Unraveling the mystery: How ancient Egyptian mummies made their way to Tulane

Nearly 3,000 years ago, two Egyptians were shrouded in linen, encased in hand-painted sarcophagi and laid to rest along the banks of the Nile. Today, they sleep soundly alongside a very different river: the Mississippi.  

How two mummified ancient Egyptians ended up at Tulane University — and what has happened to them since — is a story as long and winding as the rivers themselves, one entwined with the university’s history.

“New Orleans is a multicultural city,” said John Verano, professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology within the School of Liberal Arts who became the mummies’ unofficial “custodian” during his time at Tulane. “Maybe some other places would be different, but we always had a strong local interest in the mummies.”

The Egyptians in question first arrived at the University of Louisiana, as Tulane was then known, in the 1850s by way of George Gliddon, a former American vice consul in Cairo. Gliddon had taken up a new profession in show business, which capitalized on the widespread popular appeal of ancient Egypt in the 19th century. Gliddon traveled across the United States showcasing Egyptian artifacts, and in 1849, he shipped the mummies to the U.S., eventually showing them in New Orleans.

Here, he and a group of physicians attempted to study the mummies, one male and one female, before donating them, along with other Egyptian paraphernalia, to Tulane. Treated as medical artifacts, the mummies first stayed in the medical school’s anatomical museum before moving to the former Tulane Museum of Natural History in Gibson Hall.  

In 1927, the mummies moved to the Middle American Research Institute; then they returned to Gibson Hall. But in the 1950s, a lack of storage space prompted a surprising relocation:

Though meticulously packed in exhibit cases and wooden crates, the mummies were placed in a room under the bleachers in Tulane Stadium.

Tulane University Libraries curator Bill Cullison rescued the mummies shortly before the stadium was demolished, sending them to the downtown campus for storage before they returned to Howard-Tilton Memorial Library in 1982. In the 1990s, they moved to their current resting place in Dinwiddie Hall.

There, they lay in wait until 1997, when Guido Lombardi, then a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology, heard of the mummies and decided to undertake a formal examination of them.

“The reason we X-rayed and CT scanned them was that we wanted to see what form of mummification they had received,” said Verano, who served as Lombardi’s faculty adviser. “It helped underline the fact that these were wealthy or politically important people … as a result, the preservation is quite good.”

The research done at Tulane University Medical Center also revealed clues as to their ages and how they had died. The male mummy seemed to be in his late 50s when he died, apparently suffering from chronic periodontal disease and degenerative disease of the joints. The female mummy was a teenager who died at around 15 years of age. Dislocated joints point to complications during childbirth as a possible cause of death.

In 2012, Verano worked with Egyptologist Melinda Nelson-Hurst to put together a comprehensive reconstruction of the mummies’ histories, using 19th-century sources, skeletal analysis and accompanying artifacts to fill in gaps.  

Gliddon’s newspaper advertisements, scraps of papyrus that accompanied the mummies and the inscriptions on the male’s coffin confirmed his name was Djed-Thoth-iu-ef-ankh, a man who died around 860 B.C. The artifacts associated with his funerary preparation were from different time periods, indicating that he was entombed during a period of transition in Egyptian burial practice, in which older objects and conventions remained in use alongside newer objects.

Because the mummies now remain at the university, they can be more carefully preserved and studied. They have also provided the foundation for a master’s thesis, two honors theses and multiple publications and papers presented at international scientific meetings.

Examinations of everything from the paintings on their coffins and their linen wrappings to their skeletal structures and DNA not only offer insight into how people lived and the beliefs they held in the past; they also enhance our understanding of modern diseases.

Verano pointed to instances in which examinations of other mummies revealed parasites, bone diseases and vascular conditions that existed in ancient times and, sometimes, still exist today.

“There are better DNA techniques, like next-generation sequencing, so that they can actually do family trees of different strains of bacteria like tuberculosis to reconstruct the history and spread of particular pathogens,” Verano said.

More than 150 years after their arrival in the U.S., the mummies are carefully stored in Dinwiddie Hall, catalogued and safely maintained for historical appreciation and future learning opportunities.

“What I've found in my experience is that once a mummy is well preserved, they're pretty stable,” Verano said. “So, they seem to be resting peacefully.”