The Mystery of the Secret Shroud

How did a lost Egyptian textile end up in a GW museum? One student detective followed a string of threads from the Nile to Foggy Bottom in search of an ancient mystery.

/ / by John DiConsiglio

A Fragment in Foggy Bottom 

Fast-forward nearly 80 years to the Foggy Bottom campus of George Washington University.  

Inside The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum, thousands of textiles fill drawers, cabinets and displays at the Cotsen Textile Traces Study Center. 

Among those vast holdings—the Cotsen collection features some 4,000 fragments from across the globe, some dating back three millennia—is a colorful linen square. It’s cataloged as item T-2920. And while its faint historical footprint offers few clues to its origin, the fragment may be the missing piece to a centuries-old puzzle. 

This is a detective story. It spans 2,000 years and 6,000 miles, from ancient Egyptian ruins to European auction houses to museum halls in New York and Washington, D.C. Its cast includes world-renowned academics, antiquities experts, desert adventurers and anonymous grave robbers. 

And the sleuth at its center is Hannah Faberman, B.A. ’26, a classical and ancient Near Eastern studies major at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. Signing on for what she thought would be a semester-long assignment, Faberman spent two and a half years doggedly tracking T-2920’s past. She followed a trail of clues from pigments and thread counts to archaeological records and hieroglyphics. Undeterred by dead ends and wrong turns—not to mention a chorus of scholars convinced she was chasing red herrings—Faberman hunted the fragment’s hidden history like a Sherlock Holmes of the ancient world. 

“Hannah isn’t just brilliant—she is persistent, meticulous and will follow every lead all the way to the end,” said Elise A. Friedland, associate professor of classical and ancient Near Eastern studies and art history, who served as Faberman’s faculty mentor on the fragment mystery. “There was no one better to have on this case.” 

Anatomy of a Textile 

The fragment itself is a simple cloth square—nearly 6 inches across. Its primary color is an ochre-yellow hue, and it features archaic inscriptions in a long dead language. It shows two seated figures—likely the Egyptian deities Shu, the god of air and sunlight, depicted with a feathered crown; and Tefnut, the lioness-headed goddess of moisture, crowned with a solar disk. A third character—possibly the earth god Geb—is cut off at the right edge.  

For Karthika Audinet, the Cotsen’s academic coordinator, the curious cloth seemed like an attractive addition for a 2023 museum exhibition. “It’s a fun piece. It’s very colorful. It has scribbly text on it,” she said. Audinet decided it was worth a closer look. 

Preserved behind plexiglass on archival cloth, the fragment doesn’t immediately stand out among Cotsen’s archive. A former Neutrogena CEO, Lloyd Cotsen assembled a textile collection that spans continents and centuries, from pre-Hispanic Peru to Renaissance Europe to Han Dynasty textiles uncovered in China’s Taklamakan Desert. In 2018, Cotsen’s widow donated the collection to GW, partly to foster student research experiences and “train the next generation of textile experts,” Audinet said. 

In 2007, Cotsen purchased the fragment from the British auction house Christie’s, which acquired it sometime before 1980 from a private European collection. Listed simply as “An Egyptian Painted Linen Fragment,” it was attributed to the Ptolemaic period, dating back to 300 B.C. after the conquests of Alexander the Great. The surrounding inscriptions were marked as Demotic, a cursive Egyptian script. 

But parts of the fragment sparked Audinet’s suspicion—including the neatly cut edges that seemed to have been sliced from a larger cloth. Audinet reached out to Egyptology experts for advice—and was quickly rebuffed. “Nobody wanted to touch it,” she said. “Nobody wanted to even look at it.” 

The fragment fell into an academic no-man’s land. Its murky provenance marked it as a so-called “orphaned object,” with no documented chain of ownership to establish how it was acquired—and whether or not it was authentic. With uncertain histories, some orphaned objects may even violate international protocols on preserving cultural properties. For scholars, orphans present a lose-lose proposition: Study them—and risk legitimizing antiquities trafficking. Ignore them—and leave a piece of history in limbo. 

“I am always leery,” said Eric H. Cline, professor of classical and ancient Near Eastern studies in the CCAS Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (CNELC). Too often, Cline noted, items purchased through auction houses or private dealers come with “no backstory or a backstory made up by whomever is selling it,” he said. “You never know if what they are telling you is actually true or not.” 

Audinet approached Cline—who said he “promptly handed off” the fragment to Friedland, an expert in the Roman Near East. She showed it to CNELC Department Chair Christopher Rollston. An authority on ancient inscriptions, Rollston has testified at high-profile antiquities forgery trials. While the fragment itself didn’t look amiss, he couldn’t rule out that it might be a fake. “There are many modern forgeries on the antiquities market—and some of those forgers are very good at what they do,” Rollston said. 

For Friedland, the fragment’s authenticity was beside the point. “Whether it was fake or genuine, it was still going to make a great undergraduate project,” she recalled. By fall 2023, Friedland was looking for just the right student to take on the mystery. When she stopped by Cline’s student office hours, she found one. 

Faberman never imagined herself as the central figure in an historical whodunnit. She loved reading Greek mythology as a child, but the Boston native arrived at GW intending to study international affairs. After taking courses in classical mythology and the ancient Near East, she found herself drawn in a different direction. By her sophomore year, she’d declared a major in classical and Near Eastern studies and developed a reputation among her professors. “She’s top of the class in every class she’s in,” Cline said. 

When Friedland approached her in Cline’s office, Faberman jumped at the opportunity. “I was very excited at the prospect of doing research and getting involved with the museum,” she said. “I didn’t really know what it would entail.”  

Friedland framed the project as a one-semester independent study. In reality, it would extend into a two-and-a-half-year quest. 

First Clues 

The investigation began by following threads.  

In spring 2024, Faberman, then a sophomore, embarked on her museum internship under Friedland and Audinet’s guidance. First, she needed to learn how to handle textiles—observing and measuring ancient artifacts while mastering “how to behave around art objects,” said Textile Museum Chief Curator Sumru Belger Krody. “Our role is to guide students and teach them how to look at textiles and understand their importance to culture.” 

Under a hand-held microscope, Faberman studied the fragment like a forensics examiner. The yarn was single-ply linen with an S-twist and uneven thickness, indicating it had been hand-spun. She measured the warp and weft—the vertical and horizontal threads that shape the fabric. The thread count, consistent with standard ancient Egyptian practices, “did not raise any red flags indicating a forgery,” Faberman said. But it didn’t reveal a smoking gun, either. 

Next, she turned to the iconography. The character drawings—Shu, Tefnut and possibly Geb—followed the traditional order of Egyptian deities. So far, Faberman saw no reason to doubt  Christie’s original assessment that the fragment belonged to the Ptolemaic period. 

But Faberman was skeptical. She saw naggingly subtle differences between other Ptolemaic pieces. The colorfully painted fragment didn’t match Ptolemaic monochrome tones. Even the depictions of the god felt stylistically amiss. “It just seemed a little off,” she said. 

Meanwhile, Friedland still couldn’t find experts to weigh in. By summer 2024, Faberman drafted a research note for GW’s peer-reviewed “Textile Museum Journal.” After months of dead ends, she closed the case. “I preliminarily concluded that the fragment was a forgery,” she said.   

Pulling New Threads 

By 2025, all the loose ends seemed to be tied up. But new threads began to surface. 

After months of frustration, Friedland googled random scholars to find any Egyptologist willing to take up the case. Finally, an Eastern Kentucky University professor replied and looped in a colleague from Germany. Both confirmed that the GW team was following a false lead. The Christie’s listing was wrong. The inscription was hieroglyphic, not Demotic. The fragment wasn’t Ptolemaic. It was Roman. 

“That was the turning point,” Faberman said. 

In 31 B.C., after the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra by Augustus at the Battle of Actium, Egypt became a Roman province. The period’s art often combined traditions: Roman-style portraits layered with Egyptian religious imagery.  

Another clue broke the case wide open. One expert pointed Faberman to a dissertation by a Spanish scholar. It suggested the fragment might belong to a larger funerary textile housed at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. The object in question was a painted burial shroud—the same one excavated in the late 1940s at Deir el-Medina by Bernard Bruyère. Faberman broke the news to Audinet outside her office. 

“It was a revelation,” Audinet said. 

“The focus was no longer whether this fragment was genuine or forged,” Faberman explained. “It was whether we could confirm that it actually came from the shroud.” 

“The focus was no longer whether this fragment was genuine or forged. It was whether we could confirm that it actually came from the shroud.” 

-Hannah Faberman

The Route Unravels 

How did the shroud make its way from Bruyère’s desert excavation site to a New York museum? 

Its travels—like the roughly 6-foot shroud itself—were marked by holes and gaps. Sometime after Bruyère pulled it from the West Nile tomb, the piece was identified through its hieroglyphic inscription as the burial cloth of Neferhotep, son of Herrotiou. It dated back to the years 100 to 225. 

Almost nothing is known about Neferhotep himself. The shroud painting, rendered as a standard Roman mummy portrait, probably looked nothing like him. The surrounding decorations—the scarab above his head, a gilt ring and laurel wreath, the rows of Egyptian gods—represent “Roman Egypt’s wonderful layering of cultures,” Friedland explained. “It looks like a Roman getting buried with a Roman portrait bust, but it is still adhering to Egyptian funerary practices and rituals.” 

The shroud’s trail disappears after Bruyère’s drawings. It resurfaces at a Sotheby’s auction in London around 1970 with an additional piece missing. To fill the gaps, some unknown person restored the shroud—with dubious accuracy—before it entered the Brooklyn Museum’s collection in 1975. The brightly colored cloth featured in touring exhibitions and Brooklyn displays while becoming a staff favorite. “We lovingly call it the Pepto-Bismol pink piece,” said Curatorial Associate Kathy Zurek-Doule. 

The museum curators weren’t actively seeking the lost fragment. Their own collection contains thousands of incomplete objects. The call from the GW team was a welcome surprise—as well as a tantalizing twist. 

“It was totally unexpected,” said Yekaterina Barbash, the Brooklyn Museum’s curator of Egyptian classical and ancient Near Eastern art. “We knew there were missing pieces, but we never dreamt that someone would approach us and say, ‘I think I found one.’”  

In June 2025, Faberman, supported by a CCAS Luther Rice Fellowship grant, set out for Brooklyn, accompanied by Audinet and Krody. They carried a one-to-one scale, high-resolution image of the fragment—and a faint hope that all the pieces finally fit.

The Answer Unearthed 

In a study room at the Brooklyn Museum, curators and conservators carefully laid the 2,000-year-old shroud across a work table. The excitement was high—but so was the skepticism. “Everyone wanted it to fit,” Barbash said. “But how do you accept something like that until you see it?”  

The initial signs weren’t encouraging. Audinet remembers gasping at the color pigments. The shroud’s Pepto-Bismol pink pastels were softer than the deeply colored fragment. “They didn’t match,” she said. “I tried to keep it to myself. But I was very worried.”  

Faberman was less concerned. Color can change over time due to numerous factors, from light exposure to chemical processes. “The fragment has been separated from the shroud for a long time and subject to its own environmental conditions,” she said. “They’ve lived very different lives.” 

Tensions eased when the shroud’s warp and weft matched the fragment’s thread count. “That precise correspondence would be difficult to replicate,” Faberman explained. 

Finally, Faberman overlaid the fragment image on the shroud’s restored section. The iconography matched. The cut-off Geb figure fit like a jigsaw puzzle. Visual elements locked into place: the colorful border, a black ground line at the base, circular motifs at the top. 

“When they laid [the fragment] down on the actual object, we all stepped back and said, ‘Oh my goodness, this looks like a match,’” said Brooklyn’s Zurek-Doule. 

Taken together—the thread count, the physical fit, the iconographic consistency—the evidence was overwhelming. Faberman texted Friedland: “They match.” Friedland replied immediately: “Hooray,” with, she recalled, “a bazillion exclamation marks.” 

“I was super excited,” Friedland said. “We were so far in at this point, those suckers needed to match.”  

Unsolved Mysteries 

For now, the fragment and the shroud will remain physically separated—one in Washington, one in Brooklyn, united by scholarship rather than stitches. The museum plans to credit Faberman on its website. The restorations will stay in place too, rather than risk damaging the shroud by removing them. As Faberman noted, “They’re also part of the history of the object.” 

In reuniting historical artifacts, Faberman’s student sleuthing highlighted how provenance research addresses the legacy of looting. “It exemplifies how removing objects from their ancient contexts can destroy valuable information,” she said. Meanwhile, the GW team continues to champion university museums as collaborative spaces where students make meaningful contributions to ancient scholarship. “The beauty of [the Cotsen collection] is welcoming students to work here and make their own discoveries,” Krody said. 

But the mystery isn’t entirely solved. Key questions remain. Who removed the fragment from the shroud in the first place? Faberman doesn’t suspect Bruyère, mostly because of his detailed field reports. “If he had been responsible, why would he go to the trouble of drawing [the shroud] with the missing pieces?” she wondered. “Either he’s really good at covering his tracks, or he wasn’t the one who did it.”  

Who was the inaccurate restorer? Where are the other missing pieces? Faberman is resigned to never finding all the answers. “We don’t know who took them, and we don’t know where they went,” she said, “and it’s possible we never will.” 

Meanwhile, Faberman presented her findings to the prestigious American Society of Overseas Research and curated her own micro-exhibition at the Textile Museum this winter. She’s redrafting her forthcoming research note for the “The Textile Museum Journal.” And after graduating this spring, she’ll pursue her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University—with a résumé that includes solving a genuine historical mystery. 

“It’s absolutely a great detective story with a great student detective,” CNELC Chair Rollston said. “Hannah shows that, at the end of the day, brains, hard work and dogged persistence always win out.”