A mummy sold in Luxor around 1860 spent over a century in a Niagara Falls curiosity museum before it was identified as Ramesses I and sent home

Ramesses I founded the Nineteenth Dynasty and reigned about two years. His son was Seti I and his grandson Ramesses II. His tomb was found in 1817, already looted, and his body was not among the royal mummies recovered from Deir el-Bahari in 1881. Around 1860 Mustapha Aga Ayat, a vice-consular agent at Luxor, sold a mummy to Dr James Douglas, who bought antiquities for Sydney Barnett, son of the founder of the Niagara Falls Museum in Canada. Emory University's curators date the purchase to the years when the Abd el-Rassul family was secretly selling objects from the royal cache. The museum, a collection of curiosities, labelled the mummy an Egyptian nobleman. In the 1980s the German Egyptologist Arne Eggebrecht suggested it might be royal. When the museum closed in 1999, Emory's Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta bought its Egyptian collection. CT scans, radiocarbon dating to the New Kingdom, arms crossed in the royal manner and a face like Seti I's led scholars to conclude it was most likely Ramesses I. On 24 October 2003, at Atlanta's airport, Zahi Hawass signed the deed of gift, and the mummy flew to Cairo. Emory called it a gift from the people of Atlanta. It now lies in the Luxor Museum, across the Nile from the Valley of the Kings.