Egyptian Enigma

by LJM Owen

  ‘No. Because in many ways it was an example of what not to do.’

  ‘Why do you pronounce his name that way? And what do you mean, what not to do?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘It’s habit. His name is made up of three words – Tut, which means “an image”, Ankh, which means “waters of life” and Amun, a “sun god” – and I pronounce each of them separately because that’s how I learnt to say it,’ Elizabeth explained. ‘As for how his mummy was unusual… Typically, it took up to seventy days to prepare a body: to wash it with water from the Nile, carefully remove the lungs, liver, stomach and intestines and pack them in canopic jars, then pack the body in salt and dehydrate it.’

  ‘What about the brain?’ Henry asked.

  ‘It wasn’t considered important so it was taken out through the nose and thrown away.’ Elizabeth noticed Nathan take a step back from the table.

  ‘So if the mummies made it to the afterlife, they were actually brainless?’ Alice joshed.

  ‘Zombie mummies are a real thing!’ Henry joined in.

  ‘Stop it,’ Rhoz clowned.

  ‘The incision to remove the internal organs was normally done with care and precision.’ Elizabeth returned to the facts, watching Nathan’s face for any reaction. ‘And the body was packed and wrapped with strips of linen, ensuring trinkets and tokens were in the folds to preserve the soul for its passage into the afterlife.’

  ‘And in Tut’s case?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘It seems as though his embalming process was rushed and careless, although there’s a theory that it was deliberately messy.’

  ‘How messy? And why so?’

  ‘The incision was a huge, horrendous gash, and the removal of his organs so violent that his sternum and quite a few parts of his ribs were missing.’

  ‘I’ve never heard that before!’ Alice said.

  ‘Me neither,’ Henry added.

  ‘That’s only the start,’ Elizabeth continued, running her silver cartouche of Tut-Ankh-Amun’s name along the chain around her neck. ‘As I said before, a person’s heart was left inside their body. Or if that wasn’t possible a scarab beetle carving was added in the wrappings to replace it. Without that you couldn’t enter the Hall of Judgement and even attempt to pass into the afterlife.’

  ‘So Tut was being punished in some way?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘Maybe not. It’s possible he was more of a sacrifice. There were some other unusual things about his mummification that indicate his embalmers may have been trying to turn him into a representation of Osiris, god of the underworld and rebirth, to help Egypt get back on track after the disastrous reign of Tut-Ankh-Amun’s heretic father, Pharaoh Akhenaten.’

  ‘What sort of unusual things?’ Henry asked.

  ‘I’ve heard of this,’ Rhoz said. ‘When he was excavated by Howard Carter, he was found to have been mummified with a fully erect penis that stood at ninety degrees from his body.’

  Elizabeth nodded. ‘Again, that’s how Osiris was often depicted in Egyptian wall art. But it didn’t end there. Osiris was usually painted as either a dark green or black colour. So after Tut-Ankh-Amun was wrapped in his linen bandages, he and his coffin were, in the words of Carter, “hidden by a black lustrous coating due to pouring over the coffin a libation of great quantity”.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They covered him in bitumen.’

  ‘Definitely not what I pictured as being beneath that mask!’ Henry said.

  ‘To add final insult to injury,’ Elizabeth said, ‘due to the unusual combination of oils and other substances used in his embalming process, a chain reaction occurred after he was placed in his sarcophagus that caused his body to heat to over two hundred degrees Celsius.’

  ‘What’s that in Fahrenheit?’ Henry asked.

  ‘Three hundred and ninety degrees.’

  ‘He cooked?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, does that mean his mummy was destroyed?’

  ‘No, it held together, at least on the outside. And it was intact enough that quite a bit of information could be gleaned from scans of what remained inside the wrappings. He had a small cleft palate, which may not have been visible in life, and an elongated skull. He also had splayed toes, commonly known as a club foot…’

  ‘That’s why he had such a collection of canes,’ Henry said.

  ‘Yes. He probably had a pronounced limp, as well as quite wide hips for a male, like his father.’

  ‘You’re not painting a picture of beauty,’ Rhoz said.

  Elizabeth and Alice had almost finished laying out the fourth mummy. ‘We can start to analyse this one in a minute or two,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘So,’ Henry said, ‘you’re saying that King Tut had a cleft palate and a club foot, was hacked to pieces after death, had his brain thrown away, was deprived of a heart, given an erect penis, covered in tar, then spontaneously combusted?’

  Elizabeth nodded. ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘How is that not common knowledge? Why is it that everyone knows about the gleaming blue and gold funerary mask, but not any of that?’

  ‘People prefer pretty things to gory details, I guess,’ Rhoz said.

  ‘I always felt a bit sad for him,’ Henry said. ‘I thought of him as a nineteen-year-old boy-king who had already lost two of his own children when he died. But knowing all of this makes it so much sadder.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Elizabeth said. ‘There’s even evidence from microbes on the walls of his tomb that the people who buried him were probably in such a rush that they sealed it before the paint was dry.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Modern archaeologists didn’t help matters. They were little more than tomb-raiders at times. They removed his hands, legs and head to get at the jewellery in his wrappings, and the mask. They even, for an unknown reason, removed his right ear and penis.’

  ‘I give up!’ Nathan said.

  Everyone in the room turned to him.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Henry asked.

  ‘It’s all so – so brutal!’ Nathan said.

  Rhoz shrugged. ‘It’s reality.’

  Nathan looked a little defeated. ‘So, the fourth mummy from the Tomb…was she murdered too?’

  ‘Actually, it looks like this one might be a male,’ Elizabeth answered, ‘but, yes, probably, based on the scan of his throat tissue. How about we do the height calculation?’

  ‘Sure,’ Nathan said.

  ‘Okay, length of femur,’ Elizabeth measured, ‘forty-five but…’ she said as Nathan went to calculate the person’s approximate height on his phone, ‘since this person appears to be male it’s a different formula.’

  ‘You and your tricky ways,’ Henry teased.

  ‘What makes you think this person is male?’ Rhoz asked.

  ‘The bones have stronger markings on them where the muscles were attached, compared to the female skeletons.’ Elizabeth pointed to multiple sites on the arms and legs of the skeleton. ‘Can you see here, here and here?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Alice, could you maybe…’

  ‘Already on it,’ Alice looked over her shoulder at Elizabeth and grinned. She turned back from their shelf of boxes with the right humerus from the first Tomb mummy. She handed it to Elizabeth, who held it next to the right humerus on the table.

  ‘See the difference?’

  Rhoz and Nathan crowded in.

  ‘Yeah!’

  ‘Would you mind holding them up so I can see what it is you’re looking at?’ Henry asked.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Alice said, as she moved the laptop over to the table.

  ‘Ah, got it.’

  ‘The other indicators include the narrow pelvis,’ Elizabeth pointed to the flare of the mummy’s hips, ‘and the larger features on the skull. See how this person had a noticeable brow ridge
, larger bony bits behind the ears, and generally stronger muscle markings all over his head and jaw?’

  ‘Yes,’ Nathan, Rhoz and Henry agreed.

  ‘And his face wasn’t slashed?’ Nathan asked.

  Elizabeth shook her head.

  Nathan picked up his phone again. ‘So what formula should I use this time?’

  ‘Forty-five times two point three two, plus sixty-five point five three.’

  ‘A hundred and seventy.’

  ‘About five feet seven inches,’ Henry converted. ‘So, definitely too tall for the cartonnage.’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘And how old was he?’ Alice asked.

  Elizabeth examined the dentition. ‘Everything has erupted, even his third molars, but there’s very little wear. I’d say late teens, possibly early twenties.’ She noted that this person’s features, despite gender differences, were markedly similar to those of the first three mummies, particularly mummies two and three. There was the extra tubercle on the upper second molars; a certain shape to the orbits; the same shaped nasal aperture; similar proportion of forehead to midface to jaw; which meant that if their faces were reconstructed they would probably look extremely similar. Depending on how long it took to track down the last three mummies from the Golden Tomb, perhaps she should try an analysis of their dental non-metrics to see where they sat in comparison to existing data on ancient Egyptian populations from the New Kingdom.

  ‘I’m not sure it’s helpful at all,’ Henry said, ‘but I saw in the records for this young man that the words written on his mummy wrappings are almost legible.’

  ‘Was that a common thing?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Some embalmers were very good about writing the name of the deceased on the wrappings, over and over. Unfortunately, most of the time the ink faded long ago and it doesn’t show up with any form of x-ray or scan.’

  ‘It would be exceedingly helpful if mummies came pre-labelled,’ Henry said.

  ‘Ha! But where’s the fun in that?’ Rhoz said.

  Elizabeth and Alice packed away the replicate remains of the young man, then laid out the plastic skeleton of the fifth mummy in record time.

  ‘Not too big, not too small?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Might this one be just right for the sarcophagus?’ Henry asked.

  Elizabeth peered at the femurs on the table. ‘I’ll estimate age and gender before we do height, but it’s looking good.’ She opened the skull to expose the upper and lower dentition, noting the upper second molars again had the tell-tale drip of an extra tooth on the outside. ‘Based on the eruption pattern,’ Elizabeth pointed to the upper and lower premolars and molars, ‘this person looks to have been around thirteen when they died. See that more of their teeth have come through compared to the child who was around ten, but not as many as the female of around sixteen?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ was the general consensus of the room.

  ‘Again, this person was likely to have been female, based on what appear to be cut marks on the face. They also have light muscle markings and a female shape to the pelvis, although with a young teenager it’s very difficult to determine sex with any certainty.’

  ‘So we use the female formula to calculate height?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the magic number was?’

  ‘Thirty-nine.’

  ‘So,’ Nathan tapped virtual numbers on his phone screen, ‘multiply by two point four seven, plus fifty-four point one…one point five metres.’

  ‘Four feet eleven inches, with an allowance of an inch or so for the thickness of the linen wrappings top and bottom…could this be the person from the sarcophagus?’

  ‘If the cartonnage fits!’ Alice joked.

  ‘Perhaps the Golden Tomb was built for a princess after all,’ Rhoz said.

  ‘But what does this all mean?’ Henry asked. ‘It doesn’t exactly add up. If the people who were hidden behind the false wall had all been murdered – let’s say in revenge for being involved in the plot against Ramesses the Third – why would the person in the sarcophagus also have been murdered in the same way?’

  ‘And if they were someone who was being removed from the royal succession, why would they have been buried in such a lavish tomb?’ Rhoz said. ‘Whoever buried them clearly loved or respected them deeply to go to so much trouble.’

  ‘Could they have been a group of servants, as the original archaeologists said?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘It’s possible, of course, but not likely,’ Elizabeth said. ‘There was a run of Pharaohs who had hundreds of servants or retainers sacrificed as part of their own funeral so that they could continue to serve them in the afterlife. But those Pharaohs were part of the First Dynasty, at least two thousand years before our Tomb was built. The truth is, although this girl would fit, we don’t have any certainty that she was the one in the sarcophagus.’

  ‘Perhaps we need to reserve our judgement until we find and examine the rest of the mummies from the tomb,’ Nathan suggested.

  Elizabeth shared the group’s frustration but tried to remain positive. So far, apart from being able to list various metrics about the mummies, they hadn’t really discovered anything to help them identify the people buried in the Golden Tomb, not even which Pharaoh might have commissioned it. Perhaps they would start to get a clearer idea once they were able to compare the mummies from the Tomb against members of Ramesses the Third’s family. ‘Yes. We’ll just have to be patient. Same time again next week?’

  ‘It will take me a while to print out our various Ramesses,’ Alice said. ‘It’s slow going and I can only do it after hours. Perhaps a fortnight?’

  ‘Done,’ Elizabeth agreed, ‘and thank you again for everything you’re doing for the group.’

  —

  Two Saturdays later, following her nose, Elizabeth swung open the kitchen door to reveal culinary carnage: the making of cawl mamgu. Although preparation of the delectable Welsh lamb and leek soup should not result in burnt pans, dirty pots, splashes of lamb stock and stray slices of vegetable from one end of the kitchen to the other, in Taid’s hands, somehow, it did.

  ‘Grandmère is going to have a heart attack.’

  ‘What your grandmother doesn’t know won’t hurt her,’ Taid told her, his glasses spattered with lamb fat.

  Elizabeth’s grandfather, covered with grease smears, appeared to have dunked himself in stock. ‘This activity wasn’t sanctioned by the Grand High Council of Grandmothers?’

  He shook his head. ‘Madeleine will be back from the markets in two hours, and Cho took Mai shopping.’

  ‘Then, basically, your life is forfeit. That won’t be enough time for you to clean this up.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Taid’s accomplice, Matty, called, from a chair in the conservatory. ‘We had it all done before she got home last time.’

  ‘Last time?’ Elizabeth popped her head around the corner. ‘No, wait, I don’t want to know.’

  ‘It would go faster if you helped me.’ Elizabeth’s younger brother was perched in front of Taid’s ultimate bribe: a pile of succulent, cooling lamb bones. ‘I have half to offer?’

  Elizabeth was meant to be improving her papers for Dr Marsh this morning, then had assignments to mark. But all work and no play… ‘Sure.’ She grinned. ‘But I get the reward now, and then we clean.’

  ‘Okay!’

  ‘How is all your work going?’ Taid asked, as yet another wooden spoon fell from a simmering batch of stock to the floor.

  Elizabeth winced. ‘It’s been a long week. After work, I’ve been trying to improve my Olmec and Maya papers for publication.’

  ‘How’s that going?’

  She shrugged. ‘There’s something about the way Dr Marsh wants them written that I’m just not getting. Nothing I can do but keep trying, right?’

&n
bsp; ‘Right!’ Taid said.

  Elizabeth noticed the feline posse had followed her into the kitchen, entering in single file from the hall via one of their many cat flaps. Thoth saw her, began to make a beeline for her, then realised Taid was in the kitchen and turned to leave. The others followed. They loved Taid, particularly his extra titbits for them on Sunday nights, but he became so engrossed in cooking that he often failed to notice them, resulting in trampled tails and feelings. The cats had sensibly agreed that they would never share the kitchen floor with Taid’s feet.

  ‘And work?’

  ‘It’s okay. Amy’s great, of course, and Judy’s fine.’

  ‘Tutoring?’

  Elizabeth plucked at a morsel on one of her bones. ‘Having a bit of difficulty with a couple of guys in my class, but otherwise it’s good. An awful lot of work, though, preparing the classes, then marking assignments.’

  ‘Your mother, Cho and Madeleine always said the majority of a teacher’s work happened outside the classroom.’

  ‘They were right!’

  ‘Do you…do you have any problems with other women telling you archaeology’s for boys?’ Matty asked, apropos of nothing.

  Elizabeth looked at him questioningly. ‘No woman has ever said that to me.’ How honest should she be? ‘A few men have, though. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I have some guys at school calling me a girl for studying cooking.’

  ‘Many of the world’s top chefs are men,’ Taid said. ‘Use that to deflect what they’re saying.’

  Elizabeth felt angry on her brother’s behalf. ‘I wish people would let others do the job they’re good at. Besides, everyone needs to be able to cook. What kind of adult isn’t capable of feeding themselves?’

  Matty’s eyes lit up. ‘I have to remember that argument.’

  Standing up to tie an apron over her striped black and white top and black house pants, Elizabeth picked up her plate to put it on the side of the sink. ‘It’s difficult, but you do have to ignore idiots like that.’

  Matty grabbed a crutch and his own plate to join her at the sink. ‘I know.’

  Elizabeth popped in the plug and turned on the hot water to begin soaking the worst-hit casualties. There was so much steam that she had to wipe her own weekend glasses with a tea-towel. Washing, wiping, scrubbing and drying pots, walls and floors, Elizabeth and Matty finished just as they heard the roller door on the garage start to lift. It had taken the whole two hours, but the grin on Taid’s face made it worth losing that work time to help him make a clean getaway, scooting from the room just as Grandmère walked into the kitchen.