This mummy has been bought and sold, traversed the globe, and languished in a dusty Niagara Falls museum. Could DNA tests now being carried out reveal it to be more distinguished than was previously thought?

FATHER AND SON: Tests may reveal that the Niagara Falls mummy (above) is Rameses I, father of Seti I (below)

 

THE CANADIAN PHARAOH DNA tests may soon reveal that a mummy which until last year languished at the Niagara Falls Museum is actually Rameses I,founder of the 19th Egyptian dynasty, who ruled for two years around 1300 BC and is thought to have been pharaoh at the time of the exodus recounted in the Old Testament. The mummy's identity was suggested several years ago by a German Egyptologist. Using his own method of isolating the male chromosome, DNA expert Dr Douglas Wallace, of Emery University, Atlanta, hopes to be permitted to run comparisons with samples from Seti I, Rameses' son, and Rameses II, his
grandson, in the Cairo Museum.

Should it prove to be Rameses I, it will be the only royal mummy outside Egypt, and its present owners have promised to return it. The oft Sin (16Scm) man lies in a cardboard box, having lost his original coffins and bandage wrappingsThe incisions made to remove internal organs and the way the mummy's arms are crossed over its chest certainly suggest that it is a pharaoh.

In 1881, after two decades of rumour, a certain Mohamed Abd er-Rassul, from the vicinity of Luxor, admitted to Doud Pasha, the governor of the province, that an important royal tomb had been found. Inside were the mummies of Ahmose I, Amenhotep I, Thatmose III, Seti I, Rameses II, and Rameses III. A docket from one coffin detailed the reburial there of Rameses I, Seti I, and Rameses II. So Rameses I was obviously missing.

A honeymooning Montreal adventurer called Dr. James Douglas supposedly bought the royal mummy and four others for 150 Pounds each in Egypt in 1860.A year later, he sold it to Colonel Sydney Barnet&, the son of Thomas Bamett of Birmingham, England, who founded the Niagara Falls Museum in 1827. The Bametts were eager to expand their museum because they faced fierce competition from a rival museum based on the American side of the Falls. There was an enormous collection of stuffed animals, as Bamett pere et fils were both expert taxidermists. Prominate visitors included Abraham Lincoln, General Ulysses Grant, Jenny Lind, and PT Barnum. Thomas Barnett went bankrupt in 1878, and Saul Davis bought the museum and moved it to the American side in 1888.The moved back to Canada in 1958.

Lance Sieveking, father of FT editor Paul Sieveking, visited the museum in 1936, when it was on the American side.The handbill described it as "the Largest Private Enterprise on Earth", "the Oldest Museum in America" and "The Most Interesting Place in
Niagara".

In North American Binocular (1947), Sieveking wrote: "I should like to have spent several days strolling about its crazy galleries... There are six floors, and every one is crowded with a strange miscellany of exhibits, most of them beneath a pall of cobwebs and dust, their cases broken and cracked, their labels illegible with age, or not there at all. Some of the cases had been robbed, the label alone remaining...

"I think the handbill's author reached his most sublime heights with 'General Ossipumphnoferu, the Most Wondelful and valuable Curio in the World'. As an Egyptologist I hardly count, but somehow I feel that all is not well with the name 'Ossipumphnoferu'.The syllable 'pumph' doesn't seem to ring absolutely true..."

(In the opinion of Dr Nicholas Millet, a curator from the Royal Ontario Museum who visited Niagara Falls in 1979, the "General" is propably a commoner from the first century AD.)

When the Jacob Sherman closed the museum in 1998, the exhibits other than those in the Daredevil Hall of Fame were sold to William Jamieson, 44, the Canadian collector of shrunken heads and other curios [FT 106:40-41]. These included two-headed cows, a five-legged pig, Wild Bill Hickok's saddle and a humpback whale skeleton.There was also the 83 object Egyptian ollection, including nine coffins, eight mummies and a mummy head.

Jamieson offered the mummies and coffins to every museum in Canada, but when no offers were made, he sold them to Atlanta's Michael C Carlos Museum for US $2m in May 1999.

Cataract News, 1993; Niagara Falls Review, 29 May; Museum News, Sept/Oct 1999; National Post (Toronto) 14 June; Guardian, Sunday Times, 16 July; D.Express, 11 Aug 2000.