Why were so many of the Brooklyn Museum mummies sexes mis-identified?
I think it has something to do, in the case of our three, with imperfect knowledge. Demetris was excavated in 1911 and identified as a women because in classical Greek the “is”, like Doris is a woman’s name ending. It should be Demetrios if it’s a man. What they didn’t know yet was in Hellenistic Greek dialect in Egypt, many men’s name were just ending in “is.” But we have a whole series of notes on what a homely woman Demetris must have been as we have a very fine mummy portrait of her. People were very interested in how she wasn’t idealized. In fact, she’s a 59 year old man who was idealized. And so bad grammar is one reason for mistakes. Then Thothirdes who had a beard of Osris on his coffin, who had a red face, which is associated with being a man, was x-rayed either in the teens or in the 20s and despite the fact that x-rays do not show soft tissue, they say this is a women. They don’t say why. They say undoubtedly it’s a woman, and it may be because of the pelvic shape, which of
