Tim Abel ’93 walked into Nicolson, a dorm named after a great Latin professor. It was 1:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning in late February and there was a mummy of the Egyptian variety lying in his bed. Abel must have known why it was there or else the story of his subsequent lunacy would have been an even better story. He quickly covered it up. But he ultimately had to call Public Safety because the sheets had “mummy remnants in them” and the odor could only be described with an understatement. Tim Abel did identify the perpetrator, according to the police. More likely, he just talked the cops out of the situation; nothing happened after that, and Abel declined to identify the prankster and the University eventually did nothing. The fact that a student of Wesleyan University could just shrug a 2,500 year dead Egyptian aristocrat in his bed makes me proud to be a Cardinal.
The University might have been asking for it, leaving all the bits of the Wesleyan Museum lying around: Bison on the fourth floor of Exley, a skeleton here or there. The museum had shut down in the late fifties but there was never a clear plan for what to do with all the exhibits so they were put on display or packed up. Students heard rumors. Wasn’t there something way back a-while with stuffed birds ceremoniously decapitated on Andrus Field?
The mummy might even have been above all that. In the late 1970s, as Tutankhamen was raising all sorts of hype for himself, the Wesleyan Mummy had a chance at the big time. Professor Stephen A. Dyson of the classics department brought him out of storage and put him (it was a He, 5’2“, about 18 years old at time of death) through all the examinations. He found that in life, the Wesleyan mummy was middle- to upper-class but was going for the thrift-store look. ”Looking at the wrappings, you can tell it wasn’t a luxurious job,“ Doyle noted in the Middletown Press, but ”mummification was an expensive process.“ In the X-ray room at Middlesex Memorial Hospital, Robert Zavod noted several cylinders of cloth inside the mummy. There were murmurs of the possibility of inscriptions. A New York Times columnist speculated that they were the 18 and one-half missing minutes of Nixon’s tape or maybe answers to a Latin test from 1879.
They were nothing. A student used its DNA in a project. The mummy went back in a box and Doyle gave an occasional lecture about it. It was stowed away and somehow knowledge of it passed onto one of the Abel pranksters.
Nowadays we make jokes about defeating the patriarchal, imperialist hegemony on T-shirts, but there was a time when Old Wes didn’t hide its reliance on all of those ideas. In the 1885, according to George Gardiner ’89, Prof. James Cooke Van Benschoten, Jane A. Seney Professor of the Greek Language at Wesleyan was also the Director of the American School at Athens. ”Van Benny“ would take time off to visit archeological sites and ”always he had in mind the procurement of archaeological treasure for the Wesleyan Museum.“ Gardiner can’t recall whether it was in Turkey or Egypt that ”Van Benny got wind of the mummy,“ – he isn’t even sure that it was Asia Minor – but he does know how the professor got the mummy on the boat. The maybe-Turkish official wanted an official permit, or, reckons Gardiner, maybe a little ”palm grease.“ So the fiscally conservative professor went to the British Consulate, who suggested that he return in a few carefully counted days. On the morning of the third day he reported to the consul. A warship arrived in the night and left the next morning.
”Well, the mummy is in the Wesleyan Museum, isn’t it?“ chuckles Gardiner.
Of course it isn’t anymore. The museum is long gone. The mummy currently lies under the watchful eyes of Juliana Shortell, the Collections Manager, who hopes to move some of the pieces of the museum elsewhere. The mummy will rest in piece. Says Shortell, ”We are aware of a cultural need to respect the dead.“