June 26, 2009—Lady Hor, an ancient Egyptian mummy at New York's Brooklyn Museum, is actually Sir Hor, CT scans reveal.

© 2009 National Geographic (AP)

Unedited Transcript

The remains of the Royal Prince, Count of Thebes, and two other ancient Egyptian mummies have been scanned at North Shore University Hospital in New York.

The mummies range in age from more than 3,000 years old to just over 1700 years old.

They were brought from Brooklyn Museum for screening.

SOUNDBITE (English) Edward Bleiberg, Brooklyn Museum: "We hope to discover such things as the history of disease, to verify gender of the mummies, that have not been unwrapped and to perhaps find the cause of death, and also the age of death."

But what the new scan results showed turned out to be much more than that.

The mummy labeled Lady Hor in fact turns out to be a man.

SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Jesse Chusid, North Shore University Hospital: "In that one in particular the soft tissues were really well preserved and you can actually still see the penis is still intact, you can make out some of the structure of the internal organ of the penis and so that's how we were able to tell beyond a reasonable doubt that this was a male."

"Lady" Hor is thought to be around two thousand years old and was first discovered in 1937.

The casket was believed to contain a female body because the casket did not feature a beard - the usual sign of a male mummy.

SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Amgad Makaryus, North Shore University Hospital: "There are actually 64 detectors in there. And each one of these detectors are point six millimeters thick, so each one of those can give us a slice, a cut if you will, of the actual body or whatever it you're scanning in there. And by doing that your resolution, your ability to resolve two points in space is point six millimeters because that's how thin those slices are."

SOUNDBITE (English) Edward Bleiberg, Brooklyn Museum: "And so, it's actually I think going to revise some of our ideas about how you can tell whether a Mummy case is intended for a male or a female."

CT scans were first performed on the remains beginning in the 1980s, but they produced poorer images.

The mummies will go on display at the Brooklyn Museum, and some of the scans will become part of the exhibit.