The mummy is owned by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. He is thought to be Iret-net Hor-irw, a minor priest in the Egyptian city of Akhmim who died at a young age of unknown causes. He, and the data collected from Thursday's scan, will be the centerpiece of a new exhibition opening Oct. 31 at the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco.

The papyri were donated to Stanford in the 1920s by an alumnus who bought them from an antiquities dealer in London. They've been overlooked by generations of faculty who haven't focused on papyrology, said Joe Manning, an associate professor of classics. About 70 texts in Stanford's collection of several hundred papyri were taken from storage and brought to the university's conservation lab in April.

Stanford has acquired the library of one of the foremost Egyptologists of the 20th century. The collection of Wolja Erichsen (1890-1966), now at Stanford's Green Library, documents more than 1,500 years of Egyptian history, ranging from about 650 B.C. to about A.D. 1000. It includes Egypt's important transition from paganism to Christianity.