The Widow, The Priest, and The Mummy

In 1891, P.T. Barnum died.

Nancy Fish Barnum was the famous showman's second wife and 40 years his junior. His death in 1891 left her a wealthy widow at age 41.

She set out to see the world.

Among her travels, she toured Egypt in 1894. She came away from the visit with a suitor - an Ottoman diplomat whom she would marry in 1895 - and a singular souvenir.

The American Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, gifted Nancy with a genuine Egyptian mummy in an ancient, ornately decorated coffin.

Why would they present a gift like that?

The gift was not for her personally. Instead, it was for an organization that Nancy and her late husband had supported. When she got back home, she presented the mummy and coffin to the Bridgeport Scientific Society.

The Scientific Society was housed in the newly-built Barnum Institute of Science and History. This was P.T. Barnum's legacy gift to his beloved Bridgeport, a project he approved just weeks before his death. Now over a century old, this elaborate National Historic Landmark still stands today, and is the home of the Barnum Museum.

Human remains are a strange “souvenir.” But the fascination with ancient Egyptian culture was so great in the 1800s that some Europeans and Americans wanted to buy mummies as if they were souvenirs of the past, rather than thinking of them as real people who had lived thousands of years ago.

The craze was called Egyptomania.

P.T. Barnum was one of many showmen in the USA who capitalized on this interest. He exhibited Egyptian mummies throughout the 1800s, including up to 6 at a time in his American Museum in New York City. Later on, he displayed mummies in his famous circus Barnum & Bailey's "Greatest Show on Earth," which featured a traveling museum.

You won’t see mummies at a circus today, but Egyptomania has never really gone away. People continue to be fascinated by the culture of ancient Egypt. New discoveries spark people’s curiosity and interest. In 1922 when King Tutankhamen’s tomb was found, the discovery started a fad in women’s fashions—short hairstyles and beaded “flapper” dresses. These imitated Egyptian styles depicted on tombs and artifacts. Subsequent years brought movies, comedy sketches, and action heroes. Egypt's economy relies heavily on tourism to this day. All of this tells us the same thing: people's imaginations are still captured by this sophisticated culture dating back thousands of years.

It's important to remember that the mummy at the Barnum Museum today was not one of those P.T. Barnum exhibited. It arrived in Bridgeport several years after his death, where it was studied by the Bridgeport Scientific Society.

As Egyptomania raged, mummy "unwindings" became a popular event. In an era when medical surgeries and autopsies were open for viewing, the public flocked to catch a glimpse of a human being from Ancient Egypt. Most people were hoping to find beautiful amulets and jewelry tucked within the linen wrappings, but some scientists wanted to study the bodies themselves.

Before the invention of modern medical imaging, like X-Rays and CT scans, this was the only way to find out what secrets a body might tell.

On Tuesday, August 14th of 1894, a dozen members of the Bridgeport Scientific Society and the Bridgeport Medical Society removed the mummified body from the coffin presented by Nancy Fish Barnum. A 16-inch (40.6 cm) long rectangular net made of blue-green beads (called faience) was laid over the wrapped body.

Another interesting find was a body-length piece of linen covered with painted imagery, perhaps depicting the life of the deceased. This fabric was set aside for the unwrapping, and subsequently vanished from the Museum's collection.

In the August heat, these scientists studied the body and the intricate process of mummification, unwrapping hundreds of yards of linen strips shaped like wide ribbons. As they unwound the linen strips, these men looked for amulets. Amulets and ushabiti are small items intended to accompany the person on their journey to their next life. Small figurines representing important Egyptian gods, such as Osiris, would be essential belongings for the deceased person.

Because all moisture had been removed from this body, it almost looked like a skeleton. The skin was coated with a thick resin, at some points completely fused with the last layer of linen. The skull, which was partly filled with resin, had become separated from the body at the neck due to its weight.

At the conclusion of their study, the men announced that the body belonged to a man, a priest of the great temple of Luxor, who was of advanced age and stood about 5’ 1 ½” tall. Gleanings from the coffin’s hieroglyphs revealed his occupation as a priest. For the next 100 years, the priest’s mummy and coffin were exhibited in Bridgeport, Connecticut, at the Barnum Museum. The only information we have about the unwrapping is from a newspaper article published the next day.

Hieroglyphs are a unique language, one of very few revived from total disuse.

In the 1800s, the renewed ability to read hieroglyphs increased scholarship of Ancient Egypt in tandem with the surging popularity of Egyptomania.

But it wasn't until 1967 that an Egyptology student from Yale provided our first recorded translation of the coffin, and a name for its owner:

This mummy was known as Pa-Ib until 2017 when a French scholar, Dr. Marion Claude, offered a more thorough interpretation of the hieroglyphs with a translation that featured a different name:

As time passes, knowledge changes. Readers of hieroglyphs today find different meanings than they did 100 or 50 years ago.

Though pieces of Ancient Egyptian culture are scattered around the world, over time Egyptologists see and study more objects — in this case, coffins — and can recognize similarities and differences among them. They build upon the work of scholars before them to ask new questions. This happens in every field of history. By questioning both ourselves and the objects of our scrutiny, new meanings can become clear.

In this case, contemporary scholars noticed what is likely a scribe's error in the hieroglyphs. Correcting the typo and figuring out the third syllable led to the new name: Pa-ba-sa. In addition, we learned the names of the father and grandfather. Besides this new name, we now had a home and even an occupation: Priest of Min living in the city of Akhmîm.

More recently, Egyptologist Dr. Kea Johnston suggested Pa-en-bes as an alternate pronunciation of the name. Pa-en-bes is the version the Barnum Museum is now using. Dr. Johnston describes Pa-en-bes as a Stolist Priest, someone tasked with tending to the statues of the gods in the temple of Min.

In 2006, two radiologists from Quinnipiac University examined the mummified remains using a new tool. Professors Gerald Conlogue and Ronald Beckett are experts at studying mummies through Computed Tomography (CT) scanning. This imaging tool was developed for medical purposes, but it also allows us to take a 3-D look inside mummified bodies without harming them.

For the first time in over a century, scientists were again scrutinizing the human body presented to the Barnum Institute. Scientific knowledge and methods had changed a lot in the interim.

These first scans were intriguing. Additional, higher-resolution imaging was performed at Quinnipiac in 2010, and it confirmed what earlier scans had only hinted at: these were the remains of a woman, not a man. Moreover, she was relatively young, about 30 years old or so, definitely not the older male priest Pa-en-bes.

This ancient person had more stories to tell. How long ago did she live? Was she alive in the same time period as Pa-en-bes? The mummy experts studied the way in which she had been mummified. The location of the incision for removing the person’s organs, and the presence of wrapped organ packets placed inside the body, offer clues to the time period. They think it is very likely that she lived about 4000 years ago. The coffin, on the other hand, was about 2500 years old.

Pa-en-bes and the unknown woman lived in very different time periods: about 1500 years apart. An equivalent comparison would be comparing yourself, using a computer in the present, to someone who lived during the collapse of the Roman Empire. The difference is huge!

Once it became certain that the human remains were a woman’s, not the male priest identified by the coffin, the question of changing the name from “Pa-Ib” or “Pa-en-bes” to a female name came up.

But, we did not know who she was. Unlike Pa-en-bes, we had no clues about her name.

For some time the Museum felt it would not be right to simply give her a name without having better knowledge of what would be appropriate for her culture and time period. We didn’t want to simply choose a name among the popular ones we are familiar with! It was better, at the time, not to name her.

The issue of “naming” versus “not naming” surfaced again in 2019 when we had the opportunity to have a forensic sculptor recreate her appearance. After all, this was part of an effort to return “personhood” to this unknown young woman and gain a better understanding of what her life might have been like. It is hard to talk about a person without using a name, and we wanted everyone today to understand that she was a real person who had led a real life—though it was a very long time ago.

We discussed this question with one of our experts, Dr. Sahar Saleem of Cairo University. Her knowledge about women’s lives in ancient Egypt provided the help we needed. She suggested several names that would have been in use 4000 years ago in Egypt, at the time our young woman was alive. She also told us the meaning of each name. In doing so, she advised against choosing a name that has in more recent times acquired a negative or bad meaning, usually in another language. We agreed that was wise. We also steered away from the names of royal persons, since that might lead to confusion. The Museum hoped to find a name that visitors could easily pronounce and remember. The perfect choice became clear:

The name means “true favorite” and rhymes with "Skippy." "True Favorite" reflects the sentiments of the staff and the thousands of visitors who have seen this young woman in her afterlife at the Barnum Museum. We now refer to the mummified remains as "Ipy’s mummy." This phrase respects the cultural beliefs and practices of her time and place, and the reason her remains were mummified, so that she could successfully go on to an afterlife.

And there was more to learn. Experts from other fields were contacted, especially in the field of dental health. Could someone help us understand the images of this young woman’s teeth?

As you can see, questions often lead to more questions. We now have more knowledge, yet finding complete answers is tricky and sometimes impossible--at least at this point in the realm of science!

Women in Ancient Egypt enjoyed more rights than many present-day counterparts. Family inheritance was matrilineal – passing from mother to daughter, rather than father to son. Women not only inherited assets, they got to make the ultimate decision on who inherited what in their families.

This economic power was supported by lots of professional options. Unmarried women could run a business or start their own. A woman could also work as an artist, teacher, scribe, or a doctor. By contrast, the United States granted its first medical license to a woman in 1849.  

Marital traditions weren’t what we’re used to today - many royal couples were siblings, and the wealthy practiced polygamy, that is, having more than one spouse. But women had the right to refuse a marriage proposal or seek a divorce. Because Egyptian laws favored matrilineal property, women were financially empowered if a marriage came to divorce – Ancient Egypt even had child support laws to keep absent husbands accountable.

While childbirth was dangerous in a time before germ theory, most Egyptians bathed regularly in the Nile. They used soaps and perfumes, brushed their teeth, and invented a tampon made of papyrus. We also know that Egyptian women – and men - took fashion seriously. Their make-up, hairdos, jewelry, and clothes were exquisite, carefully chosen for comfort and beauty. Ipy probably shaved her head and wore a stylish wig - if she could afford to.

It's likely that Ipy was a woman of at least moderate wealth. Statistically, most Ancient Egyptians were peasants who farmed the Nile floodplain. But mummification was an expensive procedure, available only to those who could afford it. For this reason, and because her bones do not show evidence of hard physical work, we suspect Ipy and her family had both status and riches.

It's possible that more information about Ipy's life was recorded on the body-length piece of painted linen set aside during the 1894 unwrapping. However, no other mention of that linen was made after it was first noticed. It may have disintegrated or been discarded by someone who didn't appreciate its value. With its loss, our best chance of knowing Ipy's real name is also gone.

Ipy’s mummy first arrived in Bridgeport over a century ago. Since then, museumgoers and experts alike have looked at her through different eyes, asked different questions, and raised new ideas.

In 2019, high-resolution CT scans of the mummified woman were used to print a 3-D replica of her skull. Using that plastic print as a base, a forensic artist used clay to recreate the appearance of "Ipy" as she might have appeared when she was alive. This process combines both scientific knowledge about the layers of bone, muscle, fat, and cartilage, and the sculptor's expertise in interpreting data to create accurate facial features.

For generations, the Barnum Museum displayed what was assumed to be Pa-en-bes's mummy beneath a plexiglass case. Generations of visitors remember this as the highlight of their visit to the Museum. Yet it wasn’t until modern medical imaging methods – such as CT Scans and Endoscopy – were invented that new views were possible.

In just a few years, our understanding of Ipy’s mummy was revolutionized. And we will continue to learn about her and what her life may have been like as a woman in Ancient Egypt. Our next steps involve carbon dating Ipy: experts suspect that she is not only from a different part of Egypt, but from a different age entirely. It is possible that she lived and died centuries – or even millennia – before Pa-en-bes. In the future, we hope to do carbon dating using a piece of the linen wrapping from Ipy's mummy. This could confirm - or challenge - what our experts suspect: that Ipy lived 4000 years ago, not 2500 years ago when the coffin for Pa-en-bes was made. Perhaps we will also be able to learn, in the future, whether Ipy was born in a different part of Egypt, not near Akhmîm where Pa-en-bes was from.

On our journey of discovery we have also come to better appreciate the humanity of Ipy. P.T. Barnum was no stranger to the crowd-pleasing thrill that came from viewing mummified people. But today we strive to be more sensitive. We ask different questions. We want to learn about this individual and the culture and time period they lived in. And with the many new technologies available to share what we learn, perhaps we should think differently about displaying a person's body in a museum.

The historic Barnum Museum is currently being restored, and we look forward to welcoming guests when the museum re-opens. When it does, Ipy's story will be present, but her mummy will not be displayed in the same way it was for over a century. Do you think Ipy's mummy should be on public view? Let us know your thoughts by clicking the contact button below!

Do you have a question or idea about this exhibit? We would love to hear it: