Lady Pesed will be part of a display at the Lawrence County Historical Society.

Lady Pesed will be part of a display at the Lawrence County Historical Society.

STAFF REPORT

NEW WILMINGTON — Lady Pesed, Westminster College’s 2,300-year-old mummy, has moved temporarily from her home in the Mack Science Library in Hoyt Science Resources Center.

She will be a guest at the Lawrence County Historical Society, where she will be part of a monthlong “Ancient Journeys: A Study of Egyptian Burial Practices” exhibit.

A group of distinguished pallbearers was enlisted to move Lady Pesed into a hearse for her 12-mile trip.

Dr. Samuel Farmerie, Westminster College’s curator of cultural artifacts, said the mummy has been at Westminster since 1885. She was donated to the College by The Rev. John Giffen, an 1871 Westminster graduate who was working as a missionary in Egypt. The mummy was purchased for $8 and shipped to the U.S. for $5.

She is believed to be the mummy of Lady Pesed, daughter of Nes-hor (prophet of the eight gods associated with Min). The mummy was excavated from the city of Akhmim, about 235 miles south of Cairo, and was originally thought to have been a teenager at the time of her death. However, scientific evidence indicates Pesed lived to an age of 55 to 70.

Legend has it that Pesed enjoyed an active social life during her early days at Westminster and would appear in coed’s beds during the early 1900s. The underside of the mummy case lid has graffiti in the form of student names scratched into the wood, the earliest dated 1899.

As recently as 1980, some local high school students were involved in an abortive attempt to steal the mummy.

The mummy was professionally restored by Joan Gardner of the Carnegie Museum, thanks to the energy and fund-raising effort of Susan Grandy Graff, a 1985 Westminster graduate who tackled the project during her undergraduate years.

Pesed, and more than 100 other ancient Egyptian artifacts from the Westminster College Cultural Artifacts Collection, were part of the 2001 “Egypt: Untold Journeys” exhibit at the Whitaker Center for Science and the Arts in Harrisburg.

Dr. Jonathan Elias, Egyptologist, and the Akhmim Mummy Studies Consortium have helped solve many of Pesed’s mysteries through radio-carbon dating, X-rays, CT scans and forensic reconstructive modeling.