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Shocking Artifacts And Human Remains Found In 2000 Year Old Pyramid

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A 2,300-year-old face wrapped in linen finally gives up its secrets — without a single bandage being cut.

For decades, the mummy known as Bashiri sat in an Egyptian storeroom too fragile and too strange to touch. Its face is bound in an intricate lattice of linen unlike anything else recovered from ancient Egypt, and unwrapping it would have destroyed a pattern no conservator could ever recreate. So researchers did the only thing that made sense: they sent it for an X-ray.

• The mummy, excavated by Howard Carter in 1919 near the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, dates to Egypt’s Ptolemaic era, roughly 2,300 years ago.
• CT and X-ray imaging determined the remains belong to an elite adult male about 167 cm (5’6″) tall, wrapped beneath decoration showing falcon-head motifs and the funerary deities Anubis, Isis, and Nephthys.
• Separately, teams at Argonne National Laboratory’s Advanced Photon Source, working with Northwestern University, have used CT scanning and high-energy X-ray diffraction to look inside unopened Roman-era Egyptian portrait mummies without disturbing the linen.

Bashiri Remains Impossible to Unwrap

Bashiri earned the nickname “the Untouchable” for a reason. Unlike most mummies from the period, whose wrappings are relatively plain, Bashiri’s face is covered in a geometric lattice of linen strips arranged to echo pyramid shapes — a level of craftsmanship that appears nowhere else in the archaeological record. Carter pulled the mummy from a tomb complex near Luxor in 1919, but its facial wrapping was so singular that curators long refused to risk cutting into it just to see what lay underneath.

That left imaging as the only option. Modern X-ray and CT scanning let researchers pass through dozens of linen layers without touching them, building a three-dimensional map of the skeleton, the resin, and any objects tucked against the body during embalming. The scans confirmed Bashiri was male, an adult, and roughly 5’6″ — modest stats on their own, but enough to anchor two centuries of speculation about who was actually inside the wrapping.

The linen pattern covering Bashiri’s face has no known parallel among Egypt’s mummified remains — which is exactly why nobody has ever dared cut it open.

Reading the Decoration Without Removing It

Beyond the skeleton itself, imaging picked up the painted and woven imagery layered into the wrappings: falcon-head motifs tied to Horus, and figures of Anubis, Isis, and Nephthys — the trio most closely associated with guiding and protecting the dead through Egyptian funerary belief. Placing gods of embalming and mourning directly against the body was standard practice for wealthy Ptolemaic burials, and their presence on Bashiri reinforces that this was someone of real status, prepared for the afterlife with resources most Egyptians never had.

The value of scanning instead of unwrapping isn’t just about preserving one unusual mummy. It sets a template other institutions have already followed on similarly untouched remains.

Argonne and Northwestern Push the Method Further

At Argonne National Laboratory’s Advanced Photon Source, researchers paired with Northwestern University to apply CT scans and high-energy X-ray diffraction to intact, Roman-era Egyptian portrait mummies — the kind still sealed in their original wrappings, never opened since burial. The diffraction technique goes a step past a standard CT scan, letting scientists identify the composition of objects inside the wrapping, including calcite scarab amulets placed against the chest, without peeling back a single layer of cloth.

Those scans have turned up skeletal detail on bone health and diet alongside the amulets and other burial goods tucked into the wrappings — information that would otherwise require destroying wrappings that have survived intact for close to two thousand years. It’s the same logic driving the Bashiri work: treat the linen itself as an artifact worth keeping whole, and let the imaging do the excavating.

Between Bashiri’s pyramid-patterned face and the Argonne-Northwestern scans of sealed portrait mummies, the message from both projects is the same — some of ancient Egypt’s best-preserved secrets are staying wrapped for good, and researchers are fine with that as long as the X-ray machine keeps talking.