Peer Inside A 2,000-Year-Old Egyptian Cat Mummy

Scientist at the University of Aberdeen are using 3D imaging software to create interactive models of mummies and other ancient artifacts.

Transcript

00:00We have a number of cat mummies in the collection and this was a nice one.

00:04Basically what we're doing is looking at some items in the University

00:07collection to make more use of them for teaching. So using photogrammetry and

00:12other techniques we're able to create virtual versions of objects which

00:16otherwise just you can't handle other than a specialist coming in and

00:19looking at them. We're really looking at things that will be relevant to students of

00:23medicine and maybe archaeology as well but also thinking some of the objects in

00:27the museum that are rather intriguing and attractive that would get people

00:29attention. You are able to get that ability to look very closely so it's not

00:33just a representation of the object, it's being able to look at the detail and

00:36really understand it. That's been really important. The question of course always

00:40is what's inside it? Is it actually a cat mummy or not? There are cases where what's

00:45inside is not what you'd expect. We did actually have a crocodile mummy and all

00:49that was in it was the crocodile's head, there was no body. So we wanted to know

00:53so we were able to create this representation of it so we've got a real

00:57sense of the outside and then also we cat scanned it and it's a bad pun but

01:01never mind and we discovered inside that the real cat is a tiny wee kitten

01:06much much smaller than the bandages so presumably what went on was that

01:10actually at a temple they were selling mummified cats for people to

01:14give as a gift to the temple and you'd make more money out of selling a large

01:19cat than a little one so they've bulked it out. I think it does give a bit of an

01:22insight into what was going on in a temple of you know daily life and how

01:26they were making offerings to the gods and etude.

01:29Photogrammetry is a technique for building 3D models from photographs so

01:34basically it consists in taking a lot of photographs around an object and then

01:39using a clever piece of software to stitch them all together and build a 3D

01:43model and the result is very good. The textures are very realistic so anyone

01:50can rotate the model zoom into the object and explore the texture and the

01:57shape of the 3D model at any device. On the one hand we're thinking of the

02:02students in University of Aberdeen and their chance to really make use of the

02:06collections I mean it's a wonderful privilege being a student in Aberdeen

02:09when you've got the collection and we need to make more use of it. The other

02:12thing of course is we're able to web mount them so they're going to be

02:15available to anybody who wants to see these things and there are a number of

02:19international projects looking at things like cat mummies so we're

02:22contributing to international scholarship as well as our own teaching.