The St. Petersburg Museum of History is a strange place. An exhibit on baseball history featuring signed baseballs from past athletes and celebrities is situated alongside an exhibit on the histories of wars involving the US, while in the next room there is an exhibit on early feminists in St. Petersburg, and elsewhere an exhibit on early airplanes. Wedged between these disparate exhibits that have little to nothing to do with one another, is Our Lady of the Nile; the actual mummified remains of a 3,000 Egyptian woman and accompanying wooden sarcophagus.
As the exhibit explains up above, the remains of this woman were stolen out of Egypt and paraded around as part of some circus sideshow, aboard a boat on the Mississippi River. The boat came to be docked in St. Petersburg at some point in 1922, and was in need of repairs. When the captain was unable to pay his debts for the repairs, he gave this mummy and sarcophagus to the dockmaster, and after changing hands a few times someone donated it to the museum in 1925. It’s been in this random museum ever since. I wonder if anyone in Egypt even knows about this mummy. I am of the opinion that she should be returned to her homeland.
She has been partly unwrapped but still looking very good for her age. They found a heart scarab in her chest during an x-ray among some other amulets. What I find particularly sad is that her name is apparently not known. In the Egyptian religion, the name or Ren is part of the soul, and to speak the name of the dead is to make them live again. The last time anyone ever speaks your name is known as the second death. ‘Our Lady of the Nile’ is what they call her at the museum. Elsewhere in the small exhibit is a replica of a statue of the scorpion Goddess Serket from King Tutankhamun’s tomb, watching over her. Perhaps a name for her could be Meri-Serket, ‘Beloved of Serket’. Just an idea I suppose. It would be nice if she had been a Serket devotee in life but we have no way of knowing.
The wooden sarcophagus is the only other authentic ancient Egyptian artifact present at the museum, rather masculine-looking, and unfortunately without any writing on it to tell us who she was. The sarcophagus might have originally belonged to someone else for all anyone knows, in fact.
As stated, everything else present is a replica, but they were interesting to look at, at least. You can kind of tell they must have been like “okay we have this mummy, now we need some other ancient Egyptian stuff to go with it”, but it was easier said than done.
The throne is very famous. Not a bad replication of the real thing, not that I have ever had the opportunity to see the original. And the Anubis mask was nicely done as well. On the wall are some framed replica papyri.
First, an excerpt from the Book of the Dead, belonging to Hu-Nefer. One thing I find particularly interesting here is that Nephthys is standing in front of Her sister Isis, which is almost never the case.
One of these days I’ll learn to read those hieroglyphs and find out what’s going on in this picture. But somehow I felt like it was more obvious that it was a modern replica than the other papyrus. Looked a bit too new. I might have been fooled by the other one if it claimed to be genuine.
That’s more or less the whole exhibit. Feel free to drop by for a visit to St. Petersburg’s “oldest resident” if you’re ever in the area and pay her some respect, which I get the feeling is something she rarely gets enough of. I visited her once when I lived in St. Petersburg, but during my most recent trip back I made it a point to see her again knowing what I know now about ancient Egypt. I hope that she makes her way home someday. I wonder what she would think when she was alive if someone told her that in 3,000 years her body would be on display to be gawked at in some part of the world she never even heard of, in a country that wouldn’t exist for millennia. Still a kinder fate than being ground up and made into ink, or burned up to power a steam engine.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/1/4/1329507/-Our-Lady-of-the-Nile-Florida-s-Egyptian-Mummy
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