The Shadow King (34 page)

The hope—on both sides—is that by providing robust, detailed data that everyone can agree on, these new techniques will help to banish uncertainty and mend the split in the field. They might even give us full genome sequences for the pharaohs. Hair (for those mummies that still have it) seems to be a particularly promising source, because the DNA is locked inside the shaft, protecting it from degradation and contamination.

Zink, after his success with Ötzi the Iceman, tells me that he would love to try next-generation sequencing on the royal mummies. But the Egyptian authorities are cautious about permitting such a project, he says, as the resulting data might provide politically sensitive information about the genetic origin of the pharaohs, and whether any royal blood persists in the modern population: “This goes right to their history.”

Cost is also an issue—Willerslev reckons for example that the Greenlander genome alone cost several hundred thousand pounds. If the work were to be done in Egypt, this would be the kind of money that only a huge TV company could afford. In a field swamped with uncertainty, then, at least one thing is for sure. If this study ever happens, it will undoubtedly be captured on film.

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* See Lorenzen, E. D., et al., “Species-Specific Responses of Late Quaternary Megafauna to Climate and Humans,” Nature 479, 2011, 359–365. Since our interview, Lorenzen has moved to UC Berkeley, and is studying how ancient polar bears responded to past climatic warming events, to help predict how they will be affected by modern global warming.

* When I checked in August 2012, this photo was no longer displayed.

* Other experts have raised concerns over how useful the second lab really was. Sally Wasef and her team started work toward the end of the project, only repeated a small subset of the tests, and didn’t take their own samples from the mummies—they were dependent on testing DNA supplied to them by Gad’s team.

* These results do not appear in the JAMA paper, but the documentary King Tut Unwrapped includes a shot showing Y chromosome data for Tutankhamun on a computer screen. In August 2011, a Swiss genealogy company called IGENEA analyzed this screen shot and issued a press release concluding that Tutankhamun belonged to an ancestral line (or “haplogroup”) called R1B1a2. This line is rare in modern Egypt but common in Western Europe, where it is found in up to 70 percent of British men. This was immediately cited as proof that the DNA represented contamination from a European archaeologist such as Derry or Carter. This is possible, but it’s worth remembering that this scene in the documentary was reenacted later, so there’s no guarantee that the computer screen is actually showing the correct data. I asked Gad if the DNA really does show Tutankhamun’s haplogroup to be R1B1a2, but he refused to say. “This is not how science should be conveyed,” he says. “All the haplotype information will be published hopefully soon.” As of February 2013, however, no such paper has appeared.

* Actually DNA compiled from three different Neanderthal individuals.

KING TUTANKHAMUN looks invincible in his horse-drawn chariot as he leads his troops to battle. He stares straight ahead, bow and arrow poised for a killer shot, as his enemies fall in trampled piles beneath his wheels. Later, after sailing triumphantly home up the Nile, he sits in state to receive a gory memento of the defeated dead: their severed hands, strung onto spears like kebabs.

While Zahi Hawass’s scientists were redefining Tutankhamun as a frail, inbred cripple, scholars elsewhere painted a picture of a very different kind of king. One of them was Ray Johnson of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, based in Luxor. For the last twenty years, Johnson has worked in Luxor Temple, painstakingly copying and publishing the reliefs inscribed on its walls.

In 2010, he published a dramatic new finding relating to Tutankhamun.1, 2 He had been studying hundreds of broken wall fragments that were later reused in nearby medieval buildings. He found sandstone blocks from Tutankhamun’s additions to Luxor Temple, but he also found blocks—recognizable as Tutankhamun’s from the carving style and the presence of his name—from a different temple. The images he found on them revealed an unprecedented insight into Tutankhamun’s reign, including scenes of offerings, barge processions, rituals, and war.

The fragments were made up of small blocks called talatat, originally used by Akhenaten for constructing buildings quickly. After some investigation, Johnson was able to reconstruct their long and checkered history. Akhenaten had originally used them in a building at nearby Karnak dedicated to his god, the Aten, before Tutankhamun dismantled it and reused the blocks for his own mortuary temple, which was completed after his death by his successor, Ay. Later, the next pharaoh, Horemheb, dismantled the mortuary temple and reused the blocks for himself, to fill in a gateway at Karnak. In medieval times, the blocks were quarried yet again and used for buildings in front of Luxor Temple. Through it all, the reliefs originally carved by Tutankhamun had survived.

Fitting the scenes back together from these scattered blocks was like attempting the ultimate jigsaw. Johnson and his colleagues copied the markings from individual blocks then used a computer to fit them together. Particularly surprising were two sets of battle scenes. One shows a Nubian campaign in the south, while the other shows Tutankhamun in a chariot leading Egyptian forces in Syria. The images include a royal flotilla returning triumphantly up the Nile, with a manacled Syrian prisoner hanging in a cage from the sail yard of the king’s barge. Other blocks show Tutankhamun receiving prisoners, booty, and the gory hand kebabs—a detail that hasn’t been seen anywhere else in Egyptian art.

Battle scenes were already known on some items from Tutankhamun’s tomb, for example a painted wooden casket that shows him fighting against the Syrians. These had been interpreted as symbolic, stylized images that would be used to show any king triumphing over his enemies. Experts assumed that Tutankhamun was too young to have actually led his troops in battle. But Johnson thinks the reliefs on the temple blocks are more than that: “The originality of such scenes strongly suggests that they could only have been observed and recorded on the battlefield,” he wrote,3 so Tutankhamun’s presence in the images could mean that he was actually there after all. He points out that Egyptian art at this time stressed truthfulness, and argues that the wear on objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb, such as armor, weapons, and chariots, proves the king was strong and active: “He was certainly old enough to participate in the manly art of war by ancient standards of maturity.”

So, far from being a crippled, inbred weakling, Tutankhamun may have been a military leader who went into battle at least twice. If he did break his leg, Johnson thinks that rather than falling over on his cane, he could have fallen from his chariot while on a military campaign: “It is clear from [the battle scenes] that the young king was considerably more active than has been assumed, and it is also possible that this cost him his life.”4

Unfortunately for Johnson, his reinterpretation of Tutankhamun was published just as the JAMA paper5 appeared, supposedly showing exactly the opposite. The CT scans seemed to prove that there was no way this king would have made it into a chariot, in battle or otherwise. But the doubts subsequently cast on the idea of Tutankhamun’s crippled foot have effectively reopened the case. What’s more, recent reinterpretations of both Harrison’s X-rays and Selim’s CT scans support the idea of a strong, active king—as well as introducing a new, completely unexpected cause of death.

After CT scanning the royal mummies, the Egyptians guarded their raw data very closely. Independent experts were frustrated by not being able to verify the conclusions reached by Hawass’s team, and even the foreign consultants, such as Rühli, were only allowed to take a few selected images home with them. But there’s one man who did manage to get access to the scans: a retired obstetrician from Seattle.

Benson Harer is one of those people who questions everything and doesn’t take no for an answer. Intellectual energy spills out in all directions—he’s a philanthropist, the author of the awesome Law of Social Physics (which states that “the emotional intensity in the expression of an opinion is inversely related to the validity of the data supporting it”), and alongside a successful career in medicine is also a respected amateur Egyptologist, not to mention creator of one of the most extensive collections of ancient Egyptian artifacts west of the Mississippi.

Harer started excavating in Egypt in 1978—working with Kent Weeks as he set up the Theban Mapping Project—and has been back nearly every year since. As a physician, Harer is particularly interested in the medical aspects of Egyptology, and when he heard about the CT study of Tutankhamun, he was desperate to get a look at the scans. He started nagging Hawass, whom he says he has known since 1978, “when he was at the bottom of the pyramid.”

It took Harer two years to persuade Hawass to let him see the data—“he kept promising and then falling through,” but he finally got his wish in 2008. The data were only kept in one place—the computer in the CT trailer, parked in the Egyptian Museum courtyard, so he had to look at them there. He spent several hours going through the scans—like the previous foreign consultants, he wasn’t allowed to take the information away, so he took as many photos as he could of the screen with his digital camera.

His conclusions were quite different from those of the original CT team. He didn’t attach much significance to the supposed fractured leg or deformed foot. But he did notice several things that were weird about the way that Tutankhamun was treated by his embalmers—oddities not shared by any of the other royal mummies of the New Kingdom—which he felt provided a string of clues to the circumstances of the king’s death. Several of the details had been noted before, but no one had brought them together or commented on what they might mean.

First was the position of Tutankhamun’s embalming incision. This is the cut that the embalmers made in a corpse’s tummy, so they could pull out the intestines. It’s usually quite a long cut, positioned on the left, from the groin up past the hip toward the waist. But in Tutankhamun, it’s shorter and higher, running from the navel almost to the left hip. Derry had noted this, but didn’t comment on it particularly.

Secondly, Tutankhamun’s diaphragm was intact. Normally when the embalmers reach in through the embalming incision, they have to cut through the diaphragm to reach the lungs, but in this case, they didn’t bother.

Third, and strangest of all, Tutankhamun had no heart. Some of the other details could perhaps be put down to differences between embalming schools, but a missing heart is a fundamental omission. Whereas the Egyptian embalmers tended to discard the brain, they saw the heart as the center of a person’s intellect and personality. Other organs were removed and mummified separately, but the heart was deliberately left in the body. Its owner was going to need it at the weighing-of-the-heart ceremony, held to determine whether the person was worthy of eternal life.

Mummies are sometimes found without their hearts, and in these cases, perhaps the embalmers messed up and pulled it out by accident. After all, you can find mummies in pretty much any condition—with missing body parts, or extra body parts (not necessarily human); one unfortunate man was even found wrapped up facing the ground, with his mask on the back of his head. But the ancient priests generally took more care with royalty. According to Harer, the CT scans of the royal mummies show that Tutankhamun is the only one of them known to have been mummified without his heart.

The heart couldn’t have been lost or stolen in modern times, he says, because Tutankhamun’s chest is packed full with resin-soaked—now rock hard—linen. Anyone who wanted to remove the heart would have to dig into this solidified packing, and even if they managed to put it back afterward, there would still be a gap where the heart once was. There’s no hole in the packing, suggesting that the heart was never there.

The list of anomalies goes on. Tutankhamun’s arms were found folded over his lower abdomen, not crossed over his chest, as is traditional for pharaohs. His skull is weird too, with those two layers of solidified resin—one settled in the back of the skull, and one at the top. It seems most likely that the resin was applied twice—once through the nose with the body lying on its back, and once through the base of the skull (an opening called the foramen magnum) with the body on its front, with the head end tipped upside down over the end of a table.* This is unusual—in almost all other royals, the nasal passage is the only route opened into the skull. In Ahmose, the embalmers used the foramen magnum instead. Tutankhamun is the only mummy in which they seem to have used both.

And, of course, there is that missing chest. The front part of Tutankhamun’s ribs are gone, as is his sternum, and the left side of his pelvis is badly damaged too. Derry (without the benefit of X-rays) didn’t notice this, while Harrison and the CT team both concluded that this damage was done in modern times, by Carter, or subsequent looters.

Rather than make any assumptions, Harer zoomed in on the ends of the ribs left behind, to look for clues. He noticed three things. First, although some of the ribs were clearly broken, others were cut smoothly. Second, they weren’t cut in a straight line—all the ribs were slightly different lengths. Third, the rock-hard linen packing immediately beneath the cut or broken ends of the ribs was undisturbed.

Harer argues that these three details prove the ribs were removed in ancient times, not modern. First, he says, the ribs can’t have been cut through with a horizontally held blade, say a hacksaw, because then they would have been cut in a straight line. Instead each individual rib is severed in a slightly different place, suggesting the use of a narrow, vertically held blade, such as a saber-type saw. But such a blade can’t have been used in modern times because it would have dug into the packing beneath the ribs, leaving telltale marks.