The main aims of this book are to show how biomedical and scientific techniques have led to a new understanding of some aspects of ancient Egyptian society, and to demonstrate how the focused, multidisciplinary research of one team, working continuously in this area for more than thirty years, has been able to contribute to this field.

There has been a remarkable and significant increase in the number and range of scientific studies undertaken on mummies over the past couple of decades, and people are now aware of the information that can be derived from such investigations, in terms of explaining the cultural context of human remains and in adding to knowledge of how disease has evolved and developed from ancient to modern times. Much of this work, however, is published in scientific journals or conference papers, and is not readily accessible to the reader who has a general interest in the field.

The Manchester Egyptian Mummy Research Project, established at the University of Manchester in 1973, has conducted pioneering research on the methodology of using scientific techniques to investigate ancient Egyptian mummified remains. It has run the longest continuous research programme in the field of biomedical Egyptology, and this has led to the establishment (in 2003) of a university specialisation and a dedicated facility – the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology in the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Manchester (UK).

The earliest phase of this project was published in A. R. David (ed.), The Manchester Museum Mummy Project (1979).