Breast Cancer Awareness: Siberian Mummy

October is Breast Cancer Awareness month in the UK. I've blogged about it before, and I wanted to do a follow-up post about ancient women who died of breast cancer. The problem is that with many of them we can't be sure they died of breast cancer, we can only assume.

With this woman, the famous Siberian Princess, we can be sure.


She has long been famous for her tattoos, but new tests show that she died of cancer around the age of 25 ... and that she had been using cannabis, probably like many cancer sufferers for medicinal purposes.

Iconic 2,500 year old Siberian princess 'died from breast cancer', reveals MRI scan:

Her use of drugs to cope with the symptoms of her illnesses evidently gave her 'an altered state of mind', leading her kinsmen to the belief that she could communicate with the spirits, the experts believe.
The MRI, conducted in Novosibirsk by eminent academics Andrey Letyagin and Andrey Savelov, showed  that the 'princess' suffered from osteomyelitis, an infection of the bone or bone marrow, from childhood or adolescence.

There have been numerous claims made that cancer is a 'modern' disease, which the ancients did not suffer from, but new studies are showing that although it was rarer - probably as a result of lifestyle factors such as dying much younger - it was around. Other studies have confirmed cancer in Egyptian mummies.

'When she was a little over 20 years old, she became ill with another serious disease - breast cancer.  It painfully destroyed her' over perhaps five years, said a summary of the medical findings in 'Science First Hand' journal by archeologist Professor Natalia Polosmak, who first found these remarkable human remains in 1993.
'During the imaging of mammary glands, we paid attention to their asymmetric structure and the varying asymmetry of the MR signal,' stated Dr Letyagin in his analysis. 'We are dealing with a primary tumour in the right breast and  right axial lymph nodes with metastases.'
'The three first thoracic vertebrae showed a statistically significant decrease in MR signal and distortion of the contours, which may indicate the metastatic cancer process.'
He concluded: 'I am quite sure of the diagnosis - she had cancer. She was extremely emaciated. Given her rather high rank in society and the information scientists obtained studying mummies of elite Pazyryks, I do not have any other explanation of her state. Only cancer could have such an impact.

The press article is fascinating and worth reading in full, and I plan to read the journal article too.


Obviously women should be careful and check every month not just in October.

The Edwin Papyrus now in NY is one of the first ancient descriptions of breast cancer, although the surgical treatise describes it rather than 'naming' it.

For a discussion and identification we have Hippocrates.

The term cancer comes from carcinos - that's Greek for the tumour looking like a crab.