A brief look at a Vermont mummy

WCAX.com

The Fleming is home to an Egyptian mummy that is at least 2600 years old. She's one of the museum's most popular attractions. . . .

In the early 1900s, UVM professor George Henry Perkins traveled to Cairo's Royal Museum of Egypt and came home with the painted coffin and its contents. He paid just thirty-five dollars, part of a spending spree that formed much of the University's ancient Egyptian collection.

But still, little is known of this woman, including how she died. Fearon says of the researchers UVM consulted, "They guessed it was a disease like diphtheria or smallpox. They killed a lot of people in ancient Egypt."

Her coffin reveals very few clues. Experts in hieroglyphics told the Fleming much of the painting is nonsense: just decorations, so she has no name. The fact she was buried in sycamore wood suggests she was likely middle class, and x-rays indicate she was probably a teenager when she died.

Those x-rays also show the embalmers broke her bones wrapping her up, or perhaps, when they removed her internal organs.