Toronto Life, March 2002

Since his death at the age of 45, he has been exhumed, robbed, stripped naked, and made to suffer countless other indignities at the hands of thieves, smugglers and showmen. If he really is who we think he is, isn't it time he be allowed to go home? BY ROBERT HOUGH

THE MUMMY KNOWN AS NO. 1999.1.4 IS SHELVED, BOXED, lidded and labelled. He is naked, and for this reason is sometimes also referred to as "the unwrapped mummy." The room in which he is stored is dark, though the lights are turned on when visitors arrive to have a look, something that has been occurring more and more often of late. The temperature is kept at 70 degrees Fahrenheit (plus or minus two degrees), and the humidity is a constant 30 per cent. The box in which he lies is made from acid-free corrugated cardboard, and he is on his back, facing upward, an old man napping. His pose, as many have noted is demonstrably regal: ramrod stiff, arms crossed over his chest, a straightened left thumb suggesting he once held a sceptre. The undamaged condition of the phallus indicates that it was, at one time, separately wrapped, which means he was likely a man of importance. His toes are splayed, a sign they were once sheathed in the little gold digit thimbles worn by New Kingdom royalty.

The grand manner in which he's been preserved also suggests that he was embalmed by royal mummifiers, as opposed to curb side marketplace mummifiers. After suctioning his brains out through his nose they slit open the side of his abdomen and removed his stomach, liver, lungs and intestines so they could be separately preserved in Canopic jars. Then, once they'd extracted every last drop of moisture from his body via coarse salt called natron, they stuffed his chest cavity with rolled linen, so it wouldn't collapse under the force of the ages.

In other words, someone went to a lot of trouble to ensure he looked good throughout eternity. Mostly they succeeded. Though he has shrivelled, and his skin has blackened, and his clavicle has started to protrude, and his lips have parted to form the grimace of someone suffering from an eon's worth of reflux, it is nonetheless true that for a man who has been dead for 3,300 years, he could look a whole lot worse.

You also have to consider that since his burial at or about the age of 45, he has been on a long and fantastical journey, much of it spawned by the snakish interests of thieves, smugglers and showmen. Then, in 1999, thanks to the intervention of a Toronto-based businessman, he was acquired by the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta, Georgia. where a team of Egyptologists finally took a good, long look at him, their conclusion rippling excitement throughout the worlds of Egyptology and archaeology alike. It seems that Mummy No. 1999.1.4 may be none other than Ramses I, progenitor of Seti I, Ramses the Great, and all the other Ramseses whose likenesses dot the tourist haunts of modern-day Egypt. If this is true-his current owners are working up a series of DNA tests-he will be the most intact Egyptian king to be found since Tutankhamen, and the first king ever to be displayed by a museum outside of Egypt. It will also mean that, after centuries of wandering, he will finally be allowed to go home.

IN ANCIENT EGYPT, IT WAS RELIEVED THAT when a king died, his spirit joined the sun god Ra and that he spent eternity riding the cosmos in Ra's celestial boat. Back on earth, his body continued to work, spreading goodwill and positive energy to the people of his land. He could only do this, however, if he stayed put: the king's tomb was like a nuclear reactor, with the body acting like the plutonium. If you took the body away, the whole system failed. For this reason, the Egyptians went to great lengths to ensure that once in his tomb a king stayed there. Guards were posted, entrances sometimes hidden and sarcophagus lids built to weigh hundreds of pounds. (Contrary to popular belief, curses were not a defence method employed by royal tomb builders. Though a few have been uncovered in the graves of the workers who built the pyramids-one reads "Anyone who does anything bad to my tomb, then the crocodile, the hippopotamus and the lion will eat him"-archaeologist have yet to find a curse in the tomb of a king or queen.)

These precautions more or less worked until the end of the New Kingdom around 1100 BC, when the dynasties of Egypt began pulling out of Luxor and making their mark in the Nile delta north of the original Old Kingdom settlement of Giza, Memphis and Saqqara. This relocation costs money, and it was the pharaohs themselves who came up with the idea or raiding tombs back in Luxor to raise funds with a specious alacrity, tomb robbers were dispatched to the Valley of the Kings, the famous burial ground outside Luxor, and the plundering-un-graciously by the descendants of those bring plundered-began.

They were looking for gold-gold sarcophagi, gold burial masks, gold lances, sceptres, mirrors, stools, and jewellery. Everything else, including the mummies, was thrown in huge covered pits archaeologists refer to as caches; it is believed that No. 1909.1.4 was relieved accoutrement and then dumped along with dozens of other bodies, in a pit toward the north end of the valley, known as the Deir el-Bahri cache. Here he remained, untouched and forgotten, his skin slowly carbonizing, until the middle of the 1800s, a time when Egypt was afflicted by severe drought and famine.

The crumbling economy caused many heads or households to turn, in time-honoured Egyptian fashion, to grave robbing. Two of the most famous thieves were the Rassul brothers of Luxor; who, sometime around the, 1850s, discovered the Deir el-Behri cache and began selling its contents to the wealthy Victorian explorers who travelled down the Nile in flat-bottomed sailboats called dahabiehs. In many ways, the brothers Ahmed and Hussein were victims of their own success; so many of their antiquities were showing up in foreign museums that they were eventually taken in by police representing Daud Pasha, the provincial governor a man not known for kindness. (It was his draconian taxation policy that had collapsed the already weak economy, thereby kick-starting the rash of grave robbing he was now trying so hard to stop.) According to Egyptological lore, the brothers were asked politely where their cache
was but they refused to talk. Their interrogators asked again, this time threatening to charge them with trafficking in cultural artefacts. The brothers refused again. Pasha's men then strung up the brothers and tortured them by stripping the skin off the soles or their feet. The brothers still refused to talk, their tongues loosening only when they realised that not only would Parhn likely make good on his threat 10 start killing family members but that he would probably relish doing so.

During the brothers' tenure as the pre-eminent grave robbers of the day, one of Ahmed Rassul's repeat customers was a Canadian doctor named James Douglas. A dour-looking Scot, Douglas was educated at the University of Edinburgh. He practiced medicine in Greenland, India and Central America before settling down in Utica, New York. There, according to his memoir, he ran into a spot of trouble. Like many surgeons at the time, he performed medical experiments on cadavers dug up by grave robbers, an illegal practice that was generally overlooked so long as the bodies being experimented on weren't likely to be missed. One day, in the winter or 1826, a "contractor" in Douglas's employ accidentally presented him with the corpse of a man who had been one of the leading citizens of Utica. Douglas either didn't notice or didn't care, but a patient who wandered into the dissecting room recognized the body, commenting: "I guess I never expected to see my old friend P. again." Fearing imprisonment. Douglas and his wife decided on "immediate flight": they packed a few belongings onto a sleigh, drove it I25 miles to Ogdensburg, New York, and crossed over the frozen St. Lawrence into Canada.

He relocated to Quebec City, where he founded its first lunatic asylum. In the winters, he would travel to Egypt, each time buying for himself a mummy from the Rassul brothers, ultimately displaying his collection on the front porch of his house, the corpses facing frontward in open caskets like a band of macabre watchmen. (After his death, the mummies went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.) Often he was accompanied on his travels by his son, James Jr., who shared his father's love of all things Egyptian. In November of l860, James Jr. married. For a honeymoon, he and his wife took a trip down the Nile with a party of other Canadians, the details of which are preserved forever in his travelogue, where he outlines everything from the food served on board dahabieh to the hieroglyphs of Karnak to the interior construction of the Saqqara step pyramids. He also describes meeting his father's favourite connection, a local consul and gadfly named Mustapha Aga Ayat, who as a sideline arranged deals between the Rassul brothers and gentleman explorers.

In this journal, James Jr. portrays Mustapha as follows: "He is now about fifty years of age is dark in complexion, of Bedouin extraction, speaks tolerably good English, is greedy, grasping and unscrupulous, yet, among the Arabs, sustains a high character for hospitality and openhandedness....[He] will assuredly cheat you if he can." It seems, however, that the younger Douglas overcame his reservations, he went, and bought a Rassul brothers mummy anyway, paying Mustapha seven British pounds.

A few weeks later, the mummy came to Canada, his brittle corpse stuffed into a freight container, his bony black arms holding himself for comfort, having no idea what indignities lay in store.

THOUGH LITTLE IS KNOWN ABOUT THE EARLY HISTORY or Thomas Barnett, we do know that he was a taxidermist, a curiosity enthusiast and an impresario of the highest order. An Englishman born in l799, he immigrated to Ontario sometime in the 1820s. In 1827, he opened a museum overlooking Niagara Falls, filling it with the calibre of display one might expert from a Niagara Falls curiosity emporium: stuffed two headed animals, a pair of moccasins once worn by Sitting Bull, a saddle taken from a Wild Hill Hickock rodeo show. According to a poster from around 1850 (picture a dozen different typefaces), his was an institution containing "one hundred thousand rare and beautiful specimens of Birds, Animals, Minerals, Fish, etc. Egyptian Antiquities, Indian Curiosities, Living Animals." He had antique coins, Chinese relics, old shells, fossils, and a pair of live buffalo, whose manureish odour offended Barnett's neighbours. Nothing if not single minded, Barnett had a dog with no forelegs named Skipper whom he pulled around in a little harness fashioned with wheels. When Skipper passed on, he, too, was stuffed his sausage-shaped body put on display.

In 1860, Barnett's son, Sydney, travelled to Egypt with a party that included a honeymooning Quebecer named James Douglas Jr. when Douglas bought the mummy from Mustapha Aga Ayat it seems he was not purchasing it for himself or for his eccentric father, but for Sydney Barnett. Thus Mummy No. 1999.1.4 did not join the mummies on the veranda of the Douglas family home and instead went to the curio museum operated by Thomas Barnett.

Upon seeing his first mummy, Barnett was so pleased that he immediately dispatched his son back to Egypt. This time, having been shown the ropes by James Douglas Jr., Sydney Barnett returned with three more mummies-also likely procured via the Rassul brothers-along with their coffins and the usual array of artefacts: wooden statuettes, Canopic jar, burial masks, Ptolemaic coins, plaster casts, funerary cones, carvings and the obligatory mummified birds. All joined Mummy No. 1999.1.4 to become the Niagara Falls Museum's Egyptology collection.

Anthropologically speaking, it was a moment of supreme ludicrousness. Here were four well preserved Egyptian mummies, exhumed from a cache holding the missing kings and queens of the 19th Dynasty being displayed by a man with all the acumen of a sideshow barker. Having neither scruples nor the faintest idea what he owned. Uarnett described one of them in a way that suggested she was the renowned Queen Nefertiti, a bold and ridiculous lie. Most visitors-given they were in a museum whose proudest possession was a five-legged cow-assumed the mummies were fakes. Barnett himself probably thought they were fakes. And while the mummy collection reportedly attracted some new visitors, the museum was nonetheless going broke, mostly thanks to the competition posed by a museum owner named Saul Davis on the U.S. side of the Falls. (Clearly, the IV relationship between Uarnett and Davis was one of intense and mutual loathing. Local papers report that in 1870, member- of both families met in the street, intending to settle their differences once and for all. Shots were fired, and while no Barnetts or Davises were killed, an innocent bystander was; two of Davis's sons, thugs by the name of Edward and Robert, were convicted and jailed.)

In 1878, Thomas Barnett did indeed go bankrupt. The contents of his museum were bought at public auction by none other than Saul Davis. The mummy crossed the border, and lived for the next 80 years in the States, during which time he gained the company of five more mummies, possibly of Creek or Roman provenance, purchased by Davis from a museum in Chicago. One of Davis's sons later sold the museum to a man named Edward Noonan, who sold it to a Californian named Carlton Frank. who in turn sold it, to the Sherman family of Niagara Falls, New York, in 1942. The mummy crossed back to the Ontario side of the Falls in 1958, when the museum relocated to an old corset factory beside the Rainbow Bridge. There, he was unceremoniously deposited in a glass cast on the second floor, flanked by a pair of child mummies to one side and a female mummy whose hair had twisted into dreadlocks on the other. He stayed that way until 1998, when a Toronto businessman came to the rescue.

WHAT IS PERHAPS MOST INTERESTING ABOUT BILL Jamieson and there are many things interesting about Bill Jamieson - is the way in which he has created the lifestyle of a slightly eccentric Victorian gentleman explorer, albeit transplanted to the urban wilds of the 21st century. His home a 5800 square-foot warehouse-loft in the fashion district - has five ornate fireplaces, a winding three-storey staircase, and case after case of curiosities, from shrunken heads from the Jivaro tribe of Ecuador, to human-hair battle shields from the Dyak tribe of Borneo, to scabbards used by the headhunters of Nagaland, India. His furniture is large and leather, his walls mostly painted the deep burgundy used in art galleries. On the second level, the back end of a 19th-century hearse, which Jamieson has converted into an aquarium for his collection of salt water fish, protrudes from a wall. His office is in his home, and he spends much of his day on the phone, in the past year, he has sold shrunken heads to American film director Tim Burton and the singer of the rock band Korn. Currently, he is trying to unload a humpback whale skeleton originally owned by P.T. Barnum and a Cheyenne war shirt worn during Custer's last stand.

Before becoming a dealer in "tribal art." he worked in construction-slash-real estate development. He had also been an ardent traveller and a member of the New York-based Explorers Club for some time. In 1994, he took a trip to the Ecuadorean Amazon, travelling deep into Jivaro territory, where he drank a powerful hallucinogenic called ayahuasca as part of a shamanistic healing ceremony. ("It was like a hundred hours of therapy," he says today, "packed into a single night.") When he returned to Canada, he immediately began reinventing himself. He has since travelled to Ecuador three times, each time participating in an ayahuasca ceremony. In true Victorian fashion, these experiences are forming the basis for his own memoir, which he plans to entitle Hallucinogenics, Shrunken Heads, Egyptian Mummies and the Sale of Ramses I.

In the spring of 1998, Jamieson was in Niagara Falls with a new girlfriend, and he decided to visit the old Niagara Falls Museum (which. in an uncharacteristic display of truthfulness, was then billing itself as "Canada's oldest museum.") While looking at the mummies and stuffed animals and old barrels used by Falls daredevils, he was struck with a sudden and overwhelming urge to buy everything in the museum. "It was a crazy idea." he says today, "Individuals do not wander into a museum and than offer to buy the whole thing. I didn't have the money, and my girlfriend pleaded with me not to do it. Yet I did it. And you know, I've thought about it over and over, and I think that maybe my decision to buy the museum had something to do with Ramses wanting to go home."

Sotheby's priced the museum's contents (the figure is confidential), and by November of 1998 Jamieson had signed an agreement for the entire collection, minus some of the daredevil memorabilia. But in order to raise enough funds to finalize the purchase, he had to pre-sell a portion of the collection. As a natural first step, he contacted the ROM. There was initially some interest, though in the end the deal collapsed, largely because the then director of the ROM, an Australian named Lindsay Sharpe, felt that the museum did not have sufficient money to adequately restore and show the mummies, Jamieson then intended to go to the foreign marketplace, his problem being that the Department of Cultural Heritage regulates all Canadian exports deemed to be of "outstanding significance and national importance." Items that qualify have to be offered to Canadian institutions for purchase before being sold abroad. And while Jamieson's mummies were clearly Egyptian in origin, they had been on Canadian soil long enough (more than 35 years) to be considered Canadian by the bureaucrats overseeing our cultural properly laws.

Thus began the arduous process of collecting rejection letters from every major museum in Canada, including those without formal Egyptology departments, or in fact a single Egyptgist on staff. Finally, Jamieson was able to put his mummies up for sale. Throughout the winter, he heard from various institutions around the world, including one operated under the auspices of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Negotiations ensued and in March of 1999 Bill Jamieson sold his mummies along with accompanying artefacts, to the Michael C. Carlos Museum for $2 million (U.S.). Three months later, a team of Egyptologists and conservators, arrived with a packing crew. They spent a week crating the highly delicate mummies into wooden boxes, and then trucked them all to Atlanta.

THE FIRST INDICATION THAT MUMMY No. 1999.1.4 might in fact be royalty came well before Bill Jamieson's involvement. Back in 1966, a German tourist visiting the Niagara Falls Museum was shocked to see a mummy identified as Queen Nefertiti, whose famous limestone bust resides at the National Museum in Berlin. As the story goes, the tourist went home and puzzled over his discovery for two decades, finally persuading a film crew to do a story for a German newscast. In 1985, they arrived in Niagara Falls, accompanied by a German mummy specialist named Arne Eggebrecht, who assured all concerned that the mummy touted as Nefertiti was an impostor. While on the premises, however, he took a close look at the unwrapped mummy and pronounced that the mummification technique was consistent with the type afforded royalty. He also noted anatomical traits common to the Ramses line (Ramses VII and VIII, as well as the original Ramses, have never been found). Nothing conclusive came of his assessment.

Years later, when Egyptologist were invited to look at the new acquisitions in Atlanta, the directors of the Carlos museum were more interested in the coffins that came with the other three Rassul brother mummies, as they are decorated with rare specimens of funerary art from the 21st and 25th dynasties. It was the unwrapped mummy, however, that piqued the interest of visiting specialists. Bob Brier, an Egyptologist and host of a Learning Channel series called The Great Egyptians, conducted a visual analysis; like Eggebrecht, he noted the distinct similarity between the unwrapped mummy and Seti I, the son of Ramses, who now lives in climate-controlled splendour in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Both, it seems, are about five feet five inches tall, balding, and endowed with the prominent proboscis common to the Ramses line - a feature Egyptologists refer to as the "Ra hook nose."

James Harris, a dentist and author of a book called X-raying the Pharaohs, conducted dental examinations, and sat in on the CT scans and X-rays performed at Emory University. He determined that the mummy must have been, if not the father of Seti I, then a very close relative. Finally, a mummification expert from the American University in Cairo named Salima Ikram examined the mummy, noting that the location of the embalming scar - the ancient Egyptian equivalent of an impressionist's brushstroke - indicated that he could have been preserved by the self - same mummifier who'd worked on Seti I.

Armed with this evidence, the mummy's new owners were eager to compare the DNA of No. 1999.1.4 to that of Seti. There was only one problem; though DNA testing along the maternal line is quite sophisticated, Y chromosome testing has not evolved to the point where lineage can be definitively determined. As they only have Seti's DNA for comparison, a team of researchers in the field of anthropological DNA at Emory are working up an accurate Y chromosome testing method. By anyone's estimate, it could take years. Says Peter Lacovara, the museum's curator of ancient Egyptian, Nubian and Near Eastern art, "We don't yet know when we'll know. And we don't know if we'll ever know. Sometimes the DNA just doesn't get preserved in these things."

It's safe to say that the directors of the Carlos museum are not in any hurry for the results to come in. With sensitivities over cultural piracy being what they are, the Egyptian government has made it known that should the mummy turn out to he Ramses, they would like him back. Ramses, lest anyone forget, was one of the kings who decorated Karnak, who opened the great turquoise mines of the Sinai, and who grandfathered Ramses II, the egoist behind the construction of Abu Simbel. As a result, the directors of the Carlos museum find themselves in a strange, contradictory position. While they want the mummy to be Ramses, something that would surely draw paying visitors, they do not want him to definitely be Ramses, for this would mean they would be honour bound to give him back to the Egyptians.

Currently, No. 1999.1.4 is scheduled to go on display at the Carlos museum in late 2003. If he does go home sometime after that, his return will almost certainly be accompanied by the sort of fanfare accorded royalty; in 1976, when Ramses II was sent to Paris to be treated for a fungus developing on his body, he was met at Le Bourget airport with a red carpet and a 21-gun salute. But for the mummy lying in state in Atlanta, a positive determination would lead to another, perhaps more salient, perquisite, for it would mean that the day had finally come when he was no longer referred to as the Rassul brothers' mummy, or the mummy from Deir elBahri, or the unwrapped mummy or Bill Jamieson's mummy, or even Mummy No. 1999.1.4.

Instead, he would once again be called a king.