Mummy No. 30007, currently residing at the American Museum of Natural History, is a showstopper. She’s known as the Gilded Lady, for good reason: Her coffin, intricately decorated with linen, a golden headdress and facial features, has an air of divinity. She’s so well preserved that she looks exactly how the people of her time hoped she would appear for eternity. To contemporary scientists, however, it’s what they don’t see that is equally fascinating: Who was this ancient woman, and what did she look like when she was alive?

This is one of the many mysteries examined in “Mummies,” which opened at the museum on Monday and runs through Jan. 7. More than a dozen specimens are on display; some have not been on public view in more than 100 years, since the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The show, which originated at the Field Museum in Chicago, explores how and why two civilizations separated by about 7,500 miles — ancient Egypt and pre-Columbian Peru — practiced mummification.