Paul Waldie
National Post

Ric Feld, The Associated Press DID PHARAOH SPEND MORE THAN A CENTURY AT NIAGARA FALLS?: A mummy at the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta, Ga., awaits DNA testing to see if it is the body of the Pharaoh Rameses I. The mummy under scientific scrutiny is one of nine mummies, a mummy head and nine Egyptian coffins the U.S. museum purchased from a private collector in Toronto for US$2-million. The mummy was part of the collection at a curios museum in Niagara Falls for decades. Canadian institutions, such as the Royal Ontario Museum, were offered the artifacts but declined.

Researchers in Atlanta plan to test DNA from a mummy that sat in an oddity museum in Niagara Falls for decades to see if it is the body of a famous Egyptian pharaoh.

The Niagara Falls Museum displayed the mummy for 138 years as part of its collection, which included two-headed cows, a five-legged pig, Wild Bill Hickok's saddle and a humpback whale skeleton.

The display also had nine Egyptian coffins, eight other mummies and a mummy head.

The museum closed last year and the collection was sold to Bill Jamieson, a Toronto collector who specializes in shrunken heads.

He offered the mummies and coffins, most of which are 3,000 years old, to every museum in Canada, including the Royal Ontario Museum, which has one of the country's few Egypt collections. When no offers came forward, he sold the artifacts to the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta for US$2-million.

"There was interest from [the ROM] but I think the director squished it," Mr. Jamieson said yesterday.

Dr. Peter Lacovara, an Egyptologist at the Atlanta museum, said he jumped at the chance to acquire the coffins and mummies. "They were in terrible condition. But they were beautiful coffins," he said yesterday.

Dr. Lacovara added that there had always been mystery surrounding the Niagara Falls mummies. The Egyptian government recovered most of the royal mummies from tomb robbers during the late 1800s and they are housed in a museum in Cairo. However, some of the royal mummies were never found.

A German Egyptologist claimed several years ago that one of the Niagara Falls mummies could be Rameses I, who ruled for two years around 1,300 BC.

To help solve the mystery, Dr. Lacovara approached Dr. Douglas Wallace, a renowned DNA expert at Emroy University, which is affiliated with the Carlos museum. Dr. Wallace had recently developed a way to isolate male Y chromosome DNA, which would be the only way to definitively tell whether this was the mummy, Rameses I, or not, Dr. Lacovara said.

"The collection came to the one place in the world at the one time in history where its identity might be recoverable," he said.

This summer, Dr. Wallace and his team hope to extract DNA from the mummy believed to be Rameses. It will be compared with DNA from the mummy of Seti I, Rameses's son, which is in Cairo. If it is the ancient pharaoh, it will mark the end of a journey for the mummy that began during a honeymoon in 1860.

Dr. James Douglas, a Montreal adventurer, was visiting Egypt with his new wife when he bought five mummies for a few hundred dollars a piece. Dr. Douglas was one of several notorious dealers in ancient artifacts.

"There were a lot of sleazy characters back then," said Mr. Jamieson, who has Dr. Douglas's journal from that trip. "They would find a good coffin and find a good body, put it together and sell it."

Dr. Douglas sold the five mummies to Sydney Barnett, the son of Thomas Barnett who founded the Niagara Falls Museum in 1827. The Barnetts were eager to expand their museum because they faced fierce competition from a rival museum based on the American side of the Falls.

The Barnetts went bankrupt in 1880 and Mr. Davis bought the museum and moved it to the American side. The museum moved back to the Canadian side in 1954.

Mr. Jamieson said the museum's owners delighted in playing up their collection. The mummy now being investigated was billed as a royal mummy mainly because the arms on the body are crossed, he added.

"The museum had displayed it as a royal mummy," he said. "But I don't think they really took it seriously. I think it was just kind of a joke."