The hieroglyphic inscription on the coffin identifies the deceased as a woman named Meruah, while DNA analysis suggests the mummified individual is a man who lived centuries before the coffin was made.a But the mummy in question harbors an even more intriguing mystery.
Recent CT scans of a mummy in the Nicholson Collection of the Chau Chak Wing Museum, at the University of Sydney, revealed a restoration performed on the body already in antiquity. Researchers discovered that the corpse is fully sheathed in a mud shell or carapace, a treatment not known or previously documented with any Egyptian mummy. Hidden between layers of linen used to wrap the body, the carapace is up to an inch thick and consists of three layers: a thin base layer of mud or clay, a white calcite-based pigment, and a red-painted surface of mixed composition.
The muddy substance was a applied to mitigate postmortem damage to the body that likely occurred within one or two generations after the initial burial, possibly during a tomb robbery. The restorative treatment was meant to enable the deceased’s continued existence in the afterlife. It also was possibly used as an alternative to resin carapaces, which were much pricier and are well documented with the 19th- and 20th-Dynasty mummies of royals and nobility.
Acquired by Sir Charles Nicholson during his trip to Egypt in 1856–1857, the body was donated to the University of Sydney by Nicholson in 1860 as a set—with the coffin and mummy board (a slightly curved cover placed directly over the mummy). Like most artifacts brought out of Egypt in the 19th and early 20th centuries, circumstances of the find are lost, as are the details of the purchase, but apparently the items originated in Western Thebes. While the radiocarbon analysis of the wrappings dates the original mummification treatment to the 12th century B.C.E., the coffin was apparently made c. 1000 B.C.E. The antiquities dealers must have matched the body with a random coffin to sell both as a set, for a higher price. Nicholson’s mismatched mummy once again warns us of one of the many perils of purchasing unprovenanced antiquities—that things are not always what they seem.
The hieroglyphic inscription on the coffin identifies the deceased as a woman named Meruah, while DNA analysis suggests the mummified individual is a man who lived centuries before the coffin was made.a But the mummy in question harbors an even more intriguing mystery. Recent CT scans of a mummy in the Nicholson Collection of the Chau Chak Wing Museum, at the University of Sydney, revealed a restoration performed on the body already in antiquity. Researchers discovered that the corpse is fully sheathed in a mud shell or carapace, a treatment not known or previously documented with any Egyptian mummy. […]
You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.
