Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader (73 page)

Queen Nefertiti’s mummy has been missing for more than 3,000 years…or has it? In 1966 a German tourist named Meinhard Hoffmann paid a visit to the Niagara Falls Museum, a cheesy tourist museum and freak show on the Canadian side of the falls. He looked at their famous Egyptian mummy exhibit, which had been displayed alongside two-headed calves, five-legged pigs, and other fascinating oddities for nearly 150 years. One mummy in particular caught his attention: It was unwrapped—removing a mummy’s linen bandages had been common practice in the 19th century—and the body was partially covered by a shroud. Hoffmann wondered if the mummy might actually be Nefertiti, but how could he prove it? He couldn’t—there was no way to verify his suspicion. Still, he took plenty of pictures of it before returning to Germany.

CROSS MY HEART

A decade passed. Then one day in 1976 Hoffmann read in an article that Egyptian queens of Nefertiti’s era were mummified with their left arm, but not their right arm, folded high across the chest. He remembered that one arm had been folded across the naked mummy’s chest, and when he dug out his photographs, he saw that it was indeed the left arm.
Could it be Nefertiti?
He couldn’t tell whether the right arm was also folded across the chest, because it was obscured by the shroud.

Hey, sports fans—how big is home plate? (It’s five-sided: 17" × 8½" × 12" × 12" × 8½".)

Hoffmann got a photograph of the Nefertiti bust in the Egyptian Museum and compared it to his photographs of the mummy. Sure, the mummy’s face was shriveled and wrinkly, while the face on the bust was pristine and beautiful. Even so, Hoffman thought they were astonishingly similar.

ON SECOND THOUGHT…

Having convinced himself that the mummy was Nefertiti, Hoffmann set out to convince others as well. Over the next several years he gradually developed his case, and in 1985 he managed to persuade a TV producer at Germany’s Channel Two that he’d found the lost mummy. The producer made plans to do a TV special on the subject and flew Hoffmann and a camera crew to the Niagara Falls Museum. There an Egyptologist would remove the shroud and examine the mummy to confirm that it was the mummy of a queen, and most likely that of Nefertiti.

The examination got no further than the removal of the shroud—as soon as the Egyptologist removed it, it was clear that
both
arms were folded across the chest, not just one, which pretty much ruled out the possibility of the mummy being a queen. It was also clear that the naked mummy was anatomically a male, which ruled out the queen theory for sure.

LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE

That was a pretty big letdown after such a huge buildup, but it was here that Hoffmann demonstrated a remarkable capacity for optimism. Not a queen? Not a problem—“It must be a pharaoh!” he exclaimed.

Hoffmann actually had a point: Kings of the period
were
mummified with both arms folded high across the chest. That (and their male anatomy) was what distinguished them from the mummies of queens. But kings weren’t the only people in Egypt who were embalmed with their arms folded that way: About 1,300 years after Queen Nefertiti passed from the scene, Egypt was annexed by the Roman Empire and it then became fashionable for commoners to be embalmed with their hands folded high across their chest. This made it difficult to tell an ancient king from a newer commoner. The two had been confused many times in the past, especially by amateurs and wishful thinkers like Hoffmann.

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BACK TO SQUARE ONE

The suspicion that the mummy was a Roman-era commoner seemed to be confirmed when the mummy was X-rayed and dark masses were seen inside the chest cavity. Mummies from Nefertiti’s era had their organs removed and their chest cavities stuffed with linen to retain their natural shape. During the Roman Era, on the other hand, the organs were wrapped in linen and placed back in the chest cavity. The dark masses in the X-rays appeared to be organ packets, which led the group to conclude that the mummy was that of a commoner of the Roman Era.

Who wants to watch a TV show about a mummified commoner? Channel Two cancelled the special—it never aired.

DEJA VIEW

That’s where things stayed until the late 1980s, when an Egyptology student named Gayle Gibson began visiting the museum in Niagara Falls to study four well-preserved coffins that were part of the Egyptian collection. She noticed the folded arms on the mummy and wondered about it, too, but the idea of a royal mummy lying undiscovered in such tacky surroundings for so many years seemed too farfetched to be true.

Then, in 1991, Gibson brought a mummy expert named Aidan Dodson, who was visiting from the U.K., to look at the collection. As soon as Dodson laid eyes on the mummy and saw its exquisite condition, the obvious skill of the embalmers, and of course the position of the arms, he, too, began to seriously suspect that the mummy might be a pharaoh. The next step was to try to get a scientific estimate of the mummy’s age using carbon dating. In 1994 the museum agreed to allow the mummy to be tested, and scientists gave it a date of somewhere between 800 and 1500 B.C.—far too old to have been embalmed during the Roman Era. This mummy was no commoner.

HEADING SOUTH

So who was it? Given the mummy’s age, the chances that it was indeed that of a king increased considerably. But events still moved slowly; it wasn’t until after the Niagara Falls Museum closed in 1998 and the entire Egyptian collection was sold to Emory University in Atlanta (for $2 million) that further testing was done. Researchers at the university submitted the mummy to a battery of sophisticated tests that had not been available previously, including CT scans and computer imaging. This enabled them to get a much better look at the dark masses in the chest, which turned out not to be organ packets after all. They were tightly wound rolls of linen, which have been found in other royal mummies of the period.

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The piece of evidence that had been thought to rule out a royal connection now seemed to confirm it, as did a CT scan of the skull. It showed that the skull cavity contained a large amount of tree resin, a precious and very rare material in ancient Egypt—further evidence that the mummy was indeed that of a king.

THE CANDIDATE

But
which
king? As researchers unlocked the mummy’s secrets, mounting circumstantial evidence pointed increasingly away from other missing pharaohs and toward a single candidate: Ramses I, founder of the 19th Dynasty, which ruled Egypt from 1291 to 1183 B.C. On the throne for less than two years, he was the grandfather of Ramses II, or Ramses the Great, whose 66-year reign was the second longest in Egyptian history.

Ramses I’s body was believed to have been removed from a tomb containing several royal mummies in the mid-19th century, at about the same time that a collector representing the Niagara Falls Museum was touring Egypt acquiring the mummies that ended up in the collection. He bought it for £7, or about $34.

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON

Ramses I’s mummy had been missing from Egypt for more than 140 years, but those of his son, Seti I, and his grandson Ramses the Great are both in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Their faces bear a striking resemblance to the mummy from the Niagara Falls Museum, and that similarity was backed up when X-rays of the mummy’s skull was compared to X-rays of all of the Egyptian Museum’s royal mummies, taken in the 1960s. The shape of a human skull is hereditary, so if the mummy was related to Seti I and Ramses II, measurements of his skull were likely to be similar to theirs. Sure enough, the measurements of the Niagara Falls mummy matched those of Seti I and Ramses II more closely than those of any other royal mummy in the Egyptian Museum.

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The case for the mummy being Ramses I is based entirely on circumstantial evidence, but there’s so much of it that there is now very little room for doubt: The Niagara Falls mummy is almost certainly that of a king, and most likely that of Ramses I.

A BARGAIN AT TWICE THE PRICE

Scooping up the Niagara Falls Museum’s entire Egyptian collection for $2 million seemed to be a pretty good bargain—the mummy of Ramses I is a priceless treasure. But rather than keep it, as soon as the mummy’s identity was established to everyone’s satisfaction, Emory University announced that they were giving the mummy to Egypt. In October 2003, Ramses was flown back to his home after an absence of 150 years.

“There was never any question about whether the mummy would be returned to Egypt if it proved to be a royal,” the university museum’s curator, Peter Lacovara, told
National Geographic
. “It was simply the right thing to do.”

DELAYED GRATIFICATION

So who gets credit for finding Ramses I in his hiding place at Niagara Falls? Meinhard Hoffmann thinks it should go to him. Even when “experts” assured him that the mummy was a commoner, he was so convinced it was a pharaoh that he documented his claim in writing and hired a lawyer to notarize it. In the document, Hoffmann even suggested three possible identities for the mummy: Aye, Horemheb…and Ramses I.

“Here’s the real reason I did that,” says Hoffmann. “Because if all of a sudden you come out and say, ‘Oh, I knew all that 20 years ago,’ people will doubt you and say you’re nothing but an opportunist.”

*        *        *

FLUSH LIKE AN EGYPTIAN

The birthplace of the toilet seat (and the human litter box) was the ancient Egyptian city of Akhetaten. There is archaeological evidence that around 1350 B.C., “seats” made of wood, stone, and pottery were commonly placed over large bowls of sand.

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MORE ACTS OF SEDITION!

What can you say about freedom of speech? Anything you want. But at a few points during America’s history, that right was called into question. (For a background on sedition, turn to
page 258
.)

T
HE GREAT WAR
President Woodrow Wilson won reelection in 1916 largely because “he kept us out of the war,” which became the unofficial slogan of his campaign. That war was World War I (or “The Great War,” as it was known then), which had been raging in Europe since 1914. The United States’ position of “noninvolvement” was widely supported by the American people. A big reason was that a large segment of the American people—fully one-third of the entire population—were immigrants. Most of them were from Europe, and there were many different sentiments regarding the many nations involved in the war.

But by 1917 the mood in America had shifted. German submarines had been attacking civilian ships for two years by then, including the British passenger ship, the
Lusitania
, in an assault that killed 1,200 people, 129 of them Americans. Then, in March, the “Zimmerman telegram” was released—a secret message sent from Germany to Mexico, intercepted and decoded by the British, that proposed an alliance between the two nations against the United States. The ensuing outrage led to a dramatic change in public opinion, and on April 6, 1917, Wilson declared war on Germany.

THE WAR ON HYPHENS

Wilson had a delicate game to play with the public. Between 1900 and 1915, more than 15 million people emigrated to the United States, most of them from Germany. Wilson feared that these new Americans might feel more loyalty to their homeland (on whom he had just declared war) than to their adopted country, and that their conflicting attachments might hurt conscription efforts or, worse, induce them to spy for Germany.

The next largest group of immigrants were the Irish, and the Easter Rising, an outbreak of violence against the English by the Irish that would lead to the formation of the Irish Republican Army, had taken place in April of 1916. England was now an ally in the war, and Wilson feared Irish-Americans would not support a war on the side of their age-old oppressor. “Any man who carries a hyphen around with him,” Wilson said, referring to German- and Irish-American immigrants, “carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of the republic.” Feelings such as these led to the passing of the Espionage Act in 1917, which made it a crime to aid an enemy during wartime. In 1918 it was amended with the Sedition Act.

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WATCH WHAT YOU SAY

The Sedition Act made it a crime to “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States, or the flag.” One of the more controversial sections of the law was that it allowed the postmaster general to refuse to deliver any publications he deemed unfriendly to the war—any magazine or newspaper that criticized the president or the war. In essence, the Acts made it illegal to criticize in almost any way—through speech or through the press—the American government or its involvement in the war.

Opponents of the law saw it as a way to silence political dissent. Eugene Debs, a union leader and head of the Socialist party who had run for president against Wilson in 1912 (he got nearly a million of the 15 million total votes), was arrested for giving a speech against the war. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Rosa Pastor Stokes, another prominent Socialist and a feminist, was arrested for writing a Letter to the Editor of the
Kansas City Star
, saying “no government which is for the profiteers can also be for the people. I am for the people while the government is for the profiteers.” She was sentenced to 10 years in prison.