A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt - Ongoing. At the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York

A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt - Ongoing. At the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York.


Closeup of Roman Period Gilded Gesso Mummy Cartonnage of a Woman Hawara (possibly) Egypt 1st century CE
Mummy cartonnage of a woman with draped garment, elaborate coiffure, eyes inlaid with glass, necklace (formerly inlaid throughout) and garland. There are also serpent-armlets, in relief, on the upper arms and wrists. The front is mostly gilded, but wreath and top and sides of head are painted photographed at the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York.

The ancient Egyptians believed that to make rebirth possible for a deceased woman, she briefly had to turn into a man. Guided by new research inspired in part by feminist scholarship, the exhibition A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt tells this remarkable story of gender transformation in the ancient world, exploring the differences between male and female access to the afterlife. Egyptian medicine taught that a woman, once in her tomb, faced a biological barrier to rebirth. Because the ancient Egyptians believed that in human reproduction it was the man who created the fetus, transferring it to the woman during intercourse, rebirth was impossible for a woman alone. To overcome this perceived problem, a priest magically transformed a woman’s mummy into a man long enough to create a fetus. This required representing a woman with red skin on her coffin—the color normally assigned to a man—and reciting spells that addressed the woman with masculine pronouns, spells also recorded graphically on the coffin. A woman later returned to her original female state and incubated herself for rebirth into the afterlife as a woman.

Museum website:

 https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/womans_afterlife_ancient_egypt

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