The Mystery of the 'Yde Girl' - the World's Most Notorious Mummy

The 2,000-year-old mummy was discovered in a Dutch bog in 1897, and many believe the young girl was executed or sacrificed.

On May 12, 1897, two workers were dredging peat from the Stijfveen bog near the village of Yde in the Netherlands when they discovered a deformed, mutilated, black body with red hair. According to officials at the time, the girl was likely killed by a knotted rope around her neck and a stab wound near her collarbone.

The Yde girl was murdered between 54 BC and 128 AD. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons).

It took a century for scientists to investigate and discover that it was the body of a 16-year-old girl who was just over 1 meter tall and died between 54 BC and 128 AD. The mummy is now known as the 'Yde girl' and has been preserved for 2,000 years.

History of "Yde girl"

When officials from the village of Yde and the Drents Historical Art Museum received the body on May 21, 1897, its identity was still a mystery. The noose around the neck and the dismembered limbs suggested that the man had been brutally murdered. In addition, half of the body's hair had been cut short and the teeth were missing.

There was no way to determine the Yde girl's age, as radiocarbon dating was not available until the 1940s. It was not until 1992 that Professor Richard Neave of the University of Manchester conducted a CT scan of the skull and determined that the body was that of a female, approximately 16 years old, due to the absence of wisdom teeth. She was diagnosed with scoliosis, which caused her to have a weakened spine and an abnormal swelling of her right foot, which caused her to limp.

Radiocarbon dating showed that the young girl died in the early Christian era , and the tannic acid of the bog has preserved her body ever since. In 1994, when experts recreated a cast of this mysterious mummy, the 'Yde girl' became world famous.

The reason for the victims' deaths remains uncertain , but Dr. Roy van Beek of Wageningen University has offered some speculation: "Two hypotheses have been put forward. The first is that the bodies dumped in the swamps may have been those who broke the rules or were convicted of something. The second, more widely accepted explanation, is that they were sacrificed to a higher power."

Reconstruction of the face of the "Yde girl" made in 1994. (Photo: Drents Museum).

How did the Yde girl die?

In 2019, using landscape and topography research as a foundation, Dr. Van Beek and colleagues determined that the Yde girl's death was likely due to privacy issues.

"The girl may have come from a nearby settlement on the slopes of Mount Yde. However, her body was left in a small, relatively shallow swamp about a kilometre away," said Dr Van Beek .

Officials at the Drents Museum claim that her hair was cut off by 19th-century villagers. Furthermore, cutting off a woman's hair for adultery was actually quite common in the Middle Ages.

However, with no further evidence of a husband or basis for her being disabled or deformed, it has been suggested that the young girl was more likely an ideal target for child sacrifice in the hope of agricultural prosperity at the time.

The Yde girl mummy is on display at the Drents Museum. (Photo: ATI).

To this day, the circumstances surrounding the death  of the "Yde girl " remain a mystery. Currently, the mummy is kept and preserved at the Drents Museum in Assen, the Netherlands.