Authors: Jo Marchant
It worked on the Rhyl mummy, and on the KV55 skeleton. Connolly had confidently told his boss that using a modification of this method, he’d be able to determine Tutankhamun’s blood group too. But when the young lecturer saw the skin sample that Harrison had brought back, he was dismayed. It was tiny. The agglutination technique needs a sugar-lump sized piece of tissue to work, around a gram. Connolly had just ten milligrams to work with—one hundredth of the usual amount.
Harrison wasn’t going to take no for an answer though, and the BBC were counting on the blood result for their film. Connolly had to come up with another way. He had been researching antigens and immunity, for example, trying to identify the molecules on the surface of pollen that cause hay fever. So he was good at handling red blood cells, and he knew that under the right conditions, antigens spontaneously stick onto them if you mix the two together.
That gave him an idea. He would stick the antigens from Tutankhamun’s mummy onto modern human blood cells, to give himself a larger sample to test. In effect, he would bring the pharaoh’s blood type back to life.
It sounds simple, but it took months to get it to work. Connolly himself was blood group O, meaning that his own blood cells didn’t have any of the relevant antigens attached. They would make the perfect clean slate for a mummy’s ancient molecules. First, he tried out his idea on an anonymous mummy held at Liverpool University. In an experiment that would surely make the perfect starting point for a mummy-related horror film, Connolly took a tissue sample from the mummy, purified the antigens from it, and mixed them with his own blood.8
It worked, reviving the Egyptian’s ancient blood type and converting Connolly’s O blood into group A. Then Connolly moved on to the pharaoh himself, this time using control panels of modern blood helpfully provided by the Blood Transfusion Service.* When he tested his Tutankhamun-ized blood using the agglutination technique, he found that it was A2/MN—just the same as the KV55 mummy.
Previous studies on mummies suggested that this was a rare blood type among ancient Egyptians—one study of twenty-three mummies from the New Kingdom found that only two were blood group A.9 So Harrison concluded that the identical blood group was unlikely to be a coincidence. Tutankhamun and Smenkhkare must be closely related—father and son, perhaps, but Harrison thought they were most likely brothers.10
CONNOLLY IS NOW in his seventies and an honorary lecturer in anatomy at Liverpool University. As the last surviving member of Harrison’s team, he is the guardian of all the X-ray images and tissue samples from the Tutankhamun project, so I take the train to Liverpool to see him. “I’ll be wearing a brown suit with yellow tie and pocket square,” he texts, and meets me on the platform, holding a copy of the British science journal Nature.
His office in the anatomy department is a little box of a room with a sloping ceiling and walls lined with crowded bookshelves. On his deep, dusty windowsill, a collection of blackened skulls sits just behind the kettle. Around the room, family photos are interspersed with boxes of tiny bones, old-fashioned Cadburys tins, a picture of an armadillo, and a box of Royal Ceylon tea.
I’ve asked Connolly to show me what Harrison saw, once Reeve had developed his precious X-ray films. He slides the black-and-white transparencies out of a series of stiff A3 envelopes, and clips them to a light box, one by one.
A series of Tutankhamun’s disembodied parts flicker to life in front of us. A bright, perfectly focused foot, floating in darkness where it ends at the ankle; then a femur, with the desperately thin layer of flesh that coats it barely visible. Next, we look at a side-on view of Tutankhamun’s head, nicely showing the teenager’s protruding top teeth, and a delicate, pointed chin (see photo insert). Immediately obvious are two dense shadows inside the skull cavity, one at the top and one at the back, which together form a right angle or L-shape. Connolly explains that these represent layers of solidified resin. After removing his brain, the pharaoh’s embalmers must have poured in molten resin and allowed it to set on two separate occasions, once with the body lying on its back, and once with the head hanging upside down, perhaps with the body on its front, its top half hanging off the end of a table.
Another detail stands out—a faint smear of white at the back of the skull cavity. Connolly tells me it’s a piece of bone. At first, Harrison figured it was dislodged when the embalmers poked their hook up the king’s nose to remove his brain. But on closer examination, he thought the fragment was fused to the skull, so he guessed that it was from a depressed skull fracture (where a bit of broken bone gets pushed inward) at the back of the head, which had subsequently begun to heal over. If so, whatever blow caused the fracture didn’t kill him immediately, but perhaps it triggered a brain hemorrhage that finished him off several weeks later.
Harrison also noted a second suspicious feature in this image: an area at the base of Tutankhamun’s skull that looks unusually thin. Such “eggshell thinness,” as he put it, can be caused by a tumor or brain hemorrhage, either of which could put pressure on the skull and cause the bone to become thinner over a period of weeks. He suggested that Tutankhamun (and perhaps Smenkhkare, too) might have suffered from an inherited disorder called a congenital aneurysm, where a weak spot in the wall of one of the arteries supplying the brain causes it to bulge like a balloon. These can burst—often in young adulthood—causing a fatal bleed. Or, such a hemorrhage could also have been caused by a blow to the head.
Last up on Connolly’s light box is Tutankhamun’s torso, with ribs sprouting left and right from a slightly curved spine. His chest cavity looks cloudy white—not the evidence of major lung cancer but where the embalmers packed it with rolls of cloth soaked in resin, now rock hard. The spine looks healthy, says Connolly, ruling out tuberculosis as a cause of death, as the advanced disease usually eats away at the vertebrae. Toward the bottom of the image there’s an ominous gap, where Carter and Derry cut the entire torso in two. And there’s a scattering of white spots—tiny beads, presumably the last remnants of that stolen bib.
Then Connolly points out something truly dramatic. Tutankhamun’s heart and chest—his sternum and the front part of his ribs—are completely gone. Harrison didn’t comment on the cause of this gigantic omission, apart from describing the damage as “postmortem.” Perhaps he assumed that the ribs were sawn off by Carter, or by looters in their efforts to remove the beaded bib. Today, however, some experts, including Connolly, think that by refusing to consider the mummy’s absent chest, Harrison missed the most important clue of all to determining Tutankhamun’s cause of death.
But we’ll come to that later. X-ray tutorial over, there’s one more thing I’ve come to Liverpool to see. “So, do you want to see the bits?” Connolly says, eyes twinkling. He opens a drawer in a small chest on his worktop and pulls out a thin cardboard box, inside which is a collection of glass screw-cap tubes with yellowed labels. One of them says Smenkhkare, but it’s empty—a few years ago, Connolly gave this mummy’s toe back to the Egyptian government. Then the one I’m looking for, scrawled with the name of Tutankhamun, containing what’s left of the sample that Harrison brought home from the Valley of the Kings more than forty years ago.
Today, it’s unthinkable that a British professor could walk off with such a prize. The Egyptian authorities are understandably very defensive about their heritage being taken abroad, and it’s illegal to remove any archaeological sample from the country—particularly from something as precious as a royal mummy. I peer into the tube, and right at the bottom I spot some tiny brown-black fragments of Egypt’s most famous ever king. They look just like toast crumbs.
HARRISON IS STANDING in his plush office, wearing a black suit, and speaking to the camera in clipped, plummy tones. This is Johnstone’s film, Tutankhamen Post Mortem, and when it was originally shown, on BBC2 on October 25, 1969, it was watched by nearly a million and a half people—an exceptionally large audience for that channel on a Saturday night.
This is the moment during which one of the most persistent and popular myths about Tutankhamun was created. Harrison stands next to the X-ray image of the skull that Connolly showed me. He points to the bit that’s eggshell thin and says the following: “This is within normal limits. But in fact it could have been caused by a hemorrhage under the membranes overlying the brain in this region. And this could have been caused by a blow to the back of the head, and this in turn could have been responsible for the cause of death.”
Within that convoluted mouthful was the story that the world’s media had been waiting for. No one really cared who may or may not have been Tutankhamun’s brother, or about the identity of some little-known mummy from tomb KV55. But the violent death of Egypt’s favorite pharaoh—that was news. From the New York Times to the Sydney Morning Herald to the South China News, in Dutch, Arabic, Spanish, and French, giant headlines splashed the same story: “Tutankhamun Met with Violent End” … “Tutankhamun Murdered” … “Teoria sobre la Muerte de Tutankamon.”
The story turned Tutankhamun into a global celebrity all over again, injecting new life into the story of the boy king and sparking fevered speculation about his death. Maybe he fell from a chariot, or was kicked in the head by a large beast. But the most popular theory was murder. Because Tutankhamun died so young and was eventually succeeded by a general, journalists around the world jumped to the conclusion that he had been assassinated in an army coup.
Harrison himself described the way the story was sensationalized in the press as “complete rubbish.”11 Murder was “most unlikely,” he wrote later in his unpublished manuscript on Tutankhamun, as the degree of healing seen in the skull suggested that if there was an attack, it wasn’t immediately fatal, and “a murderer would surely not have risked retribution by failing to complete his work!” He preferred the theory that a congenital aneurysm finished off both Tutankhamun and his brother Smenkhkare.
But no one ever got to read Harrison’s book. Every publisher he sent it to turned it down. Unfortunately for Harrison, British publishers already had a glut of Tutankhamun-related books planned, to time with a huge exhibition of the king’s treasures—including the famous golden burial mask—that was to open at London’s British Museum in March 1972. It was the first time that such high-profile items from Tutankhamun’s tomb had left Egypt, and the excitement it caused took everyone by surprise, attracting well over a million visitors and inspiring a generation of Egyptologists. But by the time Harrison’s manuscript was ready, in 1971, he had missed the boat. It didn’t matter that his was the only book to include new information based on an actual study of the mummy—publishers were already bored of Tut.
So Harrison found it particularly galling when his dentist friend Leek then published a book on Tutankhamun, even if it was only an academic monograph. The Human Remains from the Tomb of Tutankhamun was published by the Griffith Institute in 1972. In it, Leek went back to Derry’s personal notes and became the first person to reveal publicly what that first brutal autopsy had really entailed. Leek also tried, unsuccessfully, to track down the mummified fetuses from the tomb. The antiquities service gave him permission to X-ray them, but when the time came, in January 1971, their tiny coffins in the Egyptian Museum turned out to be empty, with their bodies nowhere to be found.
Meanwhile, Harrison put his unwanted manuscript aside and moved on. He had a new goal—to study the other known royal mummies from Tutankhamun’s time, and untangle their confusing family relationships. In particular, he was interested in Amenhotep III (Akhenaten’s father, thought to be either Tutankhamun’s father or grandfather) and the elderly couple Yuya and Tjuiu, parents of Amenhotep III’s wife, Tiye.
By this time, Harrison had a new helper, a young female anatomist named Soheir Ahmed, who worked in Harrison’s department in Liverpool for a couple of years starting in April 1970. With her assistance, the project to x-ray these three mummies in the Egyptian Museum took place in December 1972. This time Harrison was accompanied to Egypt by a film crew from an independent channel called ITV—the BBC turned him down as they had already commissioned fourteen programs on ancient Egypt to time with the British Museum exhibition. “I think it would be more appropriate if [ITV] did the Tut leftovers,” Johnstone wrote to Harrison, rather sniffily.
The X-ray images didn’t throw up any huge surprises. But Harrison was most interested in getting his hands on tissue samples. It took a lot of persuading, but eventually he was given some scraped-off pieces from each mummy, the remains of which now sit in more little glass jars in Connolly’s collection.
Connolly found that Amenhotep III’s blood group was A2/M, while Yuya and Tjuiu were both A2/N.12 Tiye, therefore, would most likely be A2/N like her mother and father. This meant that Amenhotep III and Tiye could be the parents of Tutankhamun and Smenkhkare (both A2/MN), if that’s who the KV55 mummy was, which would make those two kings Akhenaten’s brothers.
Unfortunately, the results fit just as well with Akhenaten being their father. Or even with Akhenaten and Smenkhkare being brothers while Tutankhamun was either’s son. In short, nothing much had been ruled out at all—Tutankhamun’s family tree was as confusing as ever.
Harrison needed more family members. And he had a good idea where to find them, thanks to Ahmed el-Batrawi, Derry’s old assistant, who was appointed professor of anatomy when Derry was thrown out of the country. While Harrison was in Cairo in 1963, Batrawi had shown him around a neglected storeroom in the university’s old anatomy department—a dusty space stuffed floor to ceiling with a bewildering mass of human remains, from feet to skulls to whole bodies. It was Derry’s forgotten mummy collection. In a plain wooden box, Batrawi showed Harrison a tiny, preserved figure: one of the missing fetuses from Tutankhamun’s tomb.
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* Leek and a group of friends, including the Egyptologist Peter Clayton, often traveled to Egypt to visit ancient sites. According to Clayton, they once went to Saqqara to see some ibis catacombs there, and found some lids from the mummy cases in the sand. Leek’s wife, Phyllis, walked off the site with them tucked in her bra.