Come and visit our mummy, urges college

A CAMBRIDGE college has pleaded for more students to visit a 2,000-year-old Egyptian mummy thought to be the earliest female teacher of the classics.

The remains have been on display in the Lawrence Room at Girton College since being discovered by Egyptologist WM Flinders Petrie in 1911 in a pit in Hawara, 100 miles south of Cairo.

The name and profession “Hermione, Grammatike” are painted on her sarcophagus. Dr Dorothy Thompson, a retired fellow of Girton, said this meant Hermione is the “earliest known woman professor of classics” and made her mummy a “wonderful treasure”.

Dr Thompson said: “I wish the students would come to visit her more. We do send notices out every term suggesting they come along and some of them do, but not enough.”

Scans have shown Hermione died aged 18-22. The elaborate style of her mummification, including a painted portrait on the linen, suggests she was wealthy as well as educated.