Redefine gender for mummies

The results of the tomography finally revealed, the mummy "dancing woman" from the 2nd century is actually a mature man.

The mummy was taken to the British Museum in 1835 in a women's coffin, wearing a pink skirt and seemed to have a slightly raised chest. Perhaps so, over the past decades, in travel guides, experts have described this Egyptian mummy as the remaining, preserved body of "a dancer".

Strange mummies are on display at the British Museum

However, in the research world, there is also a difficult question to answer about why the embalmist painted the mummy's face. It was not until the 1960s, when mummies were taken with X-rays, that questions about the gender of the dead began to be formally stated.

Currently, thanks to a computerized tomography machine, experts finally verified that the mummy is in fact a mature man.

According to the researchers, the upper part of the female chest is the fold of the wraparound fabric. The same thing leads to big fat thighs of mummies. The scholars said that both regions may have been stuffed, especially, because this fat man and the mummy had tried to faithfully reproduce his appearance when he was alive.

Test results also showed that this man was at least 20 years old, about 1m67 tall and lost 5 teeth. He is said to have certainly experienced terrible pain from many dental pressure points. Experts also believe that he lived in Egypt in the 2nd century AD, when the land was under Roman rule.

The unusually elevated chest part made the mummy suspected of being a woman

Sex redefinition of the mummy is part of a new exhibition that is open to visitors at the British Museum on 21 May.

John Taylor, the museum's tour guide, explains: "The mummified man tried to give the man a face like that, maybe because he was fat. Overall, this is an extremely unusual mummy , with arms, legs, fingers and toes wrapped separately instead of covering the whole body, there are very few other mummies like that in the world .

The man also wore a leather belt and lots of linen strips on his body. They may be some kind of decoration, but we don't know what they represent. Some illustrations of Egyptian dancers show that they also wear similar strips of cloth. So he can finally be a dancer ".