Burlington: The Fleming
Museum
on the campus of the University of Vermont displays a 2600-year-old
Egyptian mummy that is one of the museum's most popular
exhibits. According to a newspaper account, "In the early 1900s,
UVM professor George Henry Perkins traveled to Cairo's Royal Museum of
Egypt and came home with the painted coffin and its contents. He paid
just thirty-five dollars, part of a spending spree that formed
much of the University's ancient Egyptian collection." Little is
known about her; researchers haven't been able to determine her cause
of death or even her name. The newspaper account continues, "Her
coffin reveals very few clues. Experts in hieroglyphics told the
Fleming much of the painting is nonsense: just decorations, so she has
no name. The fact she was buried in sycamore wood suggests she was
likely middle class, and x-rays indicate she was probably a teenager
when she died. Those x-rays also show the embalmers broke her bones
wrapping her up, or perhaps, when they removed her internal
organs."
