Charles Nicholson, one of the university's founders, the mummy has been held by the museum for almost 150 years.

The mask covering the face is that of a girl. But a name on papyrus rolls that came with the mummy, thought to be from Thebes, has been translated as Horus. "That's a boy's name," Mr Turner said.

Mummy dealers in the 1800s, he noted, frequently mixed artefacts up for sale, so there was no guarantee that the mask or the name really belonged to the mummy.

To resolve the dilemma the mummy was taken yesterday to Central Sydney Imaging, near Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, for a CT scan.

As the machine snapped 7400 X-ray images, radiologist Margaret Stewart gave a running commentary on what she was seeing on her monitor.

"There are the feet, the legs, the chest," she announced. "Now we are coming into the abdominal organs …"

Then Mr Turner heard what he was waiting hear. "There is the penis," Dr Stewart continued. "And the scrotum is there, between the thighs. It's a boy."

Although the genitals had "shrunk" after 2000 years, Dr Stewart described the body's condition as "gorgeous".

Mr Turner was chuffed. "I have two daughters and now I have a son," he said, adding that the scan had given the mummy new significance.

"We know it is a boy and we know his name, Horus. It gives a personality to the person, a child who died young. It's not just a museum exhibit, this was a real person."

Janet Davey, a Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine Egyptologist, agreed. "The Egyptians wanted their names to be spoken into eternity. If you lost your name, you disappeared into nothing."

The images, along with CT scans also performed yesterday on a mummified Egyptian cat and kitten, will be included in an exhibition, Egyptians, Gods & Mummies opening at the museum on July 12.