Stolen, Smuggled, Sold

by Nancy Moses

  In any case, sometime before 1861, the Abd el-Rassuls moved the unwrapped mummy out of the tomb, carried it to Luxor, and gave it to Mustapha Aga Ayat, the dealer, who sold it to a Canadian for the Niagara Falls Museum. At least that’s what some Egyptologists think happened.

  The Niagara Falls Museum was Canada’s first museum, founded in 1827 by Thomas Barnett, an enterprising entrepreneur who decided to move his personal “cabinet of curiosities” into a retrofitted former brewery house and charge admission. By 1844, the museum, geared to Niagara Falls’ growing tourism market, held more than five thousand items, including specimens of mammals, birds, fish, shells, reptiles, and Native American artifacts. Beginning in the mid-1850s, in order to capitalize on the public’s passion for exotic Egypt, Thomas Barnett sent his son, Sidney Barnett, across the seas to purchase antiquities. On one of those trips, Sidney Barnett was accompanied by Dr. James Douglas, who purchased for Barnett four mummies and other items from Mustapha Aga Ayat.[13] Egyptologists hypothesize that Ramesses I was one of these mummies, part of the inventory that Mustapha Aga Ayat received from the Abd el-Rassul family.

  “At the time, people were looking for mummies as souvenirs,” Lacovara told me. As evidence, there is a period photograph of a fez-wearing Egyptian dozing next to two erect mummies propped against a wall, one of them naked.[14]

  “One of the few things we do know is that Mustapha Aga Ayat, who was working with the Abd el-Rassuls, was the same guy who sold mummies to James Douglas for the Niagara Falls Museum. We assume, although we don’t have exact proof, that the mummy they got from Ayat was Ramesses I.”

  “And how do we know that the mummy had been removed from the Royal Cache by the time the Canadians came mummy-hunting?” I asked.

  “The discovery of the tomb had to date to the 1860s,” Lacovora replied, “and there is some evidence that supports this.”

  The first piece of evidence is a portion of the ancient papyrus of Nodjmet that the Prince of Wales acquired in Egypt during his tour in 1869 and donated to the British Museum.[15] The papyrus came from the Royal Cache, which means that the Abd el-Rassuls were already bringing royal items to market by that time. The second piece of evidence is a reference from 1881 by author Amelia Edwards, who visited Egypt in the 1870s. She wrote: “for the last twenty-two years, the hiding place at Dier el Bahari has been known and plundered by the Arabs.”[16] Subtract twenty years from 1881 and you get 1861. Linked together, these bits of circumstantial evidence suggest that Ramesses I’s mummy may have appeared on the market just when the Canadians were in Egypt shopping.

  The mummy likely to be Ramesses I and the other antiquities were transported by boat to Canada and placed in the Niagara Falls Museum, where they entertained and frightened tourists for more than 120 years. The naked royal mummy remained on display as the museum moved and moved again, adding the words “Daredevil Hall of Fame” to its name in honor of those brave or crazy enough to ride over Niagara Falls and acquiring new items: Japanese and Chinese relics; an egg collection; a giant Sequoia tree seventy-seven feet in circumference; a shell and coral collection; Eskimo, Asian, and South Sea Island items; and the remains of a forty-foot skeleton of a humpback whale. Sometimes the mummy was displayed in a coffin and sometimes he was set out on a shelf, his private parts discreetly covered with a blanket. The mummies and coffins were mismatched and damaged as they were moved and reinstalled.

  In 1878, the Barnetts sold their museum to the Davis family, who later purchased five more Egyptian mummies. Some years later, the owners moved the museum across the river to Niagara Falls, New York; later still, they moved it back to the Canadian side of the river, where it was installed in the Spirella Corset Factory, the only suitable vacant building capable of housing a collection that had grown to a remarkable seven hundred thousand items. In 1999, the Niagara Museum and Daredevil Hall of Fame finally closed its doors to the public.[17]

  I had read that a Toronto-based dealer, William (Billy) Jamieson, had purchased the entire collection of the defunct museum. I was curious to know who would buy seven hundred thousand oddities, so I went online to see whether I could find his contact information and came across his obituary. It described him as one of the world’s foremost dealers in quality tribal and ancient art, whose clientele featured rock stars and major museums, and whose home sported an electric chair and a collection of shrunken heads.[18] According to one account, Jamieson bought the museum’s collection after drinking opium tea. Among the persons mentioned in the obituary was Gayle Gibson, who worked in the education department of the Royal Ontario Museum, so I gave her a call to learn more.

  Gayle Gibson has suffered from acute Egyptomania ever since the time she visited the mummies in a museum as a Brownie scout. “After that,” she told me, “I went by myself every Sunday on the bus to the museum. I would walk until my feet were bleeding, and I gradually got to know the mummies and became friends with them.”

  I asked her to tell me about Jamieson. “Billy Jamieson was fun beyond belief, just being near him was exciting,” she said. He had originally contacted the owner of the Niagara Falls Museum and Daredevil Hall of Fame to ask about buying its New Guinea artifacts and learned that the family was interested in selling the entire collection. It turned out that because the museum was located in the middle of the tourist district, and because casinos were moving into the district, the land was very valuable. Jamieson also learned that the Egyptian items were worth a lot of money—in fact, they could be worth enough to cover the entire two million dollar cost of the museum. He hired Gibson to identify the antiquities and ready them for sale on the web.

  “There was competition for the museum collection,” Greene remembered, “and Billy needed to get the money to buy it. We had a lot of offers for the Egyptian antiquities. The National Museum of Scotland was very interested.”

  The community of Egyptologists is small enough so that people generally know when something important goes on the market. Peter Lacovara heard about the Niagara Falls Museum’s collection from a Canadian colleague, and he paid close attention. He had recently been hired by the Carlos Museum as senior curator of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian, and Near Eastern Art and was looking to expand its small but popular Egyptian display.

  “It’s hard to get Egyptian material nowadays—because you want stuff that’s legally out of the country, and export stopped in the early 1980s,” he explained. “There’s a limited supply of items that one can get. I’d always been interested in funerary material, and this was a large number of coffins and mummies.” Although the Carlos had no acquisition budget, he decided to go to Niagara Falls to take a look.

  Billy Jamieson made quite an impression on Lacovara when they first met. “He was tall, all dressed in black, and drove a fancy sports car. You could tell there was something odd about him. He was a shrunken head collector, interested in weird, macabre stuff.” Jamieson took Lacovara to the museum. They entered and walked by an Egyptian coffin, up a flight of stairs, and past the barrels that carried daredevils over Niagara Falls, dinosaur skeletons, and other oddities. The place was creepy and dirty, more circus sideshow than museum.

  The Egyptian objects were on shelves in a long glass case. The coffins were very beautiful and rare, though badly damaged from having been moved from place to place. Lacovara saw that most of the mummies were in their original coffins, too fragile to have been removed from their resting places. They had not been embalmed very carefully and would have fallen to bits if they had been disturbed. He noticed that one mummy was unwrapped; its arms were crossed over its chest. Could this be a royal mummy?

  Lacovara was not the first professional Egyptologist to have asked himself this question. In the 1980s, Dr. Arne Eggebrecht, a distinguished authority, had accompanied a German television crew to the Niagara Falls Museum to produce a documentary on another mummy they had been led to believe might be Queen Nefertiti. The cameras were set up. The wrap was pulled back. All looked down on the mummy and saw . . . male genitalia, whi
ch quickly put an end to the intended project. But as Eggebrecht looked around, he spotted a naked mummy with crossed arms and immediately wondered whether it might actually be a New Kingdom royal. In fact, he was so convinced that when he returned home, he wrote down the names of each of the pharaohs whose mummy he thought this might be, went to his attorney, and had the paper notarized. One was Ramesses I. Around the same time the mysterious mummy was X-rayed; the film revealed packages in the chest cavity, which Eggebrecht thought were “organ packets.” No New Kingdom royal mummy would have organ packets, so there was no way this could be Ramesses I. That’s where the matter rested until Peter Lacovara showed up.

  Jamieson was asking two million dollars for the 145 Egyptian items, including nine mummies, nine coffins, and random arms, legs, and feet. The money had to be delivered within two months.

  “I thought two million dollars was high but not outrageous,” Lacovara said. “The coffins were quite nice but needed a lot of conservation. They had been very badly neglected and cared for, but they had an interesting history. It’s so hard to get that kind of material these days, especially in bulk.”

  Lacovara returned from Toronto and soon made his case to the museum’s board of trustees. They were very enthusiastic—after all, Egypt is the most popular topic in most museums—but wanted to make sure the collection was up to snuff. Lacovara returned to Canada with the museum’s conservator. They took a careful look at the coffins, mummies, and everything else, and decided that the collection could be restored to its former glory and would make a sensational display. The board enthusiastically set out to raise the two million dollars. Soon local newspapers joined in the campaign, and contributions began to flow in from corporations, foundations, and even school children.

  Lacovara had, of course, seen the unwrapped mummy with the crossed arms and heard about its possible attribution. So, when he told the board about the acquisition, he was careful to note that the staff was committed to researching this mysterious mummy. If it turned out to be a royal, he explained, it was important to return it to Egypt.

  I asked Lacovara’s former boss, Bonnie Speed, about this. Since I am a former museum director, I knew how hard it was to raise two million dollars in only two months. How could the museum sanction buying the mummy only to give it away?

  “There was never any question,” she said when I called. “As soon as we knew it might be a royal mummy, we knew we had to give it back. Think about it. If the Egyptians happened to have the coffin of George Washington, why would they want to keep it?” Soon after purchasing the mummies, the Carlos had promised in a letter to the Egyptian government to send the mummy back if it were determined to be a royal.

  Within a few weeks, the Carlos staff was back in Canada, handling some emergency conservation and packing the Egyptian collection for its trip to Atlanta. Soon after it arrived, they made good on their pledge to learn what they could about the identity of the unwrapped royal mummy. Emory University Hospital agreed to help. Over the next two years, the mummy was subjected to X-ray and computed tomography scans resulting in hundreds of images and enabling the technicians to compile a three-dimensional reconstruction of the body. Tests verified that the mysterious mummy had received the royal embalming treatment. His right arm crossed over the left arm across the chest was further evidence, since this position was reserved for royal males of the New Kingdom. His jaw line and distinctive large hooked nose matched those of Seti I and Ramesses II. On the basis of his spinal degeneration, the doctors estimated that he was at least forty-five years old at the time of his death and likely died of chronic mastoiditis, an inflammatory condition generally caused by repeated ear infections. If Ramesses I were alive today, antibiotics would have cured his condition. As it was, he likely died in excruciating pain.

  I had been mulling over a question for a couple of days. “Do you think it’s disrespectful to take an ancient individual and put him through [computed tomography] scans and other tests?”

  Lacovara looked at me quizzically. “No, you wouldn’t think it’s disrespectful when he was alive, so why would you think it’s disrespectful when he’s dead?” Then he went on.

  “For ancient Egyptians, public displays were a bit part of their mortuary tradition. They wanted to be part of this life; they wanted to be seen after they were dead. The most important thing was to remember them and see them and look at them. So it’s far from disrespectful, it’s what they would have wanted.”

  Ancient Egyptians spent more for their tombs than for their homes. They bought their caskets well before they died and filled them with a houseful of items. All of their investments—and there were many—were made because they wanted to live forever.

  There’s an ancient Egyptian inscription that reads, “To speak the name of the dead is to make them live again.” I thought about this lovely sentiment when I read about the four-month exhibit that the Carlos staged as a send-off for this royal mummy. Thousands of visitors came. Hundreds of thousands more heard his name spoken repeatedly during a NOVA documentary, titled, “The Mummy Who Would be King,” which was broadcast on PBS. I recently watched the show and saw many who were touched by the naked royal mummy: the radiologist, the Canadian museum educator, Gayle Gibson, Billy Jamieson, Bonnie Speed, and Peter Lacovara. I watched as Salina Ikram, an Egyptologist from American University Cairo, noted the many parallels between this mummy and that of Seti I, gave it a sniff, and commented that this mummy lacked the odor associated with poorly preserved specimens. Then I watched Zahi Hawass perform his special sniff test and identify “this royal mummy.” He had smelled many, many mummies, so he should know. As I said, if Hawass says it’s the real deal, then so do I.

  Hawass and the Carlos made arrangements for transporting the royal mummy back to Egypt. On the day of departure, it was rolled out of the museum in a large crate covered with the American and Egyptian flags and sent off by singing schoolchildren. When the mummy who may be Ramesses I arrived via Air France at the Cairo Airport some hours later, more than two hundred members of the media from all over the world greeted him. “I have never in my life seen anything like it,” Hawass remembered. “It was as if a live king had arrived!”

  Today, the royal mummy occupies a room of his own in a museum in Luxor. Nearby is a sign explaining that he is a gift from people of Atlanta to the people of Egypt. He’s identified as a royal mummy. Ramesses I’s name isn’t mentioned.

  But should it be? There is a great deal of evidence from 3300 BCE forward that links this mysterious mummy to Ramesses I. Unfortunately, all of it is circumstantial.

  I know what would convince Peter Lacovara, the Egyptologist who identified him, and Zahi Hawass, the Egyptologist who brought him home. If this royal mummy has the same DNA as his alleged son, Seti I, and grandson, Ramesses II, his true identity as Ramesses I would be irrefutable. Unfortunately, DNA testing of mummies is problematic, since the ancient embalming process can distort or destroy DNA. Moreover, ancient specimens can easily become contaminated as they pass from hand to hand.

  Nevertheless, using cutting-edge technology, the mysterious royal mummy was recently DNA tested. Hawass believes it proves he is Ramesses I. Lacovara isn’t quite convinced. As usual, Egyptologists don’t agree.

  But, you can go and see him for yourself. Ramesses I awaits your arrival in the museum in Luxor. His empty tomb stands in the desolate Valley of the Kings, and the site of the Royal Cache is close by in the barren rocky cliffs of Deir el-Bahri. You can visit his descendants and other royals from the Royal Cache in the Cairo Museum. In the meantime, we all can ponder a remarkable fact told to me by the great Zahi Hawass himself: “Only thirty percent of Egyptian monuments have been discovered. A full seventy percent have yet to be found, they are still underground.”

  That means Egyptologists will be excavating, sorting, testing, publishing their findings, and disagreeing with other Egyptologists for decades, maybe even centuries into the future. And that’s good news for all who revel in Egyptomania.<
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  Notes

  1. Ibid., 12.

  2. “Carlos Museum,” www.carlos.emory.edu/.

  3. Darrell D. Baker, Encyclopedia of the Pharaohs: Predynastic to the Twentieth Dynasty 3300-1069 BC, Volume 1 (United Kingdom: Bannerstone Press, 2008), 306–07.

  4. James F. Romano, Death, Burial, and Afterlife in Ancient Egypt, Carnegie Museums, (Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Museum of Natural History), 38.

  5. Ibid.

  6. F. Gladstone Bratton, A History of Egyptian Archaeology (London: Robert Hall, 1967), 136–38.

  7. Stephanie Moser, Museum Display, Representation, and Ancient Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 94.

  8. “Tomb of Ramesses I, Theban Mapping Project,” www.thebanmappingproject.com.

  9. Giovanni Battista Belzoni, Travels in Egypt and Nubia (Italy: White Star Publishers, 2007), 206.

  10. Dylan Bickerstaffe, “The Royal Cache Revisited,” JACF, The Institute for the Study of Interdisciplinary Sciences, 10(2005), 9–25.

  11. Ibid.

  12. “Carlos Museum.”