ANCIENT Egyptian mummies on display in museums and stately homes are beginning to offer up their secrets to modern medicine.

Scientists have taken samples of tissue from more than 1,000 mummies to build a medical map revealing the way that disease has evolved over 5,000 years.

Egyptologists at the KNH centre for biomedical Egyptology at Manchester University have been charting the evolution of schistosomiasis, more commonly known as bilharzia, from antiquity to the modern day.

Researchers have found that a privileged lifestyle was no barrier to debilitating symptoms and sometimes also painful death from the waterborne parasite that causes the disease — the upper classes swam in the garden pools fed by the same canals as everyone else.

Traces of the disease have been found in 25 per cent of the samples logged with the mummy tissue bank.

The scientists are also beginning to turn their attention to other major diseases, such as malaria, and the whole family of viruses.

They hope to chart minute changes in the nature of disease and its causes, using DNA technology to open up the possibility of a direct comparison between ancient and modern man’s aches, pains and fatal illnesses.

Professor Rosalie David, who heads the centre, said: “Mummies represent, in a way, a museum of disease. We want to go on and look at the presence of other diseases like malaria.

“Ultimately we want to build up pictures of how these diseases developed over thousands of years. It is a very exciting time in the field.”

The key to exploiting the secrets of tomb was the development by Dr Patricia Rutherford of immunocytochemistry as a diagnostic tool to detect the presence of bilharzia in the body.

Early studies concentrated on the collection of 24 mummies in the Manchester Museum collection.

The scientists are now moving on to “provenancing” the samples to geographical areas to build up a “disease and time map”.

“The thing that surprised me as a historian is that they had these debilitating diseases to such an extent yet they were able to develop their civilisation,” Professor David said. “If you look at the art and literature of Egypt, it gives you this wonderful elegant world.

“The tomb scenes show them as being young, beautiful and healthy because that is how they wanted to be in the next life. But in fact I would say the work we do shows that far from living in a wonderful, idealised world, they were racked with all kinds of hideous diseases. The amazing thing is that they still managed to create this extraordinary civilisation.”

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