Authors: Jo Marchant
Once the experts studied the images properly, they realized that all of the strange-looking features had perfectly normal explanations. Tutankhamun didn’t suffer from Klippel-Feil syndrome—his vertebrae were fused not because of a congenital disorder but because of the glue and resin that Carter and Derry had used to stick the mummy’s skull back onto its spine.
The bone fragment turned out to consist of two bits of bone, not one. After a suggestion from Connolly, the researchers matched these to pieces missing from the vertebra at the very top of the mummy’s spine. So they weren’t caused by a skull fracture at all. Instead, Derry must have dislodged them in 1925, when he poked through the back of the skull to have a look inside. Further evidence for this came from the fact that Harris’s 1978 X-ray images of the skull show the fragments in a different position to Harrison’s, proving that they are loose in the skull. This means they must have broken off after Tutankhamun was mummified; otherwise, they’d be embedded in the resin that the embalmers poured into the king’s cranium.
The eggshell thinning that Harrison had seen, and the ghostly second line noted by Brier’s expert, had nothing to do with a brain hemorrhage. They were an optical illusion, caused by the fact that the skull was at a slight angle when Harrison x-rayed it. This meant that the two sides of the floor of the skull were at slightly different heights in the resulting image, so instead of one thick line, they appear as two thin ones.
In other words, there was nothing remotely pathological or suspicious about the skull whatsoever, just signs of how the mummy had been handled by previous excavators. Evidence for murder: zero.
But Boyer, Rodin, and Grey’s paper, published in an academic journal, did not filter through to the general public. A subsequent edition of Cooper and King’s documentary, produced after 2003, still claims murder, and still includes the footage of these scientists expressing the old conclusions that they have since disclaimed.
To finally kill off the murder theory would take a much more powerful voice. And newly appointed as head of Egypt’s antiquities service was just the man—someone who, it seemed, would not rest until he had become as famous as Tutankhamun himself, and as full of contradictions. He would single-handedly change the face of Egyptology, and his meteoric rise—and fall—would have profound consequences for Tutankhamun and the other royal mummies. His name was Zahi Hawass.
A dawn flight in a hot air balloon is perhaps the most breathtaking way to experience how the Nile valley is laid out. The river is bordered by a mile or two of fertile fields, which turn abruptly to the lifeless desert hills that conceal the Valley of the Kings.
Hatshepsut’s great mortuary temple is built into the base of the rocky amphitheater known as Deir el-Bahri. The village of Gurna is perched on the far (south) side of this basin, close to the hidden cache of royal mummies entered by Émile Brugsch in 1881.
Only a few houses remain of the village of Gurna, once home to those talented tomb robbers, the Abd el-Rassuls. The houses are built onto ancient nobles’ tombs, using their outer chambers as extra rooms.
The striking Elder Lady mummy was discovered by Victor Loret in 1898. Originally found lying on the floor of tomb KV35, she has since been identified as several different queens, including Akhenaten’s wife, Nefertiti, and his mother, Tiye. She is now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
A view over the Valley of the Kings. In this photograph, the entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb is located on the left-hand side of the Valley’s flat central floor, just opposite the large visitor center.
Howard Carter glances at the camera during the opening of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber on February 16, 1923. Just behind the stone blocks stands a wall of gold—the king’s outer shrine, which almost fills the chamber. The wooden platform that Carter stands on hides a hole through which he and his colleagues secretly entered the chamber ahead of the official opening.
Preparing to autopsy Tutankhamun on November 11, 1925. Howard Carter is on the left, holding a magnifying glass. On the right of the coffin, anatomist Douglas Derry bends over the mummy, perhaps about to make the first cut.
The anatomist Douglas Derry (left) surveys the harsh Nubian landscape, ca. 1909, accompanied by the eminent Egyptologist Flinders Petrie.
Douglas Derry in his office at the Kasr Al Ainy Medical School in Cairo, ca. 1930.
Tutankhamun’s mummy, as Howard Carter arranged it before he placed it back into the tomb in October 1926. The mummy is in pieces, held in place in a tray of sand. A beaded vest is visible on the mummy’s chest.
The head of Tutankhamun’s mummy, as it looked after Carter and Derry’s autopsy in November 1925. A beaded skullcap is still in place.
The larger fetus, discovered in the tomb’s treasury in 1927. The female mummy is of around eight months’ gestation and was accompanied by a second fetus of around five months’ gestation. They are presumed to be Tutankhamun’s stillborn daughters.
When workmen opened Tutankhamun’s coffin for Ronald Harrison’s X-ray examination of the mummy in December 1968, they broke the glass plate that Howard Carter had placed over the sarcophagus. It was replaced free of charge by the glass manufacturer Pilkington Brothers in St. Helens, Lancashire, UK.
Ronald Harrison with members of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities in the tomb of Tutankhamun in December 1968.
X-ray image showing Tutankhamun’s skull from the side, taken by Linton Reeve in December 1968. The white material at the top and back of the skull is solidified resin, poured in by the ancient embalmers. Near the corner of the two layers is a fragment of bone, dislodged when Douglas Derry checked inside the skull in 1925.
Robert Connolly now keeps these tiny samples of the royal mummies—obtained by Ronald Harrison in the 1960s and ’70s—in his office at the University of Liverpool, UK.
Egyptologist Kent Weeks, director of the Theban Mapping Project (www.thebanmappingproject.com), can often be found in his little dust-colored caravan, just outside the entrance to KV5 tomb in the Valley of the Kings.
The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, commonly known as the Egyptian Museum, is a huge, neoclassical building located just off Tahrir Square in the center of Cairo. Opened in November 1902, it is estimated to hold around 120,000 artifacts, many of them stored in the basement.
A statue of the revolutionary king Akhenaten, now on display in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
The famous bust of Queen Nefertiti, wife of Akhenaten. It was discovered at Amarna in 1912 and is now held in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, Germany.
An Egyptian postage stamp showing King Tutankhamun’s burial mask, printed ca. 1994.
The different faces of Tutankhamun, on display as part of “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2005. The touring exhibit smashed museum attendance records and sparked a wave of Tutmania.
Zahi Hawass stands with Tutankhamun’s exposed mummy before sending it for a CT scan on the evening of January 5, 2005.
Zahi Hawass speaks to journalists in the Egyptian Museum on February 17, 2010, during a press conference to announce the latest DNA and CT scan results on the royal mummies.
Pharaonic imagery was frequently used by protestors against President Mubarak’s regime, as this graffiti in central Cairo shows.
Soldiers in an army tank look on as antigovernment protestors gather to protect the Egyptian Museum from looters on January 29, 2011. Behind the museum, smoke billows from the headquarters of the ruling National Democratic Party.
A soldier guards King Tutankhamun’s golden burial mask in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, shortly after the museum was looted during the January 2011 protests.
I visited Zahi Hawass in his private office in the Mohandessin area of Cairo in November 2011. Having recently lost his position as Egypt’s antiquities chief, Hawass told me that he was working on two books—one on the revolution and one on Tutankhamun.
How the entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings looks to visitors today. The steep passage unearthed by Carter and his men in 1922 is hidden inside.
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* The following passage on page 103, regarding Derry’s examination of Tutankhamun’s mummy, is typical: “Tutankhamun’s autopsy at the Anatomical Institute of Cairo University on November 11, 1925, had tragic consequences: Alfred Lucas died soon after from a heart attack, and a little later Professor Derry died of circulatory collapse.” Quite apart from the fact that the mummy has never been anywhere near Cairo, Lucas died twenty years after the autopsy in 1945, and Derry nearly forty years later, in 1961.
† The rocks of the Valley of the Kings do contain a significant amount of naturally occurring uranium, however. In 2011, scientists measured concentrations of radon—a radioactive gas produced when uranium decays—in twelve tombs in the Valley, and checked the radon exposures of guards working in the tombs each day.4 They estimated that the guards were receiving a radiation dose of up to 66 milli-Sieverts (mSv) over a six-month period, well above the U.S. safety limit of 50 mSv per year.
* Not to be confused with Amenhotep III’s wife, Tiye.
SLICED, DICED, BROUGHT BACK TO LIFE
EXCITEMENT WAS USUALLY the only emotion Zahi Hawass felt when he was about to embark on an archaeological investigation. This time was different. As he landed at Luxor airport early in the morning of January 5, 2005, he did not relish the task ahead. He wrote later that he hadn’t slept at all the night before. And instead of giving any interviews to journalists, usually a favorite pastime, he went straight to his hotel and stayed there until the afternoon. “I was so nervous, I turned all the phones off.”1
Hawass is known for telling stories with the utmost dramatic flair. But on this occasion, it’s quite reasonable that he did feel particularly apprehensive. As head of the antiquities service, he was about to remove Tutankhamun from his tomb for the first time since Carter replaced him there in 1926. The plan was to run the mummy through a multimillion-dollar scanner that would provide a detailed three-dimensional image of its insides, to settle the outstanding questions about the king’s life and death. The whole thing was to be filmed by National Geographic for a glossy TV documentary.
Although this was the sort of thing that Hawass normally looked forward to with great anticipation, this time he was under attack from Egyptian scholars who did not want to see the king disturbed. Just a week before, the head of his scientific team, Saleh Badeir, had quit, accusing Hawass and his team of unprofessional and reckless behavior, and claiming that the project to image Tutankhamun had no chance of revealing any useful information, instead being just “another zero to add to the group of zeros we have obtained already.”2
“People were watching me carefully, hoping for a disaster,” says Hawass.3 He needed that evening to go off without a hitch.
LIKE HOWARD CARTER, Hawass came from a humble background to rise fast through the antiquities service. The eldest son of a farmer, he was brought up in a village near the city of Damietta, in the north of Egypt. After studying Greco-Roman archaeology in Alexandria, he was hired as a young inspector with the antiquities service in 1968, just as Harrison was finalizing his plans to x-ray Tutankhamun, and Harris and Weeks were working their way through the royal mummies in Cairo. He later spent several years in Philadelphia, earning a PhD in Egyptology, and when he returned to the antiquities service in 1987, was appointed director of the area including the Great Pyramids at Giza.
This was the position that ended so disastrously for Carter after his men fought back against a group of French tourists. But Hawass thrived, masterminding the first formal site-management plan for the Giza plateau, including entrance gates, visitor centers, stables for tourist-carrying camels and horses, and conservation efforts. More controversially, he also starred in a series of TV documentaries about the pyramids and other sites, including live specials for Fox TV in which he pried open coffins live for the cameras and sent a robot to drill through a stone door at the end of a shaft in the Great Pyramid (revealing only a second stone slab).
Inevitably, he upset more than a few Egyptologists, who accused him of dumbing down the subject and chasing audiences at the expense of careful archaeology. But his force of energy and conviction captivated viewers around the world. On camera, he enthused wide-eyed about mummies and tombs and secret chambers as if they were the most precious jewels of the universe, and made a traditionally esoteric subject accessible, without a hint of snobbery. For the millions who watched, it was the first time that they had ever learned about ancient Egypt from an Egyptian. And according to some, such as Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist at the American University in Cairo who has worked in Egypt since the early 1990s, Hawass also made Egyptians themselves care about their heritage in a way that they hadn’t before.4
Hawass was promoted to head of the antiquities service in March 2002. He set about modernizing the service, clamping down on bribery and corruption among local inspectors, and introducing site management plans at archaeological sites around the country. And he continued working with American film companies such as National Geographic and the Discovery Channel, appearing in a string of films with names like Secrets of the Pyramids and Quest for the Lost Pharaoh.
But this latest project was to be one of the most impressive yet. A few months earlier, in October 2004, National Geographic, together with the German electronics company Siemens, had donated to the antiquities service a computed tomography (CT) scanner, mounted in a trailer that could be driven wherever it was needed around the country. Worth millions of dollars, it was state-of-the-art technology that Egyptian scholars could previously only have dreamed of.
Hawass used the scanner to launch the Egyptian Mummy Project, a much-needed (and much-praised) effort to catalog and study all of the human mummies held in the many museums and storage houses owned by the antiquities service. Selected mummies would be CT scanned to collect data on topics such as the average age at death during different periods of Egyptian history, and the spread of ancient disease.