The Niagara Falls Museum, situated on the Canadian side of the famous falls, was founded in 1827 and perhaps the name of "Museum" was not the best description for a collection in the tradition of P. T. Barnum, of circus fame, since it has really consisted of no more than a mixture of exotic or bizarre exhibits many of which were meant to shock and puzzle its visitors.

During the XIX century they obtained a collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities that were until very recently exhibited side by side with freaks of nature like a two-headed calf and other such curiosities as well as barrels and other contraptions used by daredevils over the years to defy death jumping into the river and falling down with the water over the foam and the rocks below.

In 1981 we visited this "museum" and took some photographs of the ancient Egyptian objects in it in order to share them with our students in Montevideo as an educational tool of what a museum should not be...

Many years later, in 1998, we mentioned in an Internet egyptology forum this museum and its Egyptian collection, saying that we regretted that no serious institution had tried, to the best of our knowledge, to secure such objets for a more dignified and educational public exhibition as well as for a more adequate conservation.

Later on, we learnt that an American museum, the Michael C. Carlos in Atlanta, Georgia in the United States, had bought that collection, among which they think there might be an ancient Egyptian royal mummy and I welcomed the news although regretting that Canada had not succeeded in retaining those objects.

I am sharing here those photographs I took in 1981 which show how the collection was displayed then at Niagara Falls. The reader will perhaps find the signs and the explanations given there quite amusing. For instance, among the mummies there were several royal persons, queens, a prince and even a general, one of the women was described as a wife of Amenophis IV (Akhenaten). You can click on any of the images in order to see an enlarged version.

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