A Tale of Two Mummies
by Judith Zwolak

You might say this couple has been local football’s biggest boosters.

They attended every Tulane home game from 1955 until the last Wave appearance in Tulane Stadium in 1974. They were present at all three Super Bowls and dozens of New Orleans Saints games waged on Tulane turf.

And they never once complained about their lousy seats.

Locked in a tiny room below the bleachers, without the comforts of air conditioning or heating, Got Thothi Aunk and Nefer Atethu languished quietly in this dark corner of Tulane Stadium until they were discovered a year before the stadium’s 1980 demolition. No ordinary football fans, Aunk and Atethu (or would it be Got and Nefer?) actually are two Egyptian mummies that have been part of Tulane University since its early days in the 1850s.

The odyssey of the two mummies–one male and one female–from ancient Thebes in 900 B.C. to the now-demolished "Sugar Bowl" stadium is a tale of grave-robbing globe-trotters, misguided "racial theorists" and, ultimately, university officials with too little exhibit space to house their considerable treasures.

Documenting this tale is Guido Lombardi, an anthropology graduate student. Lom-bardi, a native of Peru and a medical doctor, is also a paleopathologist, a person who studies ancient human remains to detect evidence of past diseases. Got Thothi Aunk and Nefer Atethu are the subjects of his master’s thesis and a consuming passion of this confessed mummy-phile.

Lombardi came to Tulane after winning a national prize for his research on a naturally preserved Peruvian mummy while earning his medical degree. Although these mummies had been in Tulane’s possession since the 1850s, when the university was called the University of Louisiana, few on campus seem to know of their existence. Lombardi heard of the two Egyptian mummies in early 1997 while he was researching the only other mummy on campus, one from the 18th-century Aleutian Islands housed at the Middle American Research Institute.

"I couldn’t believe it," Lombardi says. "When I learned that a couple of mummies were in the basement of Howard-Tilton Library, I was so excited."

The Egyptian mummies were once people who witnessed one of the most brilliant moments in history, Lombardi says. "Their peers preserved their bodies for eternity and it is now Tulane’s responsibility to keep them that way."

Lombardi took on the role of the mummies’ champion on campus and began to learn all he could about them, during their lives and after their deaths.

Tulane’s part of the tale begins in the middle of the 19th century, when Got Thothi Aunk and Nefer Atethu were resurrected in this world.

THEY WANTED THEIR MUMMIES

The mummies’ resurrection and their journey to Tulane came at the hands of George Gliddon, a former American vice-consul in Cairo who traveled this country in the 1840s making elaborate presentations on Egyptian art and artifacts. "Mr. Gliddon" even appears as a mummy expert in Edgar Allen Poe’s 1845 story, "Some Words with a Mummy." Lecturing while standing in front of 800-feet-long revolving backdrops of scenery along the Nile valley, Gliddon thrilled American audiences with tales of the exotic foreign land.

Ever the showman, Gliddon capitalized on the growing public curiosity about mummies by "ordering" a dozen from a dealer in Egypt. After looting 12 mummies from the area around modern Luxor, the artifact dealers lost most of them in a Nile River flood. The two that survived the flood traveled to New York, arriving in 1849.

"The following June, Mr. Gliddon made a big announcement that he would unroll for the first time two Egyptian priestesses," Lombardi says. "He thought that the hieroglyphs on the mummy cases said they were both female."

The unrolling of the linen covering the mummies occurred before a capacity crowd of 2,000 physicians and intellectuals on an evening in 1850 in Boston.

"As he unrolled the linen and pulled off the last sheet, it was very apparent that the mummy was a man," he says. "Everybody laughed at Gliddon and his fame collapsed. It was a fiasco."

Fortunately for Gliddon, he had an avocation to fall back on. Unfortunately for the field of scientific inquiry, his sideline was "racial theory."

Lombardi explains. "A year and a half later, Gliddon showed up in New Orleans, where the mummies were used by a group of physicians who proposed that the origin of man was not from a single source, that mankind had originated as different races. In essence, they were scientific racists."

Samuel Morton, a Philadelphia physician and craniologist, led this group, known as the American School of Anthropology, and its members included a young physician from Mobile, Ala., named Josiah Nott. Morton used measurements of skulls belonging to native peoples of North and South Amer-ica–and, eventually, Egypt–to support his theory of polygenesis, the concept of multiple creations of races. In his 1844 book, Crania Aegyptica; or, Observations on Egyptian Ethnography, Derived from Anatomy History and the Monuments, Morton proposed that ancient Egyptians were Caucasian and had enslaved blacks, news that thrilled Southern-ers promoting slavery in the United States. In honor of Morton’s death, Gliddon and Nott collaborated on a book that would become a popular text on racial differences, Types of Mankind, in 1854.

Josiah Nott would serve a short term as an anatomy professor at Tulane, then called the medical department of the University of Louisiana, from 1857-58. His brother, Gustavus, had been a professor at the University of Louisiana in the early 1850s when Gliddon traveled to New Orleans delivering his "Egypt and the Nile lectures." Josiah Nott and Gliddon gave the male mummy to the university in 1851. Nefer Atethu, the female, was unrolled at Gallier Hall and presented to Tulane on Feb. 27, 1852.

Lombardi says he believes the enterprising Gliddon may have seen greener pastures elsewhere after his trip to New Orleans.

"Gliddon probably faced some problems here, because he gave up the mummies as a present to the medical school," he says. "After that, he moved to Central America and joined another venture, a plan to construct a railway to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through Costa Rica."

Although information about his death is contradictory, Lombardi says, one source claims Gliddon committed suicide in Panama.

Gliddon’s gifts to Tulane, however, stayed on.

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