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​​​Théophile Gautier's
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The Unwrapping of a Mummy

​"What was she, after all, this Nes Khons, daughter of Horus and Rouaa, called Lady in her epitaph?  Young or old, beautiful or ugly?  It would be difficult to say. She is now not much more than a skin covering bones, and it is impossible to discover in the dry, sharp lines the graceful contours of Egyptian women, such as we see them depicted in temples, palaces, and tombs. But is it not a surprising thing, one that seems to belong to the realm of dreams, to see on a table, in still appreciable shape, a being which walked in the sunshine, which lived and loved five hundred years before Moses, two thousand years before Jesus Christ?  For that is that age of the mummy which the caprice of fate drew from its cartonnage in the midst of the Universal Exposition, amid all the machinery of our modern civilization."

Examination of a Mummy by Paul Dominique Philippoteaux