Authors: Jo Marchant
The scanner was tested out on a handful of not-so-important mummies in the Egyptian Museum. But then, instead of gradually working through the mummy collections as most observers had expected, Hawass announced that the scanner’s first major project, beginning in January 2005, would be to scan the royal mummies, with National Geographic there to film the whole thing. They would be starting with the most precious mummy of all: Tutankhamun.
This is what seems to have got experts including Saleh Badeir, the orthopedics professor in charge of the scientific team charged with scanning the mummies, so upset.* He quit the project, complaining publicly that scanning Tutankhamun so soon was against the originally agreed plan, and that the team needed to gain more expertise before disturbing such a precious and fragile mummy. “All the attention suddenly turned to Tutankhamun’s mummy without any previous intention,” he told the newspaper Al Ahram.5 “Why the rush?” Though he supported the idea of CT scanning in theory, Badeir evidently feared that the change in direction had more to do with attracting viewing figures than answering serious academic questions. “Instead of being a very important scientific event it only serves media addicts.”
Several prominent archaeologists cited concerns too, largely over the transparency of Hawass’s plans. Cairo University professor Abdel-Halim Nureddin complained that other experts hadn’t been informed about the details of the project, and questioned whether Tutankhamun’s mummy would be safe while removed from its tomb and scanned. Others, including Gaballa Ali Gaballa, former head of the antiquities service, were uneasy about the role of National Geographic, questioning who would ultimately own the information and images that came out of the project, and asking why the Egyptian media were excluded from witnessing the event.
No stranger to controversy, Hawass’s response was robust as always. The mummy would be scanned by a professional team of Egyptian archaeologists and scientists, and the plan had been approved by the antiquities service, who would own all of the data produced by the project. Egyptian journalists were excluded from the tomb only because having too many people present would risk contaminating the mummy.
Anyway, the film crew was booked. The CT trailer had been driven to the Valley of the Kings. The project was going ahead regardless of the campaign against it. But in light of the criticism, perhaps it’s not surprising if even the publicity-loving Hawass turned off his phones.
At four thirty in the afternoon, Hawass met his team in the hotel lobby. They arrived at the Valley of the Kings in late afternoon after it had been closed to tourists for the day, under a sky that was, unusually, full of clouds. Buffeted by the wind, Hawass gave cheery interviews to the waiting journalists from Egypt, the United States, France, and Japan. But he found the worsening weather unnerving. Rain, a rare occurrence in the Valley, would be a disaster—moisture in the air when they brought Tutankhamun out of his tomb risked damaging the mummy: “I heard people whispering about THE CURSE.”6
As darkness fell, the team piled into the cramped burial chamber to rouse the mummy one more time. The room was a bustling sea of men, some dressed in shirts and jeans, others in traditional robes called galabiya, all hands reaching toward the open coffin. Then came a shout in Arabic: “In the name of Allah the merciful!”7 Suddenly, the mummy was swaying and seasick as its wooden tray was lifted by two thin ropes and balanced on the sarcophagus wall.
Hawass dramatically threw back the mummy’s cotton shroud, the moment captured in slow motion by the American film crew, who were squashed into a corner against a backdrop of mottled tomb paintings. It was a sorry sight for the cameras. As Harrison had found nearly four decades earlier, the mummy’s skin was black, eye sockets empty, both ears rubbed away to dust. Its taut, stuffed belly looked almost comical next to broken stick-limbs and pigeon toes, the disarticulated pieces lying in the sand like stones. Egypt’s immortal king had been reduced to a sad, charred puppet.
The mummy was swept out of the tomb and into the wind and swirling sand. The clouds denied it an exhilarating glimpse of the stars as it was hauled onto a hydraulic lift and hoisted into the nearby trailer. Inside, Hawass leaned forward over the mummy, smiling for the cameras, the two faces inches apart. Then the tray was pushed into the depths of the scanner.
Electromagnetic radiation swept through the mummy from every direction until barely an atom of privacy remained. Images of teeth and bone began to pop up on a nearby computer screen squeezed into a corner of the trailer, as the body was cut into black-and-white slices less than a millimeter thick. Harsh light bounced off every surface of the mummy, the decrepit figure drowning in the machine’s clean white-and-blue curves. It was a strange conjunction of the ancient and the futuristic, as if this Egyptian pharaoh was being abducted by aliens.
Then the million-dollar scanner shuddered to a halt.
CT SCANS (sometimes known as CAT scans) are routinely used in medicine for checking inside patients’ bodies for problems such as brain tumors and internal injuries. The technique is now bringing a mini-revolution to archaeology and paleontology too, where it’s also useful to look inside precious objects without cutting them open. Instead of producing a flat image like an old-style X-ray plate, a CT scanner sends X-rays through an object from hundreds of angles, then crunches the numbers by computer to produce a 3D virtual reconstruction of that object’s insides. (Or as Hawass puts it, characteristically bending the English language to his will, “this machine can change the dead to be alive.”8) Researchers can move the resulting reconstruction around on the computer screen to inspect it from any angle, zoom in to see tiny details, or even fly straight through to admire complex internal structures.
In the last decade or so, paleontologists have used CT as an alternative to breaking fossils open with a hammer and chisel—revealing for example previously unknown insect species hidden in opaque chunks of amber, the cleavage patterns inside billion-year-old worm embryos, and the spacing of vertebrae in a four-ton mummified dinosaur.9 Archaeologists have used the method to study everything from the writing on ancient scrolls too delicate to unfurl, to the intricate gearing inside a two-thousand-year-old clockwork device called the Antikythera mechanism.10
Tutankhamun was getting the full medical treatment, in an advanced machine designed for living patients.* There was an hour of nervousness in the windswept valley as technicians tried to get the halted scanner working again. It turned out that the delicate machinery had overheated, because sand had blocked its cooler fan. Two plastic electric fans were obtained from a nearby office, and the scanning resumed. In less than half an hour, the machine’s work was done. It had produced more than 1,700 images of the pharaoh’s body.
Tutankhamun was returned to his coffin, while back in the trailer, the computer, operated by Siemens’ specialist Hani Abdel Rahman, built up the X-ray slices into a three-dimensional model. As the king’s fragile body was brought to life on the screen, Hawass finally sank back in his chair and smiled. But it was just the start of a busy night—the team had five more mummies to scan after Tutankhamun, including the three mummies—the Elder Lady, Younger Lady, and Boy—from the side room of KV35.
FRANK RÜHLI is a paleopathologist (an expert in the injuries and diseases of long-dead things, for those who prefer plain English) at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. In 2005, he was in his early thirties, but he was already one of the world’s foremost mummy researchers. He had studied ancient Egyptian mummies held in collections around the world, in countries from Switzerland to Australia, but never in Egypt itself.
In late February 2005, Rühli received an email from National Geographic. Egyptian researchers analyzing the CT scans of Tutankhamun’s mummy were having trouble agreeing on certain points. Time was short but could he fly to Cairo the next week to provide a second opinion? Rühli is passionate about his subject and despite its perhaps nonurgent nature, he doesn’t like to hang around. He talks fast and fluently and sends staccato emails with the minimum number of words necessary to get his point across. He said yes immediately.
Hawass’s Egyptian team, led after Badeir’s departure by Mervat Shafik, a senior radiologist at Cairo University, had spent two months scrutinizing the CT scans, followed closely by the National Geographic film crew. A press conference to announce the researchers’ results was already scheduled for the beginning of March. They would need to finalize their report before then.
Rühli was invited to study the scans along with two other foreign experts, Eduard Egarter-Vigl and Paul Gostner, a pathologist and radiologist, respectively, from Bolzano, Italy, who were known for their work on Ötzi the Iceman, a 5,300-year-old mummy found frozen in the Alps in 1991 (and now kept in Bolzano). The three of them had a week to plough through the hundreds of images, squeezed into the small CT trailer—now parked around the side of the Egyptian Museum—with the Egyptian team members squashed in behind. They weren’t allowed to take images or data away from the trailer, but discussed their findings in the evenings over beer in the luxurious garden of the nearby Marriott hotel. For Rühli, getting a privileged view inside the body of such a famous historical figure was a dream come true. “It was one of the best weeks of my life,” he told me.
But interpreting the clues inside a three-thousand-year-old body isn’t easy, especially one that has been gutted by ancient embalmers, dismembered by modern archaeologists, and thrown about by looters. If you see some damage, how do you know if it reflects an injury or condition that affected the person during life, was caused by the mummification process, or was inflicted in modern times? The researchers couldn’t all agree, so toward the end of the week, reinforcements were called in again, in the shape of Ashraf Selim. He wasn’t experienced in studying mummies, but was a senior professor of radiology at Cairo University, and head of Egypt’s largest private radiology institute.
Selim says he received a phone call out of the blue from Hawass himself: “At the time I didn’t know him except on the news.” Hawass asked him to judge between the two teams’ findings and help to finalize a report. Because of the looming press conference, Selim would have only one day to look at the CT images. Selim refused, saying he was too busy, but Hawass wasn’t about to take no for an answer, telling him: “It’s very important to Egypt.” Selim says he sat with the images until three o’clock in the morning before meeting with the Egyptian and foreign teams the next day. “I solved the conflict between both teams,” he tells me. That’s not quite how the others see it, however, and several disagreements were included in the final report, which all of the researchers duly signed.
The press conference was held on March 8, 2005, with the results—seen as a matter of national importance—announced to the world by President Mubarak’s culture minister, Farouk Hosni.
Several of the findings matched what previous investigators had seen. Overall, the scans showed a slightly built young man, who was “well-fed and healthy and suffered no major childhood malnutrition or infectious diseases.”11 Tutankhamun’s teeth were in excellent condition (apart from an impacted wisdom tooth), with large, front incisors and an overbite also seen in other kings from the same family line. As well as a slightly receding chin, Tutankhamun had a mild cleft palate, though he probably wasn’t aware of it and there wouldn’t have been any external signs. Like Harrison, the team noticed a slight curve in the king’s back, but agreed that his spine looked normal and the body was probably just laid out this way by the embalmers.
The team noted at least five different types of embalming material in the body and skull, concluding that the priests had mummified Tutankhamun’s body with great care. And, of course, they found the king’s penis, to the delight of journalists around the world. “I don’t know why the media got so excited,” says Selim. “It’s of no clinical importance for us. It’s very dry. It just broke off and fell in the sand.”
So what about the cause of death? After scrutinizing the skull, the researchers all agreed that there was no sign of a blow to the head. “This was one of the big mysteries that I solved personally,” Selim told me. He says he determined that the bone fragments in the skull came from the top of the spine (as Grey, Boyer, and Rodin had previously suggested).
The team also concluded, like Harrison, that Tutankhamun’s missing chest was a red herring with no relevance to the king’s demise, arguing that with such a serious injury, you’d expect to see damage elsewhere on the body, perhaps on the vertebrae or arms. The ribs appeared to have been cut with a sharp instrument, suggesting that someone had removed them after death, but who? The team was divided as to whether this was done by the ancient embalmers for some unknown reason, or in modern times, by whoever stole the missing beaded bib. Playing to pro-Egyptian sentiment, Hawass blamed it squarely on the British archaeologist Carter—claiming that counter to the records the archaeologist left, he must have chiseled the bib from the mummy’s chest, taking the ribs with it, before placing the body back in the tomb.
Several of the researchers saw a clue to the king’s death elsewhere: Tutankhamun had a fractured left femur (thigh bone). Derry and Harrison had both noted this but didn’t think it was important—the mummy’s fragile bones are broken in countless places, due to their handling during and since the mummy’s unwrapping. But this break looks a bit different from the others. It has ragged rather than sharp edges, and the scans hint at a dense material inside, perhaps embalming fluid that has seeped into the crack. A fracture in this location—right at the end of the bone just above the knee—is well known in young men in their late teens.
Some of the team, including Selim and Gostner, believe this is likely to be a fracture that Tutankhamun suffered during his life. Because embalming materials seem to have seeped in, they argue that the wound was still open when the body was embalmed, suggesting the injury happened just before Tutankhamun’s death. A broken leg on its own wouldn’t kill him but bleeding or infection that followed it might. The team came up with a new scenario for the king’s death: he suffered an accident, perhaps while hunting, in which he badly broke his leg; then an infection set in that killed him a few days later.