PISA, ITALY—A skeleton discovered in a cardboard box at a fourteenth-century monastery near Pisa may be the remains of Qenamun, the chief steward and foster brother of Amenhotep II. Writing on the skull identified it as one of the 11 mummies brought from Egypt by nineteenth-century archaeologist Ippolito Rosellini. He had written a letter, recently found in the National Archives in Prague, indicating that the mummy and its black varnished coffin may have been intended for the collections of Grand Duke Leopold II. “Most likely, when the boxes were opened in Livorno, the mummy was no longer in condition to be brought to the grand duke. Rosellini possibly gave the mummy to his friend Paolo Savi, the director of Pisa’s natural history museum, so that it could be useful to science at least,” Marilina Betrò of Pisa University told Discovery News. Wires on the bones suggest they may have been hung in the museum, and the badly damaged coffin, which had not been recorded in the museum’s inventory, was found in a museum store room. Its hieroglyphs identified its owner as the “God’s Father Qenamun.” “The very important title confirmed it belonged to Amenhotep II’s foster brother,” Betrò explained.
