Hedvig Győry: Mélanges offerts a Edith Varga „Le lotus qui sort de terre” (Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts Supplément 1. Budapest, 2001)
JUAN JOSÉ CASTILLOS: Eso-Eris, the Wandering Mummy
areas. The title of sistrum player of the god Min was usually bestowed upon women, although the odd masculine exception is also known 1 . Eso-Eris, as the name came to be known in Graeco-Roman times, has become the most popular way to refer to this lady in Uruguay due to earlier and more classical renditions of her name by old school scholars in this country, which were less difficult to pronounce than the original one. As was sadly often the case in her time, she died young (probably not much older than 25) and was buried after the usual formalities and ceremonies for a person of her modest but not inconsiderable rank. Her name was occasionally found in the New Kingdom and perhaps earlier, but was frequent in the Late Period and not uncommon later on 2 . A certain man, Nesy-Pa-Mai (or Mahes) ("He belongs to (the god) Mahes"), son of the lady of the house 'Ink-n-Mnw ("I belong to (the god) Min"), whose relationship to the deceased is not clear, probably arranged the details for the proper mummification and burial of Isis the Great and was rewarded for his efforts with a declaration in the main text on her wooden coffin in which the dead woman in her newly exalted position in the netherworld as "the Osiris Isis the Great", vows to protect him against all evil. This mummy was properly published for the first time in 1976'. Previous attempts to deal with it by means of popular articles in the local press often contained grotesque and embarrassing mistakes such as one published in 1964 by a person who later managed to occupy for many years a Chair in Ancient History at the state university in Uruguay, who solemnly declared (and even worse, emphatically repeating it later on) that the texts on the coffin were written in a combination of hieroglyphs, hieratic and demotic, which if true, would have been a sensational discovery, but was just the result of a superficial inspection and incompetent arrogance 4 . The story of this mummy's wanderings starts in 1889 when a Uruguayan engineer, Luis Viglione, bought it with its wooden coffin and funerary mask in Cairo. This man had a short but distinguished career, he was bom in Tacuarembó (Uruguay) in 1852, studied at the university, graduated as an engineer and then 1 H. Gauthier, Le personnel du dieu Min, Cairo 1931, p. 95. 11. Ranke, Die Ägyptischen Personennamen, [., Glückstadt 1935, p. 4 J. .1. Castillos, A late Egyptian mummy at the National Natural History Museum of Montevideo, RdE 27, 1976, pp. 48-60. 4 L. Bausero, La momia egipcia del Museo Nációnál de História Natural, Sunday Supplement of "El Dia"', Montevideo 2 Aug. 1964, n. p. n.
