The University of Reading and the British Museum (BM) are pleased to announce a fully funded Collaborative doctoral studentship under the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Scheme. Mummification evolved over thousands of years and was used by the ancient Egyptians to preserve bodies for the afterlife. Mummified remains from Pharaonic Egypt (c. 3000-332 BC) are mostly of elite adults, but Egypt's integration into the Roman Empire (30 BC-AD 395) marked a shift in mortuary traditions, with a greater number of child mummies recovered throughout the country. The paucity of mummified children from the Pharaonic period is often seen as evidence that they were at the edge of society, while attitudes appear to have changed under the Romans. Our uncertainty about the social and funerary status of children in Egypt stems from limited research on the child mummies themselves, and a lack of a comprehensive comparative dataset. This project involves direct analysis of c. 50 child mummies held at the British Museum using Computerised Tomography (CT) scanning, with data compared to non-adult skeletal remains, and published data and CT-scans of mummified adults and children held elsewhere. The age, sex and health of the children will be combined with funerary evidence for items such as amulets to understand the transition of attitudes towards children in life and death in ancient Egypt.
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