Interactive Meresamun

On January 25, 1920, Oriental Institute founder James Henry Breasted, traveling Egypt in search of antiquities and excavation sites, wrote a letter to his wife, Frances, at home in Hyde Park. “Just as I was leaving Luxor,” he told her, “old Mohammed Mohasseb sent his son to see me and tell me he had something to show me. After many precautions and much secrecy, the son took me into the court of a house where lay a beautifully colored white and red mummification coffin, as fresh and bright as the day it left the painter’s studio.”

Inside was the mummy of Meresamun (view the interactive feature), a woman who lived nearly 3,000 years ago in the ancient city of Thebes, where Luxor stands now. For 330 Egyptian pounds (nearly $17,000 in today’s dollars), Breasted bought the coffin and another artifact and hauled them back to Chicago, where they became part of the Oriental Institute’s nascent collection. The coffin was never unsealed, because doing so would destroy it, but OI scholars gleaned what they could from its exterior. The lavish decoration—painted flower garlands, winged serpents, wedjat eyes, suns, falcons, jackals, gods wrapped as mummies—located the coffin in time and place, and a ribbon of hieroglyphics provided Meresamun’s name and occupation: Singer in the Interior of the Temple of Amun. “Her job,” says Egyptologist Emily Teeter, PhD’90, “was to make music for the god.” Meresamun stood near the top of an elaborate bureaucracy of singers, dancers, and priestesses in Thebes’s sprawling Karnak Temple. She was one of only a few allowed into the deep sanctuary where Amun, in the form of a statue, ate, slept, and received offerings from Karnak’s priests.