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This is a cemetery in Middlebury, Vermont,
where a little Egyptian Prince is buried.
His name was Amun-her-khepesh-ef
and supposedly he was a son of SenWosret III.
He was brought to America by Spanish sailors
and sold to Henry Sheldon, in 1886 , for his museum in Middlebury,
but was so badly damaged that he was stored in the attic.
Where he deteriorated to such an extent that in 1945,
George Mead, president of the Museum's board of trustees,
had the little mummy and his coffin cremated,
then buried the ashes in his family plot in the cemetery.
This is the tombstone of the little prince.
On it are an ankh and a little "chicken"
which was the closet the carver could come to a ba-bird.
The plain New England stone is in stark contrast
to the plethora of Egyptian Revival monuments
which surround it.
Unfortunately mummies have not always been treated well.
Right around the time of the Civil War
thousands of them were shipped to the United States
so that paper could be made from their wrappings.
There were four mills in Gardiner, and one in Westbrook,
Maine,
two in New York State (Broadalbin and Marcellus Falls)
and two in Connecticut (Windsor Locks and in Norwich)
--and no one knows for sure how many others--
which were known to have made mummy paper.
This has long been considered an urban legend,
but the Chelsea Manufacturing Company of Norwich
boasted in a broadside
that the material from which the paper was made was taken from
tombs at Thebes where it had been used in wrapping mummies.
To see an article I wrote on mummy paper
for the American Antiquarian Society's publication THE BOOK, please follow
the link to MUMMYPAPER.
The article is on page 4.
LIINK TO MUMMYPAPER
Padi's inner coffin is also in the Ether Dome
but is outer coffin is in the
George Walter Vicent Smith Art Museum
in Springfield, Mass.
(All the photos of Padi on this page were taken by my husband
David A. Rawson,
a professor of history at Worcester Polytechnic Institute
in Worcester, Massachusetts.)
I am in the process of writing a book
on the history of the Egyptian mummy
as artefact in the United States.
The mummies on this page are only a few of the ones
which I have met and studied.
For more information on my research
and the papers and presentations I have done on it,
please click the link to CREDITS.
LINK TO CREDITS
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