The Shadow King (31 page)

The researchers also pointed out that more than a hundred “walking sticks” were found in the tomb, and argued that the blemish on the mummy’s left cheek might be an inflamed bite from the malaria-carrying mosquito. Finally, they cited images of Tutankhamun that showed him “performing activities such as hunting while seated.” For example, an ornamented chest from his tomb shows him sitting on a stool with his queen at his feet while he shoots arrows from his bow.

In the JAMA paper, the team came up with a scenario for how he died that impressively managed to include all of these factors, as well as the broken leg reported in 2005 (which has now mysteriously transformed from a mere possibility into a confirmed fact): “The project believes that Tutankhamun’s death was most likely a result of malaria coupled with his generally weak constitution. The CT scan of the pharaoh earlier confirmed the presence of an unhealed break in the king’s left thigh bone; the team speculates that the king’s weakened state may have led to a fall or that a fall weakened his already fragile physical condition.”

Meanwhile Hawass focused on the revelation that Tutankhamun was the product of incest. The union between Akhenaten and his sister “planted the seed of their son’s early death,” he wrote in National Geographic.11 “Tutankhamun’s health was compromised from the moment he was conceived.”

The resulting documentary, called King Tut Unwrapped, showed over four hours on the Discovery Channel a few days later. A New York Times reviewer described it as “CSI: Egypt,”12 and while he wasn’t captivated by repeated shots of scientists in lab coats peering at test tubes and computer screens, the film certainly got the attention of the world’s press, for example National Geographic daily news, which announced “King Tut Mysteries Solved: Was Disabled, Malarial and Inbred,”13 or the Daily Mail’s rather less concise “Unmasked: The Real Faces of the Crippled King Tutankhamun (Who Walked with a Cane) and His Incestuous Parents.”14

The success of the latest project was stunning, and its dramatic findings soon became, as one blogger put it, “accepted cocktail-party fact.”15 But it wasn’t long before cracks started to appear. In June 2010, JAMA published five letters16 from scientists in various fields, attacking the Tutankhamun paper on a series of fronts. Each seemingly clear conclusion was suddenly dragged into a mire of academic uncertainty.

One letter, from Brenda Baker, an expert in ancient human skeletons at Arizona State University, complained that the KV55 mummy couldn’t be Akhenaten, as pretty much everyone who had studied it, from Elliot Smith to Derry to Harrison, as well as a more recent examination by a physical anthropologist named Joyce Filer, had concluded that this individual was in his early twenties at most when he died (based on fusion of the ends of his bones, and the state of his wisdom teeth), whereas Akhenaten was thought to be at least in his mid-thirties.*

Selim says his CT scans show that the mummy’s age at death was considerably older than previously thought, supporting the identification of Akhenaten. Pinning him down on the details proves difficult, though. The reasoning behind this conclusion isn’t given in the JAMA paper, and Selim has given various age ranges at different times. In the paper itself, he concludes that the mummy was aged thirty-five to forty-five, in the accompanying press release, he says, “between forty-five and fifty-five,”17 and in a documentary that features the CT study he says, “forty-five to fifty-five, even sixty.”18

When I asked him to clarify in an interview in November 2011, he couldn’t remember exactly what age range he had concluded. He says that assessing the age of any fully grown skeleton is a “very subjective judgment,” but argues that the age at death of the KV55 mummy must be significantly older than early twenties because of signs of age-related decline such as arthritis in the spine and joints.

Filer says she’s confident from her examination that there is no sign of arthritis on the bones, and cautions that even if there were, arthritis on its own doesn’t give an accurate indication of age. In line with Derry and Harrison, she believes that the individual is most likely to be the younger Smenkhkare. Selim is sticking with Akhenaten, arguing that CT scans show details that aren’t necessarily clear in a visual or X-ray examination.

A second letter questioned the team’s suggestion of malaria as the primary cause of Tutankhamun’s early death. Christian Timmann and Christian Meyer, molecular biologists from Hamburg, Germany, pointed out that as adults, Tutankhamun, Yuya, and Tjuiu were very unlikely to have died of malaria. In areas where malaria is endemic, as it presumably was in ancient Egypt, malaria tends to kill young children; anyone surviving to adulthood would almost certainly be semi-immune to the disease.*

The third letter was from Irwin Braverman of Yale Medical School and his colleague Philip Mackowiak, the scientists behind the previous suggestion that Akhenaten suffered from a variant of Antley-Bixler syndrome. The Egyptian team had ruled this out, saying there was “no evidence” of female breasts in the KV55 mummy or Tutankhamun. Braverman and Mackowiak pointed out that as KV55 is just a skeleton and Tutankhamun’s entire chest is missing, this is a pretty meaningless statement. In their view, the case for Antley-Bixler (in both individuals) is still open.

Then, there was skepticism over Tutankhamun’s supposedly crippled left foot. James Gamble, an orthopedic surgeon at Stanford University, argued that although the foot is in a slightly twisted position, the individual bones each look perfectly normal, ruling out clubfoot. He thinks it’s much more likely that the foot just got scrunched up when bandaged by the embalmers, while the missing toe bone has probably just fallen out of the mummy during its various trials since 1925. Meanwhile, other experts have questioned the diagnosis of necrosis, pointing out that embalming materials applied to the body after death could have eaten away at the bone over time.

Egyptologists too have poured cold water on the idea that Tutankhamun was crippled. For example, Marianne Eaton-Krauss, an independent scholar based in Germany, who has published extensively on Tutankhamun’s burial, describes the JAMA paper as “aggravating” and complains that it shows little knowledge of relevant Egyptological discussions.19 She rejects the idea that sticks found in the tomb suggest Tutankhamun needed help to walk, arguing that staffs and staves were a sign of prestige in ancient Egypt, and would be a key part of any pharaoh’s tomb contents. Rather than being intended as crutches, she points out, many of them were used in hunting or hand-to-hand combat, or to handle snakes.

She isn’t persuaded by the “seated while hunting” argument either. She points out that the scene on Tutankhamun’s ivory chest shows him fishing from a folding stool, a situation in which it’s perfectly reasonable to sit down.* Similar images are known for other pharaohs, for example, a depiction of the Fifth-Dynasty king Sahure from the causeway of his pyramid complex at Abusir, which shows him seated while fowling.

Selim stands by his conclusions, claiming that the abnormalities seen in Tutankhamun’s foot “could never have happened after he died.” If the damage had occurred after death, he argues, you would expect to see breaks or damage in the other toe bones too. The Italian radiologist Paul Gostner, who advised on the study, supports Selim’s diagnosis, arguing that the foot matches the diagnostic criteria for “grade 1 clubfoot” and that the CT images the team has published “aren’t sufficient for a conclusive evaluation when viewed on their own.”

Overall, however, some scholars remain concerned that many of the abnormalities diagnosed again and again in these royal mummies, including scoliosis and clubfoot, are simply side effects of mummification. Selim and his team are talented radiologists, they argue, but aren’t experienced in the particular challenges of studying ancient mummies (as of course very few researchers are). Interpreting damage to a three-thousand-year-old mummified body is very different from diagnosing a living patient, or carrying out an autopsy on a fresh corpse.

There was one more letter, and because of my background in genetics, this is the one that intrigued me the most. It seemed to tear apart the flagship part of the paper, the multimillion-dollar DNA analysis.

The authors of the letter, Eske Willerslev and Eline Lorenzen, come from the Centre for GeoGenetics at Denmark’s Natural History Museum in Copenhagen, one of the world’s most respected ancient DNA labs. They claim that “in most, if not all, ancient Egyptian remains, ancient DNA does not survive to a level that is currently retrievable,” before concluding: “We question the reliability of the genetic data presented in this study and therefore the validity of the authors’ conclusions.”

For an academic publication, this is about as strongly worded as scientists will get. Roughly translated, it basically means, “We don’t believe a word of it.” Yet this seems to be a robust, careful study, with a huge budget, state-of-the-art equipment, and well-respected international consultants. It’s published in an authoritative journal, and the team appears to have followed the internationally accepted list of guidelines for ancient DNA to the letter. How can it have upset these other experts so much? I call Lorenzen and Willerslev, and then a string of other ancient DNA experts around the world, to find out what’s going on, and immediately feel a little like Alice going down the rabbit hole. It turns out that in the field of ancient DNA, particularly when it comes to Egyptian mummies, very little is as it seems.

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* In case you’re interested in the details, Zink says they used a method called gel electrophoresis. This involves injecting the sample into a slab of gelatin, then applying an electric current to pull the charged components (including DNA) through the gel. Smaller molecules travel faster through the matrix of the gel than larger ones, so this separates the different components in the sample by size. The researchers then cut out the piece of gel where they expected the DNA to end up, and washed and purified it from there.

* The mummy once thought to be Thutmose I, sampled during the Hatshepsut project.

* According to Egyptologist Aidan Dodson of the University of Bristol, UK, author of Amarna Sunset: Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb, and the Egyptian Counter-Reformation,5 these statues are now recognized as actually representing the female king Neferneferuaten, a coruler and possible successor of Akhenaten. It seems likely that she was none other than Nefertiti, who disappears from view just as Neferneferuaten appears in the record.

* James Harris was the only exception, concluding in 1980 that the mysterious KV55 monarch died in his thirties. Frustratingly, he never published the reasoning behind this conclusion.

* Timmann and Meyer have an alternative theory for Tutankhamun’s death—sickle-cell disease (SCD). In SCD, a mutation in the gene for hemoglobin causes red blood cells to become rigid and sickle-shaped. Sufferers have severe anemia and often die young. The disorder can also cause bone necrosis like that seen in Tutankhamun’s mummy, when deformed blood cells get stuck in the tiny capillaries of the feet. Hawass’s team initially responded that the idea was “an interesting and plausible addition to the palette of potential disease diagnoses in Ancient Egyptian royalty that we are currently investigating.” Timmann and Meyer have developed a test for the SCD gene, so they offered to collaborate with the Egyptian team, but say they received a letter from Hawass that “somewhat roughly” declined any cooperation, and claimed to have ruled out SCD two years earlier.

* Apparently, he’s using a bow rather than fishing rod because of the special royal status that this weapon had in ancient Egypt.

“IT’S SO FRUSTRATING,” says Eline Lorenzen, which is barely necessary as I can hear frustration if not anger dripping from every word as she speaks to me on the phone from her lab in Copenhagen. “Now everyone will be taught in school that King Tut died of malaria.”

Lorenzen works at the Centre for GeoGenetics, part of Denmark’s Natural History Museum. Led by evolutionary biologist Eske Willerslev, it is a leading center for ancient DNA research, where researchers tease aging genetic material out of everything from killer whales to moas. Lorenzen herself studies the DNA of large prehistoric animals such as the mammoth and woolly rhino (extracted from remains found frozen in permafrost in places like Canada and Siberia), to investigate whether climate change or hunting by humans finished them off.*

Together with Willerslev, she wrote the letter to JAMA that criticized Zink, Pusch, and Gad’s DNA analysis of the royal mummies.1 She tells me that she felt obliged to speak out about it after seeing the huge press coverage that their results gained. “This is not seen as a rigorous study,” she says. “When working with samples that are so well-known, it is important to convince readers that you have the right data. I am not convinced.”

To find out if other experts agree with her, I start calling around. Although no one comes out and says the data on Tutankhamun and his family are definitely wrong, I have trouble finding anyone who believes them. “I’m very skeptical,” says Willerslev. The study “could do a much better job,” complains Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Leipzig, one of the founders of the ancient DNA field. “I would be extremely cautious in using these data,” agrees Ian Barnes, an expert on the survival of ancient DNA, based at the Royal Holloway University of London. The DNA analysis of Tutankhamun and his family might have been a media sensation, but behind the headlines, many scientists seem to have written it off.

Despite Zink’s track record in publishing DNA from Egyptian mummies going back five thousand years, the critics don’t believe that his team could possibly have detected the DNA that they claimed. And it’s not just Tutankhamun. Enter the world of ancient DNA and you are soon asked to choose between two alternate realities: one in which DNA analysis from Egyptian mummies is routine, and the other in which it is impossible. “The field is split absolutely in half,” says Tom Gilbert, a young professor who heads two research groups at Willerslev’s geogenetics center.