Two women, both dead, one wearing a beadnet dress.

This is the story of two women.  Both are dead. 

One of them wore this dress when she was buried in ancient Egypt.  It is called a beadnet dress.

That, her burial that is, happened during the reign of King Khufu, which would mean about 2,550 B.C. 

On March 30, 1927 she looked like this, when her tomb was opened by a Harvard-sponsored archeological expedition to Giza. 

The pattern of the dress was recreated by modern scholars who found places on her mummified body where the beads still lay in their original configuration as when she was placed there 4.5 millenia ago.

The second woman died in Dresden, Germany.  In February, 1945 she looked like this.

She was killed by the Allied firebombing of that city after British and American planes dropped more than 650,000 incendiary devices such as these over a three-day span from the 13th to the 15th of February, 1945.

These two women's deaths were separated by 4,500 years of human history, but only by 1,700 miles as the crow flies.  Their lives sat equidistant to the Mediterranean Sea and to the birth of Christ, almost.  About them I know nothing else.