Padihershef arrives

Padi face.jpg

The Saturday, 26 April, 1823, Boston Daily Advertiser announced that the Yankee brig Sally Anne had arrived in Boston, under the command of Capt. Robert B. Edes. On board her was a most unusual passenger, an Egyptian mummy, complete with a double coffin, the second one documented to have arrived in America.

He was a stonecutter from the city of Thebes, a man named Padihershef, although these facts were not to be known for more than a hundred years, well into the twentieth century. He had died, been embalmed, and enclosed in two decorated coffins, there to await his rebirth in the Western Lands, according to his religious beliefs. Little could he have dreamed in his most wild imaginings, that he would be uprooted and transported such a far distance as Boston, Massachusetts, or that his arrival and subsequent travels would ignite such an interest that it would become known as “mummymania.”