In 1909, a New York businessman named Samuel Brown traveled to Egypt to purchase a pair of ancient mummies for the Albany Institute of History and Art, where he served as a board member. Brown and generations of subsequent researchers believed that he brought home a female mummy dating from the 21st Dynasty and a male one from the Ptolemaic period.

But when Emory University Egyptologist Peter Lacovara visited the institute in the early 2000s, he felt that the female mummy wasn’t in the coffin in which she was originally buried. Maybe it wasn’t a mummy of a woman at all.