[CPProt.net] Engaging mummy mystery unravels at Niagara Falls museum. Amazing but true - An ancient curiosity draws just the right set of eyes, which leads to a surprising identification.

[Museum Security and Cultural Property Protection (Ton Cremers)]

Engaging mummy mystery unravels at Niagara Falls museum 
Amazing but true - An ancient curiosity draws just the right set of eyes,
which leads to a surprising identification 
FACTBOX

 
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
TED MAHAR 
"The Mummy Who Would Be King" is a clever title that sets the tone for an
engaging "Nova" documentary that mixes history, drama, comedy and a dash of
farce. 

It also illustrates the absurdly dominating role simple coincidence can play
in both history and the discovery of history. 

The title mummy's almost-certain identity is kept from the viewer until late
in the show, but if you saw the news a few years ago, you know. The mummy
that is probably Rameses I was identified and returned to its rightful place
in Egypt. 

But he was dug up in the 1800s, one of scores of mummies and other Egyptian
antiquities unearthed, sold and shipped worldwide. Today, we consider
mummies precious relics that deserve reverence as former people and as
objects uniquely suited to helping us understand the past. 

Since the crusades, visitors from all over snatched up what they could. But
they were not plunderers. They were customers. Egyptians regarded the
ancient objects -- outside of jewels and precious metals -- as
providentially commercial. Mummies and other objects were findable and cost
nothing. They were like money lying around. Gullible visitors paid the local
equivalent of a year's income for them. Buyer and seller parted happily,
each knowing he had blithely and openly cheated the other. 

Egyptian individuals and clans discovered tombs, kept them secret and lived
for decades on their spoils. A rivalry led someone from one family to rat
out another in the late 1800s, when official Egypt was beginning to
appreciate its heritage. Egyptian historians and scientists began to
persuade the authorities that treasures that could be institutionally
studied should be preserved in Egypt. 

Even so, the British expedition that found Tutankhamen removed him in the
early 1920s. 

Before all that, Europeans and others had unwrapping parties. Mummies by the
scores amused revelers and were discarded. Others were retrieved for museums
of widely differing qualities. One, on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls,
held ancient treasures, curiosities such as two-headed animals, other
tributes to the art of taxidermy, the preserved corpses of deformed humans
-- and the mummy who would be king. 

He amused visitors for more than a century. Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S.
Grant and P.T. Barnum signed the guest book. Thousands saw the mummy, but
just the right set of eyes did not fall on him until the late 20th century.
Someone thought he saw him for what he was. But his evaluation was debunked.


But, even debunked, his theory drew serious attention from professional
Egyptologists. The mummy quietly stimulated many serious minds. 

Then along came DNA testing. It could not be applied to this mummy, but it
bolstered other technologies. 

Then, yet another individual joined the discussion, a scientist who had
perfected an analytical technology that might offer an answer as nothing
else could. He is an elderly scientist, and he subjected the mummy, finally,
to a test that could not have been attempted even 20 years ago. By this
time, the mummy's home was an Atlanta university, another story in itself. 

The documentary shows how coincidence favored the identifying of (almost
certainly) Rameses I for millennia. Time and again, the mummy might have
been missed, overlooked, bought by the wrong person or even dumped, as
scores were. It's another tale that has to be true, because, as fiction, it
would be laughed off the stage. 

To explain Rameses' story, "Mummy" replays key elements of Egyptian history,
the intricacies and variations of the 3,000-year-old practice of
mummification and why the Rameses dynasty -- 10 pharaohs descended from a
commoner -- was such a big deal. 

Tombs and even pyramids were plundered soon after the intended tenant took
up residence. Logic suggested that most were looted quickly, often by the
builders or their progeny. But Rameses I made it to the 1860s. Tut made it
to the 1920s. We may hope that undisturbed tombs still wait. And now, in the
21st century, new technologies exist to find them and to study them. 

"To speak the name of the dead is to make them live again," says a
millennia-old tomb inscription. But it was unreadable, even by Egyptians,
from the time of Cleopatra to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by a
soldier of Napoleon in Egypt. Like Rameses I, other mummies -- maybe scores,
maybe hundreds -- may still slumber, awaiting the wakeup call from just the
right scientist with just the right tool. 

Ted Mahar: 503-221-8228; tedmahar at news.oregonian.com