My life in sherds!

So, the individual we're dealing with here is a Roman period mummy that was CT scanned in 2014 as part of the Ancient Lives and the skeleton was determined to be a male, but was originally brough to the British Museum in a coffin that was named and styled as female. The mummy is accession number EA 6704 and the coffin is EA 6703. (Concurrent accession numbers mean they were brought in together and EA stands for 'Egyptian Antiquities' and please be aware that the link for EA 6704 contains images of the mummy for those of you wish to avoid more images of the deceased)

Now a lot of people, in both the comments, the OP, and the book this is taken from are...assuming a lot of things. First of all the tweet and the book it's taken from (no idea which one) say 1960s, and the tumblr comment says 1950s. If we check the museum catalogue entry in the 'Bibliographic References' section it says 'Dawson and Grey, 1968' and is their survey and research of mummies in the collection. It was then further CT scanned in 2014 which confirmed the 1968 analysis. The skeleton, at least, is male.

So why is the above a hot take, and, unfortunately, deeply incorrect?

This mummy, and the coffin it was in, were bought by Henry Salt in the 1820s from an Egyptian seller, which he later sold to the museum in 1835. Given the nature of its arrival, and the complete lack of x-ray ability or Egyptological knowledge (the field of study really only got going in the 1820s when we deciphered hieroglyphs) it was assumed that the coffin, belonging to a woman named Mutemmenu, and the mummy were the same burial.

That's not accurate.

The coffin, styled female and lists her occupation as 'Chantress of Amun' dates to the New Kingdom (c.1200 BCE) and the mummy found within it dates to the Roman Period (anywhere from 30 BCE to 646 CE). This makes the mummy *at least* 1200 years younger than the coffin they were brought in with and therefore doesn't not belong to the mummy. Occurrences like this are relatively common. This is mostly because when these coffins were excavated antiquities dealers just shoved random mummies into random decent looking coffins so they could be sold as one lot. The other option is for the Romans to have reused (again not uncommon) a coffin from an older period and since Hieroglyphs had fallen out of use...no one could read it to say 'hey that coffin belongs to a woman.'

So that's the coffin issue sorted.

Lets move onto the 'breasts', tattoos, and jewellery. I fully understand why people think they're breasts. They look like them, I won't lie to you. Unfortunately, that's not what they are. The 2014 CT scans showed that this individual had a lot of excess skin that before mummification would have meant that the individual was fat. They also had significant tooth decay on one side of their face. Where do you think the embamlers packed out the mummy with extra padding to make them seem more like they did while they were alive? The face, the stomach, and the chest. They're not 'breasts' they're fat rolls. In Ancient Egypt, being fat was a sign of wealth and good fortune. It meant that you had an abundance of food, so officials would often depict themselves with fat rolls and the men with what look like breasts to indicate to people that they were well off. It does not indicate an individual's gender. As the book says, this practice stems right from the Old Kingdom through to the Roman period. It's more common in the Roman period, but I would also state that this is likely a bias in the record as we have more Roman mummies survive than most other periods. It cannot be taken as absolute fact because we're missing data.

Tattoos and jewellery? Well, those, it appears, were taken by the 1830s museum staff, the 1960s scan, and apparently most people in the notes of this post as being exclusively female. Even the OP of the tweet this is taken from seems to take this as a given. Which is deeply strange, because in what world are you guys expecting gender progressiveness from academics in the 1960s? Seriously. You're not even praticing it yourselves because you've defaulted 'male sexed body with jewellery and flower tattoos cannot be male because those things are for girls.' Can you hear yourselves? You rag on archeologists and museums for 'omg they were roommates' and here you are defaulting to 'jewellery and flowers are for girls.' Please.

The 1830s academics did the same thing. They saw the jewellery, 'breasts', 'tattoos' and female coffin and presumed (not being able to read the coffin which said 'Chantress') that the person inside was a woman, and a dancer. In the 1960s, when they x-rayed the body and determined the skeleton was sexed male, they didn't really update any other information so the 'dancer' part was left in. Truth is, we simply don't know who this person was or their occupation. The strapping has been found on some dancers, but it's not exclusive to dancers since it's found on other mummies too. Dancer has simply been assigned to this person based on that and the 'tattoos'. This individual is also covered in gold leaf, marking them out as a high status individual. Dancers were not high status individuals and were certainly not buried with their skin covered in gold leaf. It is important to understand that while the strapping may appear to match dancers from earlier periods, we're talking about 1200 years between those depictions and this mummy. That's like saying someone today wearing something similar to someone from 825 CE have the same occupation despite the fact that there is a huge amount of cultural and societal change between the two. It's not enough to identify anything other than 'might be the fashion of this period', and certainly not enough to pinpoint someone's gender identity. They may have been a dancer, but we cannot prove this and dancing is not a female only occupation.

Tattoos and jewellery were not a female only items. Men wore jewellery in Ancient Egypt and this practice didn't end with Roman occupation. Tattoos were also for both genders (Egyptian definion of gender not modern) and the lotus flower is a symbol of rebirth, it's not consigned to one gender but an extremely important symbol connected with Egyptian mythology. A lot of early research, I won't lie, was extremely biased. It labelled tattoos as for dancers and sex workers only, which reflected the views of tattoos in wider society. A lot of people even today believe that tattoos mean you should be shunned. Thus it was assumed that only women had tattoos. In fact, I can find a paper from 2003 that boldly claims that no male mummies have tattoos (citing a 1988 paper)...then cites several examples of male mummies having tattoos. That's a level of head/desk someone should have caught, because the paper I link for 'tattoos for both genders' shows them from the Pre-Dynastic period (c.6210 BCE - 3100 BCE) on both genders. We also have very few mummies from the Old Kingdom through to the New Kingdom because mummification was still developing, so we don't exactly have a wide data set to say 'men don't have tattoos' thus, I'd take this claim with an extreme pinch of salt since we have examples. I would also state that the caveat is that most tattoos are found on Nubian dancers in one Meroitic cemetery. Something something, sample size.

Fun thing, after that little segue, the mummy doesn't have tattoos. The 'tattoos' are the painted lotus flowers on the linen above the knees that's covering the mummy. Which, at this point, if they're solely on the mummy coverings (we can't check the physical body without unwrapping and we're not doing that) they're more likely to be rebirth symbols and not literal tattoos. Thus taking us even further away from the 'only dancers have tattoos' assumption. The face is painted on too, including side burns and a beard which are what those dark marks are along the side of the cheeks.

That's a beard. It's not the best beard, but it's a very artistic interpretation of side burns.

Likely immitating something like this, which is backed up by the CT scan showing the mummy has short hair on the head and face. It also shows one of their teeth has fallen out and is resting at the front of their mouth, which is pretty cool.

The final thing I want to address is the 'pink' skirt or kilt that was found on the mummy at the time it was accessioned into the BM catalogue. It's not mentioned above, I know that, but it is mentioned in other articles about this mummy. This hasn't survived, so I can't look at it and say what type of garment it was. I don't even want to take 'pink' as the definite colour as we're talking about a c.2000 year old piece of clothing that absolutely will have faded with that amount of time having passed. I would also discourage 'oh they're wearing pink they must be...' because no we're not doing that c'mon people.

Sexing skeletons is an incredibly tricky business and is liable to change given new techniques or technologies as they become available. The skeleton in this case was identified to belong to a woman when first discovered solely based on the jewellery, skirt (though it could be a kilt), and the fact that the coffin was made for a woman. When the body was reexamined in the 1960s they discovered that the body more than likely belonged to that of a man and was likely in the wrong coffin (something that happens very regularly in Ancient Egypt). Subsequent studies have not changed this, but there is always the possibility that this body does belong to a woman and we’re all wrong. There are no certainties with this sort of thing unless you have a good deal of contextual evidence. But we wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell the “genital configuration” through scanning.

Many things happen during mummification and one of those things is uhh…shrinkage. This makes it nigh on impossible to see on CT scans. Even mummies were sure of the identity on (those of pharaohs) the actual presence of an identifiable phallus is extremely hot and miss. For most of the kings we can’t actually see it at all!

I’m aware cis men can have breasts and I’m very aware of gynecomastia. But when I say “fat rolls” I am talking about a very specific detail that the Egyptians culturally used. I’ll show some images of what I mean:

take up space, read the plaques, get the audioguides. you are just as entitled and right in being there. visit museums, boycott museums, be expressive about your opinions about museums.

a lot of museums are free, or discounted for youth and students. take advantage of that. check your local art museum. check your local history museum. museums are there for you, they are there to educate the public, not to distinguish between class. it isn't a private collection, it's a public exhibit.

This sick bleach shirt I made. Something to showcase my undying love for prehistoric cave art.