Wednesday, February 15, 2006

The Mystery of Unkown Man E

Bob Brier uses all the available data to speculate on the identity of a mummy found in 1886 in the Deir el Bahri Cache: "On a day at the end of June 1886, Gaston Maspero, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, was unwrapping the mummies of kings and queens found in a cache at Deir el-Bahri, near the Valley of the Kings. Inside a plain, undecorated coffin that offered no clues to the deceased's identity, Maspero found something that shocked him. There, wrapped in a sheepskin--a ritually unclean object for ancient Egyptians--was a young man, hands and feet bound, who seemed to be screaming. There was no incision on the left abdomen, through which the embalmers normally removed the internal organs; the man had not been afforded the traditional mummification. Maspero was convinced there had been foul play."
See the rest of this abstract, complete with photographs, for the possible identification of this unusual individual. The full text is available in the print copy of Archaeology Magazine March/April 2006 edition.

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