Professor turns ancient Egyptian hand into a teaching tool

BROOKVILLE, N.Y. -- When a severed human hand arrived in his mailbox, Bob Brier wasn't horrified or shocked. He thought it might be something cool to bring to work.

Brier is a professor of Egyptology and a renowned mummy expert, and the hand was a gift from a woman whose father had purchased it in 1926 in Egypt from locals touting it as an ancient mummified hand.

On Monday, Brier and his students at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University took the hand to the school's radiologic technology lab to determine whether the hand was real or fake.

The verdict? Brier has a hand between 2,000 and 3,000 years old on his hands.

But that wasn't all he was able to determine.

Due to the lack of growth plates, or growing tissue near the ends of the bones, Brier said the hand belonged to an adult -- not a child as he'd originally suspected. It was probably a woman, due to the hand's small size. The woman was well fed, since the bones showed no signs of malnutrition. And she was wealthy: The fingernails had the ancient version of a manicure -- painted with henna.

The hand was one of two bought by an American student, Merrill S. Tope, near the Valley of the Kings for what would be about 7 cents in today's currency.

The hand will now stay in the collection of Long Island University. Carbon dating of the linen it was wrapped in could tell its precise age, and the school's chemistry students might test a bit of the resin to determine what tree it came from.

While the mummy's hand is not a significant scientific find, Brier said it was important to provide his students to an exciting historical project.

"The fun thing is trying to figure out clues about life in ancient Egypt," Brier said. "It's a bit of a detective story. This is another little piece of the puzzle."