Tutankhamen (20 page)

Carter had read Herodotus; he even quoted his writings on mummification in his diary. He therefore had a good, basic understanding of the processes that Tutankhamen's body would have undergone and, even before the mummy was revealed, could reconstruct events immediately following the king's death with a fair degree of accuracy.

Egypt is a hot, fly-infested country. Assuming that he died in Egypt, Tutankhamen would have been taken to the undertaker's workshop (more realistically, the undertaker's tent) as quickly as possible, before putrefaction could set in. Undertakers traditionally operated on the edge of the desert, partway between the land of the living and the land of the dead. Thus their workshops, often accessed by boat, served as a ritually significant first stage in the journey to the afterlife while maintaining a healthy distance from the settlements. As a king Tutankhamen would probably have had his own dedicated workshop; he may even have been embalmed within the grounds of his memorial temple. Here he would have been stripped, laid on a gently sloping embalming table, and washed in natron solution; a naturally occurring mixture of sodium carbonate decahydrate and sodium bicarbonate used both as soap and a preservative.

The brain, its function unknown, was discarded at the start of the mummification process. This was usually achieved by breaking the ethmoid bone (the bone separating the nasal cavity from the skull cavity), poking a long-handled spoon up a nostril, and whisking vigorously until the brain became sufficiently liquid to trickle down the nose. The empty skull cavity would then be part-filled with resin. The heart, in contrast, was regarded as the essential organ of reasoning. As such it would be required in the afterlife, when it would testify before Osiris. It was therefore left in place and, if accidentally removed,
immediately sewn back; though not always in its original location.

Next an incision would be made in Tutankhamen's left flank, and his entrails – stomach, intestine, lungs and liver – drawn out. This was a messy but vital part of the proceedings: as all non-vegetarian cooks know, these organs would decay rapidly if left inside the body. The insistence on extracting the organs through a relatively small and inconveniently placed hole – rather than through the major Y-shaped incision used in modern autopsies – hints either at a reluctance to damage the corpse, or at an adherence to a particular ritual. The dead Tutankhamen would need his internal organs. Preserved in natron, they were encased in miniature anthropomorphic coffins labelled with the names of the protective Sons of Horus: the human-headed Imseti (guardian of the liver), baboon-headed Hapy (guardian of the lungs), dog-headed Duamutef (guardian of the stomach) and falcon-headed Qebehsenuef (guardian of the intestines). The four coffins were wrapped in linen, coated in unguents, and stored in hollows carved into the base of a calcite canopic chest. The hollows were plugged with royal heads carved from calcite. The canopic chest was then placed in a gilded shrine guarded by figures of the protective goddesses Isis, Nephthys, Serket and Neith. During the funeral this canopic shrine would be placed close by the mummy, in the Treasury.

Back in the embalmer's workshop, Tutankhamen's finger and toe nails would have been tied in place and his corpse would have been packed inside and out with natron salt.
⁴
He would then have been left for up to forty days, until entirely dry. His desiccated body, which would be both lighter in weight and darker in colour, would have been washed, oiled and packed with resin-impregnated linen to restore its shape. Wrapping would have been a long and complicated process, as the undertakers employed a mixture of bandages, linen pads and sheets to impart a lifelike appearance to the corpse, and a mixture of charms and amulets, distributed within the bandage layers, to ensure its protection. With the body desiccated and somewhat stiff, and the
limbs difficult to manoeuvre, this would have required more skill than we perhaps appreciate.
⁵
Finally, the masked mummy would have been placed in its innermost coffin. Seventy days after entering the undertaker's workshop, Tutankhamen would have been transformed into a latent Osiris, ready for his funeral.

Autopsy, like excavation, is a destructive process. Once performed, it is impossible to put the subject back into its original state and only extensive recording and full publication can preserve the body, albeit in a virtual form, for future generations. Carter understood the destructive nature of archaeology very well, and was prepared to take infinite pains to conserve Tutankhamen's fragile grave goods. Yet he saw absolutely no reason why Tutankhamen's mummy should not be unwrapped immediately, even though that unwrapping would inevitably cause its destruction. Lacau, who as Director General of the Antiquities Service was responsible for the preservation of all of Egypt's ancient artefacts, mummies included, did nothing to halt the process. Indeed, Lacau insisted that he be present to observe – and perhaps to enjoy – the unwrapping, which was to be the climax of several theatrical stages in the excavation (the opening of the Burial Chamber and the opening of the sarcophagus being the two main others). It was the anatomist Douglas Derry who felt the need to justify the autopsy, although his principal argument – that the autopsy would preserve Tutankhamen's mummy – is not one that stands up to detailed scrutiny:

Carter, Lacau and their colleagues were reflecting early twentieth-century opinion, which saw the mummy as both uninformative and undecorative. Not everyone agreed with them, and, for the first time, Egyptologists had to deal with a backlash conducted via the letters pages of the national newspapers. The Bishop of Chelmsford was inspired to put pen to paper:

The popular author Rider Haggard was less concerned about the autopsy than about what would eventually happen to Tutankhamen's remains. He had developed a profound dislike of the mummy room in Cairo Museum and worried that Tutankhamen might soon be added to its ghoulish collection. Writing to
The Times
ten days after the Bishop, he proposed an ingenious solution:

Petrie, speaking on behalf of the Egyptological community, disagreed; why spoil a good pyramid? he asked. Sir John Maxwell also disagreed:

Throughout the nineteenth century Westerners had worried about what would happen to their own corpses after death. Some worried
that they might be accidentally buried alive, and went to what now appear to be ridiculous lengths to ensure that they escaped this horror, designing safety coffins equipped with flags and bells, and ‘waiting hospitals' where the dead would lie, uncoffined and closely observed, until putrefaction was established beyond any reasonable doubt.
¹⁰
Others – the vast majority – worried that they might not go intact and whole to the grave, and so might not be able to respond to the trumpet call that would surely herald the resurrection.
¹¹
The idea of autopsy, of dissecting and desecrating the corpse, was to most people abhorrent, all the more so because it was in Britain for many years the last and most awful punishment meted out to executed criminals. Still warm, occasionally with still-beating hearts, the dead would be taken directly from the gallows to the dissecting room where, in front of an assortment of medical students, artists and the morbidly curious, they would be subjected to unimaginable indignities. Ultimately, the desecration over, they would be denied a proper burial. A shortage of hanged bodies naturally led to black market body-snatching – fresh, or nearly fresh corpses ‘resurrected' from their graves – and eventually culminated in the passing of the 1832 Anatomy Act. From this time on it was the poor and the destitute, those whose bodies went unclaimed, who were destined for the autopsy table.

This concern for the protection and proper burial of the body rarely extended to long-dead Egyptians. Perhaps Egypt's corpses were simply too old, and too dead, to inspire respect? To many, they were not human remains, but an infinite resource to be dug up, bought, sold, displayed, destroyed and occasionally consumed. From the fifteenth century onwards mummy was a valued comodity, widely ingested as a medicine;
¹²
during the nineteenth it was used as an ingredient in the self-explanatory mummy-brown paint. The suggestion that mummies were also used to fuel the early Egyptian railways was simply a rumour started by author Mark Twain, although, as many tomb robbers discovered, mummies do burn exceptionally well.

In 1898 Thomas Cook & Son could boast of escorting 50,000 travellers to Egypt, providing splendid three-storeyed boats for the long Nile voyage.
¹³
As the mild Cairo climate was considered health-giving, these numbers increased from year to year. The tourists were welcomed by the Egyptians: they had a beneficial effect on the economy and on the rather neglected monuments, which the Antiquities Service was now forced to tidy up. But, like all tourists, they wanted souvenirs to remind them of their visit. Some found that a mummy or mummy fragment made the perfect reminder of the perfect holiday, and many respectable people thought nothing of returning home with a human body, or a head or hand, to display in their private cabinet of curiosities. These relics impressed their nearest and dearest and frightened their servants and – in some cases – would-be burglars. The most celebrated example of the protective power of the mummy was the home of Dr James Douglas in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, which had two unwrapped mummies and their coffins prominently exhibited on a glazed veranda, and which was never robbed even though neighbouring houses often were.
¹⁴

So great was the demand that some enterprising Egyptians were happy to manufacture mummies, either by wrapping together fragments of genuine old mummies (plus sundry rubbish) or by bandaging the not so long dead, for sale to gullible Europeans. Tales of ‘ancient' mummies being recognised as recently vanished tourists were rife, and almost certainly apocryphal. The fact that dealing in antiquities – and, of course, in dead bodies – was illegal simply added to the thrill of the purchase. Even Amelia B. Edwards, who was later to found the Egypt Exploration Fund, a society dedicated to preserving and recording Egypt's antiquities, could be temporarily seduced into the murky world of the mummy trade: