Ancient Egyptian artifacts cross Canadian border on their way to Emory museum where it will take at least two years for the conservation to be complete.
By Catherine Fox
staff writer

Ever since ancient travelers discovered the pyramids, Western civilisation has been fascinated with the Egyptian way of death. Millenniums later, in 1976 to be exact, an exhibition of artifacts from a young pharaoh's tomb was the first museum block buster.      Surely, you remember King Tut.

     The cross-generational success of that show, and others since then, helps explain why five staffers from the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University have assembled with a free-lance conservator and two packers in a Niagara Falls, Ontario, museum on a recent Monday. Their task: so prepare for the move south the 83 artifacts - 1O mummies (one of which may be the only royal mummy outside of Egypt), nine coffins and accessories - that the Carlos bought for $2 million.

     This will be a new experience for everyone.

     "I've moved labs and I've moved collections, but not objects of this size, and certainly not mummies," says Carlos conservator Therese O'Gorman. "That's why I chose this team with care. I wanted people with a lot of energy who would be up to problem-solving by the bour"

     One of the last known collectlens of ancient mummies and coffins in private hands, the cache has been displayed in this three-story building, formerly a "women's foundation" manufacturing plant, for 30 years. But the mummies, coffins and assorted accouterments of the ancient burial ritual - some of hem 3000 years old - arrived in North America in stages. In the latter half of the 19th century, Canadian Sydney Barnett purchased some in the 1850's and '6Os for his father's museum of curiosities, The Niagara Falls Museum, and the Davis family, the subsequent owner of the museum, purchased more in the 1890s.

     Over the years, the collection moved back and forth from the Canadian to the, American side of the falls, changing owners as well. Jacob Sherman purchased the museum in 1942, and his son, also named Jacob, is now the director.

     Tracy Doan, 33, who works in the gift shop, remembers seeing the mummies as a child - displayed exactly as they are now, on the second floor above the DareDevil Museum, an exhibit in the same building devoted to those who have braved a ride over the falls; it includes the barrels and other homemade contraptions, newspaper accounts and assorted memorabilia.