Little is known about the pharaoh Rameses I, and he does not feature to any
significant extent in the literature of Egyptology. The reason is that he succeeded
to the crown in 1315BC at an advanced age, and died only two years later, leaving
affairs to his son Seti I, who duly entered the history books.
Rameses is thought to have designed the hypostyle hall at Karnak, and to have
made endowments, in the form of slave labour, towards the temple at Wadi Halfa
in Nubia. Rameses was originally buried in the tomb of Seti at Luxor in the
Valley of Kings, but in the turmoil of unrest some years later he was removed
to the tomb of Queen Inhapi, and finally to that of Amenhotep I at
Deir-el-Bahri.
According to a report in Science for July 28, Egyptologists of the Michael C.
Carlos museum in Atlanta, Georgia, claim to have found the mummy of Rameses
I among nine mummies acquired by a Toronto private collector. It was for many
years stored anonymously in the Niagara Falls museum in Ontario from the 1850s.
It was divested of its wrappings and coffin, but the characteristic positioning
of the arms across the chest, together with the pattern of the lateral incisions
made to remove the internal organs, indicate a royal burial of some 3,300 years
ago. The face shows characteristics associated with the Ramessids, particularly
the nose, straight and curved towards the tip.
There is a project to confirm these suspicions by comparing DNA from the mummy
with specimens in the Cairo Museum taken from the mummies of Rameses’s
son Seti and his grandson Rameses II.