Ancient mummy comes out of his coffin

A 2,500-year-old Egyptian mummy named Padihershef came out of his coffin Friday to go to the hospital.

The mummy was a gift from a Dutch diplomat who was happy with Boston's hospitality. It has been on display at Massachusetts General Hospital, one of the nation's oldest, since it received him as a gift from the city of Boston in 1823 as a medical oddity.

A conservator trained in restoring ancient artifacts removed him from his coffin Friday and began using cotton swabs dabbed in saliva to wipe away salt deposits from his face. The salt has been slowly seeping out of his tissue, a result of the mummification process.

Mimi Leveque, the conservator, also used a tiny brush to wipe the film of white salt and used a small vacuum cleaner to remove the fine dust from skin darkened by mummification resins.

Experts are also expected to do minor repair and stabilization work on his coffin. The whole process is expected to take three days.

The mummy and his coffin will then be moved to a special horizontal case, in which they will lie next to each other, in the Ether Dome, a surgical amphitheater.

Padihershef was a 40-year-old stonecutter in the necropolis in Thebes, an ancient city on the west bank of the Nile, in what is today's Luxor.

"He was probably someone who was employed to open up the ground and to create the tombs for the kings in the Valley of Kings," said Leveque, who specializes in Egyptian antiquities.

No one knows exactly how the man who became a mummy lived or died. Experts are exploring those questions through a conservation project supported by the hospital and donors.

He had been greeting visitors to the hospital from his upright, open sarcophagus. He was removed from his case in March and taken on a patient stretcher to the imaging suites in the hospital, where technicians subjected him to full body X-ray and CT scanning.

Experts were surprised to see a broom handle embedded at the base of his head and running through his torso in what likely was a crude attempt to stabilize his head.

They also showed the mummy still has the brain in his skull, a rarity because it was typically removed to eliminate the chance of decomposition.