Student discovers writing on pieces of ancient Egyptian mummy case

Phys.org ^ | August 30, 2018 | Alex Shashkevich, Stanford University

[SunkenCiv]

When Ariela Algaze signed up for a spring 2018 course on museums, she didn't expect to get wrapped up in the mystery of an ancient Egyptian mummy case that Jane Stanford herself purchased more than 100 years ago... Algaze's research led her to discover information that was not known by university scholars - including inscriptions on the coffin and the name of the mummified woman inside it... Algaze learned that the artifact contained writing after sifting through hundreds of its fragments, which have been stored in three boxes, unstudied for decades. The mummy case, which Jane Stanford purchased in 1901, was once display at the Stanford Museum. But the 1906 earthquake shattered the coffin made up of fragile cartonnage, a type of ancient Egyptian material of either linen or papyrus covered in plaster, into hundreds of pieces. The fragments went largely unexamined until Algaze took them out and studied each piece as part of Christina Hodge's course, Museum Cultures: Material Representation in the Past and Present. As part of the class, Algaze and other students picked an object from Stanford's collections to research and present in an exhibit at the Stanford Archaeology Center... Algaze's research into the coffin advanced when she discovered two inscribed fragments. To translate the text, Algaze consulted with Egyptologists Foy Scalf at the University of Chicago and Barbara Richter at the University of California, Berkeley, and other experts on demotic, the ancient Egyptian written language. Algaze found that the name of the buried woman was Senchalanthos... Hodge, academic curator and collections manager of the Stanford University Archaeology Collections... said it's possible that the inscriptions were mentioned somewhere, but those records did not survive the 1906 earthquake.

[Drawsing]

Sorry, SunkenCiv.

I know I read this someplace, but it was apparently an unreliable source. Thanks for setting me straight.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Drawsing.