The priest is a mummy, dead for some 2,500 years, and getting him under a scanner may shed new light on the religion, the art and the history of a time before the Persians conquered the land of King Tut, researchers say. His name was Iret-net Hor-irw, meaning "The Eye of Horus is Upon You." He was probably about 20 when he died in the major Egyptian cult city of Akhmim, where thousands of other mummies have been a major source of respectful research by archaeologists and anthropologists for decades.

Now his body is being readied for a new exhibition on the long-gone culture surrounding ancient medical care and death in Egypt. Intriguingly named "Very Postmortem: Mummies and Medicine," the exhibition is set to open in October at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

Stanford houses one of the most advanced whole-body CT scanners around. It is a kind of 3-D X-ray machine, a gleaming white device with a clutch of computers that on Thursday recorded up to 3,200 images at once - one microscopic cross-section at a time - as a swinging arm ran up and down the mummy's body, which was wrapped in thick linen and a resin of cedar and juniper sap.

The mummy was brought to the medical center this week in a climate-controlled truck from the Haggin Museum in Stockton, where it has been a major attraction ever since 1944, on loan from San Francisco's M.H. de Young Memorial Museum.

On Thursday afternoon, Dr. Rebecca Fahrig, who directs the medical center's research scanner, carefully positioned the mummy's body on a horizontal platform as the large instrument moved slowly, inch by inch, from his feet to his head. The images taken by the scanner will be studied and some will be put on display at the exhibition in October.

Among those standing behind a thick, lead-glass window for protection from the radiation were Jonathan Elias, director of the Akhmim Mummy Studies Consortium, a research center in Harrisburg, Pa., and Rénee Dreyfus, curator of ancient art and interpretation at the Legion of Honor.

"He's very well preserved," said Dreyfus. "He seems much more intact than many other mummies. It's just amazing how much he will be able to tell us about his time and the cult of the dead that was so important in ancient Egypt."

Elias, who has studied the X-rays of 19 mummies, said Stanford's high-tech scanner is bound to reveal much about the body, its ceremonial ornaments, the rituals surroundings his death and perhaps what caused his death.

"He's in relatively good shape, and his teeth look great, too. That will fascinate the specialists in paleopathology," he said.

Many amulets adorned the mummified bodies of ancient Egyptians, and their grouping and composition can tell much about their status, Elias said. "Not all mummies were created equal," he said.

This mummy has an intriguing scarab on his forehead that appears to be made of a fused, glass-like ceramic called frit - a sort of faience. Perhaps its composition will become clear from the scans, he said.

Typical of the ancient Egyptians, the scarab, an image of the dung beetle that encases its eggs in animal dung, is a symbol of resurrection, "of life returning after death - very powerful magic," Elias said.

The mummy was discovered lying on its back, and its head was elevated by a wooden block, a symbol of awakening - "and that, too, is a metaphor for resurrection," Elias said.

E-mail David Perlman at dperlman@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle