Mystery Mummy May Have Been Pharaoh's Personal Eye Doctor
Among the ancient Egyptian pharaohs, queens and religious elites who elected to be immortalized through mummification, there was also at least one ophthalmologist.
Meet Nespamedu, a 2,200-year-old eye doctor made quite the spectacle of himself in the afterlife, according to some new research shared by the National Archaeological Museum (MAN) in Madrid, Spain. According to a series of recent papers published in the museum's in-house journal, the lavishly decorated mummy was once a priest and doctor thought to minister to none other than the pharaoh Ptolemy II (and possibly his successor Ptolemy III). The doc is thought to have lived sometime between 300 B.C. and 200 B.C.
Bedecked in five intricately inscribed gold plates and crowned with a painted-on face and wig, Nespamedu's mummified remains were initially thought to be a woman's when the museum first received them from a donor in 1925. Inscriptions on the mummy's golden encasement revealed him to be a priest named Nespamedu from Saqqara, Egypt, but little else could be discerned about who the bandage-wrapped man had been. Read more.
