Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings (2 page)

Realizing the uniqueness of their discovery, the three men now behaved more professionally, and wisely left the tomb before disturbing it further. The Inspector General of Egyptian Antiquities, Sir Gaston Maspero, was informed and a guard placed on the tomb so that the photographer, a certain R. Paul, could record the contents were they lay, and the expedition artist, Lindon Smith, could draw the panel reliefs of the golden shrine. By the end of the month the contents had been catalogued, drawn and photographed, and everything except the shrine panels and the mummy itself had been removed from the tomb and stored on board Davis' boat moored off Luxor. Yet still they were no nearer to identifying the mummy.

Even by the scientific standards of the time, the first
examination of the mummy, still
in situ
in the tomb, was little more than vandalism. For some unknown reason, Weigall and Ayrton chose to be absent from the stripping of the mummy, and it was left to Maspero, Davis and Lindon Smith to unwrap the three-thousand-year-old corpse. Some idea of the incredibly amateurish way in which they proceeded is provided by Davis' own account: 'When we had taken off the gold on the front of the mummy, we lifted it so as to get to the gold from underneath . . . Lindon Smith then pulled out a six-inch long thick sheet of gold. More gold sheets followed . . .'

Not only were they more interested in the gold than the historical secrets the mummy could impart, but the unqualified Lindon Smith was allowed to ferret freely around inside the ancient wrappings. Worse still was the way the body was treated once the bandages had been removed. Davis, for instance, prodded at one of its front teeth and by his own admission, 'Alas! It fell into dust.' The unwrapping of the mummy may have been a travesty of scientific method, but the security afforded its burial jewels was a complete joke. The mummy's golden necklace was left lying around on Davis' boat and immediately went missing. A few weeks later, an antiquities dealer in Luxor contacted Davis to tell him he could buy it back if no attempt was made to arrest the culprits responsible for its theft. Davis agreed and paid dearly for its return. The gold bands, however, were lost for ever. An Egyptian laboratory assistant in Cairo – a virtual stranger – had oddly been entrusted with their safe keeping. He promptly ran off with them, never to be seen again.

It is a complete mystery why the men in charge of the operation should have acted so out of character. So unusual was their behaviour throughout the excavation and its aftermath that it has even been suggested that they might have fallen foul
of some supernatural influence from the tomb. Maspero was one of the leading Egyptologists of his time – if not the greatest – and as Inspector General was responsible for assuring the highest professional standards from excavators at digs all over Egypt. Likewise Davis, who although not a professional, had been, and would be, responsible for financing and organizing some of the most important archaeological expeditions of the early twentieth century. That they had firstly behaved little better than tomb robbers, and afterwards as complete incompetents, is almost as bizarre as the contents of the tomb itself. As two of Britain's three leading Egyptologists (Carter being the third), Ayrton and Weigall were little better, in the way they ham-fistedly smashed their way into the tomb. But the worst was still to come, as Davis, Weigall and Ayrton, once close professional colleagues, began to bicker among themselves like unruly children.

Shortly after the unwrapping of the mummy, Ayrton did what he should have done before the tomb was opened: he began sorting through the rubble that had been the inner entrance of the tomb in search of the missing royal seal. In tombs of the period, a seal bearing the cartouche of the reigning pharaoh was placed on the entrance of the tomb of any important dignitary. The tomb of a pharaoh himself, however, would not bear the seal of his successor but his own, as the new pharaoh would not officially succeed to the throne until his predecessor was buried. As the cartouches on the coffin and the serpent on the mask headdress specifically identified the mysterious mummy as royal, Ayrton concluded that the missing entrance seal must bear the name of the king who was buried inside. He was certain that it must have been on the inner door, beside the jackal seal, but had broken away as the outer wall fell inwards when the tomb was first broken open. Aided by Emma
Andrews, he painstakingly sifted through the limestone chips for many hours until, piece by piece, the shattered shards of the royal cartouche were recovered. When the seal was pieced together Ayrton was elated: it seemed that he had at last beaten his archrival Howard Carter. The seal bore the name of Tutankhamun.

Fifteen years later, and only thirteen metres from the entrance to the mysterious tomb discovered by Ayrton, Tutankhamun's tomb was again discovered, this time by Carter himself. This tomb was filled with the myriad celebrated burial goods and magnificent wall paintings which made it abundantly clear that it was the real tomb of Tutankhamun. Who, then, lay in the tomb that Ayrton had discovered – a tomb that was secured with Tutankhamun's personal seal?

In 1907, even before Tutankhamun's tomb had been discovered, Davis concluded that the mysterious mummy could not be the now-famous king, as it was clearly that of a woman. When they first unwrapped the ancient bandages, the first thing they observed was the position of the arms. The mummy had been embalmed in the pose normally associated with queens of the period, with one arm folded across the chest, and the other by the side, instead of both being folded across the chest like a king. The mummy also wore a queen's crown, as evidenced by the first published report of the mummy made by Walter Tyndale, an observer at the unwrapping. Like everyone else, he took the body to be female: 'Her dried-up face, sunken cheeks, and thin leathery-looking lips, exposing a few teeth, were in ghastly contrast to the golden diadem which encircled her head and the gold necklace that partially hid her shrunken throat.'

Beside the fact that the mummy's arms were in the attitude of a woman, and around its head was a gold band bearing the image of a vulture – the same headdress shown frequently in contemporary portraits of queens and princesses – both the
coiffure on the coffin and the figure on the carved stoppers of the Canopic jars were depicted with a hairstyle affected by court ladies of the period. Ayrton, however, emphatically rejected all evidence that the mummy was a queen and not a king. It seemed to everyone that his obsession to outdo Howard Carter and be the first to discover Tutankhamun's tomb was completely clouding his judgement.

What Tutankhamun's entrance seal
had
evidenced, however, was that the body had been entombed sometime during Tutankhamun's reign, approximately between 1347 and 1338
BC
. As Tutankhamun's queen was known to have outlived him, Davis decided that the mummy was Amonhotep III's wife, Queen Tiye, who he believed had died during Tutankhamun's reign. As the stopper heads of the Canopic jars were usually made in the image of the person whose organs they contained, Davis drew attention to their similarity to statues of the queen. Moreover, a stone toilet vase found in the tomb was actually inscribed with her name, as were other tiny amulets found in two small boxes. What clinched the argument for Davis, however, were the gilded panels. Forming part of a shrine that was meant to be erected around the coffin, they were decorated in relief with figures of Queen Tiye, and an accompanying inscription declared that it had been specifically made for her.

Ayrton vehemently disagreed: if the carved head on the stoppers really was the likeness of the mummy, why had they not been disfigured like the mask? And if it was Queen Tiye's name that had been so painstakingly eradicated from the mummy, the coffin and the Canopic jars, why so foolishly leave it on the toilet vase, the amulets and the shrine panels? In support of his Tutankhamun theory, Ayrton drew Davis' attention to numerous fragments of clay seals discovered while sorting through the rubble around the collapsed bier which,
when pieced together, were found to be impressed with the cartouche of Tutankhamun. He was sure that these had originally sealed boxes of Tutankhamun's burial treasure and had broken off when his tomb had been plundered by the desecrators.

While Davis and Ayrton continued to argue, Weigall came up with a third candidate of his own, suggested by the so-called 'magic bricks'. Common to the period, these four inscribed stones – protective amulets placed in the walls of the tomb at the four cardinal points to safeguard the mummy magically – were always inscribed with the name of the deceased. In this tomb the bricks bore the name of neither Davis' nor Ayrton's candidates, but the king who was thought to be Tutankhamun's uncle: the pharaoh Akhenaten. Weigall was certain that it was his tomb and that his name still remaining on the bricks had been overlooked by the desecrators.

In support of his theory, Weigall drew his colleagues' attention to the inscription on the shrine panel which declared that it had been made for Queen Tiye. It had also been inscribed with the name of the person who had commissioned it to be made; a name that had been erased just like the name on the coffin and the Canopic jars. Surely, he reasoned, this must be the same person who was in the coffin. Why else bother to erase it? From the context of the inscription, the mysterious benefactor could only have been her royal son, her husband's successor Akhenaten. Weigall examined the gold straps encircling the outer wrappings of the mummy, further concluding that these inscriptions could also only refer to Akhenaten.

To settle the argument promptly, Davis invited a European physician living in Luxor to examine the body while it was still in the tomb. The mummy wrappings had decayed through damp and could be lifted off in great pads, exposing the bones
from end to end. Examining the skeleton, the doctor quickly concluded that, because of the width of the pelvis, it could only be the remains of a woman. Although the physician was no forensic expert, Davis was satisfied enough with the findings to publish his account of the excavations immediately, under the title
The Tomb of Queen Tiye.

Although Ayrton dropped his Tutankhamun theory and quickly began searching elsewhere in the Valley of the Kings for his elusive pharaoh, Weigall was not silenced by the results. The mummy's wide pelvis may well be a female feature, he argued, but it also corresponded with Akhenaten's strange physical appearance. In both the statues and the reliefs of Akhenaten found throughout Egypt, he is depicted with a slender feminine waist and unusually wide hips. This prompted many historians of the period to speculate that Akhenaten may even have been an hermaphrodite. Accordingly, the identification of the mummy as female because of its wide pelvis could equally apply to Akhenaten.

Within a few months, both Weigall and Davis were apparently proved wrong. In July 1907, the mummy was sent for complete analysis to Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, Professor of Anatomy at the Cairo School of Medicine. He found to his intense surprise that, instead of the body of an old woman that Davis had led him to expect, he had been sent the remains of a young man who had apparently died in his early twenties. Other eminent experts were called in and all agreed that it was unquestionably the body of a young male, and definitely not that of an older woman. Not only was the mummy not Queen Tiye, but neither could it be Akhenaten, as he was known to have reigned for at least seventeen years and had been well over thirty when he died.

A further discovery made during Elliot Smith's examination
of the mummy was that the gold vulture band around its brow was not a female crown, as first thought, but a 'vulture collar' of male pharaonic burials. The mis-identification was due to the fact that it had fallen up over the head when the bier collapsed, giving it the appearance of a headdress. The mummy was therefore not only unquestionably male, but also a king.

So who was the mysterious mummy in Tomb 55? And why, when he was undeniably a king, did his tomb not bear his own seal? The answer to both questions appeared to be that he was one of Tutankhamun's discredited predecessors, placed in the tomb during Tutankhamun's reign. As the mummy was too young to have been Akhenaten, and the tomb of Akhenaten's immediate forebear, Amonhotep III, had already been discovered in the western Valley of the Kings in 1799, both were ruled out as possible candidates.

Eventually, the development of modern forensic techniques enabled a likely relationship to be established between Tutankhamun and the mummy. In 1963, an examination of the remains by a team of scientists, led by Professor R. G. Harrison of Liverpool University, not only showed beyond doubt that the subject was male and had died around his twentieth year, but it revealed that he shared the same blood group and type with Tutankhamun's mummy: the two were so closely related they were almost certainly brothers.

Although there are no surviving records specifically referring to a brother of Tutankhamun, a shadowy figure emerges from Egyptian history just prior to Tutankhamun's reign who may have been just that. During the last years of Akhenaten's reign, a few carved portraits of the royal entourage include someone identified as Ankhkheperure, and bearing the appellation Nefernefruaten, 'Fair is the beauty of the [god] Aten'. As this was a title used by Akhenaten's queen, Nefertiti, the appellation would
suggest that Ankhkheperure was related to her. As she had no sons, then he was probably a nephew, and possibly Tutankhamun's brother. Ankhkheperure appears to have dropped Nefertiti's title at the end of Akhenaten's reign in favour of his birth name Smenkhkare, 'He whom the spirit of [the god] Re has ennobled', and, as Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare, his name appears on a number of stones, finger rings and furniture trappings found on the site of Akhenaten's royal palace at Amarna in Middle Egypt.

Smenkhkare (pronounced
Smen-car-ray),
as he is generally called for convenience, appears to have become Akhenaten's chosen successor, as a carved limestone portrait of the two of them, side by side, and both wearing a royal serpent, was found on the site of the Great Temple at Amarna in 1933. It also seems certain that he succeeded Akhenaten, as a scene in the tomb of Meryre, the overseer of Akhenaten's harem at Amarna, shows him in the accoutrements of a reigning pharaoh with his name enclosed in a royal cartouche. No records of his reign have yet been discovered, although it does not seem to have been a long one. An inscription on a honey jar docket discovered at Amarna shows that Tutankhamun's reign began in the same year that Akhenaten's ended, and a wine jar docket also found at the site, dated to the first year of Tutankhamun's reign, is inscribed with the words, 'wine from the estate of Smenkhkare, deceased'.