Authors: Jo Marchant
According to Selim, this mummy’s skull is asymmetrical at the back, and has an unusual extra fragment between the two plates at the rear of the skull. Of the royal mummies, only Tutankhamun has similar anomalies, Selim claims. In the film (none of this has been published in a formal academic paper), Hawass and Selim reach a surprise conclusion: the Younger Lady could be none other than Tutankhamun’s mother.
Because the study hasn’t been published, it’s hard for other radiologists to give a second opinion. But some Egyptologists are skeptical about this too—after all, Tutankhamun’s mother was probably a queen herself, so if a straight arm rules out Nefertiti, wouldn’t it rule her out too? Several of them, such as Aidan Dodson of Bristol University, UK, argue that the rush to identify these women as key missing persons from Tutankhamun’s time ignores the archaeological context of the tomb. As Loret noted back in 1898, the royal mummies found in Amenhotep II’s tomb had all been carefully rewrapped and labeled, whereas the two women were found naked on the floor in another room. Dodson argues that however much we’d like to believe otherwise, these mummies probably aren’t famous royals at all, but relatives of the tomb’s owner, Amenhotep II.
THE ELDER AND YOUNGER LADIES have since been moved from the KV35 tomb to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, so I make a trip there to visit them. I’m keen to see for myself these two women who have prompted so much heated argument and speculation. The Valley of the Kings has yielded plenty of anonymous mummies, so what is it about this pair that causes so much fascination?
I try the Royal Mummy Rooms first, but it turns out they haven’t made it into these specially designed chambers, or into the climate-controlled cases that the pharaohs enjoy. Instead I find them, alongside the bones of the unnamed king from KV55, in a deserted walkway just outside.
Like the other royal mummies, both are covered neck to toe with a sheet. The younger woman has a small frame and gray-black skin, with a shaved head, closed eyes, and a delicate, flattened nose. She’d look peaceful, pretty even, if it wasn’t for the huge hole ripped out of her face (experts still argue over whether this wound killed her, or the damage was done later, by tomb robbers).
The elder woman is gray too. She must once have been beautiful, with high cheekbones, a delicate chin, and long, dark, wavy hair with a slight auburn tint. One eye is open, the other closed, and the top of her left hand is just visible above the top of the sheet, held over her throat with clenched knuckles and a thin thumb sticking out, as if she once held a scepter or staff.
She looks dignified but sad. I lean over the case to look down on her (something that isn’t possible with the taller cases in the Royal Mummy Room, where you can only look in from the side). The pharaohs are fascinating to see but an anticlimax in a way, dried and dead and leaving me dispassionate. I’m not really the type to get too carried away by these things. Yet looking square into the face of the Elder Lady, I am suddenly confronted with the emotional power that Egyptian mummies can have. It’s as though she’s still there, her open eye staring straight at me with something between disdain and accusation, and quite unexpectedly I get that butterflies feeling of leaning over a cliff edge, when you scare yourself and have to step back.
Of all the royal mummies, the Elder Lady demands respect, making me feel as if I’m truly in the presence of someone who once ruled an empire at the height of Egypt’s military might. It’s all subjective, of course; my reaction has more to do with the emotional wiring of the human brain and the mummy’s excellent state of preservation than anything relating to this woman’s actual identity. And yet, staring into her open eye feels like gazing straight into a chasm that stretches three thousand years into the past. Suddenly, I’m not surprised that so many others have seen in her an ancient queen.
I’m jolted back to the present by the implausibly loud roar of low-flying planes passing directly overhead. It’s October 6, and Egypt is once again celebrating Victory Day.
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* Although the details are murky—Hawass now claims that starting with Tutankhamun’s mummy was actually Badeir’s idea.
* A Siemens SOMATOM Emotion 6, if you’re interested in that kind of thing.
* In the National Geographic documentary about this study, King Tut’s Final Secrets, much is made of apparent signs of healing within the break, which Egarter-Vigl and Gostner say prove that the injury happened while Tutankhamun was alive, probably between one and five days before his death. Rühli does not see any evidence that the break had begun to heal (though this wasn’t mentioned in the film). When I interviewed Gostner by email in 2012, he had changed his mind too, saying that there are no signs of healing, although because of the apparent presence of embalming material in the wound, he still believes the break represents an injury that occurred at the end of the king’s life.
* Before this exhibition, the alternative spelling, Tutankhamen, was more common, but Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs cemented the spelling with a u.
* This idea was first suggested by Marianne Luban in 1999, although Fletcher’s claim was higher profile.
THE MUSEUM OF EGYPTIAN ANTIQUITIES in Cairo, commonly known as the Egyptian Museum, is a huge pink-and-white neoclassical building adorned with arched windows and flags, which reminds me (a tiny bit) of a giant piece of Battenberg cake. Thousands of visitors each day pass through security at its main entrance, a huge doorway set between two lofty columns right in the center of the building’s grand façade. They’re greeted by high ceilings, giant statues, and century-old glass cases that house the most impressive collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts in the world.
Most of them probably don’t notice a much plainer wooden door, all the way over to the right. This is the “backstage” entrance, used by staff and visiting archaeologists, and it takes you to the parts of the museum that the public doesn’t get to see. There are no turnstiles here, just a sleepy guard at a desk who asks you to sign your name in an old notebook. Inside is a maze of dimly lit, dusty corridors with low vaulted ceilings, a hum of Arabic, and a large director’s office furnished with sofas and ornate clocks. Stone stairs lead down to the museum’s mysterious basement, off-limits to all but the most privileged, and stuffed to the brim with tens of thousands of forgotten objects that the curators don’t have room to display.
If you ignore that entrance too, though, and turn the corner around the building to your left, you’ll come to a third option. After the history-filled spaces beyond the first two doors, crossing this threshold is like entering another world, or at least jumping a century or two forward in time. A flight of stairs takes you down to a metal double door, secured with multiple layers of locks that admit only authorized personnel. On the other side, there are no ancient artifacts, nor even a speck of dust. Instead, you’ll find a series of rooms with shiny floors, UV lights, and sterilized walls, filled with high-tech laboratory equipment and workers unrecognizable beneath hats, masks, gloves, and gowns.
This is Egypt’s first ever ancient DNA lab. It’s the site of the next (and last) phase of Zahi Hawass’s investigations of Tutankhamun and the royal mummies: the most ambitious—and controversial—studies they have ever been subjected to. The lab was built in 2006, and its first project was another TV-friendly tale: the hunt for the mummy of the audacious Hatshepsut.
Toward the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty, 150 years or so before Tutankhamun’s reign, lived a queen who dared to be king. Hatshepsut was the eldest daughter of a pharaoh, Thutmose I, but as power was inherited through the male line, she didn’t take the throne when her father died; instead it went to her younger half-brother. He became Thutmose II, and Hatshepsut married him. When he died too, Hatshepsut—still just a teenager—became queen regent to his toddler son by another wife.
At first, Hatshepsut performed her role as expected, guiding and supporting her young stepson, Thutmose III. Before long, however, she started performing kingly functions, such as making offerings to the gods and raising obelisks, on her own behalf. Eventually, she went the whole hog and took the role of the pharaoh for herself, with her stepson relegated to second-in-command. As there was little precedent for a female ruler in Egyptian history, she depicted herself as a male king, with a royal headdress and false beard.
She ruled for seven years as regent and another fourteen as king, ably watching over a strong Egypt and commissioning hundreds of temples and monuments in her name, including the awesome mortuary temple built into the foot of the Deir el-Bahri cliffs. When she died, her stepson finally got his own stab at power and became one of Egypt’s great pharaohs, with a string of wives and victorious military campaigns that extended Egypt’s dominions to their greatest ever extent, stretching from northern Syria to the heart of the Sudan. Later in life, he set about wiping his stepmother’s name from history, smashing her statues and chiseling away her image and name wherever they were found.
Hatshepsut is one of the few Eighteenth-Dynasty rulers for whom a mummy was never located—she didn’t turn up in either of the royal mummy caches found at the end of the nineteenth century. Archaeologists have discovered two tombs bearing her name, prepared at different stages of her life, but neither contained her mummy.
It was possible that priests had hidden it for safekeeping, like the other pharaohs. So the idea of the Hatshepsut project was to CT scan and DNA test various anonymous individuals from around the Valley of the Kings that Hawass thought might be Hatshepsut, then compare them with identified royal mummies related to the missing queen. Of course, this assumed that her mummy had survived at all, which was a long shot, especially considering her stepson’s campaign to erase all trace of her as king.
In charge of the DNA project was a mild-mannered Egyptian geneticist named Yehia Gad, who had dreamed of investigating the royal mummies for well over a decade. Based at the National Research Centre (NRC) in Cairo, Egypt’s main government-funded research institute, he initially specialized in disorders of sex development. Then in the early 1990s, he traveled to the United States and learned about a recently invented technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR)—also being used around this time by the Mormon ancient DNA researcher Scott Woodward—that can amplify tiny scraps of DNA into large enough amounts to be studied. One of its uses is in genetic fingerprinting, a method that can identify related individuals based on their DNA. After Gad returned home, his lab became one of the first in Egypt to offer DNA fingerprinting, for cases such as paternity and immigration disputes.
But he really wanted to be doing something else. Over the years, he saw growing numbers of studies from around the world, like Woodward’s, that used PCR to extract DNA from ancient specimens, and he harbored a farfetched desire: that he would one day open a lab in Egypt capable of extracting DNA from Egyptian mummies. Ancient DNA was (and still is) an extremely difficult field to work in, however. Researchers have to study tiny amounts of very degraded DNA, which are easily swamped by modern DNA molecules (from bacteria in the air, for example, or the investigators themselves). Keeping the two apart requires hugely stringent—and expensive—precautions against contamination, including working in a dedicated lab that has never been used for studying modern DNA.
Gad faced a catch-22. He couldn’t build such an ambitious lab without generous funding, but he couldn’t convince a funding agency to give him the money without a track record of scientific publications in the field—for which he needed a lab. To work on mummies, he would also need the support of the antiquities service, and this was not forthcoming. Gad watched the abortive attempts by foreigners to DNA test the royal mummies during the late 1990s and in 2000, and saw the bad press that this generated within Egypt. Perhaps an Egyptian-led DNA project would be different. But in 2002, when Hawass took charge of the antiquities service, the idea seemed further away than ever.
Hawass had previously rejected the idea of DNA testing the royal mummies, arguing that samples were too easily contaminated, which would lead to inaccurate results, and that it was better to concentrate on “more beneficial research,” such as the cause of Tutankhamun’s death.1 As late as March 2005, after Tutankhamun was CT scanned, he insisted that the mummy would not be disturbed again.
But later that year, encouraged by Gad that research techniques had advanced, Hawass changed his mind. He followed his multimillion-dollar agreement with National Geographic with another huge deal, this time with the Discovery Channel, to DNA test the royal mummies in the basement of the Cairo museum. Hawass approached the head of the NRC: he wanted an ancient DNA lab and could pay whatever it would cost to build one.
As artifacts were cleared out of a large section of the museum’s basement, it fell to Gad, and his colleague Somaia Ismail, to oversee construction of the lab itself. Despite Gad’s long-standing interest in the topic, neither of them had worked with ancient DNA before. So Gad read up on the internationally agreed requirements, and worked with museum engineers to design the space he wanted.
The result was a network of underground rooms, like an ultramodern version of an Egyptian tomb. In a royal tomb, every chamber has a specific purpose, from the entranceway and storerooms to the burial chamber itself. In Gad’s DNA lab, a small entrance corridor leads to a dressing room, where researchers must don disposable gowns, caps, gloves, and masks before proceeding any further. Then there’s a sequence of other dedicated rooms, with one-way doors between like surgical theaters: a biopsy room for taking samples from the mummies, followed by spaces for extracting, amplifying, and sequencing their DNA.
To get any further, though, Gad and Ismail would need help. Hawass insisted that the research team had to be all Egyptian, but there wasn’t anyone in the country with the expertise to carry out such challenging research. Someone would have to train the team—in how to take samples from the mummies, and how to analyze the DNA—and then melt into the background.