Account of the examination of the mummy of Pet-maut-ioh-mes : brought from Egypt by the late John Gosset, Esq. and now deposited in the museum in the island of Jersey / communicated to the Society of Antiquaries by T.J. Pettigrew.

  • Pettigrew, Thomas Joseph, 1791-1865.
Date:
1838
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Account of the examination of the mummy of Pet-maut-ioh-mes : brought from Egypt by the late John Gosset, Esq. and now deposited in the museum in the island of Jersey / communicated to the Society of Antiquaries by T.J. Pettigrew. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    character of judge, the unity of the deity, and to this unity, or original essence, man returned after death, but man collectively, and no distinction of sex was maintained after the soul had quitted its material envelope. All this seems to confirm the statement given by Herodotus, who, it must be recollected, in his account of the persons employed in embalming, says, “Elod di in aorta roorta Karearai, Ka) rkyyrpj e%oo<ri raorrjv. ooroi e7reav <r§iKoy.i(rQri veKpos, (ieiKvoatrt roltri Kofiratri Trapa^elyp-ara veKpwv %6\iva ty\ ypa(pfj yey-i^^yeva. Ka) ry\v jaev <T7rouSajoTarv]v aorktov <f>a(r) eivai, too ook otriov 7roieoy.ai to oovopia iir'i roioorto irpr^y^an ovo[j.dgeiv”—u There are certain individuals appointed for the purpose (i. e. embalming), and wJ10 profess that art; these persons, when any body is brought to them, show the bearers some wooden models of corpses, painted to represent the originals ; the most perfect they assert to be the representation of him whose name I take it to be impious to mention (i. e. Osiris) in this matter.” Now the cases of the Jersey Mummy are in the representation of Osiris, and the beard is, I conceive, thus accounted for, and the Mummy belonging to them may fairly be considered as having been prepared in the very best mode of embalment. A greater difficulty, however, presents itself in the erasure of the hieroglyphics upon the cases ; thus preventing all means of identifying the body as appertaining to the individual for whom the cases were made. Be- fore I describe the Mummy, I shall say a few words upon the cases. They are of sycamore wood ; and, from the style of painting with which they are orna- mented, may fairly be considered as belonging to the time of the sovereign Amunoph III. depicted within them. Amunoph III. was the son ofThoth- mes IV. and lived two hundred years before the Trojan war. He reigned 1430 B.C. which is twenty-one years after the death of Moses, and sixty-one years posterior to the Exodus of the Israelites; so that the antiquity of the cases is very great. Interiorly and exteriorly they abound with figures of the Egyptian deities: to describe these would demand an entire essay on the Egyptian Mythology ; they bear relation chiefly to the deceased, figured as Osiris, and the deities through whose intervention or intercession her admission into the mansions of the blessed was hoped to be obtained. Within the inner case or coffin was a lid placed immediately over the body of the Mummy, re- presenting a female without any beard or Osirian character, and having a line