Meet Ken, the 3,000-year-old Egyptian with a shocking smile

Few things are as terrifying as mummies, the stuff of countless camp horror flicks, and scary precisely because you can't see what's beneath the inscrutable cotton. No longer. A new exhibition sets forth the results so far of the Bristol Mummy Project, started in 1981, in which a mummy has been unwrapped and the body extensively analysed. So, who's the man receiving a rude awakening after 3,000 years of oblivious swaddling? Horemkenesi, that's who (let's call him Ken for short) - a chief workman in charge of tombs in the Valley of the Kings. We know this from inscriptions on his coffin, but medical analysis reveals much more. A fragment of aorta indicates clogging of Ken's main artery, which probably caused his death at a ripe old age somewhere in his late fifties. He had terrible teeth, apparently because so much sand got in your food in the desert that it would wear down the enamel - and he tested positive for malaria and a rather nasty Egyptian worm. But, contrary to the popular image of the pyramids being built by starving slaves, Ken was extremely well-fed. The exhibition teaches you all this and more, and thanks to some clever computer modelling, you can stare Ken in the face - if you've the guts for it. After all, aren't there fatal curses attendant upon violation of the Egyptian dead? Curator, Sue Giles, is cheerfully sanguine. "At the time there were organised gangs of tomb-robbers, and they probably spread the rumours of a curse themselves, to protect their patches." Ah well. It's a wrap, guys.

Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery, Queen's Rd, Bristol (0117 922 35*********************************************