Three millennia ago in the hot, dry land of Thebes, there lived a woman named Djedmaatesankh. Djedmaatesankh was neither princess nor priestess but an ordinary middle-class Egyptian. When she died, in the middle of the ninth century B.C., her husband, Paankhntof, had her mummified and encased in a cartonnage--a shell-like coffin of linen and glue--as was fashionable for a woman of her station. The cartonnage was decorated with pictures of gods and protective entities and with Djedmaatesankh’s image in gold. She was probably buried along the west bank of the Nile, across a ridge from the Valley of the Kings.
Djedmaatesankh eventually resurfaced at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Egyptologists there have no record of exactly when or how she arrived, except that it was around the beginning of this century. They do know that her cartonnage is one of the best preserved of its period.
Much of what ...
