Authors: Jo Marchant
Researchers there found that Rameses was infested with fungus. After much discussion about what to do—there were concerns that chemical or heat treatment might damage the mummy, though it’s hard to imagine what could be worse than decades of insecticide—it was decided to sterilize him using gamma rays. Scientists at the French Atomic Energy Commission carried out a series of trials on less valuable mummies, to make sure, for example, that their hair didn’t fall out. Then the pharaoh was placed into a smart new case and irradiated, before being flown back to Cairo the next May.
Rameses survived the treatment unscathed, but unfortunately his display case, made of an advanced type of Plexiglas, had been wiped with a cleaning product just before the irradiation. This caused the gamma rays to react with the glass, which became cracked and yellowed. After the entire lengthy rescue process, poor Rameses wasn’t fit for display.
Meanwhile, Bucaille decided that he wasn’t happy with Harris’s X-ray plates, and worked with staff at the museum to x-ray, again, several royal mummies including Rameses II and Merenptah. He concluded that Rameses II was an old man when he died and suffering from excruciating pus-filled abscesses in his teeth, so was unlikely to have taken off across the desert chasing the Israelites shortly before his death.
Merenptah, on the other hand, had a hole in his skull—evidence of a blow to the head that killed him. Bucaille took this as proof that Merenptah came to a tragic end, and must therefore be the king he was looking for. You might think that someone swallowed up by the extensive waters of the Red Sea is unlikely to have been retrieved and mummified in order to end up in the Egyptian Museum. But Bucaille found a passage in the Qur’an that says the body was recovered—saved by God “to act as a sign for future generations.”
This would mean that Rameses II, Merenptah’s father, was the pharaoh who originally ordered the killing of Jewish babies, and subsequently welcomed Moses into his court. Bucaille got quite carried away when looking at Rameses II’s face, noting that the embalmers had removed his eyes: “Those eyes had enabled one of antiquity’s greatest sovereigns to see one of the greatest figures of religious history—Moses … Having looked at those closed eyelids, I was certain beyond the shadow of a doubt that Rameses II knew Moses personally.” It’s a quote that seems to sum up Bucaille’s scientific approach rather well.
Other authors have identified Moses himself from among the pharaohs. The prime candidate is Tutankhamun’s predecessor Akhenaten, who thanks to his religious revolution has been often described as the world’s first monotheist. Back in 1939, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud suggested in his final book, Moses and Monotheism,8 that Moses was inspired by Akhenaten’s devotion to the Aten. Then in 1990, Ahmed Osman went one step further, claiming in a book called Moses and Akhenaten9 that the heretic king was in fact Moses himself.
Osman is an Egyptian-born writer and self-taught historian, now based in London. He had previously argued that Yuya, the smiling elderly mummy found with his wife, was none other than Joseph, famous for his multicolored coat. The Book of Genesis tells how Joseph was sold into slavery by his jealous brothers. He ended up in an Egyptian prison, but used his God-given talent for interpreting dreams to become the most powerful man in Egypt next to the pharaoh. He’s also highly regarded by Muslims, with a whole chapter of the Qur’an dedicated to him.
Most modern biblical scholars date the story in its current form to the fifth century BC at earliest. Osman’s alternative theory is based largely on convoluted wordplay and coincidences. For example, he sees in Yuya’s name the shortened form of the Hebrew Yahweh, God of the Israelites, and concludes that Yuya was a foreigner in Egypt, nicknamed after his God.
Then, in 1992, Osman went even further and in a mind-bending reinterpretation of accepted history, decided that Tutankhamun was Jesus. In Jesus in the House of the Pharaohs,10 Osman follows a trail of clues of which Dan Brown* would be proud. For example, he points out that the biblical word Messiah comes from the Hebrew Mashiach, which he claims can itself be traced back further to ancient Egypt, to a word meaning crocodile. Meanwhile, the English name Christ derives from the Greek Christos, meaning the Anointed One, or King. It was an Egyptian custom to anoint kings not with oil but the fat of the holy crocodile. So, Christ must have been an Egyptian king.
But which king? It could only be Tutankhamun, says Osman, because his birth name—TutAnkh-Aten—translates as “Living image of the Lord.”† Osman isn’t concerned by the fact that Tutankhamun lived more than 1300 years before the supposed birth of Christ. He concludes that Judaism and Christianity derive from an ancient Egyptian mystery cult that was later suppressed and transformed by the Roman authorities in a triumph of fictional propaganda. In other words, the roots of the entire Western religious belief system lie in Egypt, with biblical personalities simply fictitious versions of various Egyptian kings.
Sound farfetched? As you might expect, the idea of a divine Tut has been largely ignored by conventional academics. But scholars have felt the need to rebut Osman’s work in publications such as the Biblical Archaeology Review,11 while his ideas have been covered positively in leading Egyptian newspapers including Al Ahram.12 And he has sold a lot of books. We all love a good cover-up.‡
ON THE EDGE of the Faiyum oasis, in the desert around eighty miles southwest of Cairo, is an early Christian cemetery called Fag el-Gamous. In the early 1990s, two scientists were excavating there: Scott Woodward and Wilfred Griggs from Brigham Young University in Utah. Griggs is an archaeologist and Woodward is a geneticist; both are high-ranking members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, otherwise known as the Mormons.
Woodward was a pioneer of the new field of ancient DNA research, and around this time he published a groundbreaking paper in the U.S. journal Science, reporting DNA from an 80-million-year-old dinosaur15 (though read Chapter 15 before you get too excited about this). In Egypt, he was using his cutting-edge techniques to isolate DNA from the mummies at Faiyum.
In 1993, Nasry Iskander of Egypt’s antiquities service asked Woodward to test six intriguing mummies held in the Cairo Museum. Known as the “Akhmim” mummies after the site north of Luxor where they were found, they dated from Dynasty Four or Five. Two were of grandparent age, two were of parent age, and two were children. X-ray images revealed broken necks—they had all been hanged. Using DNA, Woodward was able to confirm the mummies’ sex, and show that they represented three generations of the same doomed family.16
The success of that work led to an even more exciting project. After Bucaille’s complaints about the conditions in which the royal mummies were being kept, they were all being moved into new climate-controlled cases, designed by the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles. With Iskander’s permission, Woodward used the opportunity to take samples of the royal mummies’ DNA. Like Harris, he hoped to tease out the murky family relationships of the Eighteenth-Dynasty kings. His work was featured in a U.S. documentary series called Secrets of the Pharaohs, shown on PBS in 2000. He collected scraps of loose tissue from the mummies (he wasn’t allowed to use more invasive methods) and took them back to Utah for lab tests.
Woodward hoped to test Tutankhamun too, but his project came to an abrupt end, after coming what he later described as “tantalizingly close” to sampling the boy king.17 The PBS documentary says that the authorities decided Tutankhamun was “too precious to disturb.” But Egyptologists widely believe the termination of the project was triggered by concerns of an ulterior—religious—motive.
To anyone on the outside, Mormonism looks like a pretty strange religion. Its followers believe that in 1827 an angel named Moroni led Joseph Smith, the movement’s founder, to a set of golden plates buried in a hillside near his New York home. The plates contained divine writings in a strange language described as “Reformed Egyptian.” God provided Smith with a pair of glasses and seer stones that allowed him to translate them, producing the “Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ.” Among other things, it claims that a forgotten tribe of Jews sailed from Jerusalem to the New World in 600 BC, and became the ancestors of the Native Americans.*
There are now around 13 million Mormons around the world and they are massively into genealogy. The Church has the largest genealogical library in the world, in Salt Lake City, Utah. It contains more than 2 million names, on everything from fourteenth-century English church records to African oral histories, and more than two thousand people visit every day. The Church also has a website, FamilySearch.org, that contains over a billion names from over a hundred countries, and is working on a huge project to digitize microfilm and other records, which it says could potentially add billions more.
They’re not just doing this out of curiosity. A central Mormon belief is that if you can identify your dead ancestors, you can posthumously convert their spirits to the cause. As the Mormon.org website puts it: “Discovering that you’re related to a renaissance nobleman could be a lot of fun. It could also mean giving him and his family an opportunity to receive the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
The Mormons are particularly interested in Egypt, because they believe that the Jews who supposedly traveled to America in the sixth century BC were descendants of the biblical Joseph, who lived in Egypt and was close to the royal family (or was part of the family, if you believe Osman’s claims).
So Woodward and Griggs’s presence in Egypt raised a few eyebrows, with some Egyptologists wondering whether they might be looking for distant ancestors to convert to Mormonism. “There was a feeling that they wanted to baptize the bodies,” one prominent Egyptologist (who asked not to be named) said to me about their work at Faiyum. “It was odd: there was no need to excavate the cemetery. There weren’t going to be any grave goods there.” Meanwhile, Ahmed Saleh, an Egyptian Egyptologist working for the antiquities service, complained to Egypt Today that Woodward was looking for links between Egyptian kings and Jewish prophets.19 “They are trying to say that our Egyptian history belongs to them,” he said.
Whereas Osman claimed Judaism and Christianity for Egypt, the fear was that Woodward aimed to do the reverse, and prove that the Egyptian rulers were in fact Jews. Did he even plan to convert the pharaohs?
Woodward has since left Brigham Young University to run an organization called the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation (SMGF). Funded by a Mormon billionaire, it combines genealogy with DNA tests—on a huge scale. The aim is to create a large, searchable database of DNA sequences from different individuals, linked to their corresponding family trees, “to help people make new family connections.”20 Since it was founded in 2000, the SMGF has collected more than 100,000 DNA samples, with corresponding pedigree charts, from volunteers in more than 100 countries.
Woodward didn’t respond to my repeated requests for comment about his work and motivations (although when I called the SMGF, a helpful young man who answered the phone scanned the database for my ancestors before I’d even had a chance to explain what I wanted). He hasn’t commented publicly either on why his project was cut short. But in a lecture to the Egyptian Study Society in 2001,21 he said that among the questions he was trying to answer at the Faiyum cemetery at least was whether the individuals buried there have any living descendants, and whether they can be genetically tied with living peoples in Egypt and elsewhere.
So on the one hand, it would perhaps seem strange if someone with Woodward’s beliefs wasn’t interested in finding direct ancestors among the Egyptian mummies he studied. But then maybe it’s a bit lazy simply to assign religious motivations to his work. After all, presumably he wasn’t looking for souls to convert when he analyzed those dinosaur bones.
Whatever Woodward’s intentions, little useful information has come out of his project. In that 2001 lecture, Woodward said he took tissues from eleven mummies and had sequenced DNA from seven of them, including Amenhotep I, the so-called Thutmose I, and the queens Seknet-re and Ahmose-Nefertari. The PBS documentary also showed samples being taken from Thutmose III and the two fetuses from Tutankhamun’s tomb (Woodward and Griggs are shown tracking them down in the medical school, under the care of anatomy professor Fawzi Gaballah—it seems that despite Soheir Ahmed’s searches for Harrison during which she found only the larger fetus, both of them were there after all). Some claim that Yuya—who Osman had identified as the Mormons’ ultimate ancestor Joseph—was included in the study too.
In the documentary, Woodward said that although his analysis wasn’t complete, preliminary data suggested several brother-sister marriages in the early part of the dynasty (with Ahmose marrying his sister Seknet-re, for example), followed by a break in the maternal line during which new genetic material was introduced. But Woodward has not published his results, nor submitted any data to the Egyptian authorities. So it’s impossible to know whether these preliminary hints can be trusted or not.
In 2000, another attempt was made to DNA test Tutankhamun’s mummy. The project was coordinated by Iskander at the antiquities service and led by a respected Egyptologist named Sakuji Yoshimura, director of the Institute of Egyptology at Waseda University in Japan. The researchers hoped to determine Tutankhamun’s royal lineage by taking samples from his mummy as well as Amenhotep III (thought to be his father or grandfather). They also planned to test the Elder and Younger Ladies in the side room of KV35, to investigate whether the Elder Lady was really Queen Tiye (Amenhotep III’s wife and just possibly Tutankhamun’s mother) as James Harris’s hair analysis suggested.
In November 2000, the researchers announced that they would carry out the tests the next month.22 But at the beginning of December, the plans were postponed without explanation. According to press reports, the idea of testing the mummies had provoked controversy among archaeologists in Egypt, who saw it as “meddling” with Egypt’s history, trying to alter the established view of the pharaohs and their succession.23