Baby Spears – But Not the Britney Kind (ca. 380-250 BC)

By: The Scribe on November, 2007

A mummified toddler is prepared for a CT scan, in order to determine whether a spear in it skull was what killed the child.

The mummy of a child from ancient Egypt caused scientists to do a bit of a double-take when they performed a CT scan on the body – images revealed that a spear-like object was wedged inside the child’s skull and upper spine!

CT scans are commonly performed on mummies so that not all bodies need to be unwrapped for study – in many cases, the mummies are so fragile that unwrapping them might potentially destroy the remains. Instead, X-rays on the body reveal things like how a person was wrapped and buried, the condition of the skeleton, and whether there are any added items inside the wrappings such as jewelry or ornamentation.

The child with a spear in its head was probably between three and five years old when it was buried, and the scan seemed to show that the child had an unusually large head. While scientists haven’t been able to pinpoint the cause of the abnormality, the bone structure of the head and face may result in a facial recreation sometime over the next several years.

However, the primary question still remains – was the spear in the child’s head a cause of death, or did the embalmers insert the spear in order to keep the head and neck steady during the mummification process. Either explanation is entirely plausible, though the former explanation is far more disturbing to consider.

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