Ancient Egyptian canopic jars on display in the Egyptian collection of the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb, Croatia.

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The Canopic Jar Project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, is the first in the world to investigate a large series of ancient Egyptian canopic jars from European and American museum collections in a truly interdisciplinary research environment.

The inventive focus on the contents of canopic jars produces results unobtainable by conventional ancient mummy research methods. The project involves macroscopic, radiological, chemical, and paleogenetic studies of ancient Egyptian canopic jar contents and mummies based on prior Egyptological assessment.

古埃及的檐瓶

古埃及人认为，死者的尸体是因为他们相信灵魂在其肉体的信封外行进，必须能够回到它。因此，对人体的验尸保存对于来世中灵魂的生存至关重要。另一方面，内脏必须从身体中提取以避免其分解，但也需要保留。

死者的某些内部器官被保存在称为Canopic Jars的船只内。尽管葬礼练习以及Canopic罐的设计和使用从旧王国的第一个实验阶段（约公元前2700-2200）到新王国的峰值（约公元前1550年至1077年）和第三个中级时期发生了很大变化。（约公元前1077 - 652年），通常是四个Canopic罐子，每个罐子都用于保管一个特定器官。

Mostly made of alabaster or terracotta, 30-40 centimeters in height, many jars feature lids, of four possible types, indicative of their contents: a human head for the liver, that of a baboon for the lungs, a jackal for the stomach, and a falcon for the intestines. Canopic jars were placed near the sarcophagus, inside the funeral chambers.

Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832), the French linguist who had deciphered the Hieroglyphs on the Rosetta stone, seems to already have discovered their use in 1812, but the study of their contents is only very recent and few canopic jars have been analyzed to date. For a long time they were mainly considered from an artistic point of view.

“Surprisingly, ancient Egyptian canopic jars – containing precious mummified human internal organs – have been widely neglected in biomedical research so far. This despite their unique value to contribute to the understanding of the ongoing evolution of diseases”, says Prof. Frank Rühli, Director of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine and senior author of this study.

The advantage of examining ancient Egyptian canopic jars is that it frees scientists to some extent from ethical constraints linked to the invasive study of ancient Egyptian mummies, therefore opening up several fantastic areas of exploration.

The medical field will benefit from advances in the understanding of pathogen evolution, while genetic fingerprinting and pathogen identification are of vital importance to increasing our understanding of health and social structure in ancient Egypt.

It’s what’s inside that counts

Opening them [canopic jars] may induce oxidation of contained biological tissues, or even contamination by bacteria.

Yet, the number of canopic jars with preserved contents suited for such studies is not infinite. Opening them may induce oxidation of contained biological tissues, or even contamination by bacteria. To avoid wasting such unique study material, one step involves the use of recent medical imaging techniques to look inside the canopic jars: planar x-rays, computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

为了第一次，将这三种标准的临床成像方式进行了比较，以研究古埃及罐装罐的含量。我们探讨了适用于此类独特的样本，探讨了古生物学中三种主要最新诊断方法的一般可行性和诊断敏感性。

出乎意料的是，放射学分析也使我们得出了社会文化的发现：与希罗多德的文本相反，希罗多德的文本代表了古代埃及木乃伊化程序的一些最古老的来源，可能并没有将整个器官保存在罐子中，而是小小的器官碎片。大多数测得的canopic罐子在干燥后也显示出整个人体器官的容量不足。

This discovery is of substantial significance: It may not be the organ itself that the Egyptians thought to find in the afterlife, in a figurative way, but rather its presence. This could mean, that death and the hereafter were comprehended at a different level of abstraction than previously thought. However, this remains to be confirmed.