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A Woman's Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt

DATES December 15, 2016 through TBA
There are currently no digitized images of this exhibition. If images are needed, contact archives.research@brooklynmuseum.org.
  • A Woman's Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt
    In ancient Egypt, a tomb was not simply a place for the burial of remains, but rather the site of quite literal rebirth. Here, the individual’s soul was born again, into the afterlife. But surprisingly, the ancient Egyptians believed that to make this rebirth possible for a woman, it was necessary that she briefly turn into a man, in order to conceive the fetus of her reborn self.

    Egyptian medicine taught that a woman faced a biological barrier to rebirth. According to Egyptian belief, the man created the fetus and simply transferred it to the woman during intercourse. Thus rebirth was impossible for a woman alone in her tomb. To overcome this perceived problem, a priest magically transformed a woman’s mummy into a man long enough to create a fetus. The ritual for this transformation required representing a woman with red skin on her coffin—the color normally assigned to a man. Furthermore, the priest recited spells that addressed the woman with masculine pronouns, spells also recorded graphically on the coffin. The use of “male” color and language had the magical power to change her gender in her coffin. A woman later returned to her original female state and incubated herself for rebirth into the afterlife as a woman.

    Coffins that represented women with red skin and masculine pronouns were previously regarded by scholars as mere mistakes. But as this exhibition reveals, new research— inspired by the growth of feminist scholarship—has led to a better understanding of the ancient logic behind this unexpected gender transformation in the tomb.