By LAURE CIOFFI

By LAURE CIOFFI
VINDICATOR NEW CASTLE BUREAU
NEW WILMINGTON, Pa. -- Pesed has kept a silent vigil on the Westminster College campus for more than 100 years.
Now, officials say, the centuries-old Egyptian mummy may finally be ready to talk.
They believe she may be related to an Egyptian mummy in a Buffalo museum -- a link that could tell modern scholars more about the Ptolemaic period, a little-known era of Egyptian history that begins about 310 years before Jesus Christ was born and ends with the death of the famous Cleopatra in 30 B.C.
It is believed Pesed died around 275 B.C.
"The chronology of this period is not well developed and this is why the coffins and the mummies inside them [at Westminster and Buffalo] are so important," said Jonathan Elias, an Egyptologist and exhibit designer at the Whitaker Center for Science and Arts in Harrisburg.
Possibilities: Elias, an expert on Egyptian coffins, said the two are at least a generation apart because of differences in their coffin construction and mummification.
Similar markings on both coffins led Elias to believe that Pesed and Nes-Hor, the Buffalo mummy, could be father-daughter or mother-son -- the exact relationship is still unclear.
Who is older can only be determined by radio-carbon dating. The process can measure the amount of carbon in the linen and tell researchers how old the mummies are within 25 years. The mummies' exact familial relationship will only be known with DNA testing.
Both processes are very expensive and college and museum officials say they are still looking for funds to pay for them.
Radio-carbon dating costs about $500 and DNA testing could cost thousands of dollars, said Samuel Farmerie, curator of Westminster's cultural artifacts.
They are hoping a laboratory that does those types of testing learns about their mummies and donates services, or that alumni will donate money for that purpose, he said.
The connection has area Egyptian buffs excited, but it's one that was discovered by chance.
The Rev. Willis McGill, a retired Presbyterian missionary living in Lawrence County who spent many years in Egypt, was reading a magazine article last summer about a male mummy in the Buffalo Museum of Science and noticed similarities to the Westminster mummy.
Original home: Both came from a city about 235 miles south of Cairo called Akhmim. Both were excavated in the 1880s. And they shared similar names on their coffins, which often listed genealogical information.
"As soon as I saw that, I said surely there has to be some connection," said McGill, who is a member of Westminster College's cultural artifacts advisory committee, the group that oversees the college collection.
Buffalo was contacted, and Elias, who was contracted to help piece together the exhibit there, and the Buffalo museum's associate curator, Kevin Smith, visited Westminster's campus in October.
The two poked, probed, and took pictures and samples from Pesed.
They also visited a mummy at the College of Wooster, just west of Akron, that was brought to the United States with Westminster's mummy.
The two were gifts from missionaries John Giffin and Alexander Thompson, who were working in Assiut, Egypt, in the 1800s.
A diary of one of the men says the two visited a city near where the mummies were excavated in 1885 and bought four, each for $8.
Elias said this was not uncommon in the mid-1880s for missionaries and wealthy western travelers to pick up artifacts in Egypt, which was in dire need of cash at the time.
Where mummies went: The two missionaries agreed to leave one mummy at a college they started in Assiut. The others were to be divided among Westminster, Giffin's alma mater; Erskine College in North Carolina, the alma mater of Giffin's wife; and the College of Wooster, Alexander's alma mater.
Elias said it's impossible to tell if the Wooster mummy is related to the Westminster or Buffalo mummies because the genealogy area on the coffin was badly damaged in a fire years ago. But they could make out an unusual title that may be linked to the mummy the two missionaries left in Egypt.
A similar or the same title can be made out in recent pictures Elias examined of the Assiut mummy.
Those pictures also revealed that Westminster's mummy may be a sister of the woman in Egypt because they share the same mother's name, he said.
Officials say they will never know if there was any relationship to the Erskine College mummy because it was destroyed in a fire a few years after arriving.
Elias said determining that all four were related could tell them more about the evolution of culture in Akhmim.
"Akhmim was becoming a paramount city in southern Egypt at that time. It was as significant as New York City is today. We might be able to find out what was happening when there if we can get a chronology of these mummies," he said.
Until testing is done, the mummies will remain on display at their respective homes.