BEIJING, April 21 -- The largest and most comprehensive collection of mummies and funerary material outside of Cairo is permanently housed at the British Museum in London. A portion of these world famous antiquities will soon go on display at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California, just 35 miles south of Los Angeles.

    The extensive exhibition features ancient 140 objects, including six mummies and 14 coffins. The exhibits will also include examples of embalming tools, sarcophagi, amulets, papyri and the process of mummification, to illustrate the story of the Egyptian ritual of preparing and sending the dead to the afterlife.

    When the six mummies arrived in Southern California in early April, a team of radiologists and curators conducted a computed tomography or CT scan of each one.

    Dr. Nigel Strudwick, a curator from the British Museum in charge of fragile exhibits, says that, thanks to virtual reality technology, the CT scan method allows mummies to be preserved while at the same time dissected in the same manner as a forensic autopsy.

    British Museum curator Nigel Strudwick said: "The thing it needs to stress it that it proves the validity of not unwrapping the mummy in the old-fashioned method, because as technology improves over the years, we can try it again and again, because it's not destructive, non-destructive technology, so we're learning more things, more precise things."

    "Mummies: Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt" will run at the Bowers Museum for two years.

(Source: CCTV)