The dark brown-black body of a man who may have ruled Egypt more than 3,000 years ago lies before me on a padded cushion in the conservation laboratory at Emory University's Michael C. Carlos Museum. Seeing it there--stripped of linen wrappings, arms crossed over chest, lids nearly closed over empty eye sockets, dried lips pulled back from teeth--I am amazed at the body's extraordinary preservation and feel an intense curiosity about its identity. Tempering these feelings is the knowledge that, whether or not they are a pharaoh's remains, they are from a person who died and was buried millennia ago only to be sold by tomb robbers in the nineteenth century and exhibited in a Niagara Falls museum alongside a two-headed calf and barrels in which daredevils braved the falls. A sad fate, but that will change because many scholars are now convinced that it is indeed a royal mummy, and Egypt is poised to reclaim it later this year.

Long-neglected, the mummy came to the public's attention two years ago, after the Niagara Falls museum closed its doors and its Egyptian collection was acquired by Atlanta's Emory University ("New Life for the Dead," September/October 2001). The media, including this magazine, noted the mummy's crossed-arms pose and a resemblance between its face in profile and those of the mummies of the 19th Dynasty pharaoh Seti I and his son Rameses II. Could the Niagara Falls mummy be that of Seti's father, Rameses I, which has never been found? If it were, said Carlos Museum curator Peter Lacovara, it would be returned to Egypt.

Looking at the royal mummies in the Cairo Museum, this past December, I could see that the one in Atlanta would not seem out of place among them, but I asked three Egyptologists who have seen it firsthand if they believe it could be a pharaoh's. "The mummification techniques used are certainly consistent with a 19th Dynasty mummy," says ARCHAEOLOGY contributing editor Bob Brier. "In addition, this is top-of-the-line mummification, a wealthy person who got what he paid for. Furthermore, the position of the arms is consistent with a royal mummy. So there are real reasons to entertain the idea that we have a royal 19th Dynasty mummy. "In Egypt, I spoke with Salima Ikram, a mummy specialist at the American University in Cairo. "I went there completely suspicious," she says, recalling her own trip to Atlanta. "The method of mummification is what I was looking at, and what it looked like to me was more late 18th, as in tail end of 18th, to 19th Dynasty. Obviously it is royal because of its arm position. "The high position of the Atlanta mummy's arms is, she says, unlike the lower crossed-arm pose found centuries later on some 26th Dynasty mummies.

"I first met this particular mummy something like ten years ago, when I went to Niagara," says Aidan Dodson of Bristol University, speaking to me in his Cairo hotel suite with a view of the Giza pyramids. "I walked into the room and looked at it and said, 'Oh my god, it looks like a New Kingdom pharaoh's mummy." Like Brier and Ikram, Dodson places great weight on the position of the mummy's arms. "There are," he says, "no mummies of the New Kingdom of which I'm aware with both arms fully crossed like that of anybody other than a pharaoh."

Given that the mummy may well be that of a pharaoh and that it beare a resemblance to Seti I and his descendants, it would seem a simple matter to compare their DNA to see if they matched. Knowing that the retrieval and analysis of DNA from Egyptian mummies has proved problematic in the past, Emory University geneticist Douglas Wallace began by first trying to extract it from the other mummies acquired from Niagara Falls, which are later and definitely nonroyal. He reportedly had some success, but before he sampled the possible royal one, Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Archaeology made it clear that comparative samples from the pharaohs in the Cairo Museum would not be forthcoming. "In Egypt," Hawass told me, "DNA testing is not permitted. From what I understand, it is not always accurate and 'it cannot always be done with complete success when dealing with mummies. Until we know for sure that it is accurate, we will not use it in our research. "Brier echoes Hawass' cautious approach: "We just haven't been able to that much information out of ancient Egyptian mummies. We are perhaps a couple of years off from being able do that, so I don't think DNA is going to help right now. "With DNA ruled out, any chance of identifying the mummy lies in tracing its history and making a close examination of it-inside and out-using both "eyeball" observation and high-tech scientific techniques.

THEBES WAS THE HEART Of Egypt during the New Kingdom, with the temples of Karnak and Luxor on the Nile's west bank and the necropolis on the east, including the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens. In the later nineteenth century, the area was already a tourist destination. "Luxor is a large village, inhabited by a, mixed population of Copts and Arabs, and doing a smart trade in antiquities," wrote English novelist Amelia Edwards in A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, an account of her journey through Egypt in 1874 and 1875. "As workmen, the Copts are perhaps the more artistic. As salesmen, the Arabs are perhaps the less dishonest. Both sell more forgeries than genuine antiquities. "Pitted against the looters, the forgers, and the wealthy foreign travelers who bought most anything was Auguste Mariette, a French Egyptologist who had been appointed head of the nascent Antiquities Service and given exclusive excavation rights by the Egyptian viceroy, Said Pasha, in 1858. After his death in 188 1, Mariette was succeeded by countryman Gaston Maspero.

Much of the speculation about the Atlanta mummy's identity has centered on the supposed resemblance between it (far right) and, from left to right, the mummies of Seti I, Rameses II, and Rameses VII. (The photograph of Seti I is reversed for comparison proposes.)

At the center of the Luxor antiquities trade was Mustaplia Aga Ayat. The consular agent for Britain, Belgium, and Russia, he took advantage of his diplomatic immunity to act as a middleman for tomb robbers and tourists. Quebec City physician James Douglas described him in his Photographic Views Taken in Egypt and Nubia (1860): "Mustapha himself may be considered one of the institutions of Thebes. He is to 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. "What is crucial about Douglas' account is a passage that begins by describing Mustapha fleecing "an English Gentleman" who paid him in advance for any jewelry that might be found on two mummies. The mummies were unwrapped and no gold or jewels were discovered. Then Douglas comments: "The first Mummy unwrapped was certainly a very good one, and its double cases [nesting coffins] were very good. During my last visit, I obtained a finer one, in double cases, for Mr. Barnett, of Niagara Museum, for seven pounds. "There is only one high quality mummy from the Niagara collection, so this passage must refer to the supposed royal mummy now in Atlanta. It appears that in the winter of 1858-1859 or 1859-1860-the date of his visit is uncertain-James Douglas bought a pharaoh for L7.

If Mustapha sold the mummy, where did he get it? Again, Douglas' account helps, stating that Mustapha dealt with "a couple of Arabs who resided in the tombs at Sheik Abd el Goorneh." There is little doubt that this is a reference to the notorious Rassul brothers, of whom Edwards' wrote in Harpers, "They live together, with their wives and families, in a terrace of rock-cut tombs...their ostensible calling being that of guides and donkey-masters, their private profession that of tomb-breakers and mummy-snatchers."

Rameses I, founder of the 19th Dynasty, because pharoh after the death of Haromheb, the last 18th Dynasty ruler. The 20th Dynasty began with Sethnakhte, a descendant of Ramese II whose exact parentage is unknown. The dynasty ended with Ramese XI.

The Rassuls are best known for their plundering of the royal mummy cache at Deir el-Bahri. "There were whispers about this time of a tomb that had been discovered on the western side, a wonderful tomb rich in all kinds of treasures," wrote Edwards of her stay in Luxor in 1874. The "whispers" were of finds from Deir el-Bahri, but authorities didn't break the case until 1881. "On arriving at, Luxor, I caused to be arrested one Ahmed Abd-er-Rasoul, an Arab guide and dealer, to whom a mass of concurrent testimony pointed as the possessor of the secret," Maspero wrote to Edwards. Ahmed and his brother Hussein were questioned by the provincial governor, the soles of their feet being beaten with sticks-the same torture undergone by tomb robbers interrogated three millennia before. Amazingly, they maintained their silence, even after being imprisoned for two months. But Mohammed, the eldest of the brothers, later confessed and led Emile Brugsch, Maspero's assistant, to the Deir el-Bahri tomb. Brugsch was astounded by what he saw, "reaching the turn in the passage, a cluster of mummy cases came into view in such number as to stagger me." In the tomb, originally carved for a 21st Dynasty high priest of Amun and his family, were forty mummies and coffins, including royals from the 17th through 20th Dynasties, New Kingdom nobles, and members of the 21st Dynasty priest-king Pinudjem I's family.

	James Douglas (above, at right) had bought the Atlanta mummy in Egypt by 1860. It might have come from a royal cache at Deir el-Bahri. At left, Gaston Maspero (reclining) and Ahmed Kemal (center) of the Egyptian Antiquities Service visit the cache site with tomb robber Mohammed Adb er-Rassul (left, in white).

From the testimony of ancient judicial proceedings recorded on papyrus and the evidence of the tombsthemselves-artifacts in disarray and sealings broken-we know that the burials were often violated in antiquity, sometimes soon after interment. At the end of the 20th Dynasty, during a period of weakened rule, impoverishment, and upheaval, matters became critical, and the priests and officials of the royal necropolis began to dismantle it. Continuing through the 21st Dynasty, the tombs were opened and the dead stripped of their treasure-for which the living had a need-then rewrapped, placed in recycled coffins, and cached in a few places for safekeeping.

The necropolis workers left a record of their efforts: graffiti on tomb walls noting the removals of pharaohs and labels or dockets on the new bandages and coffins identifying the deceased. From these, we know that by Pinudjem I's death in 1026 B.C., the remains of Rameses I and Rameses II had been removed from their tombs and placed in Seti I's. Around 958 B.C., the three pharaohs were moved to Queen Ahmose-Inhapi's tomb before being placed in the cache at Deir el-Bahri in about 918 B.C. But although the lid and fragments of the bottom of Rameses I's coffin were found there, his mummy was not.

Could the Rassul brothers have found the cache before 1860 and through Mustapha sold the mummy of Rameses I to James Douglas when he visited Luxor? Ahmed claimed he had found it while searching for a lost goat in 1875, but the real discovery date is unknown. "My own feeling has always been that pushing the discovery back into the 1860s is stretching it a bit," says Eton College Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves, but he notes that the late A.F. Shore of Liverpool University suggested to him that a papyrus Book of the Dead in the British Museum was probably acquired by the future Edward VII when he visited Mustapha at Luxor while touring Egypt in 1869. The papyrus was written for Nodjmet, a noble women whose mummy, coffin, and grave goods were found in the cache. So it seems likely that it came from the cache and that the Rassuls had found it by at least 1869. This is consistent with Maspero's suspicion, which he mentioned to Edwards in an 188 1 letter: "Having noted how Egyptian antiquities of every description were constantly finding their way to Europe, I came ten years ago to the conclusion that the Arabs had discovered a royal tomb."

For Peter Lacovara, closing the gap between the discovery of the cache, around 1869, and the purchase of the Niagara Falls mummy, around 1859, to only a decade helps make an identification of the mummy as Rameses I more plausible. "If it is Rameses I," he tells me over coffee at the Carlos Museum, "then perhaps the Rassuls unwrapped it and found no jewelry because the 21st Dynasty priests had already stripped the royal mummies. They didn't then bother to unwrap the others which is why they survived intact until the cache was seized by the Antiquities Service in 188 1." Brier, however, is skeptical that the Rassuls could have kept the cache secret for a decade. "It's a hell of a long time for it to be festering," agrees Dodson.

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