The Shadow King (18 page)

* Another time, the industrious Leek tested whether it really is possible to remove someone’s brain through their nose with an iron hook, as ancient Egyptian embalmers apparently did. After trials on two sheep heads, he found that you can’t exactly hook the brain out, as had been assumed. But if you whisk the hook around enough, it reduces the brain to a gloopy liquid, which can then be drained out through the nose.

* According to Connolly, human tissue legislation in the UK means it would no longer be permitted to use donated blood for this type of research.

IF YOU GO TO THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS today, chances are that among the buzz of tourists and tour guides, you’ll find a kindly gentleman named Kent Weeks sitting quietly in a little dust-colored caravan just opposite the entrance to a tomb called KV5.

After studying archaeology and anthropology at the University of Seattle, Weeks started work in Egypt in 1963, aged twenty. But his first few days didn’t go too well. “I arrived in Cairo in November 1963,” he tells me. “Within eighteen hours, I was in the hospital having my appendix out.” Five days later, he flew south to the stiflingly hot town of Aswan, and when he saw the local youths swimming in the Nile, he unthinkingly jumped in to join them. “I pulled all my stitches,” he says sheepishly. “I didn’t realize how strong the current was.”

However inauspiciously Weeks’s career in Egypt began, it developed into greater things. He’s now one of the most respected archaeologists in Egypt, and director of the Theban Mapping Project, an effort to survey and catalog all of the tombs and monuments of Luxor’s west bank, particularly in the Valley of the Kings. He started in 1978 and has since used a variety of methods, from hot air balloons to laser scanning, to map the area and make accurate three-dimensional plans of every royal tomb.

He’s now working on KV5, a tomb built by Rameses II for his many sons. The rubble-filled hole was first discovered in 1825, then dismissed by Howard Carter as uninteresting in 1902. Its location was forgotten until Weeks rediscovered it. He started clearing its chambers in 1994, and soon found that it is much larger than previously believed; in fact, it’s by far the most extensive tomb in the Valley. So far, Weeks’s team has revealed more than 130 corridors and chambers dug deep into the hillside (compared to an average of eight or nine for other royal tombs) taking up more than 1,200 square meters, and they still haven’t determined its full extent. They have also found four mummies, whom Weeks believes are Rameses’s sons.

But all of this was a long way off in 1963. Weeks’s first trip to Egypt, when he pulled his stitches, was for something quite different. He didn’t know it, but the project he was about to embark upon would ultimately become a major effort to unlock the secrets of the royal mummies, including Tutankhamun.

Weeks was following in Derry’s footsteps, as part of another mission to salvage information from an area in Nubia that was soon to be flooded. In 1960, President Nasser announced the construction of the Aswan High Dam, a billion-dollar project that would dwarf the old Aswan dam. In fact, at more than two miles long, it dwarfed all the other dams in the world. The resulting lake now extends three hundred miles to the south, through all of Egyptian Nubia and well into Sudan.

Virtually the entire population of Egyptian Nubia had to be relocated. And all trace of the ancient people who lived there was soon to be lost forever. The United Nations led a hugely expensive international effort to rescue a number of ancient monuments, including a project to move the massive twin temples of Abu Simbel, piece by piece, to higher ground.

Like Derry, Weeks’s job was to study and measure skeletons excavated from Nubian graves—as many of them as possible. After a short stretch clearing a cemetery at Armina, about twenty-five miles north of Abu Simbel, he went to work at the Citadel of Gebel Adda, one of the most important ancient cities in southern Nubia.

It was a remote desert area, about ten miles from the border with Sudan. Weeks was working on the east bank of the Nile, on a sandy plain about half a mile wide, with hills in the distance, and beyond that nothing until you got to the Red Sea. He lived in a tent, with an assistant, a Nubian cook, and a dog, in temperatures—at up to 125°F in the shade—that can only be described as brutal. “It was so, so hot,” he recalls. “In the afternoon when we could bear it no longer, we would stop measuring skulls and jump into the river. But the water was so warm it didn’t help. It didn’t cool you down, it just meant you were wet.”

He worked through six thousand skeletons and mummies, making more than a hundred measurements of each. He was interested in who the ancient Nubians were, in particular how they lived, how their genetic composition changed over thousands of years, and what pathological conditions they suffered from. As well as measuring the skeletons, he photographed them, described any abnormalities he found, and took hundreds of tissue samples for later analysis.

Thousands of miles away, a scruffily dressed orthodontist named James Harris was trying to understand why so many American children end up with crooked teeth. A professor at the University of Michigan, he wanted to tease out the different factors involved, including environmental factors such as diet and family dental history, as well as long-term shifts in the genes of entire populations. Ultimately, he hoped such studies would help him to predict whether the crowded teeth in his young patients were best corrected by braces, extraction, surgery, or just time.

To test his theories, he needed to study how the teeth of individual patients developed as they grew up, but also to compare different people from the same population over several centuries, to see how their teeth changed over long periods of time. U.S. dental records didn’t go back far enough, but then Harris heard about Weeks’s work. This ancient Nubian population sounded perfect. People had lived at this major crossroads of civilization for more than four thousand years, and their teeth were still perfectly preserved in their graves.

In the spring of 1965, Harris traveled to Nubia to x-ray the skulls that Weeks had previously examined and left in numbered boxes. As he would have no power source to produce X-rays in the middle of the desert, he decided—as Leek did a couple of years later—to use a chunk of radioactive metal that produced the radiation spontaneously as it decayed. Harris chose Ytterbium-169, which has a half-life of about thirty days.

Taking X-rays in the desert wasn’t straightforward. The amount of radiation being produced by the ytterbium fell throughout the project as the source decayed, so Harris constantly had to adjust his exposure times. Keeping dust out of his equipment and keeping his developing solutions cool enough were also major problems. But he had it slightly more luxurious than Weeks, living not in a tent but in a boat moored on the Nile.

That spring, Harris x-rayed nearly a thousand skulls, all of which now lie at the bottom of Lake Nasser. In subsequent seasons, he also studied more than two thousand living schoolchildren at Aswan. He found that modern Nubians have smaller faces, smaller jaws, and more crowded teeth than their ancestors, suggesting that overcrowded teeth are so common today because our jaws have been getting smaller as we evolve.

As with Derry, studying Nubian skeletons soon led to higher things. Most of the skeletons that Harris and Weeks examined in Nubia belonged to commoners. They wanted to find out what was happening in the upper classes of Egyptian society too, which meant they needed to x-ray a set of high-status bodies, ideally belonging to related individuals over many generations. The royal mummies in the Egyptian Museum would be perfect. The two researchers submitted a proposal to the antiquities department, and it was approved.

Given such a valuable opportunity, Harris widened his approach beyond the mummies’ teeth. He decided to use the study to estimate the royals’ ages at death, something that he hoped would resolve various arguments over the chronology of different pharaohs’ reigns in the New Kingdom. And he introduced a newfangled technique, popular among orthodontists, called cephalometrics. When taking an X-ray image of someone’s skull, you stick a pair of rods into the person’s ears, to line up their head perfectly with the X-ray beam. Aligning the images in this way allowed use of a computer to compare images of different jaws, or different images of the same person’s jaw over time. That might sound simple today, but in the 1960s, when the microchip had only just been invented, this kind of analysis was cutting-edge.

The royal mummies represented individuals from the same family who had lived over three hundred years. So Harris and Weeks decided to use the technique to track the inheritance of facial resemblance down the family line, trying to pin down how the different pharaohs were related.

They started work on the royal mummies in December 1966, while Ronald Harrison was still chasing permission to study Tutankhamun. It took three seasons to get through them all. Harris, Weeks, and their team arrived at the museum each morning at nine, signed the guard’s register, and trooped upstairs to Room 52, where the royal mummies were kept. They averaged four pharaohs a day. One by one, the museum workmen took one of the huge display cases, slid it into a narrow passage, and removed the glass lid. Inside, the mummy lay in a solid oak coffin, which the workmen gingerly carried over to the X-ray machine.

It was a tense working environment. After all, if you dropped and smashed an Egyptian king, you couldn’t exactly run out and replace him. “We were surrounded by people who were frightfully concerned—rightly so—about the mummies,” says Weeks, not to mention a constant crowd of curious tourists. But the garrulous Harris did his best to lighten the atmosphere and calm everyone’s nerves. The mummies didn’t break so much as a toe.

The normal orthodontists’ technique had to be adapted slightly. The mummies were too fragile to stick metal rods into them, and anyway their ears were plugged with resin. So the researchers rigged up an ingenious contraption involving a right-angled gun sight to line up the mummies’ heads perfectly without touching them.

Another bathroom was adapted for use as a darkroom, this time in the Nile Hilton hotel just across the street, where the team was staying. Harris’s young technician had to make regular dashes there to develop his film, to check the images were suitable before each mummy was returned to its case.

The results revealed various items that had been wrapped with the mummies, such as three wax figures inside Rameses III’s rib cage, and a gold plate placed over Yuya’s embalming incision, as well as various maladies from which the royals had suffered. Amenhotep III, despite his fine-looking statues, apparently died a fat, diseased, sedentary man, while the attractive mummies of Yuya and Tjuiu were hiding awful teeth.

There were some bizarre findings too. Mysteriously, Merenptah, the son of Rameses II, had his testicles removed shortly before or after his death. Ahmose, founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty, wasn’t circumcised—strange because this was customary for all males at puberty, even described as a “symbol of Egyptianness.”1 Harris wondered if perhaps Ahmose was a foreigner, or suffered from a physical disorder such as hemophilia that would have made the operation impossible.

A Twenty-First-Dynasty high priestess named Maatkare was long thought to have died in childbirth, partly because she shared her coffin with a miniature mummy—assumed to be her stillborn child. But the X-rays showed that her companion was actually a baboon.*

After the museum staff saw the successful results, they took Harris and Weeks to a small attic room, which they said had been locked for as long as they could remember. “Stepping over the threshold into two inches of choking dust, we felt like excavators entering a tomb that had been sealed for millennia,” the pair wrote in a book about their project, X-raying the Pharaohs, published in 1973.2 The room was filled with coffins, stacked three deep along the walls. It contained nearly forty mummies dating from the late New Kingdom: high priests, officials, and others. It took another two seasons to X-ray them all.

Back in Michigan, Harris used a computer program to compare the “craniofacial structure” (the bone structure of the face) of the different pharaohs, a process that involved painstakingly plotting 177 coordinates on each skull. Working with Egyptologist Ed Wente from the University of Chicago, Harris hoped to piece together how the different mummies were related, in other words to produce a family tree for the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties. But they soon realized there was a problem: many of the mummies seemed to be suffering from cases of mistaken identity.

Out of all the royal mummies in the Egyptian Museum, only Yuya and Tjuiu were found in their own, nearly intact tomb, so their identity is pretty much certain. The others are identified from notes written on them by the priests who rewrapped and reburied them in the Twenty-First Dynasty, or from the name on the coffin they were placed in. Maybe, when the priests were rewrapping and labeling all of those plundered Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Dynasty bodies, they got some of them mixed up.3

For example, the mummy identified by Gaston Maspero as Thutmose I (who ruled at the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty) seemed to be just twenty-two—far too young for a king who had supposedly campaigned vigorously in Nubia and Asia. This mummy didn’t have any inscription on the bandages themselves, and though its face resembled the mummies of Thutmose II and III, its arms were by its sides rather than folded across its chest—not what you would expect for a king. Harris concluded that this man wasn’t Thutmose I at all, but another member of his family.

The mummy thought to be Seti II, of the Nineteenth Dynasty, didn’t look anything like the other heavy-jawed pharaohs of his family line. But he did bear a striking resemblance to kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and was most similar to Thutmose II and III. The throne names of Seti II and Thutmose I look similar in the hieratic script used by the priests to label the bodies, suggesting that perhaps this mummy is really the missing Thutmose I.