FOR more than 3000 years the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah's body lay in the Valley of the Kings on the west bank of the Nile. In 1898, his mummified remains were taken to Cairo and a few years later the eminent Australian anatomist and Egyptologist Grafton Elliott Smith examined them. Smith described Merneptah as "an old man... almost completely bald, only a narrow fringe of white hair... remaining on the temples and occiput". But his autopsy revealed something much more fascinating. "It indicated Merneptah had atherosclerosis," says cardiologist Randall Thompson at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. To say that he and his colleagues were sceptical when they discovered this would be an understatement. "We didn't believe it."
Their incredulity is not surprising; atherosclerosis is generally thought of as a modern scourge. A chronic disease involving inflammation of the arteries, it is associated with high blood pressure, high cholesterol and heart attacks, ...
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.
