'Lady Hor' mummy not a lady

Brooklyn Museum officials said CT scans performed on the facility's mummies by doctors at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., discovered a scrotum and penis on a 2,000-year-old mummy that was thought to be Lady Hor when it was first discovered in 1937, the New York Daily News reported Wednesday.

"It's definitely a man," said Edward Bleiberg, the museum's curator of Egyptian art. "Physiologically, it's really clear."

Bleiberg said the mummy was thought to be female for so long because the coffin it was found in did not include the beard usually used to identify a male mummy.

"Because the coffin was beardless, we've assumed since 1937 that she was a woman. I never even thought twice about it," he said. "This is actually going to revise some of our ideas about how you can tell if a mummy is male or female."

Copyright 2009 by United Press International.