The Shadow King (35 page)

Second, he argues, it would be pretty much impossible to cut through Tutankhamun’s ancient bones today and leave a smooth edge. The bones are now so brittle and fragile, they would snap before you could cut all the way through, leaving a partly broken surface. He tested this idea using some leftover pork ribs (after leaving them for a few months to dry out). No matter how carefully he tried to saw through them, he always ended up with a spike where the last bit of the bone snapped. To create the clean edge seen on Tutankhamun’s ribs, they must have been cut through when the body was still fresh, says Harer.

Because some of the ribs are broken and some are cut, Harer concludes that the king suffered a devastating injury that smashed the front part of his chest. The body presumably arrived at the embalming house with much of the chest already missing, so all the embalmers could do was to trim some of the ribs around the injured area to try to tidy it up.6, 7

This scenario nicely explains the other anomalies in how Tutankhamun was embalmed. The priests couldn’t leave his heart in place because it was already missing or seriously damaged before they received the body. And they didn’t need to cut through the diaphragm to reach the lungs because they could lift them straight out of the gaping hole in Tutankhamun’s chest. That meant they positioned the embalming incision slightly differently because they only needed to access organs and intestines from the lower abdomen. The arms were placed low, below the injury, rather than folded across the damaged area.

When it comes to the skull, Harer thinks the embalmers must have tried to extract the brain through the nose as usual, but that this proved unsatisfactory—perhaps because the caved-in chest made it difficult to position the body on its front as necessary to drain the contents of the skull through the nose. So after pouring in some molten resin through the nose (with the body on its back, so the resin would settle in the back of the skull), they turned the body back over onto its front, and made a second large hole into the skull cavity through the foramen magnum. After the brain was completely removed, they poured in a second layer of resin with the head hanging upside down.

Once the chest was packed with resin-soaked linen, Harer thinks the priests placed the blue-and-gold-glass-beaded bib directly over the opening, perhaps to protect it. This might explain why Carter was unable to remove it, because the beads were stuck directly to the resin, rather than being laid on top of bandages or skin.* The surface of the packing on the mummy today is ragged and bumpy, where whoever removed the bib literally had to chisel it off. Harer also thinks the injury might explain why the embalmers piled so many layers of protective amulets and jewelry over Tutankhamun’s chest area. As there are no other equivalent royal burials to compare him to, however, we don’t know if this was normal practice.

Harer’s scenario of a fatal chest injury has support from another source too. Robert Connolly, the anatomist in Liverpool, has been looking again at Harrison’s 1968 X-ray images, and independently sees a similar picture.

Connolly worked with radiographers in Liverpool to digitize and enhance Harrison’s old X-ray plates, before reanalyzing them.8 He agrees that the best explanation for the king’s absent heart is that it was already missing or destroyed before the embalmers got hold of the body. He also noticed the combination of broken and cut ribs and concludes that some were broken in an accident, with the embalmers later trimming away the rest for fast access to Tutankhamun’s internal organs. “I think Tutankhamun died in an accident, some distance from home,” he told me. “After a few days transporting the body at that temperature, putrefaction would have started. They would have wanted to get the odiferous gut out as quickly as they could.”

So what could have ravaged the king’s chest and pelvis in such a strange way? Apart from the possible broken leg (Harer says he’s skeptical that this happened before death: “The embalming material inside the alleged fracture is very subtle if it’s there at all”), Tutankhamun doesn’t have any other major injuries, for example to his arms, skull, or spine. So something smashed up his front, but only his front.

In an article published in June 2012,9 Harer goes through some of the possibilities, mostly wild animal related. He discounts a lion attack, arguing that the king would never have traveled or hunted without an entourage. So even if he were set upon by a lion, the animal wouldn’t have time to claw open and devour his chest before Tutankhamun’s men intervened.

The now-extinct aurochs—a larger ancestor of today’s domestic cows, with fearsome horns—is another contender. An aurochs bull could easily kill a man, but to be gored in the chest, the king must have stood facing the charging bull like a matador, which seems unlikely. It’s also thought that the aurochs may have been extinct in Egypt at the time of Tutankhamun’s death—no hunts in Egypt are recorded after the reign of Amenhotep III.

There’s the old chestnut of Tutankhamun falling from (or being struck by) a chariot, but this would have caused multiple injuries from tumbling, perhaps breaking his arms, legs, neck, or back. Or he could have been kicked in the chest by a horse, but that would presumably result in a much more localized injury.

If the king was fowling in the marshes and lost his balance, he might have fallen in the water and been attacked by a crocodile. But a biting croc, with rows of razor sharp teeth on its upper and lower jaws, would cause equal damage to both sides of the body. There is another watery predator, however, that Harer claims could cause just the sort of injury seen in Tutankhamun: the hippo.

Although it seems lumbering, and perhaps even cute (in a big-boned kind of way), the hippo is often cited as Africa’s most deadly animal—not counting the malaria-carrying mosquito. They can grow up to three tons, are surprisingly fast in water and on land, and although vegetarian, have huge saber-like teeth in their bottom jaw, which they’re quick to use if they feel threatened.

Harer argues that when an angry hippo attacks, it typically catches its fleeing victim and clamps them in its mouth, with one or both saber teeth impaling the unfortunate person from the front. A twist of the hippo’s head disembowels the victim, or rips out their chest, depending on the positioning of the teeth.

Connolly also favors the idea of a hunting accident, though he doesn’t think there’s enough evidence to speculate on the exact culprit. Other experts have expressed caution about the hippo idea, skeptical that the pharaoh would ever have been exposed to such a danger, and that such a huge animal could have destroyed Tutankhamun’s chest and pelvis without leaving a series of injuries elsewhere on his body.

But when I asked hippo specialists, they were cautiously positive that Harer’s scenario is at least possible. Erustus Kanga of the Kenya Wildlife Service confirms that hippo bites can cause clean-cut piercing or stab wounds, while David Durrheim, a public health expert who has reviewed hippo fatalities in South Africa, says that although most of the human deaths he came across were due to people getting trampled, hippo bites do also cause more localized injuries. “A well-placed hippo foot could certainly crush a human chest and a penetrating lower incisor could disembowel an unfortunate victim,” he says.

Pharaohs from the Old Kingdom at least are known to have hunted hippos. Legend has it that King Menes, the first king of a unified Egypt, was killed by one. Hunting these animals was seen as an act of religious significance, as the hippo, associated with the god Seth, epitomized the forces of chaos—which it was the pharaoh’s role to quell. Perhaps the eighteen-year-old Tutankhamun would have relished such an adventure, suggests Harer, particularly during a period when he was keen to restore order to the land after the disruption of Akhenaten’s Aten heresy.

Alternatively, Tutankhamun could simply have been fishing or hunting birds in the marshes (there are statuettes of him doing this, standing on a little wooden skiff) when a hippo attacked his boat. Hippos are known to attack and topple boats without warning, then bite the unfortunate occupant when he or she falls into the water.

There is evidence that hippos did live in Egypt in Tutankhamun’s time. One papyrus from the Eighteenth Dynasty includes a prescription for treating a hippo bite. And Ay, Tutankhamun’s successor, has a rare scene of a hippo hunt in his tomb—could he have been asserting his dominance over the animal that killed his predecessor?

Although Harer thinks that a hippo is the most likely cause of Tutankhamun’s death, he does have one other possible explanation for the king’s missing chest. If he was killed in battle, perhaps by an arrow that struck his heart, his enemies might have cut open his chest and retrieved the arrow and heart before his body was recovered by his own troops. It’s a scene that presumably isn’t included in the triumphant battle reliefs that Ray Johnson is deciphering on those temple blocks.

Harer and Connolly’s work adds yet another twist to the arguments over Tutankhamun’s death. The king has gone from a tragic child who succumbed to tuberculosis, to a murder victim, daredevil chariot racer, malaria-infected cripple, brave soldier, and even a hippo’s last meal. You can pick whichever story you like. We might not be any closer to a definitive answer over the pharaoh’s demise, but the sheer range of explanations is surely a testament to human ingenuity and imagination.

Unfortunately, we’re unlikely to get any more data to help solve the mystery any time soon. Dramatic events unfolding in Egypt were about to bring all scientific work on the mummies—not to mention Hawass’s glittering career—to an abrupt halt.

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* Robert Connolly points out that in the 1968 X-ray images, Tutankhamun’s nasal passage appears intact, suggesting that the brain was removed only through the foramen magnum. However, experts who have studied the 2005 CT images, including Richard Boyer, Paul Gostner, and Benson Harer, all agree that a hole has been broken through the right-hand side of Tutankhamun’s nasal passage, “about the right size to admit a good-sized trocar” according to Boyer. He says that the defect is in an area “with lots of overlapping shadows” so he isn’t surprised that it doesn’t show up on the flat X-ray images. It is possible, of course, that this damage has been sustained since 1968, but it seems most likely that the Egyptian embalmers did indeed enter the brain twice, once through the nose and once through the foramen magnum.

* In his diary entry for November 15, 1925, Howard Carter states that the beaded bib was located “at the lowest level before reaching the skin.” However in his later account of the discovery, The Tomb of Tutankhamun, he says that the bib was “next to the flesh, though not in actual contact with it; for there were several thicknesses of linen underneath, charred almost to powder.” Harer believes that the first account is correct.

IN THE LAST WEEK of January 2011, Yehia Gad watched from his lab at the National Research Centre in Cairo as the protests outside grew. He was itching to take part in the marches, but worried about jeopardizing his job. If there was a revolution, he figured he’d be needed in a position of influence, to help build a new, democratic Egypt.

What started as a lone street trader burning himself alive in protest at police corruption in Tunisia was fast becoming a wave of mass defiance against repressive regimes around the Arab world. In Egypt, huge crowds were turning out to call for the fall of President Mubarak, whose thirty-year rule since Sadat’s assassination was characterized by corruption, press censorship, and imprisonment without trial of thousands of political activists.

By the morning of Friday, January 28, Gad could stand by no more. He knew this would be the biggest demonstration yet, as Friday prayers would provide a natural starting point for marches afterward. Gad went to pray with his two sons-in-law at a mosque in the Cairo suburb of Nasr City, then walked with the other protestors the five miles or so to Tahrir Square.

Events that day exploded beyond everyone’s expectations. Hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life demonstrated for a democratic Egypt, enduring violent attacks from pro-government groups as military tanks looked on. The tense scenes were flashed to TV screens around the world, and suddenly, the country the rest of us had associated mostly with pyramids, mummies, and perhaps holidays by the Red Sea, took on a new dimension. We noticed that this was actually a police state. And its people were finally doing something about it. We looked on those Egyptian crowds with a newfound understanding, and respect.

That night, the Cairo museum was broken into and looted. The galleries containing items from Tutankhamun’s tomb and the Amarna period were worst hit, with glass cases smashed and their contents thrown broken onto the floor. A statue of Tutankhamun astride a panther was ripped from its base then cast aside. A model boat from his tomb was destroyed. Two mummy heads were found on the floor—sparking rumors that Yuya and Tjuiu had been decapitated.*

It wasn’t clear (and still isn’t) whether the rampage was carried out by opportunistic looters as officially claimed. The intruders supposedly entered through a glass skylight in the ten-meter-high ceiling, triggering questions over who would just happen to be carrying that much rope with them, and stories circulated that it was an inside job, set up by government supporters to make the demonstrators look bad. If so, it backfired. Once the breakin became apparent, young protesters formed a human chain around the museum to protect it from further attacks.

Hawass did not march with the demonstrators. On January 31, his status as a key part of Mubarak’s regime was cemented, when the president promoted him to Minister of State for Antiquities. Hawass issued repeated statements insisting that reports of looting at antiquities sites around the country were exaggerated, and that nothing was missing either from these sites or from the Egyptian Museum. “All of the Egyptian monuments are safe,” he said. “I want everyone to relax.”1

What was needed, he insisted, was a return to order. He appeared on foreign television, for example the BBC, expressing strong support for Mubarak on behalf of the Egyptian people.2