Authors: Jo Marchant
The woman’s mummification was a freak accident caused by the location of the cupboard she was found in, Harrison concluded. It was next to a chimney flue, causing a draught of warm air to circulate, which had slowly dried the body before it could fully decompose.
The police thought that the victim was most likely a previous lodger of Harvey’s, a divorcée named Frances Knight, who hadn’t been seen for twenty years. Harrison found that the victim’s height and physical attributes matched Knight’s records. He clinched the identification by testing the blood group of the mummy and matching it with the blood of Knight’s relatives. It was cutting-edge science for the time. He carried out the tests with the help of scientists at the British Museum in London, who sent him the necessary antiserum on ice on the 12:20 P.M. train from Euston.
But Harvey was acquitted of murder. Despite the cord—a cotton stocking—twisted tight around the victim’s throat, the prosecutors were unable to prove how she died. Harvey claimed that wrapping a warm stocking round your neck is a well-known remedy for the common cold, and that when her sickly lodger died suddenly, she panicked and hid the body in case she got accused of murder. She did go down for fraud though—it turned out that she had been claiming the woman’s two pounds per week maintenance for the entire twenty years that she had been missing.
For Harrison, the case cemented his interest in mummies, and showed him the potential—very much ahead of his time—for using molecular techniques to reveal family relationships of the long dead. It was the perfect approach for studying royal mummies.
WHEREAS CARTER WAS always a bit awkward, defensive even, when it came to authority, Harrison was full of charm, supremely self-confident, and relished being part of the establishment. He wasn’t born into it though. The son of a stationmaster, he was brought up fairly modestly in England’s pretty Lake District, then won a scholarship to Oxford University and went on to become one of its youngest ever dons.
He was passionate about Oxford and its traditions, and was one of the last professors there to lecture in Latin. A member of the British Eugenics Society,* he initially specialized in research into fertility and contraception, writing papers on subjects like what happens to guinea pig testicles when you freeze them.2 Harrison moved to Liverpool University in 1950, to take over an anatomy department left crippled by bombing during the Second World War, and thanks to his charismatic speaking style became something of a minor celebrity there. His lectures were jam-packed, and he was much in demand as an after-dinner speaker, addressing groups such as the Egremont Housewives Club and Liverpool’s Hundred Best Ladies.
His interest in ancient Egypt seems to have started thanks to his friendship with one of his colleagues at Liverpool, the Egyptologist Herbert Fairman (usually known as H. W.). Fairman had worked at Amarna in the 1930s and had a strong interest in the tangled events that occurred at the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty.
In 1961, Fairman became the latest Egyptologist to study the inscriptions on the coffin found in the KV55 Amarna cache, and decided that it was originally made for Meritaten, the eldest daughter of Akhenaten and wife of his successor Smenkhkare.3 He reckoned that Meritaten’s body had been later taken out from the coffin and her husband buried in it instead, apparently not an unusual practice for the time. This suggested that the body wasn’t Akhenaten but Smenkhkare—as Derry and Engelbach had earlier concluded, albeit by a different route. After the success of Harrison’s work on the Rhyl case, Fairman asked him to examine, again, the mysterious remains of the mummy from KV55.
It was Harrison’s first trip to Egypt, in December 1963, and he had a blast. He was treated like royalty—invited to lavish dinners, and even taken down the Nile on the luxury yacht that had belonged to King Farouk. (Farouk himself was in exile by this time. He was deposed by a revolution in July 1952 led by a young colonel named Gamal Abd el-Nasser, who became Egypt’s most famous leader of modern times.) Harrison examined the KV55 bones in the Egyptian Museum, as Elliot Smith and Derry had done before him. Then he took them to the hospital at Derry’s old medical school, now at the University of Cairo, to x-ray them.
It wasn’t the first time that anyone x-rayed an Egyptian pharaoh. In 1903, just eight years after the discovery of this revealing form of radiation by the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen, Elliot Smith and Carter tried it out on Thutmose IV. In a forerunner of Derry’s favorite student theft, they surreptitiously slipped the rigid mummy out of the museum, put it in a horse-drawn cab, and took it to the only nursing home in Cairo that had an X-ray machine. They were able to estimate his age at around forty to fifty years, saw that his chest was packed with linen, and found some small pieces of jewelry in the wrappings that had previously been missed.4
Carter originally hoped to x-ray Tutankhamun’s mummy too.* He arranged the procedure with a British pioneer of medical radiography, Archibald Douglas Reid, before the mummy was even found, but Reid died suddenly in February 1925, while recuperating from illness in Switzerland (and not, as several curse advocates later claimed, on his way home from x-raying the mummy). Then in 1932, Derry x-rayed Amenhotep I, the beautifully wrapped pharaoh that Maspero couldn’t bear to spoil.5 He found a middle-aged man whose hands and feet had been torn off by thieves. And that was it until Harrison looked at KV55 in 1963.
He reached very similar conclusions to Derry regarding the king’s young age at death.6 He estimated that the mystery monarch was a rather small man despite his enormous skull, around 5 feet 7 inches tall. He also reconstructed the king’s face based on the X-rays, and was struck by the resemblance to images of Tutankhamun. Harrison agreed with Fairman, Derry, and Engelbach that the mystery body was Smenkhkare.
Harrison had one more tool at his disposal. Since the Rhyl case, he had taken on a young lecturer and researcher, Robert Connolly, who specialized in determining blood groups. Harrison carried one of the skeleton’s toes home with him to Liverpool and gave it to Connolly to test.
Blood groups are determined by molecules called antigens on the surface of red blood cells. Which antigens are present determines what blood group you are. There are various different classes of blood group, but two of them involve antigens that stand a chance of surviving in a three-thousand-year-old mummy. One is the commonly known ABO system, in which you can be A, B, AB (if you have both types of antigen), or O (if you have neither). To complicate matters slightly, A comes in two versions—A1 or A2. The other class Connolly tested was the MN system, in which you can be M, N, or MN. Both involve molecules that are present on cells all over the body, not just blood cells, and that can survive for long periods of time.
Connolly took the toe and duly worked out the blood group: A2/MN. This didn’t tell Harrison much on its own, though. To conclude anything about the identity or family relationships of the king from KV55, he needed someone else to compare it against. Harrison was now desperate to get his hands on an even bigger prize—the mummy of Tutankhamun.
But Tutankhamun was holed up in his tomb, shut away in the gold-plated coffin where Carter had left him in 1926. You couldn’t just walk in and take a chunk. To get to this king, Harrison knew he’d need allies on the ground in Egypt. So he played a long game. He took on Egyptian students in his department in Liverpool, who later returned to influential positions at the University of Cairo. They included Ali Abdalla, whom he met in Cairo on his 1963 trip and soon afterward took on as a PhD student. Abdalla was sweet, hardworking, and devoted to his British mentor and Harrison’s wife, June. “I can hardly keep the tears from my eyes,” Abdalla wrote after he and his own wife returned to Egypt. “We’ll always think of you as the best friends we have.”7
Harrison set Abdalla to work, pulling strings and working contacts in the antiquities service to secure the go-ahead to study Tutankhamun. But even if they could get permission, another difficulty was where to x-ray the mummy. It wasn’t clear if there was any suitable radiography equipment in the whole of Luxor, let alone in the Valley of the Kings. Undaunted, Harrison suggested that the authorities might save themselves the trouble of policing Tutankhamun’s tomb if they moved the coffin and mummy to the Egyptian Museum. They didn’t take him up on his offer.
Harrison also needed funds. The project didn’t form part of his official duties at Liverpool, where he was supposed to be teaching anatomy. So he approached the BBC. In May 1967, a senior producer named Paul Johnstone,* agreed to fund the project, which Harrison estimated shouldn’t exceed £400. They sealed the deal over a tasty lunch on London’s Kensington High Street.
Johnstone wanted to film the project for a prestigious archaeology series called Chronicle—one of the first documentaries ever to be filmed in color. Initially, Johnstone and Harrison agreed to carry out the project that December, but had to postpone as “things were boiling up in the Middle East” after President Nasser’s brief but ill-advised war with Israel.8 And Abdalla still hadn’t gotten written permission for the project from the antiquities service. “If you could procure this as soon as possible I would be more than grateful,” Harrison wrote to him in December 1967, as if he was asking him to pick up some milk from the shops.
With the Suez Canal and half of its oil production in Israel’s hands, Egypt was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and riven by protests. Harrison received dramatic reports that Luxor was overrun with wild, rabies-infested dogs, and that hospitals in the area were lacking even basic supplies. In March 1968, he decided to delay the project again—much to the relief of Johnstone, who was in the middle of filming at a prehistoric earthwork near Stonehenge, in a pioneering project to film a complete excavation from start to finish.
At the end of March, Abdalla finally came through with written permission from the antiquities service, but there was a snag. The permit included the condition that “the mummy should not be removed from its place.” In other words, Tutankhamun could not be taken out of his tomb. Harrison would need to take an X-ray machine to the mummy, and hope that the electricity supply in the tomb was up to the job.
He didn’t have the budget to fly heavy equipment from the UK—a hugely expensive undertaking in those days—so he wrote to Abdalla again, who eventually tracked down a portable machine in Cairo University’s anatomy department. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a vintage contraption dating from the 1930s—presumably the one that Derry had used to x-ray Amenhotep I. Luckily, Harrison enjoyed the services of Lyn Reeve, his department’s photographer and radiographer. Reeve was brilliant at improvising with mechanical devices, and at getting broken things to work.
By the beginning of December, everything was finally in place. The team flew to Luxor: Johnstone and his film crew, Harrison, Reeve, and an enthusiastic couple named Mr. and Mrs. Leek. Frank Leek was a retired dentist from Hemel Hempstead, and he had plans for Tutankhamun’s teeth.
The group stayed in luxury in the Winter Palace hotel, right on the Nile, where Carnarvon had once had a suite. They would have just two days to study the mummy, and were not allowed to close the tomb or disrupt the flow of visitors. On the morning of Wednesday December 4, they crossed the river and drove to the Valley of the Kings in a green minibus, cameras rolling and spirits high. Harrison, despite the bright sunshine, had for some reason attired himself in a bright-red woolen jumper and white hat (at least on the resulting film it’s easy to tell which one is him). None of them suspected that when they arrived at the tomb and finally opened Tutankhamun’s coffin, they would find that someone else had gotten there first.
HARRISON’S LIFTING of the lid wasn’t quite as dramatic as Carter’s opening ceremony. But it was chaotic, tense, and brightly lit. The baking-hot burial chamber was filled to bursting with a crowd of men and boys—inspectors, workmen, hangers-on—in traditional robes and white turbans. Between their feet, a mess of cables snaked to floodlights squeezed up against the ancient stone. The work was supervised by Zaki Iskander, Alfred Lucas’s successor as scientific director of the antiquities service. Meanwhile, the camera crew, a few passing tourists, and Leek’s wife, Phyllis, looked down on the melee from a wooden gallery, built where the sealed doorway from the antechamber had once been.
Some of the workers held up electric lights, while others grabbed round every square inch of the great glass sheet that covered the sarcophagus. Easing it off was no easy task in such a cramped space, so perhaps it’s impressive that all they broke was the corner (the plate was later replaced free of charge by Pilkington Glass).
There was another burst of activity, with Iskander at one point climbing into the huge sarcophagus alongside the golden coffin, as the workmen reached down to grasp the handles around the sides of the coffin lid, lifted it amongst much hubbub and shouting, and laid it on the floor to one side.* The sweet, almost sickly smell of resin once again floated through the tomb.
With Harrison a hovering red blob in the background, Iskander’s men used ropes to lift out a small, flimsy-looking wooden tray, and laid it across the top of the sarcophagus to inspect its contents. What they saw was, frankly, a mess. Thick clumps of cotton wool were placed roughly over Tutankhamun’s blackened remains, fixed on with just a few strips of bandage that were tied around the tray. On top was a small card signed by Carter, giving the date that the mummy had been reinterred.
When Harrison and Iskander lifted off the cotton wool, they were shocked to see that the mummy was in pieces. This was the first time anyone realized that Carter hadn’t put the mummy back whole, as he and Derry fudged this detail in their published accounts. A reporter for the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram was present in the tomb for Harrison’s opening, and the next day the paper ran a front-page splash, slamming Carter for decapitating Egypt’s king, then putting his remains in a tray that had been used for storing sugar. Carter’s disrespect soon became worldwide news, with headlines like: “Britain Accused of Cutting Off Boy King’s Head” and “Head of Pharaoh Found in Sugar Box.”