In May 1999 I accompanied collector Bill Jamieson to a former corset factory in Niagara Falls, Canada. We were there to say goodbye to some very old friends. Since 1958 the factory had housed the Niagara Falls Museum, and within it the mummified bodies of nine people who had once lived in ancient Egypt. For over 100 years these preserved remains had formed part of an old-fashioned museum, a cabinet of curiosities, which also included brightly painted Egyptian coffins, fossils, Civil War and Wild West memorabilia, the two-headed calves and the barrels used by dare devils who had challenged the Falls. The Egyptians were leaving this all behind, setting off by moving van for Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Under the supervision of Dr. Peter Lacovara, curator at the Museum, these ancient Egyptians now enjoy the finest care and most serious study that modern Egyptology can provide. Long relegated to obscurity, they are emerging into the light of the Twenty-first Century publicity. Reporters and film-documentary producers compete to track down their stories. A handsome member of the group, with his arms crossed on his chest, has even graced the front page of Canada's national newspapers, under the headline "Mummy from Oddity Museum could be Rameses I." The accompanying article asked, "Did pharaoh spend more than a century in Niagara Falls?"

So how did these nine Egyptian mummies happen to get to Niagara Falls, and why did they leave Canada after so long a residency? This article is an account of the unfinished history of the Niagara Falls Mummies and my own small part in it.

The Niagara Falls Museum was founded in 1827.[1] The original building stood on Table Rock, on the brink of the Horseshoe Falls. Founder Thomas Barnett was a collector of natural-history specimens and ethnographic curios. The first group of Egyptian mummies arrived at the Museum in 1861, brought by Barnett’s son, Col. Sydney Barnett. A fire in the Woods Museum in Chicago in the 1870s added a few more. When the Barnetts declared bankruptcy in 1877, Saul Davis purchased the Museum and continued to accumulate objects from all over the world: some precious, some fakes, some simply trash. In 1887, however, the Museum site was appropriated by the Canadian government for park land, and the whole assemblage was moved to the United States side of the Falls.

Davis constructed an elegant Museum in Niagara Falls, New York, which was still there in 1942, when a local family, the Shermans, bought the curio business. Expropriation of the Museum site a few years later, in 1958, for additional park land forced the operation back across the border to Canada. These moves are part of the colorful history of the institution, but they may have had grave consequences for the Egyptians, who were crated up with the “freaks of nature,” a Hawaiian feather cape, and Wild Bill Hickok’s saddle. During the relocations the labels associated with the mummies got shuffled. Reinstallation shifted some of the mummies from the coffins they originally had occupied when arriving at the Museum in 1861.

But then, had any of the mummies and coffins belonged together originally? On at least one occasion, Colonel Barnett had been assisted in purchasing Egyptian antiquities by James Douglas, an eminently respectable Canadian medial doctor and philanthropist. When Douglas returned from Egypt in 1861, he published the story of his own adventures as Honeymoon on the Nile. In this memoir Douglas says that, in order to obtain the mummies for himself and others, he had dealt with one Mustapha Aga, the titular British consul at Luxor. Mustapha Aga Ayat, who also represented Belgium and Russian, may be familiar to readers. His house, according to The Times reporter, William Russell, was “planted like a swallow’s nest against the eaves of the Luxor Temple.” [2] Mustapha Aga “discovered” and sold antiquities to wealthy tourists, using the immunity provided by his consular status to avoid prosecution for his illegal activities. He was sufficiently confident, in fact, to bring artifacts to the American ex-patriot Charles E. Wilbour for translations of their texts![3] As an employer of Royal Mummies Cache discoverers Ahmed and Hussein Abd er Rassul, he was a primary conduit for materials which these modern-day tomb robbers were removing bit by bit from the secreted royal hoard they accidentally had found in the cliffs at Deir el Bahari. If the exact provenance of the Niagara Falls Mummies is not known, some of them, at least, came from a man with impressive sources. How many might have originated with Mustapha Aga? Douglas mentioned only one: “During my last visit, I obtained…one, in double cases, for Mr. Barnett, of Niagara Museum, for seven pounds.” (p.33) Could this possibly have been Rameses I?

I first encountered the mummies of Niagara Falls in 1986. I was in the process of changing careers, following at last my childhood love of ancient Egypt by studying history and hieroglyphs at the University of Toronto. With half a dozen chapters of Sir Alan Gardiner’s Egyptian Grammar under my bed, I was looking to practice my new skills. On a family trip to Niagara I decided to make the acquaintance of the renowned Ossipumpneferu, “…the oldest and best preserved mummy in North America.” I’d seen his read-bearded face on brochures.

On the second floor of the Museum, “Ossi” was lying in state in a glass display case with a fine view of the American falls. Near him were eight other human mummies, wonderful coffins, and assorted Egyptian and Egyptomania bric-a-brac. There were “squeezes”, very old ones from the tomb of Seti I, along with ushabtis amulets, mummified animals, and Ptolemaic coins. Nineteenth century plaster casts, life-sized, of tomb stelae, an Assyrian winged bull, and the “Black Obelask” were souvenirs of a biblical-history display. A seated pharaoh – a cast of Amenhotep III from the British Museum? – was so tall that I couldn’t read the name on his belt buckle. These casts had been refreshed with coats of bright enamels. Though lively the colours were not always correct; still the overall effect was probably quite authentic.

The coffins drew me. There were outer and inner cases, good quality, of the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth dynasty, covered in hieroglyphs; an intriguing black box of late-New Kingdom style; and a small coffin, rather plain, but with a charming red face – perhaps Saite, or Persian?

Four coffins, two with mummy boards, were the characteristic yellow of twenty-first Dynasty cases. They were crowded with lively scenes of the soul’s journey through the Underworld. Two male and two female – a family? Leaping to conclusions, I put the squeezes from Seti’s tomb together with these and came up with my first hypothesis: These were coffins found in KV17 by Belzoni in 1817! Maybe they were part of a cache, royal mummies housed in cheaper coffins? Maybe not. Peering under the lid, I saw loose shrouds – rewrappings after thieves had rummaged for gold? The bodies, as far as they were visible, seemed poorly preserved, nearly skeletal. One gentleman retained his curly black beard, not quite the usual style of a new Kingdom royal. No, the folks whose bodies were now in these coffins – protected by the beautiful images of Isis, Mut and the Four Sons of Horus – did not seem to be the original owners. Romans maybe? Or even Copts? The labels were of no help. Hundred-year-old handwritten cards claimed that these bodies were royal or noble.

Besides the unwrapped, coffinless mummy of a small woman, her black hair still dressed in many braids, was the label, “Princess Amenhotep, Daughter of Amenhotep II.” Her face disguised and disfigured by remnants of bandages and resins, her mouth gaping, teeth chipped and broken, she was the very image of a Hollywood horror. How undignified! How pitiful! I tried to imagine that face alive, young, perhaps beautiful. Her coiffure looked familiar. Queen Nodjmet and other ladies from the Royal Mummies Cache had worn their hair in similar braids. This woman did not look at all like a Roman. Had one of the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth Dynasty coffins been hers? At the entrance to the Museum was a fine coffin lid. The owner’s name was clearly written: Iawtaysheret, servant of the Divine Adoratrice, daughter of the Lady of the House, Tadiast, and the wab priest, Padiknumdjhuty. Iawtaysheret? Princess Amenhotep? Had either been the name of the woman who now lay exposed to every curious gaze? Though her mouth was open, she had no voice.

According to the old guide book, her sister-in-law lay next to her. Septnestp. The label helpfully continued that this mummy had once been the wife of pharaoh Amenhotep IV, and mother of his six daughters. Nefertiti? Nefertiti? The mummy did have a fine profile but both arms crossed over the chest, not just one, as seems to have been typical of royal ladies of the eighteenth Dynasty. Though the mummy was modestly covered from the waste down, the exposed chest looked decidedly masculine. Those crossed arms. A Ptolemaic gentleman, perhaps? Very likely, but wasn’t there a chance that this might be a New Kingdom royal, after all? Who’s still missing? Most of the eighteenth Dynasty male rulers are accounted for,[4] and the mummy in question didn’t look to me, at all like Akhenaten. Could he possibly have been a Ramesside king? “A nice Ptolemaic priest,” I told myself; but I started to call him “Rameses”, hoping that this ka would forgive the liberty. After all, it was as likely a name as any.

In the Museum’s place of honor, like a bearded Sleeping Beauty in a glass coffin, lay Ossipumpneferu himself. He was identified as a general who had saved Pharaoh Thutmose III from the attack of a raging elephant while the warrior-king was campaigning in Syria. The story sounded familiar. Was this Amenemheb, the army officer and oarsman, who had had his greatest adventures carved into the walls of his tomb, as if reporting to Amenhotep II?

“I was the very faithful one of the sovereign, LPH, the wise-hearted of the King of Upper Egypt, the excellent-hearted of the King of Lower Egypt. I followed my lord on his expeditions in the northern and southern country. He desired that I should be the companion of his feet, while he was upon the battlefield…”[5] A little further on Amenemheb related an extraordinary event which had occurred while he was hunting elephants with the previous king, Thutmose III: “I engaged the largest which was among them, which fought against his majesty; I cut off his hand while he was alive…while I stood in the water between two rocks.” The animals “hand” presumably was its trunk. Jean Francois Champollion had seen this inscription. Georg Ebers had published the text in Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache in 1873, and so had Francois Chabas in Melanges egyptologiques III in 1875. Whoever had written the identification cards had read, or at least heard of Thutmose III, Amenemheb and the elephant.

Could “Ossi” have been that eighteenth Dynasty royal companion, Amenemheb? Not in my most romantic imaginings would I fit the individual before me into the eighteenth Dynasty. His read hair and beard, and the pattern of his shroud resembled the Roman mummies found at Duch. “Ossi” was not North America’s oldest mummy, though he was indeed very well preserved. Though he was not that brave, Amenemheb, he was intriguing. Perhaps he had been a military man, after all, a member of the Roman garrison at Thebes.

In fact, all of the mummy labels had outrageous claims. Who could blame the original importers of these old folks from hoping that they were truly something special? Hadn’t I immediately jumped to the conclusion that they were friends of Giovanni Baptista Belzoni? Hadn’t Douglas purchased at least one of them from Mustapha Aga, who had access to one of the great discoveries of Egyptian archaeology? My reverie was disturbed by my fellow tourists, expressing disbelief.

“Are they real?”

“Nah, they’re just wax.”

As I knelt on the wooden floor copying the inscriptions, looking for names, people began to ask me about the dry and pathetic memento mori. “Yes”, I assured them, “these are real people. Those yellow coffins are three thousand years old. The coffin over there, the black one, is older than that.”

“Were they really kings and queens?”

“Probably not. But they were real people, real ambassadors from the past.”

By the early 1990s, I had visited the Niagara Falls Museum enough that Jacob Sherman, the manager, recognized me. He and I fell into a pleasant acquaintanceship. One afternoon he told me about his youth as a member of a member of a family whose business included mummies. He’d spent many weekends cleaning the glass of their showcases, dusting their coffins and sometimes lifting their old bodies to change the display. He asked me if I could read their names.

Their names. We both wanted to know their names. For Jacob Sherman, they were old friends, almost playmates from his childhood. What were they for me? Why did it – why does it – seem so important to find their names?

The middle Egyptian word for name is ren. For the Egyptians, a name was not a label, not something accidental or external. The name, for them, was an integral part of a person. The man sick of life laments in the Dialogue of a Man and His Ba that his “name stinks like bird dung on a summer day…”[6] and for this reason, among others, he no longer wishes to live in this world or in the next. Names mattered.

I saw my first mummy when I was eight years old. The body lay, small and strange, in its open coffin at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. My Brownie troupe had marched past and I shivered. A year or two later, testing my courage, I went right up to The Mummy. A label said that this was the body of a man named Antjau. I said his name out loud: “An-chow.” Without thinking, I crossed myself and said a little prayer for Antjau. After that, whenever I went to the Museum on a Sunday afternoon, I’d visit him, pray and have a chat. Knowing the name had changed my perception. The dried up corpse was no longer a scary “it”, but a sad and somehow friendly “him”. Names matter.

Thirty years later, kneeling beside the Niagara Falls mummies, I looked earnestly for names. Over the next fourteen years, this quest gave focus and direction to my studies. Maybe I am just stubborn, but I remember the last phrase of the Address to the Living. When Metjetji, a fifth Dynasty Overseer of Tenants, asked for offerings he assured those who were still on earth that “…anyone who will come to offer me, I will let him see that he recognizes that it is useful to offer a spirit in the Necropolis.”[7] I usually translate this more loosely: “If you pray for me, I will be your friend.”

I learned a great deal about the Niagara Falls Museum’s coffins. The black one is of the eighteenth of nineteenth Dynasty date, is well made, of good quality, but is without inscriptions. The smallest, plainest coffin, a boy’s, is broken at the foot, just where the name should be, but inside is a friendly, forward facing Nut, her arms reaching out to embrace. Three of the attractive yellow twenty-first Dynasty coffins seem to be anonymous, but one had originally belonged to a woman named Tahat. A beautiful painting shows this Chantress of Amen watching as her heart is weighed against the feather of Truth. Holding her hands, friendly and reassuring, are a charming green skinned genie with a cartoonish cat’s head, and a stylish lioness sporting ostrich feathers that look like donkey ears stuck in her hair.

The coffin lid of Iawtaysheret is part of a complete set. The inner coffin, with her name and titles, and filiation – until it’s recent departure from the museum, was displayed above a mirror – so that visitors could see the clear yellow-and-white bands of writing that promised her bread and beer forever. A large, plainer outer coffin matches it. But inside that coffin is another.

Fortunately, this mystery was easier to solve. The coffin bottom wedged inside Iawtaysheret’s outer coffin belongs to quite another set. It became wedged in this manner during a rearrangement of relocation of the display. When I asked what had happened to the rest of it, Jacob Sherman showed me an elegantly decorated lid, broken and badly in need of restoration and conservation, hidden away under the display. It bore a famous name: Nespakashuty. Had it been made for a relative of the vizier of pharaoh Psamtik I? Could “Ossi” (“Rameses”) have been Nespakashuty? The coffin had not been intended for the children whose mummies rested nearby. Patches of gold on the older child’s face placed him in Ptolemaic or Roman times. The other was a mere infant.

The confusion seemed hopeless. How were the mummies connected to the coffins? Or were they at all? Had the collection begun as Mustapha Aga’s tourist-pleasing mix-and-match of unrelated coffins and corpses from western Thebes? My studies had yielded a handful of names, none of which I could securely attribute to any of the Museum’s mummies.

Gradually I became more interested in the nine anonymous bodies. Whenever I came to visit I’d recite the offering formula: “May you be given bread and beer, beef and foul, linen and ointment, everything good and pure, such as the gods live on. For your ka.” But would it ever be possible to put a name into the prayer?

Others had tried. At one time an x-ray had been prominently displayed. Jacob Sherman filled me in on a fascinating story. In 1966 a German tourist, Meinhard Hoffman, noticed that one of the mummies was alleged to be the wife of Akhenaten. He was intrigued. Why was Nefertiti in Niagara Falls? How could one prove or disprove such a claim? Years later, Hoffman came across the story of how a nameless female mummy found in a side room of the Tomb of Amenhotep II in the Vakky of the Kings had come to be widely accepted as the famous Queen Tiye, mother of Akhenaten. As he reexamined the old snapshots he’d taken at the Niagara Falls Museum, Hoffman became convinced that the mummy with the braids could not possible have been Nefertiti – but that one of the others was! The labels simply had been mixed up! X-rays could prove who was who, he felt. Hoffman managed to get a ZDF television crew interested. More importantly, Egyptologist Arnie Eggebracht of Hildensheim and mummy specialist Wolfgang Pahl of Tubingen had become sufficiently intrigued to travel with the television film-crew to Canada to study the mysterious mummies firsthand. There was no publicity in Canada about their visit, but Jacob Sherman had a copy of the resulting film and their report, both in German.

When the Germans arrived in 1985, Sherman was hopeful that he might lean the identity of his charges. He closed off the Egyptian gallery for the duration of their visit and did everything in his power to he helpful. Dr. Eggebacht examined the entire Egyptian collection, advising which items were simply fakes, identifying the squeezes as such and recommending better ways to store and display the authentic artifacts. On the basis of Eggebracht’s recommendations, Sherman reorganized the gallery, removing the more questionable artifacts.

With the aid of a portable x-ray machine, Wolfgang Pahl and radiologist Liza bark examined all the Museum’s mummies and gave them official designations: NFM-M1, -M2 and so on. The four bodies in the yellow coffins, held fast by resins, could not be extricated without damage, so Sherman, ever careful of his charges, did not permit them to be removed; and thus they were examined and erayed inside their coffins. They did appear to be of late date, Romans or Copts The other human remains were studied more thoroughly, however.

A turban-wrapped severed head (NFM-M12) labeled “Wife of Seti I”, had greeted visitors as the entered the Museum. Gold patches on her skin suggested that she, like the young child, had lived in Ptolemaic or Roman times. Perhaps a beauty in her life, her head was on of many gruesome trophies brought back from Egypt by Nineteenth Century tourists. Does she have stories to tell?

And that child, NFM-M8. Dying at four or five years of age, he had been prepared for eternity with all the care that his family could provide. His little body disproves of the often-repeated slander that ancient peoples did not invest their feelings in young children. What tales might this youngster tell of his diet and his fatal illness?

There were more puzzles when the other child, NFM-M9 was x-rayed. His little body is only fifty-six centimeters in length. Thought he probably had died before his second birthday, he had nonetheless been properly mummified, with removal of the braid through the nasal passage. But why were his left and right tibia missing? Had his body been disturbed by the tomb robbers and then restored by pious hands?

The x-rays and other studies confirmed that “Ossi”, now officially NFM-M6 was indeed Roman. A very interesting Roman. Since the whole collection almost certainly came from the Luxor area, I began to wonder just when he had lived in ancient Thebes, and what his position had been. He was fairly tall, 1.6 meters and lived to a good age for his time, perhaps sixty. Had he known those Roman ruins alongside the Nile in downtown Luxor when they were functioning buildings, bustling with provincial Roman life? Had he worshiped at the basilica constructed within the Luxor Temple? Someday he may tell us more about life in Thebes in those first centuries AD. Perhaps careful study of his x-rays will reveal the muscle attachments built by wielding a gladius. We may learn what he ate, what diseases he suffered and how he managed to live nearly twice as long as normal in his time. The story of Thutmose III and the charging elephant may not be his, but he does have tales to tell.

Unfortunately for the film crew who had crossed an ocean to meet Nefertiti, neither an x-ray nor any scientific examination was required to prove that “Septhnestp”, the black body with arms crossed over the chest and the elegant fact, was not Akhenaten’s queen. This mummy had been completely unwrapped at some time,[8] and then modestly covered from the waist down with lengths of ancient linen. It required only a lifting of this sheet to reveal that the body was, in fact, male. But other findings were more ambiguous. The brain had been removed through the nose, the cranial cavity filled with resin and the internal organs eviscerated – as one would expect to find in a late-New Kingdom mummy. But the x-ray disclosed that the viscera had been wrapped and replaced within the body, a most unusual practice for that time. Or had they? There were many uncertainties about the x-rays; and the German team had wished to perform further tests, such as a CAT-scan. Under the constraints of time and money, however, this had not been possible. After studying the x-rays and samples of hair and linen, Pahl and Eggebracht concluded that NFM-M5, a man of 1.60 meters, who had lived into middle age, was probably Ptolemaic.

The German investigation, sparked by an interested amateur, supported by a television network and conducted by experts had produced a tremendous amount of information. Many questions had been answered, but others remained. There was still little sense of who these folks had been. And so the old labels remained in place. In 1990 I began work at the Royal Ontario Museum and learned more about other students of Egyptology who had looked at the Niagara Falls mummy collection. Though Peter Lacovara has been quoted as saying that “…no one had ever gone to see it because it’s such a weird, out-of-the-way museum,”[9] the mummies and their coffins were not unknown in the world of Egyptology. Situated in a private museum, however, a few hours from major centers of Egyptological study, they fell into no one’s particular charge. Very few Egyptologists who did visit the Museum, passing through as tourists, had found time to make Jacob Sherman’s acquaintance or to discuss the Egyptian collection with him. Though many people had read the names on the coffins, no one had shared this information with the Museum’s manager. All those Egyptologists who visited, studied and made notes, did so informally and in isolation.

The Egyptian collection closest to the Niagara Falls Museum is at the Royal Ontario Museum. Winifred Needler, ROM curator from 190-1970, had gone to Niagara Falls about 1955, made notes and looked for names. Dr. Nicholas Millet, her successor as curator, has been a pioneer in the scientific study of mummies with ROM 1, the weaver Nakht.[10] He was interested in getting the Niagara Falls mummies properly examined. Millet visited the Museum and added his observations to Miss Needler’s notes, but his duties at the ROM, and limited financing, prevented any joint projects with the NFM.

In 1991 fellow student (now professor) Sara Orel told me that English Egyptologist Aidan Dodson was coming to Canada for a visit. I suggested that the three of us take a trip to Niagara. And so we did, on a beautiful March day, with bright sun making mounds of ice at the foot of the falls gleam like newly made pyramids. Jacob Sherman made a point of being at the Museum that Saturday to meet with us. We spent a good hour studying and discussing mummy NFM-M5 with him, the regal one who is not Nefertiti. A radiocarbon test would settle the question of whether he is Ptolemaic or later New Kingdom. Without access to government funding or grants from foundations, the Sherman family whould have to pay for such a test themselves. Jacob, as manager, had to decide if it would be worthwhile. Aidan’s and Sara’s delight and interest reassured him.

"So, who do you think he is?” Aidan asked later, as we ate our lunch, picnic style, overlooking the frozen river.

“I think he looks like those later Ramessides, IV, and V especially. Wouldn’t it be fun if he were Rameses VII or VIII or X?”

Why not Rameses I?” suggested Aidan. “He nears a striking resemblance to the mummy Seti I.” Sara agreed and, on the bus ride back to Toronto, we imagined the enormous publiscity that would come to Niagara Falls if NFM-M5 really is an Egyptian king. “Jacob would send him home,” I said “Picture the governor general and the Egyptian ambassador sitting beside the mummy, holding his hands all the way to a royal reception in Cairo! Twenty-one guns salute, army escort, just like Rameses II visiting Paris.”

Aidan Dodson and Sara Orel had not thought I was crazy to suggest the NFM-M5 was a Ramesside king! Emboldened, I approached Nick Millet, who had been unaware of the German study. After reading it, Millet called Professor Eggebracht and received his blessing to look over the mummies and coffins and to publish findings. There would be no funding, no official status to the study; but there, also, would be no objections. Accordingly, in July 1991, Nick Millet, Roberta Shaw, Lyn Green and I went down to Niagara. On this occasion, as she wrote up her notes, Lyn asked me what I called the regal gentleman. “I call him Rameses. For Luck.” I replied.

"Rameses-for-Luck he is then!”

Our pleasant fantasies were fueled in 1994, when Jacob Sherman had Geochron Laboratories run an AMS C-14 analysis of a muscle sample from NFM-M5. The difficulty of getting a “clean” date from a body which has been moved so often, and has been in contact with so many off materials over the years, makes this even more slippery than most C-14 dates. Nevertheless, Rameses-for-Luck tested older than expected. The dates were not Ptolemaic, but Third Intermediate Period, somewhere between 790 and 1085 BC. Rameses I reigned circa 1307-1306 BC[11] and Rameses X from 1112-1100 BC. Under the circumstances, rather promising, but hardly definitive. A series of test would be required, but these was no one to pay for them.

And there the story gets paused. At the Rom the new galleries were being installed. The Niagara Falls Mummies were private property; neither time nor money could be committed to studying them. By 1994 my own duties in the ROM Educational Department were taking me farther from Niagara Falls. I had less and less time to track down leads, and none at all to go through archives, looking for connections and missing information. Jacob Sherman, with a large museum to run, and a limited budget, could not hire researchers to excavate in NFM’s 140 year’s of correspondence. I wrote a preliminary report for the Sherman family, and shared it with colleagues, but never had time to formally publish it. I continued to write informally about the mummies from time to time,[12] and to talk about their coffins,[13] hoping that someone with time and money would someday take responsibility of studying my old friends.

Meanwhile, the family-business aspect of the Niagara Falls Museum was becoming more complex. Through endless patient effort, Jacob Sherman had reorganized the entire Museum. The beautiful whale had been cleared of a hundred years of graffiti. The rock-and-mineral collection, begun by Louis Aggasiz, was now organized and clearly labeled, a fine resource for students in the area. School groups visited the Japanese and Native American collections. The whole place looked more respectably museum-like than it had when Meinhard Hoffman visited in 1966. But modern, museum-quality control of light, heat and humidity was beyond the budget of the private operation. The city of Niagara Falls, erstwhile “Honeymoon Capital of the World,” having survived hard times, was experiencing new prosperity, the advent of casinos having encouraged a different sort of passion. The old corset factory, with its excellent view of the falls, had become prime real estate.

Enter collector Bill Jamieson. The Toronto businessman had visited the NFM over the years and become friendly with Jacob Sherman. Jamieson is a member of the Explorer’s Club, a real adventurer, who has lived in the Amazon jungle. His interest in tribal art and weapons has led to a large collection that includes skulls and shrunken heads.[14] In 1998 Jamieson asked Sherman about buying the Oceanic artifacts.

“How about the whole museum?”

“The building? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Not the building. Just the artifacts. All of them. Except the Daredevil Hall of Fame.” Sherman wanted to keep those objects for a small museum of local history.

In not much time than it takes to tell, Bill Jamieson had put a down payment on the best and biggest attic full of stuff imaginable. Jamieson realized that, thought the entire collection was filled with strange and peculiar treasures, the Egyptian material was the biggest draw and potentially could pay for the rest. He decided to sell the Egyptian collection separately. To sell, he’d need to advertise, and to do that, he’s need someone with knowledge of the collection. Mutual friends put him in contact with me. In the fall of 1998, I had the pleasure of writing a website for him describing the mummies, their coffins and the other Egyptian artifacts.[15] As we worked on the project, Jamieson became fascinated with the ancient Egyptians and took his first trip to Egypt that winter. Passionately interested in the future of the Egyptian collection, he hoped that the ROM or some other Canadian institution would give it a good home. That was not to be. The mummies crossed the border again in 1999.

Why did the NFM mummies leave Canada? Despite efforts by Heritage Canada, no Canadian institution was able to raise funds to bid on the collection. Some sought to purchase individual mummies of coffins, but Bill Jamieson realized that the collection, because of its history, is much more interesting and scientifically valuable intact. This meant, though, that the purchase price would be out of range for most public institutions. Other factors also limited the number of museums which could realistically consider purchasing the collection.

Nine mummies and nine coffins, with dozens of small artifacts of varying quality and importance will fill a gallery. Few museums have the space to house such a collection, nor the money to build to do so. And housing the collection would be only part of the expense. Without a skilled curator to direct research and conservation, it would still be merely a cabinet of curiosities.

The beautiful, intricately decorated coffins suffered during their years at Niagara Falls. There were damaged during their various relocations and inexpertly repaired. Their last home, the old corset factory, had no climate controls to moderate Niagara’s seasonal extremities. Until recently there had been no attempts to protect the wood and paint from natural light. Potential purchasers realized that years of effort of skilled conservators would be required to restore the coffins. Careful work in this area will not only make the coffins more attractive, it may even uncover a few more names.

As for the mummies, if they are to be more than side-show horrors, they will require years of scientific study. Appropriate research – involving DNA testing and a series of CAT-scans and other procedures – will be very expensive. Few museums could commit resources for all of this.

Even so, as news spread that the collection was for sale, there were interested parties in several countries. Dr. Peter Lacovara in Atlanta, Georgia, heard of it, even before the website was up, and became determined to win the prize for the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University, where he was curator of ancient art. His previous work in the Department of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian, and Eastern Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, had given Lacovara an expertise in Egyptian funerary arts that few can match. Despite the cost, he realized the potential of the collection. As the Museum director, Tony Hirschel, put it, “The quality is such that it would put Carlos on par with the great collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston…not in quantity, of course, but in quality.”[16] Atlanta put in the first bid. Hirschel appealed to the people of Atlanta for help with the $2,000,000 price tag. They responded enthusiastically, and the city has taken the collection into its heart.

Many questions will be answered by the work at Emory. DNA testing already under way should determine whether Rameses-for-Luck is really Rameses I – or VII, VIII. X or XI. It may be possible to prove that the small woman with the braided hair really was Iawtaysheret. It’s not likely that “Ossi’s” real name will ever be known, but we will learn something of his life.

When I miss my old friend from Niagara Falls, I think of Robert Frost:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry that I could not travel both,

And be one traveler, Long I stood,

And looked down one as far as I could,

To where it bent in the under Growth. Then took the other…

Many scholars visited the Niagara Falls Museum over the years, wishing they’d been able to stay and study the collection, to take that road and follow it to the end. But no one could. Now, thanks to the generosity of the people in Atlanta, and the skill and dedication of Peter Lacovara and his team at the William C. Carlos Museum, the world will soon have a map of that road not taken. We may even come to know the names of the Egyptians who lived along it.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] The basic history of the Museum can be found in the Educational Booklet of the Niagara Falls Museum, written by Louis Grigoroff. It is often reprinted. Under Bill Jamieson’s direction, professional researchers have since pursued original documents in the Ontario Archives and other places. I have the great good fortune to be a beneficiary of this work and draw upon it in this account, New and surprising details of the Museum’s history are continually being uncovered.

[2] Quoted in John Romer, Valley of the Kings (New York, 1981), 130.

[3] Ibid., 131.

[4] At least there are lots of bodies who might be Thutmosids. Readers of KMT are familiar with the difficulties of identification of these royal dead.

[5] The whole account can be found in James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt II, 227 ff.

[6] Translated by John L. Foster, Echoes of Egyptian Voices (Norman, 1991), 15.

[7] From a section of his tomb in Berlin, 32190. This translation by Christiane Ziegler in The Art of Egypt in the Age of Pyramids (New York, 1999), 411.

[8] Some of the mummies were formally unwrapped in the 1860’s by William Rooth, in the presence of two local business men, Charles Patten and George Simpson. As yet, no notes from those proceedings have surfaced. If they ever do, they should at least identify which bodies were in which coffins when they arrived in Canada.

[9] E.g., Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2.4.99 from the internet http://stacks.ajc.com. See also American Research Center in Egypt Newsletter 2000.

[10] Nicholas B. Millet, “ROM 1: mummification for the common people,” in Aidan and Eve Cockburn, Mummies, Disease, and Ancient Cultures (Cambridge, 1980).

[11] Dates are from J. Baines and J. Malek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt (New York, 1980), 36.

[12] E.g., “Excellent Mummies, Dated Labels,” KMT 3:4 (winter 1992-93), 37.

[13] Most recently at the American Research Center in Egypt’s 1999 annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois.

[14] Newspaper and magazine articles have stressed Bill Jamieson’s connection with shrunken heads, but few know that he personally delivered two Native American mummies which had been in the Niagara Falls Museum collection to the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa, so that their origin could be determined. Then he paid their way home to British Columbia. He takes human remains very seriously.

[15] The site is still up. Additional information about the history of the collection is added as it becomes available. Check out www.egyptianmuseum.com

[16] Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2.4.99.

About the Author Gayle Gibson studied Egyptology at the University of Toronto. She now teaches in the Educational Department of the Royal Ontario Museum. Her article, “How Tall Was Thutmose III? An Investigation into the Nature of Information,” appeared in KMT 11:1 (spring 2000), 60-65.