AN EGYPTIAN royal mummy displayed in a Niagara Falls freak show for more than a century is to be returned to Cairo. The quality of the mummification and the position of the arms suggest that the body belongs to one of the missing pharaohs of the New Kingdom, perhaps Ramesses I or Ramesses VII; it could also be the mummy of Horemheb, the next-but-one successor to Tutanhkamun, experts suggest.

The mummy was looted in the mid-19th century and bought by James Douglas, a Canadian doctor “for Mr Barnett, of Niagara Museum, for seven pounds”. The vendors were probably the Rassul brothers, tomb-robbers who found and plundered the famous royal cache of reburied mummies at Deir el-Bahri, as recounted in the prizewinning Egyptian film The Night of Counting the Years.

Whether the Niagara mummy came from this cache is uncertain: Mark Rose notes in the forthcoming issue of the American journal Archaeology that the Rassuls were looting the cache by 1869 at the latest, while Douglas’s purchase was made a decade earlier. Its high status seems certain, however. “Obviously it is royal because of its arm position,” says Salima Ikram, of the American University in Cairo. The forearms are crossed over the chest, the hands closed as though to grip the royal accoutrements of crook and flail.

“I first met this particular mummy some ten years ago, when I went to Niagara,” Dr Aidan Dodson, of Bristol University, says. “I looked at it, and said ‘Oh, my God, it looks like a New Kingdom pharaoh’s mummy’. The question is, which one?”

One clue lies in the high position of the arms, which suggests the late New Kingdom date, between about 1300BC and 1000BC This is the period of the final 18th Dynasty pharaohs, Ay and Horemheb, the 19th Dynasty from Ramesses I (died 1296BC) to Siptah (died 1189BC), and the 20th Dynasty from Sethnakhte and Ramesses III to Ramesses XI in 1064BC. Later dynasties employed a lower arm position.

Several royal mummies of this period are missing, and it is among these that scholars are seeking an identity for the Niagara individual, currently being studied at Emory University in Atlanta. “The missing kings are Ramesses I, Amenmesses, Ramesses VII, VIII, X and XI,” says Dr Dodson, but the last two were probably buried in the delta where their capital lay, and their bodies are unlikely to have survived the wetter conditions there.

Amenmesses was a usurper and may not have had a formal burial, and Ramesses VIII reigned for only a few months; his tomb site is not even known, Dr Dodson says, and he probably did not have an elaborate mummification and burial. That leaves Ramesses I and Ramesses VII, the latter reigning from 1133 to 1125BC

“The mummy looks early 19th Dynasty to me,” Dr Ikram says, because it lacks painted-on eyebrows and the stuffing of the eye-sockets that you get later on. Also the linen scraps that remain on the otherwise stripped-down body are like those on the mummy of Seti I, who reigned from 1296 to 1279BC as the immediate successor to Ramesses I.

X-rays and CAT-scans confirm the earlier date, showing resin-soaked linen rolls inside the body cavity and resin half-filling the skull. Dr Dodson notes that later royal mummies have “rather unusual packing” ranging from dried lichens to sawdust.

While Ramesses I seems the favoured candidate, Dr Ikram suggests that Horemheb is equally possible; even though bones were found in his sarcophagus when it was discovered in 1908. She believes that they may have been dumped there long after his death when reburials occurred.

While DNA testing might give some clues, the Egyptian authorities will not at present allow the vital comparative sampling from the royal mummies in the Cairo Museum. “It is not always accurate and cannot be done with complete success when dealing with mummies. Until we know for sure that it is accurate, we will not use it in our research,” Dr Zahi Hawass, of the Supreme Council of Archaeology, says. Whoever the Niagara mummy was, he will return to the land of his birth in at least temporary anonymity.