The Mysterious Case of the Body-Swapping Pregnant Mummy
In 2015 scientists in Poland were in the midst of a large comprehensive study of the National Museum in Warsaw’s mummy collection when they ran across something strange. An Egyptian mummy that, for decades, had been thought to be the remains of an ancient male priest had something unusual in its pelvis area.
The anthropologist was examining the pelvic area of the mummy to confirm the sex of the remains when he noticed an “anomaly”: a tiny foot. This was not the body of a male religious leader it was that of a woman. The surprising discovery is the first time that archaeologists have discovered the remains of a mummified pregnant woman.
The mummy first arrived in at the University of Warsaw in 1826. The donor supplied correspondence that indicated the mummy was discovered in the famous royal tombs at Thebes, but nineteenth century accounts of origins are notoriously unreliable. Vendors of antiquities often connected their discoveries to celebrity sites in order to inflate their value for sale. For nearly two centuries afterwards inscriptions on the sarcophagus led scientists to believe that the mummy was a male priest named Hor-Djehuti. It seems likely that the woman had been placed in the wrong coffin by 19th century antiquities dealers. Archaeologist Dr. Wojciech Ejsmond, of the Polish Academy of Sciences and director of the Warsaw Mummy Project, said that the inaccurate matching of mummies and coffins happens in about ten percent of cases.