[00:14.35]Did the doctors find out how the woman died?
[00:20.86]The mummy of an Egyptian woman who died in 800 B.C. has just had an operation.
[00:29.71]The mummy is that of Shepenmut who was once a singer in the Temple of Thebes.
[00:38.79]As there were strange marks on the X-ray plates taken of the mummy,
[00:44.12]doctors have been trying to find out whether the woman died of a rare disease.
[00:50.15]The only way to do this was to operate.
[00:53.55]The operation, which lasted for over four hours,
[00:57.06]proved to be very difficult because of the hard resin which covered the skin.
[01:03.76]The doctors removed a section of the mummy and sent it to a laboratory.
[01:09.47]They also found something which the X-ray plates did not show: 
[01:14.04]a small wax figure of the god Duamutef.
[01:20.33]This god which has the head of a cow was normally placed inside a mummy.
[01:27.14]The doctors have not yet decided how the woman died.
[01:31.14]They feared that the mummy would fall to pieces when they cut it open,
[01:35.82]but fortunately this has not happened.
[01:39.24]The mummy successfully survived the operation.