 "Photo: Jon Tan/Targum Staff Photographer")
Although now at home in the Rutgers Geology Hall, the female mummy that resides on the Old Queens campus building spent many years in a far more undignified place: one of the closets of the New Brunswick Theological Seminary.
That's right, mummy.
Few students here are aware of the opportunity to catch a rare glimpse into the burial ceremony of a foreign and strange culture.
Of course, other than its resting place, there is very little known about the mysterious mummy.
"We know it came from Northern Egypt, but that's about it," said William Selden, the collections manager of the Geology Hall.
Other than that and the fact it dates to about 320 or 330 B.C., Rutgers experts are unaware of exactly where the mummy originated from, or to what family the woman belonged.
A missionary who had traveled to Egypt brought the mummy to New Jersey in the early 1700s, back when Rutgers was still a school of the Dutch Reformed Church, Selden said. When Rutgers and the church went their separate ways in 1766, the seminary kept the mummy.
According to Ray Murray, the geology chair at the time of the transfer, the mummy was stored in a closet located in the New Brunswick Theological Seminary.
In 1968, Murray realized that a historical artifact dating back to the Ptolemaic era did in fact deserve better than sharing space with the vacuum cleaner, and he asked if the mummy could be displayed in the Geology Museum.
Today, the hall still showcases the mummy, on loan from the seminary, as one of its premiere attractions. The Geology Hall is located in the Old Queens campus off of Somerset Street.
The mummy is classified as a female, with the best speculation from experts placing her death age around 17 years, according to Selden.
There is gold on the coffin lid, suggesting at least somewhat of a higher class status, but Selden described the mummy as a "generic woman's coffin." The name on the tomb, according to Murray, was "Isit Ha."
The face painted on the coffin is a gilt image of the woman's face and not her likeness. Images on the lid include her own burial ceremony, jewelry she wore and an image of the winged goddess Nut.
Four jar-shaped pieces of stones that were stored with the mummy are also showcased. They look like canopic jars that would be used to store organs in, but, according to Selden, are just stones.
It took about 70 days to prepare a mummy for a funeral. The Egyptians would drain the blood and gut the body of its organs.
Natron, a salt-like substance, was used for mummy purification and preservation would then be introduced to further preserve the tissue.
Finally, the body was wrapped in large amounts of linen, some of which contained spells to help the deceased in their passage to the afterlife.
Be the first to comment on this article!