Mummies may begin trip to Carlos Museum by week's end
By Catherine Fox
staff writer
Niagara Falls, Ontario

The Carlos Museum's mummies are getting ready to hit the road for their trip south.      On Monday, a team of five curators and conservators -and two packers - from the Emory University museum arrived at the Niagara Falls Museum to begin preparations to move the $2 million cache of ancient Egyptian artifacts to Atlanta.      Wearing purple plastic gloves, the Carlos contingent began inspecting the museum's 83-piece purchase and shoring up the fragile objects, which look like they have been gathering dust since they were installed in this building in 1958. Using little brushes and special fixatives, the conservators fastened fragments that might fall off during the move.  "It's really exciting to get our hands on them," said Peter Lacovara, curator of Egyptian Art at the Carlos. "When I began at the museum one year ago I hoped they would improve the collection. but I didn't think they'd do it this quickly."

     The mummies and decorated mummy cases lie in vitrines like Sleeping Beauties- or Uglies, depending on how you feel about mummified humans, some of which are 3,000 years old. Sprinkled throughout the cases are scarabs, canopic jars (containers for the dead person's organs), even ancient baskets, along with reproductions of Egyptian sculpture and such oddments as a medieval-lookng pot with a cactus growing in it.

     In general, this Niagara Falls institution is a curious place, often looking more like a collectibles booth at the Lakewood Fairgrounds than a museum. The first floor houses the Daredevil Hall of Fame, a collection of falls memorabilia. The mummies share the second floor with dinosaur and whale bones, a display of origami and the plaster busts of Queen Victoria and Napoleon III, to name a few objects that crowd the room.

     William Jamieson, the Toronto collector who purchased the artifacts from the Niagara Falls Museum and sold them to the Carlos, also has been on the scene. A collector himself - though he specializes in tribals arts and shrunken heads - Jamieson, 44, is excited that the mummy collection is coming to Atlanta.

     "I really liked the Carlos' plan to keep them together and restore them," he said.

     The Carlos acquisitions are expected to leave Niagara Falls at the end of the week, transported - for free - by North American Van Lines. The details of their arrival in Atlanta are being kept secret for security reasons.

     Examples from the collection, purchased in February after an extraordinary public plea for funds, will go on view in July. The entire conservation process, a major undertaking, will take two years. Said Lacovara, "Some of these coffins look like they went over the falls.