IF A HISTORICAL LINK between the Atlanta mummy and Rameses I can't be proved, other candidates must be considered. Many royal mummies were recovered from two major caches, the one at Deir el-Bahri and another in the tomb of Amenhotep II. "The kings you've got missing," says Dodson,"are Rameses I, Amenmesses, then you've got Rameses VII, VIII, X, and XI." He then proceeds to narrow the field. The tombs of Rameses X and XI in the Valley of the Kings were never finished, he notes. They were probably buried in the Delta, where the Ramesside pharaohs had established their capital, and their mummies are unlikely to have survived the wetter conditions there. Amenmesses, he continues, was a usurper and may not have been given a burial at all. "Which brings you to Rameses I and VII. I think that's where the debate is, and Rameses VIII, but we don't even know where he was buried, he only reigned for a few months." Rameses VIII, he says, probably did not have an elaborate mummification and burial. "So it is vaguely possibly Rameses VIII, but Rameses I or VII always struck me as the most likely"

The two pharaohs were separated by the better part of two centuries, Rameses I at the start of the 19th Dynasty and Rameses VII in the middle of the 20th, so a close examination of the mummy might yield clues as to which one it might be. "It looked to me late 18th or earlier 19th and not 20th because of certain things," says Ikram. "In the 20th you start getting painted-on eyebrows and sometimes a black line just giving you a hairline over the forehead, and this one didn't have those features. Also in the later Ramessides you do start getting the eyeballs stuffed [with linen] or with a dried-up little onion bulb under the lid so you have a feeling that there is something going on and it's not just blank space. Again, this mummy didn't have this." Although it was rewrapped to some extent during the 2 1 st Dynasty, and later stripped by tomb robbers, Ikram finds some evidence from the remaining scraps of original linen on the mummy The wrapping around the neck, she says, is "absolutely" like that on Seti I. And on the stomach, 'first you have very fine linen closest to the body then slightly cruder linen on top, so even the positioning of the linen and the fineness of the linen match with what I have seen with Seti I." The embalming incision is a less certain indicator. Its position is not wrong for an early 26th Dynasty date, according to Ikram, but "I think it is more New Kingdom... It is actually at a slight angle, which is post-Thutmosis III, which makes it more late 18th, early 19th, even more precisely."

Rolls of linen inside the Atlanta mummy's chest, below left, suggest it is earlier than the 20th Dynasty, as does the amount of resin inside its skull (white area). Widely splayed toes would have been wrapped individually and perhaps, like Tutankhamun's been encased in gold sleeves.

So, from its exterior, the mummy would appear to be earlier, closer to the time of Rameses I, rather than later. But what about inside? Here, x-ray images and CAT scans made at Emory come into play The amount of resin, which fills half of the skull, suggests to Ikram early 19th Dynasty rather than later 20th. Another clue comes from the images showing rolls of linen inside the mummy's chest. Resin-soaked linen is found in the body cavities from Seti I through Seti II. The only exception is Merenptah, who was found to be filled with a white mixture typical of the 21st Dynasty and probably inserted when his mummy was rewrapped then. The later Ramesside mummies Siptah and Rameses IV were packed with dried lichen, and Rameses V with sawdust. 'You seem to get from the middle of the 20th Dynasty some rather unusual packing, probably as precursor to full stuffing of the body, which you get in the 21st Dynasty," says Dodson. "So if Mr. Niagara hasn't got major stuffing in the abdomen that would lead me back in the direction of Rameses I."

With the mummy's own evidence seeming to favor Rameses I over Rameses VII, Ikram introduces a dark horse candidate for the Atlanta mummy Horemheb, the last pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty. "Everyone has been rattling on about Rameses I," she says, "and I would just like to throw into the broth [that] Horemheb's mummy is missing." But Nicholas Reeves has suggested that the bones found in his sarcophagus and elsewhere in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings in 1908 might include the pharaoh's remains. Funeral garlands in the tomb indicate to him it was used as a mummy cache in the 21st Dynasty. "Look at the tomb of Rameses II's children," Ikram counters. "Yes, there are lots of bones in it and they're all maybe 26th Dynasty I think Horemheb's tomb having some bones doesn't necessarily mean they're Horemheb's." The Atlanta mummy would fit what one would expect for Horemheb in terms of its mummification, says Gram. Since the bones from his tomb have not been studied and may no longer exist, it is impossible to determine if they were late 18th Dynasty or from intrusive burials of the 26th Dynasty as are found elsewhere in the Valley of the Kings. He can't be excluded from consideration as the mummy in Atlanta.

Of course, the Atlanta mummy needn't have come from the Deir el-Bahri cache. Several royal burials were discovered in the middle and late 1850s close to the mummy's purchase date. In 1857, Mariette's workmen found the burial of Kamose, the pharaoh who founded the New Kingdom, which had apparently been removed from his original tomb, been rewrapped, and reinterred in an isolated grave at Dra Abu el-Naga. Two years later, they found another isolated royal coffin there, that of Queen Ahhotep, mother of Ahmose I. There were also other caches. A tomb found at Sheikh Abd el-Qurna in 1857 had been used by the 21st Dynasty priests to cache a number of 18th and 19th Dynasty princesses, and a collection of papyrus scrolls bought in 1855 were said to have been found in a tomb full of mummies, another possible cache.

"The idea of gathering up mummies from plundered tombs and putting them somewhere safe is not unusual," says Dodson, commenting on the implications if the Atlanta mummy were actually Rameses VII. "And bear in mind that he's got a very shallow tomb in an extremely exposed spot. So, if the priests were going to start evacuating royal tombs his was probably evacuated first. It may have been he was first out before they fully organized caching and he was simply put in a little tomb somewhere in the Theban hills, and he was tripped over there in the 1860s or 1850s. He just happened to be a mummy which was found and happened to be sold." The same scenario, an isolated tomb and chance could also apply to Horemheb.

If the Atlanta mummy (top right) is a pharaoh's, the possible identification's are few: Rameses I (top left), Horemheb (bottom right), and Rameses VII (bottom left). none of the identifications can be proved. The historical link between Rameses I's mummy and the one in Atlanta is incomplete. Horemheb's remains might have been among the bones found in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings in 1908. The mummification techniques used on the Atlanta mummy are more consistant with a pharoah earlier than Rameses VII.

ONE OTHER AVENUE Of investigation remains open-the resemblance between the Atlanta mummy, Seti I, Rameses II, and Rameses VII. Does it really mean anything? Bob Brier is skeptical: "We all know people who look like brothers but are not related. With mummies, this is a-little complicated because they are all desiccated, which makes them look a bit alike. Add to this that bandaging distorts the cartilage of the nose in similar ways and makes noses seem similar." These problems notwithstanding, both Egyptologists and the media have speculated about the resemblances, some claiming the Atlanta mummy looks just like Seti I, others maintaining it is closest to Rameses VII. I presented the images (see pages 20-2 1) to Adelphi University forensic anthropologist Anagnostis Agelarakis, and asked him if it was possible to determine familial relationships based on them. The slightly different angles, depths of field, lighting, and shading of the images compromises their value, says Agelarakis. "Any evaluations based on the images will have serious scientific flaws." So, simply looking at the profiles and guessing who is most closely related gets us nowhere.

To go a bit deeper, Emory called in James Harris, who took a side view x-ray image of the mummy's head. Harris, a former University of Michigan orthodontics professor, has x-rayed the royal mummies in Cairo. His images have the advantage of having been taken from the identical orientation. Those familiar with his work say that the closest match he found for the Atlanta mummy was Seti I, the son of Rameses I. There may be, however, difficulties with this sort of analysis. We have, for example, the mummy of Rameses VI, the father of Rameses VII, but much of his skull is missing. So for one candidate, the closest supposed relative can't be compared. In a larger sense, there is the question, how closely does the shape or morphology of our skull reflect our genetic heritage? What if the Atlanta mummy is Horemheb, who was entirely unrelated to the Rames side pharaohs, and he just happen to look more like Seti I than any of the others?

"We no longer believe the skull is an exact reflection of an individual's genetic makeup," says Agelarakis. "The head of a living human undergoes many changes during life that are dependent not only on the genetic data of the individual, but also on a plethora of other conditions. Hence, an evaluation based exclusively on morphology may not provide a great level of accuracy." He also sees a problem with comparing a few skulls without knowing more about the general population from which they come. As it is, he notes that while the three related mummies-Seti I, Rameses II, and Rameses VII-all have a slightly sloping forehead, the Atlanta mummy has a more bulging forehead. Furthermore, the Atlanta mummy seems to have, more prominent jaw muscle attachments, which can be related to age, diet, and tooth loss.

There is another problem with determining relationships based on photographs or x-ray images of the pharaohs' heads. 'We've not got the bodies of any of the mothers," says Dodson. For Agelarakis, not having the women is like "working in a 50 percent vacuum." He concludes that, based on skull shape alone, it is difficult to provide scientifically substantiated data supporting genetic similarity or difference between the Atlanta mummy and any of the others. To do this sort of evaluation, he says, one would need photographic and x-ray images of the front, back, top, and sides of the skull. That work has not been done, so yet another line of evidence about the mummy's identity is inconclusive.

THE ATLANTA MUMMY is scheduled to go on display at the Carlos Museum in late April, before returning to Egypt, perhaps this fall. For more than 140 years, the mummy was neglected and unrecognized. "Nobody was prepared to believe-it seemed too incredible-there could be a royal mummy in a freak show in Niagara Falls," says Dodson. Who is it? The mummification techniques and pose point to it being a pharaoh of the late 18th - or 19th Dynasties, but the historical evidence is equivocal, and none of the three candidates - Horemheb, Rameses I, and Rameses VII-can be entirely eliminated. The Atlanta mummy's estimated age at time of death, more than 45 years, doesn't help since all three came to power later in life. Perhaps identification will be made one day. DNA analysis might do the job, eliminating Horemheb as a candidate. Carbon dating would be able to separate Rameses VII from the other two. New evidence might also come from the Deir el-Bahri cache site, or a comprehensive comparative study of the royal mummies. But that is for the future. For now it is enough that the mummy, probably a pharaoh, will go home.

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MARK ROSE is executive editor of ARCHAEOLOGY. He would like to thank those who contributed their observations to this article and Jonathan Wickham of ZoeTV for sharing his research about James Douglas undertaken for an upcoming NOVA documentary on the Atlanta mummy. Travel to Egypt for this story was made possible by the International Executive Service Corps. For further reading, visit www.archaelogy.org

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