Mystery of the Mummy

The mummy was brought to San Francisco in 1895 as part of an Egyptian exhibit for the California Mid-Winter Exposition. At the close of the exhibition, the mummy was sold to a private collector who then loaned it to the Golden Gate Park Museum. It remained there until 1910, when Kalamazoo businessman Donald O. Boudeman purchased the mummy from the owner. Boudeman brought it back to Kalamazoo and kept it in his home on South Street until he donated it to the Kalamazoo Museum in 1928. It instantly became a featured exhibit, and when the Museum moved to a new building in 1959, a reconstructed Egyptian tomb was built to house the mummy and her coffin. The mummy moved once again to its present home in 1996 and is on permanent display in the Mystery of the Mummy exhibit.

The first step in our process of finding out more about the mummy was to have a piece of her linen wrappings tested using Carbon-14 dating technology.The test revealed that the Museum’s mummy died sometime between 360 and 290 B.C.E. In other words, the mummy is approximately 2380 to 2310 years old. Based on those dates, this mummy lived during the Ptolemaic period in Egypt – a period that had considerable Greek influence on its arts and design.

To read more, visit: 

https://kalamazoomuseum.org/images/museon/2011-Muse_Fall2011-csi.pdf