This seventeen-minute video is titled "New Perspectives on the Egyptian Mummy at the Barnum Museum: An Interview with Dr. Sahar Saleem, Cairo University.” The interview took place on December 8, 2019 at the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Dr. Sahar Saleem is a highly-respected and sought-after radiologist who, after receiving her medical degree, began specialized in paleo-radiology. She has studied numerous mummified human remains, including the royal mummies of Egypt, and she is very knowledgeable about women’s roles in the various periods of ancient Egyptian history. Prior to the interview, Dr. Saleem studied high resolution CT scans of the Barnum Museum’s mummy, made about ten years earlier, and she conversed with Professor Emeritus Gerald Conlogue of Quinnipiac University who had conducted the scanning. The Museum’s Curator, Adrienne Saint-Pierre, interviewed Dr. Saleem the day she was visiting the Museum to present a public lecture. Firelight Media, LLC of Trumbull, Connecticut, filmed the interview, and the lecture; portions of latter will be included in a future video. A grant from Connecticut Humanities provided a substantial portion of the project funding. The purpose of the interview was to gain insights into the life of the mummified Egyptian woman whose remains have been in the Museum’s care since 1894. Long thought to be the body of an older man, a male priest, the remains were determined to be those of a youngish woman, as a result of medical diagnostic imaging work done in 2006 and 2010. This new knowledge led to a sea change in the Museum’s interpretation of the remains not only because of the different sex, but also because it was thought likely that the remains were far older than the coffin in which they had been placed. Intentional “mismatching” was a common practice of mummy vendors, and in this instance it was probably done in the late 19th century when the coffin and remains were presented to P. T. Barnum’s widow to give to the Bridgeport Scientific Society. The Museum’s recent and ongoing goal has been to restore a sense of personhood to this unidentified woman, to better understand her culture, lifestyle, health, and the disease that probably caused or hastened her death, and to share this journey of discovery with the public. Our work and discussions with experts are helping the Museum explore and develop new facets of understanding her, rather than defining her only by her death and the mummification of her body, the “traditional” museum practice that considers the body primarily as an object. Another video, done in March 2019, highlights the forensic recreation of the woman’s face, using a 3-print of the skull, a project that helped give a sense of her individuality and a once-living human being. Detailed information about the ancient Egyptian woman, who is believed to have lived circa 2000 BCE and was perhaps 30 to 40 years old when she died, can be found in a historiography of the Museum's ownership of the mummy and coffin, as well as a detailed catalog record with images, both found in the Barnum Museum digital collection hosted by CTDA.
