Takabuti was the first Egyptian mummy to be brought to Ireland. After the Napoleonic Wars there was a brisk trade in Egyptian mummies. She was brought to Belfast in 1834 by Thomas Greg of Ballymenoch House, Holywood, Co Down. Her hieroglyphs were deciphered by a leading Egyptologist from Ireland, Dr Edward Hincks, of Killyleagh, Co Down. The horizontal inscriptions gave the names and titles of Takabuti and her parents while the vertical inscriptions in compartments were the speeches of the gods depicted alongside. Dr Hincks was able to say that she was a woman named Takabuti and that she was a married lady between twenty and thirty years of age. She had been the mistress of a great house in Thebes, now called Luxor, which was an important town with a large cemetery where the mummy was buried. Takabuti’s father, called Nespare, was a priest of the god Amun and her mother was called Tasenirit. Modern research dates Takabuti’s coffin to approximately 660BC, at the end of the Twenty-Fifty Dynasty.

Image | Coffin of Takabuti