Authors: Jo Marchant
Rühli, on the other hand, slows right down when it comes to drawing such conclusions, arguing that trying to tell the difference between damage that occurred before or after death is “a minefield.” He argues that the evidence isn’t strong enough to say that Tutankhamun broke his leg while he was alive. He points out that the mummy is damaged at the site of the fracture, leaving the bones exposed. Just by looking at the mummy, “you can clearly see the fracture and the material inside,” he says. So the dense material inside the crack could easily have been inadvertently pushed there by Carter and Derry, for example when they painted the mummy with a protective coat of melted wax. He adds that the CT scans show no signs of a hemorrhage or bleed, which you would expect if the bone had been broken during life.*
The press release did a good job of acknowledging the disagreements within the team, although Hawass felt there was certainty enough. “These results will close the case of Tutankhamun,” he said. “The king will not need to be examined again.”12
A COUPLE OF MONTHS LATER, the antiquities service put out another press release, this time on efforts to reconstruct from the CT scans what Tutankhamun would have looked like.13 It wasn’t the first time anyone had tried to re-create Tutankhamun’s face. In the 1960s, the BBC commissioned a sculptor to produce a clay bust from Harrison’s X-rays (he took on the time-consuming task for free, hoping that the publicity would boost his career, and was sorely disappointed when all mention of his masterpiece was cut from the final film). In 2001, the ex–FBI agents, Cooper and King, commissioned another bust based on the same X-rays, which was made by a physicist in London and delivered to them in a cardboard box.
This time, three separate faces were created by independent artist-scientist teams from the United States and France (both chosen and sponsored by National Geographic), as well as Egypt (selected by the antiquities service).
The French and Egyptian teams knew they were working on Tutankhamun and referred to ancient images to guide their reconstructions, which presumably allowed for a fair bit of subjectivity in the final result. The Egyptian team’s version, perhaps not surprisingly, is kingly and handsome, with a broad, angular face, high cheekbones, and strong jaw. The American team worked blind, with no idea whom they were recreating, so their bust is probably the most insightful. They identified the racial type as Caucasian, specifically North African. Their face is quite similar to the French version and shows a weaker-looking man than that produced by the Egyptian team, with a ski-jump nose and receding chin.
Hawass, ever the salesman, said the faces created by the teams were remarkably similar to a famous statue of Tutankhamun as a child, in which his perfectly round, wide-eyed head is shown rising out of a lotus blossom. I’m not sure I see it myself.
National Geographic’s documentary on the CT project, called King Tut’s Final Secrets, aired on May 15, 2005, accompanied by a cover story in the June issue of National Geographic magazine. In the film, the uncertainty over the cause of Tutankhamun’s death has disappeared, with no mention of Rühli’s doubts over the timing of the fractured femur. The conclusion—described by the film’s narrator as “a turning point in the history of the boy king”—appears unequivocal: Tutankhamun died from complications following a broken leg.
But the CT project was about much more than just a documentary and magazine article. These were curtain raisers, which stoked excitement for the main event: a touring international exhibition that it was hoped would beat even the blockbuster tour of the 1970s.
After Hawass took charge of the antiquities service, Tutankhamun became the centerpiece of his strategy to bring in tourists—and money—to Egypt. In 2003, Hawass and the culture minister Hosni secured a law that allowed the Tutankhamun treasures to leave the country once more (such travel had been banned after a statue in the previous tour was damaged in Germany in 1981). This paved the way for two related exhibitions.
The first, called “Tutankhamen: The Golden Hereafter,” visited Basel in Switzerland, and Bonn in Germany, in 2004. While the 1970s exhibition was intended to soften American attitudes toward Egypt during negotiations with Israel, this tour grew out of more modern political concerns, including the war on terror.
Egypt openly promoted it as a peace initiative. President Mubarak’s wife, Suzanne, went to Basel for the grand opening, noting rather dubiously that the “magnificent Egyptian heritage is in itself evidence that since the dawn of history Egypt has embraced a culture of peace.”14 Mubarak himself attended the Bonn launch, accompanied by the German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. The Egyptian leader stressed the exhibition as a way to combat conflict between different cultures and religions, and used the occasion to push for international cooperation to combat the worsening crisis in Darfur, Sudan, and to address the root causes behind the growing phenomenon of terrorism.15
Some commentators say this shielded a slightly more self-interested motive. Egypt was heavily dependent on income from tourism, but visitor numbers had dropped sharply after a series of attacks by Islamist terrorist groups, the worst being a massacre at Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahri in 1997, in which gunmen brutally murdered sixty-two people before fleeing into the hills and committing suicide in a cave. Most of the victims were tourists from Switzerland and Germany. As Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times put it: “Tut was sent to invite them back.”16
The show was a huge commercial success; in Basel, more than 600,000 people saw the show in six months. For Hawass, it was an early lesson in the power of Tutankhamun’s popular appeal. “The people at that time did not know the value of what King Tut can do,” he told USA Today.17 “We know this now.”
The second leg of the tour, revamped by National Geographic and renamed Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,* went to the United States, starting at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in June 2005. It ended up making the 1970s tour look like a quaint educational effort, breaking the mold for museum exhibitions in that it was a completely commercial venture, aiming quite openly to make as much money up front as possible. It was sponsored not by a museum but by three commercial companies: National Geographic, AEI (Arts and Exhibitions International, a relatively new company formed to create profit-making extravaganzas for museums), and AEG (Anschutz Entertainment Group, which makes family movies, owns sports teams, and produces rock concerts).
Egypt too would take a hefty cut. In negotiating the deal, Hawass hoped to earn about $10 million from each U.S. city, to go toward antiquities as well as a hugely expensive Grand Egyptian Museum, planned to be built in Giza.18
The show was assembled and presented by the antiquities service and the sponsors, leaving the museums themselves with no say over the content or presentation of the exhibits they were hosting—or the cost of tickets. According to the New York Times, the exhibition did no less than redefine the role of museums, by outsourcing their traditional job—curating content—to commercial companies.19 Or as one arts blog more succinctly put it: “LACMA curators have effectively left the building.”20
Scientific studies on Tutankhamun’s mummy were key to marketing the exhibition, providing fresh results that earned headlines around the world. The National Geographic–sponsored CT study was timed perfectly to promote the big U.S. opening. The tour ended up lasting another six years and visiting seven U.S. cities (as well as London, UK, and Melbourne, Australia).
The exhibition consisted of fifty objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb. The gold mask and coffin were still not allowed to leave Egypt, but the show did include his golden crown, one of the gold coffinettes that had contained his internal organs, and a lifelike wooden torso, perhaps used as a dress model. These were joined by seventy objects from other royal tombs of the Eighteenth Dynasty, including a sensuous unguent spoon shaped like a swimming woman and a painted leather collar from a royal hunting dog. The last gallery of the exhibition proudly presented the big finale: the results of the CT scans.
This was Tutankhamun done up for Hollywood. LACMA rolled out the red carpet for its glamorous opening night gala, while inside, the museum was transformed as if for a movie set, with plywood pillars, flowing drapes, and scorpion-shaped wall lights. The galleries featured sand-colored carpets and walls, with enlarged photos of desert landscapes and slanting doorways reminiscent of stone gateways and tomb entrances. As visitors first entered the exhibition, a set of heavy black curtains opened to reveal a film featuring Zahi Hawass, with a voice-over by an old friend, Egyptian actor Omar Sharif.
To one reviewer, the mysterious lighting, curtains, and waiting invoked “the atmosphere of an amusement park where you know that things are fake, while trying hard to look real. [It] creates the expectation that the Tutankhamun torso will burst out in the ancient Egyptian rendering of ‘It’s a small world after all.’”21
The exhibition itself was well received by critics, who agreed that the objects on display were exquisite. But in general, media attention was quite negative—there was much criticism of the commercial organization of the event, while groups of protestors, upset by light-skinned depictions of the king, maintained that “Tut is back and he is black.”22 The final CT gallery was initially meant to house a bust showing Tutankhamun’s reconstructed face, but after protests that it looked too “un-African,” it was removed and replaced with a photo.
It didn’t matter though. Just as in the 1970s, visitors came in droves—the exhibition was ultimately seen by nearly 8 million people worldwide—leaving marketers enthusing over Tutankhamun’s “huge brand recognition.”23 Memorabilia on sale this time included a plastic Tut mask tissue dispenser and a Tut-themed olive oil gift set, while one industrious bar-owner invented the Tutini cocktail in the pharaoh’s honor.
The exhibition also focused attention on Hawass himself, with publications around the world rushing to profile the charismatic king of archaeology. The New York Times described him as “part Indiana Jones, part P. T. Barnum,”24 while the Los Angeles Times called him “the Arab equivalent of a first-class Irish yarn spinner.”25
But these articles also highlighted his supposed darker side. Critics claimed that he regularly took credit for the work of others and was intolerant of dissenting views to the point of stifling academic debate, not hesitating to suspend antiquities service employees or evict foreign archaeologists who failed to toe the line. Hawass emphatically denies these accusations, as I was to find out when I later visited him, but he failed to convince Britain’s Sunday Times. “He rules Egyptology with an iron fist and censorious tongue,” its correspondent concluded. “Nobody crosses Zahi Hawass and gets away with it.”26
Hawass’s media-hungry style came in for more criticism too, including his handling of the CT study, which Thomas Hoving, the ex-director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, who had coordinated the 1970s tour, dismissed as a media stunt rather than serious scholarship. Even one of Hawass’s friends described him (in the nicest possible way) as “a media whore … who understands how to talk to people at the lowest possible level.”27
“I’m not doing this for fame. I’m already famous,” Hawass responded. “I’m not doing this for power. I don’t need power. I’m doing this because I’m the only one who can do it. It’s the first time that Egypt is being explained to the public.”28 And thanks to him, more people knew Tutankhamun’s name than ever before.
HOW TO FOLLOW the commercial success of CT scanning the boy king? Hawass’s next big documentary followed another dramatic storyline: the search for the lost queen Nefertiti. Nefertiti and the Lost Dynasty,29 made by National Geographic, first aired in July 2007. It focused on the CT scans of the two mysterious women from the side room of tomb KV35.
Both women had previously been considered as candidates for Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s beautiful wife. An Egyptologist named Susan James suggested in 2001 that the Elder Lady has a pronounced physical resemblance to the famous Berlin bust of the ancient queen, including a square jaw, elongated neck, and pronounced filtrum (the little vertical groove underneath your nose).30 Like Harris, who thought that she might be Hatshepsut before changing his mind to Queen Tiye, James noted the Elder Lady’s bent left arm, a pose associated with female royalty.
Another Egyptologist, Joann Fletcher of the University of York, UK, subsequently suggested (in a 2003 documentary followed by a 2004 book31), that Nefertiti was instead the Younger Lady.* Her claim proved controversial among some Egyptologists, not least Hawass, who described her as “nuts” and “an amateur,”32 and accused her of breaking rules by publicizing her work without running her results past the antiquities service first. Fletcher denies this, arguing that she did submit a report as required, although this didn’t stop the antiquities service, led by Hawass, from temporarily banning her from working in Egypt. They even issued a report saying that the mummy was male, though this was conveniently forgotten by the time of the CT study.
In Nefertiti and the Lost Dynasty, Selim’s CT scans are presented as ruling out both women as Nefertiti, but provide drama for the TV cameras by then suggesting them as other prominent members of Tutankhamun’s family. Based on mild degeneration in the Elder Lady’s spine and knees, Selim and Rahman decided that she was aged between forty and sixty when she died, just the right age for Queen Tiye, as Harris had suggested. Some Egyptologists have since pointed out that this evidence is hardly conclusive—after all, Nefertiti could have been that age too. In the film, Hawass chooses his words carefully. He pronounces merely that the mummy could be Tiye. But no alternatives are presented, and there’s something so persuasive, almost hypnotic, about his delivery that the casual viewer is left in no doubt that the true identity of this enigmatic mummy has at last been found.
Meanwhile, scans of the Younger Lady showed that she died in her thirties, possibly a more likely age for Nefertiti. But Selim concluded that of two right arms found near the mummy, a straight one fit her best, rather than a bent one with clenched fist favored by Fletcher. (One of the problems with the royal tombs is that there are sometimes several dismembered body parts left lying around by the ancient looters, so it can be hard to know what belongs to whom.) Selim and Hawass decided that she wasn’t an important royal after all, so she couldn’t be Nefertiti.