It turns out that Hen, the mummy that resides in the Cazenovia public library's museum area, was a man. The Post-Standard's Alaina Potrikus reported the findings of the mummy's recent CT scan in the April 8 issue of that paper; details are copied below.
Mummy not a female after all
Saturday, April 08, 2006
By Alaina Potrikus
Staff writer
It took 2,000 years and the help of modern medicine to learn Cazenovia's Egyptian mummy is actually a daddy.
Hen, the public library's beloved mummy who was long thought to be a young woman, checked into Crouse Hospital last month for a CT scan and came out with a sex change. Musculoskeletal radiologist Dr. Mark Levinsohn discovered that beneath the mummy's tightly bound strips of browned linen are the remains of a man.
"She's a he!" exclaimed library director Betsy Kennedy when she first heard the news.
X-rays in the 1980s and '90s suggested Hen was an 18-year-old woman with a good spine and teeth, based on feminine characteristics in the hip and pelvis dimensions. But the latest CT scan gave a better three-dimensional view of soft tissues and muscles, leaving no doubt in Levinsohn's mind that Hen was a male.
"I was pleased that there's so much preservation of the tissue," he said. "You can see the nose, the ears."
The jokes already are flying: Wouldn't the mummy be more aptly named Rooster instead of Hen? Kennedy's trying to figure out how to approach the delicate gender topic with the 1,000 schoolchildren who explore the museum each year.
"We know that boys and girls are made differently," she said. "We know that Hen is a man now. And we're going to leave it at that."
The mummy was purchased by a wealthy Cazenovia resident, Robert James Hubbard, in Cairo in 1894.
Staff writer Alaina Potrikus can be reached at 470-3252 or apotrikus@syracuse.com.
© 2005 The Post-Standard. Used with permission.