Rosalie David on the science of Egyptian mummies

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

Rosalie David is a pioneer in the study of ancient Egypt. In the early 1970s, she launched a unique project to study Egyptian mummified bodies using the techniques of modern medicine. Back then, the vast majority of Egyptologists regarded mummies as unimportant sources of information about life in ancient Egypt. Instead they focussed on interpreting hieroglyphic inscriptions, the written record in papyrus documents and archaeological remains and artefacts. Rosalie David proved that the traditionalists were quite wrong.

Professor David’s mummy research started at the Manchester Museum when she began to collaborate with radiologists at the nearby Manchester Royal Infirmary, taking the museum’s mummies for x-rays at the hospital. Her multi-disciplinary team later moved to a dedicated institute at the University of Manchester, the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology. Over the decades, the team there has made remarkable discoveries about disease and medicine in ancient Egyptian society, providing a new perspective on the history of medicine and giving extraordinary insights into the lives of individuals all those years ago.

Rosalie tells Jim Al-Khalili about her journey from classics and ancient history to biomedicine, including some of her adventures in Egypt in the 1960s. She talks about some of her most significant research projects, and the 21st Century forensic detective work on the mummy of a young woman which revealed a gruesome murder 3,000 years ago...

Presented by Jim Al-Khalili Produced by Andrew Luck-Baker

Transcript

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0:42.2	Hello and welcome to the podcast edition of the Life Scientific.
0:45.0	I'm Jim Alcalini, and this is the show where I get to talk with some of the world's leading scientists
0:50.0	and you get to find out what drives them. So sit back, get comfortable and enjoy
0:54.8	the episode. Think of ancient Egypt and you probably picture the pyramids or the Sphinx
1:00.8	or Hieroglyphics or Mummies. Well today we will be focused very much
1:06.1	on mummies because my guest is Rosalie David, the UK's first female professor of Egyptology.
1:12.4	Half a century ago as a young Egyptologist in Manchester,
1:16.1	Rosalie launched a unique project to study Egyptian mummified bodies using the techniques of
1:21.7	modern medicine, something no other Egyptologist was doing back
1:25.2	then. Rosalie's mummy research started at the Manchester Museum and later moved to a dedicated
1:31.5	University of Manchester Institute, the K&H Center for Biomedical
1:35.9	Egyptology. Over the decades her team have made remarkable discoveries about disease and medicine
1:42.4	in ancient Egyptian society, providing a new
	...

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