For years it has been a quiet mystery in a glass case at the Walters Art Museum, where it rested a few feet from a 4,000-year-old coffin in what is known as the Afterlife Room.
But yesterday the 5-foot, 2,900-year-old mummy traveled by truck to University of Maryland Medical Center for its first-ever CT scan to see whether scientists can learn more about it - including whether "it" is a he or a she.
For the mummy and its retinue, the biggest challenge was the same one facing everyone negotiating Baltimore's midday traffic: getting there in one piece. "It's very, very, very fragile," said Regine Schulz, the Walters' curator of ancient art and director of international curatorial relations.
With that in mind, a crew of curators and staffers spent two painstaking hours packing the mummy in bubble wrap and tissue paper, then lowering it into a custom pine box, complete with foam bed, for the mile-long trip.
"I approach everything like it was an explosive," said Michael McKee, the senior art handler at the Walters who coordinated the move. "It doesn't help to be nervous."
The University of Maryland School of Medicine approached the Walters several months ago about scanning the mummy so doctors can discuss the results at the school's annual pathology conference this spring.
The gathering usually includes an examination of the cause of death of a historical figure. Past subjects have included Abraham Lincoln, Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Booker T. Washington. This year's mystery is Akhenaten, a mysterious monotheistic pharaoh.
With a mummy available at the Walters, medical school officials thought scanning it might help unravel some ancient Egyptian medical mysteries.
"It might help us see what diseases they had, infectious and otherwise, along with how they preserved these bodies and what problems there were with preservation," said Dr. Philip Mackowiak, chief of the medical service at the Baltimore Veterans Affairs Medical Center, a professor of medicine at UM and organizer of the conference.
The gathering, which is open to the public, is scheduled for 1 p.m. May 2 at Davidge Hall on the medical school campus.
On Monday, UM radiologists also scanned a precious container from the Walters designed for religious artifacts, as well as an Egyptian "corn mummy," a doll-sized human figure made from soil and clay that might have been used in annual religious ceremonies.
Scientists have been scanning mummies for decades in an effort to uncover their secrets. Egypt is currently scanning all the royal mummies in its Cairo Museum. A scan of King Tut, sanctioned by the Egyptian government in 2005, indicated that the teenage pharaoh was probably not murdered - as some Egyptologists had previously believed.
A CT scan uses X-ray technology to create a three-dimensional image, giving physicians a better look at diseased bones and tissue. "In the human body, we're interested in the whole range of human tissues that we're going to find," said Dr. Barry Daly, a professor of diagnostic radiology at the medical school.
The CT scanner that probed the mummy for two to three hours yesterday can snap 128 images per second. It is more often used to scan the coronary arteries of heart patients, Daly said, so it had to wait for its turn until 4 p.m., so that no CT patients would be inconvenienced.
Officials said it would take anywhere from a few days to a week or so for the results to become clear.
Curators at the Walters were initially reluctant to pick up and move a 3,000-year-old set of remains, they said. But they knew so little about their only adult mummy that, in the end, scientific curiosity outweighed the risks.
"We thought, 'We could learn so much from doing this,'" said Terry Drayman-Weisser, the museum's director of conservation and technical research.
Icons on the mummy's papyrus and stucco outer wrappings, depicting Egyptian gods and protective spirits, indicate that the inhabitant lived between 950 and 720 B.C., said Schulz, who is also an Egyptologist at the University of Munich in Germany.
Archaeologists with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York excavated the mummy in the winter of 1930-1931 at a government-sanctioned site known as Deir el-Bahari, on the west bank of Thebes. The Walters acquired it soon after that, Schulz said.
They know that in life the mummy stood about 5 feet tall, but not much else - including the mummy's age, gender or cause of death.
The Walters also has the mummified remains of a Roman girl, but officials thought she was too fragile to move, Schulz said.
The Walters plans to use images from the scan in a computerized "Virtual Autopsy" exhibit at the entrance to the Egyptian galleries. Visitors will be able to manipulate images to get a better view of the mummy's contents.
The Egyptians mummified their dead by extracting the body's organs and stuffing the bodies with sawdust, linen and other materials, so that the remains could continue to house the ka or life force of the individual, experts say.
"If they wanted to survive in the next world, they had to have a connection to this world," said Schulz.
dennis.obrien@baltsun.com