The Cohen Mummy

Who Am I? Remembering the Dead Through Facial Reconstruction

The Archaeological Museum stewards an ancient Egyptian woman whose skeletal remains are only partially preserved. Our recent study of this individual revealed surprising new insights that contradict earlier assumptions.

She has been named the “Cohen mummy” because she was collected by Baltimore’s Colonel Mendes Israel Cohen in the mid-1830s. Cohen’s Catalog of Egyptian Antiquities identifies “no. 568” as a “Mummy of a youth” collected in ancient Thebes (now Luxor) and “no. 569” as a coffin, which may or may not have belonged to the mummy. Both were donated to Johns Hopkins in 1884 with the majority of Cohen’s collection and were stored at Evergreen House. In 1979, the Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Pathology Department autopsied the mummified individual with the assistance of Egyptologist William Peck of the Detroit Institute of Arts. An article in the Baltimore Sun reported that the remains were thought to be of a young, middle class man with worn teeth whose legs had been broken and/or disarticulated to fit in his coffin. This coffin is now exhibited in the museum.

While previously identified as a young male, our study of this person’s remains revealed the individual is, in fact, female. The development of her bones and the amount of wear on her teeth also indicate she was an adult when she died, possibly in her forties or older, and her pelvis suggests she may have borne children. Based on measurements of her long bones, she was approximately 4 feet 7 inches tall and weighed about 89 pounds. She lost several teeth over the course of her life, and she had abscesses that must have caused her severe pain. Small patches of straight reddish hair are still preserved on her skull, the color of which is likely due to either natural decomposition processes, or may be evidence of her hair being dyed.