The Amulets of Seramon

By Grant Ellis

Seramon, ancient priest of Thebes, has lain in state in a French museum since 1851. He died 3000 years ago, a royal scribe and a middle-class Egyptian of importance who wore an impressive necklace of amulets as protection against real and imagined dangers. His embalmers, according to their custom, wrapped additional protective amulets in linen and placed them on and in his abdominal and thoracic cavities after they removed his organs. None of these artifacts has ever seen the light of day. Seramon’s mummy remains intact and undisturbed.

In January 2007, an ambulance carried Seramon from the Museum of Fine Arts and Archaeology through the streets of Besançon to the University Hospital, where Dr. Samuel Mérigeaud was waiting in the Radiology Department. Seramon’s amulets had become the subject of Mérigeaud’s doctoral thesis in radiology. He needed detailed, realistic 3D images derived from CT scan data. This is a specialty of I.M.A SOLUTIONS, a French team of physicians and imaging experts who combine medical imaging expertise with a passion for Egyptology. Benjamin Moreno, a I.M.A SOLUTIONS co-founder, tells us about this collaboration and how the remarkable images of Seramon’s amulets were created.

How did you derive 3D images from a CT scan?

With the help of Dr. Bruno Kastler and Dr. Jean-Michel Lerais of the CHU Radiology Department, Dr. Mérigeaud used a GE Lightspeed Ultra CT scanner to take more than 10,000 tomographic X-ray slices of Seramon at thicknesses ranging from 0.6mm at his head to 1.0mm at his feet. The CT scan slices came to us as 512 x 512 images in the medical-standard 2D DICOM format. Our job was a treasure hunt – finding the artifacts hidden by tissues and wrappings and assembling or segmenting CT scan slices - to extract high-definition 3D mesh. This was intense work, aided greatly by the automated algorithms in VGStudio MAX 1.2.1 image-processing software. We ran the applications on a Mac Pro and viewed our work on a pair of 23-inch Apple Cinema Displays.

It wasn’t difficult to extract images of metal, glass, or stone objects such as the scarab, the glass eyes placed over Seramon’s own eyes, the necklace amulets, the neck chain, and the metal plate over the embalmers’ incision. They stand out against the soft tissues because of their density. The beeswax ibis (also known as the Benu-bird, an Egyptian version of the Phoenix) was also easy to see, because it was placed on, not in, the body. The beeswax figurines of the Sons of Horus, the companions of every mummified Egyptian, presented a challenge, because they’re similar in density to soft tissues. We saw three of them fairly quickly, but it took us two hours to find the fourth. This is a technological first, by the way: the first time wax amulets have been discovered in situ with non-invasive techniques.

The images are extremely realistic. How did you achieve that?

The amulets were exported as high-definition images in stereolithography (.stl) file format to Orealia Designer, an innovative, photorealistic 3D realtime rendering engine from Onesia, a company not far from our facilities in Toulouse. Orealia Designer let us create the highly realistic textures you see. It also enabled us to manipulate images with 4096 x 4096 x/y resolution in real time, comparing colors and textures on the same screen and flying around the amulets interactively at 70fps. We never had to wait for rendering.

Of course, we were working with monochrome images of colored objects we couldn’t physically see. But we had access to amulets removed from other mummies over the years, and we applied their colors and textures to our images of Seramon’s amulets to give them an authentic appearance.

Apart from enjoying their appearance, what do we learn from these images?

We gain insight into the fascinating culture of the 21st Dynasty (1080-950 B.C.). As an example, Seramon’s mummy contains a scarab amulet, a carved image of a sacred dung beetle that represents his heart. The underside of the scarab amulet is inscribed with Spell 30B of the Book of the Dead, a collection of spells and incantations. In effect, Seramon implores his heart not to testify against him when it is weighed in the judgment ceremony:

• O my heart which I had from my mother!
• O my heart which I had from my mother!
• O my heart from my different ages!
• Do not stand up as a witness against me,
• Do not be opposed to me in the tribunal,
• Do not be hostile to me in the presence of the Keeper of the Balance.

The ultimate experience for an Egyptologist would be to touch and handle these amulets without disturbing Seramon’s mummy – and we have achieved that. We send our meshes to an Envision rapid prototyping machine, which builds up a replica using layers of resin. The physical model is faithful to the original within 20 microns. Using Orealia images for reference, we add color and texture. When you handle the scarab, it’s cool to think that the last person to do that was the 21st Dynasty embalmer of Seramon.