“We can affirm that both cases had no treatment and followed an evolution of the disease until death,” professor Miguel Cecilio Botella López of the department of legal medicine, toxicology and physical anthropology at the Universidad de Granada (UGR) and the leader of the UGR anthropology group involved in the research, told HCB News. “Very likely they would have some treatment against pain since opiates already existed and opium poppy heads were found in some Egyptian tombs, but there was no specific treatment for either. Both reached their terminal phase with a very intense physical deterioration, which indicates the presence of an advanced society that invested economic and human resources in their care until death.”

And mummies made headlines again in 2016, when a book from famed Egyptologist Zahi Hawass and Cairo University radiologist Sahar Saleem, "Scanning the Pharaohs: CT Imaging of the New Kingdom Royal Mummies," reported on scans of royal mummies from about 1543 B.C. to 1064 B.C., including Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, Tutankhamun, Seti I as well as Ramesses III.


The authors had earlier found that Ramesses' likely cause of death was a slit throat — slicing through the trachea and esophagus — but added another injury to the fatal assault.

"The site of foot injury is anatomically far from the neck-cut wound; also the shape of the fractured toe bones indicate that it was induced by a different weapon than that used to induce the neck cut," Saleem said at the time. "So there must have been an assailant with an ax/sword attacking the king from the front, and another one with a knife or a dagger attacking the king from his back, both attacking at the same time."

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