The Shadow King

by Jo Marchant

  Unlike the cached royal mummies, reburied with scarcely a scrap of jewelry, this king was smothered from head to foot in an awesome array of precious items, each precisely placed according to ancient beliefs and rites. Unfortunately, the bandages beneath the wax were in an even worse state of decay than those of the top layer. They resembled black crumbly charcoal, which made the operation a messy business—less orderly unwrapping, more treasure hunt in a barrel of ash.

  It was a big disappointment. Derry had unwrapped mummies seven hundred years older than Tutankhamun, with bandages that were still so strong he couldn’t tear them. And because the king had never been disturbed, hopes had been high that he might be pristine. The deterioration seemed to be caused by an unfortunate combination of damp conditions—from plaster still wet when the tomb was sealed and floodwater that had leaked in over the millennia—and the huge quantities of oils and unguents poured over the mummy at the funeral, which as well as gluing it inside the coffin, had eaten away at the bandages.*

  Derry started at the feet and over the next five days worked slowly up toward the mummy’s neck, delving through its protective cocoon layer by layer as Carter brandished his magnifying glass in delight. The economic value of the trinkets they unearthed was incalculable but what had Carter so enthused was their meaning—an unprecedented insight into the magic and rituals with which the ancient Egyptians sent a king to his grave.

  Tutankhamun’s feet sported gold sandals, with individual toe stalls engraved with nails and joints. Over his legs were gold bangles, a ceremonial gold apron, and, to Carter’s surprise and excitement, a beautifully decorated gold dagger with an iron blade still bright and rust-free after three thousand years. It was one of three iron objects found on the mummy, which were the earliest examples of iron ever found in Egypt. The discovery suggested that iron was introduced into Egypt by the Hittites in Tutankhamun’s time—an early indication of foreign influence, and as Carter saw it, an omen for the future: “one of the first steps in decline of the Egyptian Empire—the greatest empire of the Age of Bronze.”4

  Around Tutankhamun’s waist was another golden girdle, and tucked under it, another dagger, this time with a golden blade. The king’s arms, instead of being crossed over his chest in the traditional pose seen in other royal mummies, were folded over his tummy, the left hand slightly higher than the right. Bangles were hidden in the wrappings just above his elbows, including one carved with a distinctive bird. Carter, always keen to link the Egyptians’ religious beliefs with the wildlife he saw around him in the Valley of the Kings, identified it as the Egyptian swift. These birds lived in huge colonies in the cliffs at the edge of the desert, as he noted in his journal. The swifts flew down to the Nile at sunrise, screaming, and headed home, even louder, as the sun set. Maybe the Egyptians associated them with the transformation of the sun god, he mused, or the souls of the dead, which come forth by day with the sun and return at night.

  The mummy’s slender forearms were coated from elbow to wrist with chunky gold bracelets, all of different designs, some inlaid with semiprecious stones and glass. Each finger and thumb was individually wrapped in fine strips of linen, then enclosed in a gold sheath. Over its wrists were clusters of finger-rings made of gold, lapis lazuli, white and green chalcedony, turquoise, and resin.

  The chest was even busier—a gleaming jungle of thirty-five objects placed at thirteen different layers within the wrappings. Four magnificent gold collars featuring vultures, snakes, and hawks were piled on top of one another. Two golden hawks covered the lower part of the chest, with their wings extending up under the king’s armpits, as well as three more collars made up of hundreds of individual pieces of gold and inlaid glass. There was another series of gold bangles, and nearer the body, personal jewelry that showed signs of having been worn during life. Three beautiful blue scarabs (dung beetles) made of lapis lazuli held the disks of the sun and moon in their forelegs. And underneath everything, close to the skin, was an elaborate bib, made of tiny beads threaded together in a pattern of golden waves on a blue background.

  Around Tutankhamun’s neck was a profusion of amulets and sacred symbols intended to protect and guide him on his journey through the underworld, each separated by layers of bandaging. They included a red jasper teyet charm (shaped like an ankh symbol with droopy arms) to ensure the protection of the goddess Isis, and an inscribed gold djed pillar, which depending on whom you ask might be intended as a tree trunk, or as Osiris’s backbone, and symbolizes stability and durability. There was a tiny scepter made of green feldspar symbolizing power and eternal youth; a red carnelian snake’s head to protect Tutankhamun’s spirit against the snakes that infested the tunnels of the underworld; and figures of several gods including the baboon-headed Thoth, jackal-headed Anubis, and falcon-headed Horus.

  Suspended on a long gold wire was one of the most important items of all—a large black-resin scarab, its wing cases inlaid with a Bennu bird, or heron, in multicolored glass. This is thought to have been Tutankhamun’s heart scarab (normally placed over the heart, but in this case it was closer to his navel).

  The ancient Egyptians saw the heart, rather than the brain, as the seat of intelligence and knowledge, and the final challenge for any soul wishing to pass into eternal life was to have it weighed. The heart was placed on a set of scales before Osiris, with a feather representing Ma’at (a concept encompassing truth, order, and justice) on the other side. If your pans balanced, you would live happily ever after. If your heart was heavier, indicating that you hadn’t lived your life in accordance with Ma’at, it was fed to a monster called “The Devourer,” a lion-hippo-crocodile hybrid that crouched waiting, and your spirit would be cast into darkness. A mummy’s heart scarab played a key role, rather like a “get out of jail free” card, preventing the deceased’s heart from testifying against them and thus guaranteeing a positive outcome.

  The number and richness of Tutankhamun’s amulets brought home to the investigators just how much the ancient Egyptians must have feared the dangers of the underworld. The other overwhelming impression was that this mummy seemed to have been wrapped with no expense spared, not to mention oodles of care, love, and respect.

  According to the Book of the Dead,* when these charms were placed on the mummy, magic spells associated with them were to be uttered “in solemn voice.”5 Now Carter and Derry put the careful work of the embalmers into reverse, transforming the divine, protected king back into a fragile, mortal corpse. Along the way, they turned his magic into science. At each layer, after brushing away the charred bandages, they carefully labeled each item with a letter, while Burton took photos to record the exact position in which each was found.

  In all, they unearthed 143 items, wading through the jewelry all the way down to Tutankhamun’s gray skin, which was brittle as eggshell and laced with cracks. Here, Carter lost interest somewhat. He was desperate for biographical information about the king’s life—his age, for example, or cause of death—to shed some light on the mysterious Amarna period. Otherwise, the body itself paled into insignificance beside the glorious treasures that adorned it. With the amulets gone, it was little more than an obstacle to retrieving the gorgeous gold coffin and mask into which it was glued.

  Derry, on the other hand, was now in his element. He took the autopsy slowly and carefully, noting each tiny detail in neat pencil in his exercise book. As he had feared from the carbonized wrappings, the body itself was in a poor state too, horribly fragile and shrunk until little more than skin and skeleton remained. When some flesh on one leg flaked away down to the bone, the whole thing—what had once been plump muscle, tendons, fat, and skin—was no thicker than cardboard.

  The left kneecap came away at Derry’s touch, exposing the lower end of the mummy’s femur. This provided crucial information about the king’s age because in children and adolescents, long bones like the femur are still growing, so the bulb of the bone isn’t yet fused to the shaft (instead it’s attached by cartilage). The end
of Tutankhamun’s femur was still free from its shaft, so Derry concluded that he died young—as Carter had thought—at perhaps no more than eighteen.

  No pubic hair was visible but the king’s penis was easy to spot. Bandaged in the erect position, it measured around five centimeters long. And on the left side of Tutankhamun’s tummy, running from his navel toward his hip, was a ragged opening through which the embalmers had pulled out his internal organs.

  Assisted by Hamdi, Derry cleaned the limbs and body, took as many measurements as possible, and painted the whole thing with more hot paraffin wax to stop it crumbling any further. By the morning of November 16, they had stripped the entire mummy down to the skin—and in some cases the bones—apart from the head and shoulders, which were still stuck fast inside their golden helmet.

  In case you’re imagining the body neatly laid out beneath the mask, though, the truth is rather more brutal. Carter glossed over this minor detail in his diary and published account. But Derry’s notes, written as the examination was taking place,* are more revealing. Because the mummy was stuck to the bottom of the coffin with resin, the team weren’t able to remove much of the jewelry. So they took drastic action, pulling the mummy’s limbs apart to slide free the bracelets, and then cutting the body completely in two, like magicians at work on an unlucky assistant, before using a hammer and chisel to scrape out each dismembered piece.

  This procedure revealed that the body cavity was filled with a tightly packed mass of resin-soaked linen, now caked into a solid black. It also had the happy side effect of exposing the ends of various other bones that helped Derry to determine the body’s age, so he was able to firm up his previous estimate of eighteen. Finally, the coffin was empty except for Tutankhamun’s head and neck, stuck inside the mask, its wide, obsidian eyes staring straight up toward the painted vultures that circled on the tomb ceiling.

  The hammer and chisel technique didn’t work on the head, so finally Derry extracted it by sliding hot knives between the bandages and the metal, to soften the resin and work the head free. Inside the mask, the head lay on an iron headrest, which according to the Book of the Dead would help the mummy rise up from its supine state and overthrow its enemies.

  On the head, under a few layers of bandages, was one of the most impressive items found on the mummy—a gold and carnelian crown with cobra and vulture heads standing to attention in the front, and more snakes sweeping downward like ribbons at the back. Down through a few more layers of bandages, Derry found a band of burnished gold, and further down still, fitting tightly over the king’s shaved head, was a skullcap made of linen, embroidered in a snake design with tiny gold and faience beads. The fabric of the cap had deteriorated, meaning that trying to remove it would scatter the beads in all directions. So Carter decided to leave it in place on the king’s head, coating it in yet more wax.

  It was time to reveal the king’s face. Derry removed the final wrappings carefully, brushing away the last decayed scraps with a sable brush. At last, they saw the man himself: long eyelashes, nose squashed into a triangle by the bandages, pierced ears, and parted lips, which revealed slightly protruding upper teeth. The flesh of Tutankhamun’s face had dried and contracted, leaving prominent cheekbones. On his left cheek was a round scab, like a large spot or mosquito bite that had yet to heal.*

  Carter described “the serene and placid countenance of a young male . . . refined and cultured, features well formed, especially clearly marked lips.”6 I guess that’s all true, though I can’t help seeing in him a slightly awkward, goofy teenager.

  Derry estimated Tutankhamun’s height in life as 5 feet 6 inches tall, exactly the same height as the two guardian statues that had stood either side of the sealed door to the burial chamber. Meanwhile, Lucas took samples from plugs in the mummy’s nostrils, white spots on its shoulders, and some reddish material in its right eye, and analyzed them to see what they were (linen, salt, and resin respectively). His methods, though pioneering at the time, seem today like a series of school chemistry experiments—testing whether a sample was soluble in alcohol or benzene, whether it left a greasy stain on paper, or whether it melted with heat.

  Much to Carter’s disappointment, neither Derry nor Lucas came up with any clues to the cause of Tutankhamun’s early death. The autopsy did reveal one other important detail, though. Afterward, Derry wrote to his son Hugh at boarding school in England, telling him all about the tomb and the mummy.7 Derry described the richness of the jewelry he had retrieved, and explained how he calculated the king’s age from the ends of his bones. Then he added mysteriously: “I also made another discovery which is of great interest and which may help to make the history of that time clearer, but I am not permitted to make it public and Carter will eventually do so I expect.”

  He was probably talking about the shape of Tutankhamun’s skull, which he recorded in his notebook and was later included in the second volume of Carter’s book on the tomb.8 Back in 1907, Derry’s mentor Elliot Smith had examined the mummy from the KV55 Amarna cache, then thought to be Akhenaten. One of his key findings was that the skull was quite exceptional—it stuck out a long way at the back, and at 154 centimeters across, was one of the widest skulls ever discovered in Egypt.

  When Derry made his measurements, he found that Tutankhamun’s skull closely matched the unusual shape of the KV55 skull. In fact, it was even broader, at nearly 157 centimeters wide. Derry concluded that Tutankhamun must have been closely related to the KV55 king, perhaps his brother, or his son.

  This was a big surprise. Until then, archaeologists had assumed that Tutankhamun became heir to the throne when he married Ankhesenamun, King Akhenaten’s daughter. But Derry’s finding suggested that Tutankhamun was himself of royal blood. For historians of the period, with so little information to go on, it was a huge discovery, and required much rewriting of textbooks. It explained why Tutankhamun had ended up on the throne at such a young age—he was the heir in his own right. But it raised a question that still exercises experts today: Who were his royal parents?

  Derry finished his examination on the morning of November 19, and appears to have seen no reason to hang around. He and Hamdi left for Cairo straight after lunch.

  CARTER AND LUCAS were left with the “terrible job,” as Carter described it,9 of separating the two stuck-together coffins. With the mummy out of the way, it was time for extreme measures, not to mention nerves of steel. They lined the inside of the gold coffin with thick plates of zinc, then suspended both coffins upside down on trestles. They covered the outer coffin with wet blankets. Then they put several Primus paraffin lamps under the hollow of the gold coffin and set them burning full blast.

  For several hours, nothing happened, despite the gold coffin reaching a temperature of nearly 1000° F. Then it shifted an inch. At last, the resin was starting to melt.

  Carter and Lucas turned off the lamps and left the coffins suspended on the trestles. After another hour or so they began to fall apart, and eventually they were free, albeit covered in a dripping mass of what looked like gloopy molasses. Even then, the gold mask was still clinging steadfastly to the inside of the coffin. They pulled it away, and cleaned off the sticky mess with a blast lamp and cleaning solvents.

  The heat caused the glass inlay to come away from the mask; weeks later they were still replacing the tiny pieces. But on New Year’s Eve, they were finally finished and sent the mask and inner coffin—the largest golden relic ever unearthed from the ancient world—on the night train to Cairo. Meanwhile, the mummy itself stayed in the converted lab tomb, its pieces collected in a tray of sand.

  Newspapers had followed the whole process. The solid gold coffin and mask brought home to everyone around the world just how wealthy Egypt was in the Eighteenth Dynasty. Even the wildest funeral extravagances of Rome and Byzantium hadn’t gone beyond marble and alabaster coffins. Confirmation of the mummy’s young age also helped to fill out a romantic tale of a king who came to power as a child and died while still a te
enager. Some liked to end this tale with a suitably tragic death from tuberculosis, but murder was a popular theory too. As well as Ay, suspicion fell on Horemheb, the general of Tutankhamun’s armies. The elderly Ay only reigned for a few years before he died and was succeeded by Horemheb, who ruled for at least fourteen years and laid the foundation for the great military empire that was the Nineteenth Dynasty.

  Work on the jewelry and other coffins continued until early May; then Carter returned home for the summer. When he returned to Egypt in late September, he was horrified to find that rats had burrowed under the entrance to the laboratory tomb. It was pure luck that they spared the dismembered king.

  Carter prepared the mummy for reburial—carefully arranging its pieces in the sand to give the appearance of an intact body, folding its arms across its chest, and calling Burton to take one last photo before covering it in wads of cotton wool. On October 23, 1926, he placed the whole tray into the outermost of the three coffins and put that back into the sarcophagus, which still stood in the middle of the burial chamber. Finally he placed a large glass plate over the sarcophagus instead of its original lid, so visitors to the tomb could look down on the king’s golden face.

  There was no ceremony or fuss. Carter regularly waxed lyrical in his diary about how overwhelmed he was at certain key moments, such as first entering the tomb, or revealing the golden coffins, but he appears to have been little moved by reinterring the king. His words on this occasion were curt: “The first outermost coffin containing the King’s Mummy finally rewrapped, was lowered into the sarcophagus this morning. We are now ready to begin upon the investigation of the Store Room” (i.e., the treasury).10