Middlebury, Vermont

Grave of Amum-Her-Khepesh-Ef

Vermont grave of a 4,000-year-old mummy prince.

Henry Sheldon was a collector in the late 1800s in Middlebury, Vermont. After his death, his collection remained in his house at 1 Park Street and became the Henry Sheldon Museum. One of his most interesting pieces, however—an infant mummy prince—did not end up in the museum, but was instead buried in a cemetery about half a mile away.

As is understandable even to non-collectors, Sheldon wanted to add a bona fide Egyptian mummy to his collection, so he arranged to have the mummy of a two-year-old Egyptian prince shipped to him from across the ocean. But it arrived in such a degraded condition that Sheldon never put it out on display, instead “archiving” it in his attic.

Decades after Sheldon’s death, a curator at the Henry Sheldon Museum named George Mead discovered the infant mummy prince and had him cremated and buried in his own family plot in tiny West Cemetery on Route 30, across from the Middlebury College Museum of Art.

The inscription on the simple rectangular stone includes the images of a cross, an ankh, and a bird. It reads:

Ashes of Amum-Her-Khepesh-Ef Aged Two Years Son of Sen Woset 3rd King of Egypt and his wife Hathor-Hotpe 1883 BC.