Wiscasset: There
once was an Egyptian mummy on display at the Nonesuch Antique Store.
Antique dealer Terry Lewis purchased the
3000-year-old mummy from a small museum in New Hampshire that was going
out of business. Supposedly the mummy was an Egyptian princess. When the
press publicized Lewis's purchase, the Egyptian government heard about the
mummy and (believing that it was royal) asked for it back. Lewis requested
$20,000; the Egyptian government refused.
Then experts from the Museum of Fine Arts
in Boston were called in to examine the mummy: was it an Egyptian
princess? They discovered that the mummy definitely was not a princess.
How did they make this determination? "The
mummified penis was still attached to the body," one expert explained,
according to a Third Age Media report. "I don't know how the penis
was overlooked for so long, but probably no one was looking for
it."
Sometime
in the late 1990s Lewis sold the mummy to the Niagara Falls Museum
in Toronto. In 1999, the Niagara Falls Museum sold its collection of nine
mummies to the Michael C. Carlos Museum
(part of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia). The Wiscasset mummy was
apparently one of the mummies sold to the museum. Also among the nine
mummies was Rameses I.
When Terry Lewis died in 2006,
the entire collection of antiques from his store was sold.
