by Jo Marchant
As a chemist, Lucas was particularly interested in identifying the components of the embalming products used in mummification.* One material he didn’t find was bitumen, an oil-like substance found in certain rocks. It had long been assumed that the black material found on mummies was bitumen—Greek, Latin, and Arab authors had all described the use of bitumen or pitch to preserve mummies, and modern experts had gone along with this assumption. Lucas seems to have been the first to actually bother to test what the black substance was, and when he did, he found no trace of bitumen or anything like it. Instead, the bodies were embalmed with plant-based materials—such as juniper resin, gum, and wood pitch.8, 9
This is ironic, as the very word mummy comes from the Latin word mumia (itself derived from the Persian mūm), meaning bitumen. In ancient times, mumia/bitumen had a reputation as a drug that could cure all manner of ills, from epilepsy and heart murmurs to tuberculosis. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the belief that mummies contained bitumen led to a bizarre cannibalistic craze for consuming them for medicinal purposes, and ground mummy became a popular item in apothecaries’ shops in Europe. Dealers even started faking mummies, drying out corpses exhumed from local cemeteries, to try to meet demand. Lucas’s work finally revealed that aside from being highly unethical (not to mention unpalatable), the entire mumia craze was built on a misconception. Not that this put everyone off, though. As late as the 1970s, there was still reportedly a New York pharmacy, catering to witches, selling powdered Egyptian mummy for forty dollars an ounce.10
Another topic that interested Lucas was the nature of the salt that the Egyptians used to dry bodies prior to embalming them. It is generally agreed that this was natron, a naturally occurring salt mixture deposited at the bottom of various lakes in Egypt when they dried up at the end of the annual river flood, for example at Wadi el-Natrun, about forty miles west of Cairo in what’s now Libyan desert. But was it used dry, with the mummies cured like pieces of ham, or were they pickled in a salty natron bath?
Elliot Smith thought the Egyptians used a bath, arguing that the top layer of mummies’ skin appeared to have peeled off, something you’d expect after immersion in corrosive natron solution, and that their finger- and toe-nails were often tied round with string, presumably to prevent them coming away too. Derry, on the other hand, argued that the interior of the body cavity showed no signs of having been submerged in such a bath, so where parts of the skin had come away, it was probably just the result of normal decomposition.
Lucas tested the bath theory, mummifying two chickens by soaking them in natron solution for seventy days, then drying them in air. He found that it works fine—five years later, the dry, shrunken birds hadn’t deteriorated at all, as opposed to another chicken he soaked in common salt.11
It’s an argument that still fizzles on today. Most scholars think dry salt was used, because in general the mummies’ skin looks too good to have been immersed in natron solution, and because no mummy “baths”—the receptacles they would have been soaked in—have ever been found. In the end, though, both techniques were probably used, with dry natron being most common. In the 1990s, an American Egyptologist named Bob Brier made his own human mummy with a donated body, using dry salt and as many authentic details as possible, even down to chanting the appropriate spells.12 It’s still going strong and now serves as an experimental resource for scientists wanting to test out their techniques for working on mummies. Meanwhile, Stephen Buckley, a chemist from the University of York, UK, thinks that for a period during the Eighteenth Dynasty at least, the embalmers used a bath, and recently made his own human mummy—of a taxi driver named Alan—to prove it.13
It may have been Derry, however, who made the first Egyptian-style human mummy of modern times. Later in his life, he told his grandchildren that he once mummified a recently demised colleague in Cairo (who had volunteered use of his body after his death) to test out his theories. Unfortunately, there’s no record of who this was or how the mummification turned out.*
Meanwhile, Derry built on his collection of mummies from all over Egypt and beyond, and studied several of the royal mummies kept in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. In 1931, he examined the mysterious KV55 mummy, concluding that this king couldn’t be Akhenaten.14 Like Elliot Smith in 1907, Derry said the ends of the bones suggested an age of early twenties—too young to have been Akhenaten. Elliot Smith had found a get-out clause, arguing that the king could have suffered from a condition that caused his bones to mature more slowly than normal, meaning that the body could have been older, and therefore might be Akhenaten after all.*
But Derry pooh-poohed this idea, and suggested that the body was much more likely to be Akhenaten’s son-in-law and short-lived successor Smenkhkare. He published a paper with Rex Engelbach, curator of the Egyptian Museum, who had reinterpreted the objects found in the confused Amarna cache, and likewise concluded that the coffin actually belonged to Smenkhkare.15 It is an argument that continues to run.
ON APRIL 17, 1939, the silence of the Egyptian Museum’s huge hall was broken by a series of shrill, piercing blasts. It was the sound of two military trumpets from Tutankhamun’s tomb, played after three thousand years by a British bandsman named James Tappern. The event was broadcast around the world to an estimated 150 million listeners, being heard in New York at 11 A.M. Before Tappern’s performance, Lucas was interviewed about the trumpets, and explained that one was made of silver and the other of bronze. He didn’t say that he’d been up all night repairing the silver trumpet, after the use of a modern mouthpiece (not by Tappern) during a test run the evening before had caused the instrument to split right down its length. Lucas was reportedly left as shattered as the trumpet, and needed hospital treatment from the stress.16
Within a few months, the world was at war.† Tutankhamun’s coffins, jewelry, and furniture were temporarily taken from their display cases; Lucas helped the museum staff to pack the objects into boxes, and hide them in bombproof cellars thirty feet underground. In the Valley of the Kings, however, no such measures were taken. With most foreign antiquities officials posted elsewhere, security fell apart—with devastating consequences for Tutankhamun’s mummy that wouldn’t be discovered for another two decades.
Lucas traveled around Egypt during the war, lecturing to British servicemen in hospitals and military camps, and showing officers around the museum after it reopened in 1944. He died in December 1945, aged seventy-nine, after suffering a heart attack on a train to Luxor, with the medicine he needed stuck in a different carriage.
By the late 1940s, Derry had been in Cairo so long he was something of an institution (according to one of his colleagues, “Do you know Derry?” became a kind of test of social acceptability among British expats in Egypt17). Teaching at the medical school was a tough job, mainly because of the huge number of students—he taught in an enormous lecture theater, often to more than a thousand people at once—combined with a scarcity of bodies with which to teach them.
The body shortage was eventually solved by a cholera epidemic, but until then it motivated a number of thefts. One group of students (who Derry rather admired), stole a whole corpse, dressed it, and drove it out of the university in the back of an open car, talking to it as they passed the police guards.
Body theft wasn’t the only disciplinary issue he had to face. In May 1950, a student brought a loaded revolver to his oral exam and, fearing he was about to fail, shot Derry’s colleague in the arm. He then tried to shoot Derry but the gun jammed so he beat the professor round the head with it instead. After subduing the attacker and waiting for the police to arrive, Derry drove himself to the hospital.*, 18
But it was becoming impossible for even someone as tough as Derry to remain in Cairo. Egypt had been occupied by Britain’s army since 1882, and nothing had changed with formal independence in 1922. The country had its own king, Farouk, but the British had humiliated him in 1942, surrounding his palace with tanks and ordering him at gunpoint to appoint thei
r chosen cabinet or abdicate (Farouk went into moral decline after that, and spent the rest of his life womanizing, gambling, and eating). Egyptians bitterly resented the intervention. Once the Second World War was over, there were increasing numbers of anti-British riots and demonstrations.
In October 1951, the government dismissed all British employees. Events culminated in “Black Saturday,” on January 26, 1952, when violent mobs rampaged through the streets of Cairo, setting fire to many of its iconic buildings. Derry, along with all the other Brits in the country, was forced to go home. He left his beloved Egypt and retired to a thatched cottage in Essex, bringing his gung-ho driving habits—learned on Cairo’s lawless roads—to the unsuspecting village of Saffron Walden.
At regular intervals, he gave interviews to the newspapers debunking the idea of Tutankhamun’s curse, which resurfaced—even decades on—every time someone connected with the project died. “Look at me,” he told journalists in 1952, pointing out that if anyone should be exposed to the curse it was surely him, as the person who actually cut open Tutankhamun’s mummy.20 “I have never suffered from and I have never been affected by ill effects from dissecting mummies.”
But a few months after his return to England, the curse arguably caught up with him. Derry was incredibly proud of his youngest son, John, a famous test pilot who in 1948 had become the first British pilot to exceed the speed of sound. On September 6, 1952, John broke the sound barrier again, in front of excited crowds at a prestigious air show in Farnborough, Kent. A few seconds later, his fighter plane disintegrated and crashed into the crowd, killing him, the observer on board, and twenty-nine spectators. It was the worst air-show disaster in Britain’s history.
Derry lived out his retirement in his picturesque cottage: watching birds, playing croquet, and entertaining his grandchildren with tales of Egypt. He remained alert and upright until he died, aged eighty-seven, in February 1961. He was the last surviving member of Carter’s team.
Meanwhile, a new chapter in the life of Tutankhamun’s mummy was just beginning. In the sleepy coastal town of Rhyl, north Wales, a terrible secret had just been found in a landlady’s cupboard.
_____________
* This fire-lighting kit consisted of a rectangular slab of wood with a series of holes around its edge that had been treated with resin to promote friction. It also included a “bow drill,” which was used to rapidly rotate a piece of stick in one of the holes, to create a spark. The thong of the bow wound round the shaft of a drill into which the stick was fixed, so that moving the bow backward and forward rotated the drill (and therefore the stick).
* It’s called Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation and you can see it here: http://www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/tutankhamundiscovery.html.
* The ancient Egyptians believed that the soul had several components, including the Ba, represented by a human-headed bird, which traveled within and beyond the tomb, and the Ka, which stayed with the body and needed offerings of food (real or metaphorical) to survive.
* Herodotus said to cure the body for seventy days, but this was probably the time required for the entire mummification process. The actual drying time may have been just forty days.
† John Taylor, a specialist in ancient Egyptian funerary archaeology at the British Museum in London, argues that this method wouldn’t actually dissolve the organs. He suggests that Herodotus may have been mistaken, and the injection of resin was instead meant to preserve the organs inside the body.
* He had plenty of other interests too, though, and also wrote about other ancient Egyptian technologies from wigs and cosmetics to glassware and even poisons.
* Derry’s grandson, Ramsay Derry, suggests that it might have been his flatmate, Dr. Roy Dobbin, chair of the medical school where Derry worked and an obstetrician who pioneered safer methods of caesarean section, who died in 1939 on a trip with Derry to Port Said.
* Elliot Smith also interpreted the mummy’s unusual skull shape as being caused by hydrocephalus—a build-up of fluid around the brain. Derry rejected this idea, particularly after finding that Tutankhamun’s skull was so similar.
† Giving curse enthusiasts the opportunity to blame even the Second World War on Tutankhamun. According to the BBC, a curator at the Cairo museum claims the trumpet retains “magical powers” and was also blown before the first Gulf War, and the week before the Egyptian uprising in 2011.
* Another time, students at the university threw a bomb from the college roof into the street below, killing a policeman, and followed it up with bottles of acid from the chemistry lab. The enraged police swept through the building, beating up anyone they found, killing two orderlies and seriously injuring the physiology professor. A dissecting-room attendant stripped naked and lay on a dissecting table to escape the violence. Derry sat quietly in his room through the whole thing.19
CHAPTER SEVEN
LETTERS FROM LIVERPOOL
NOTHING MUCH used to happen in the drab Welsh seaside resort of Rhyl. Then, in April 1960, a frail grandmother and landlady named Sarah Jane Harvey was admitted to hospital with a stomach tumor. While she was there, her son-in-law decided to decorate her home as a surprise for her return.
There was a locked cupboard on the landing that she had told him never to open, but to do a proper job of the painting, he forced the door with a knife. Inside, covered with thick layers of dust and wearing a blue nightgown, was a horrific-looking mummy.
The long-dead woman was shriveled and brown, with flesh and skin somehow still clinging to her bones. She lay on her back with legs bent up against the wall, her head facing the door with empty eye sockets and teeth bared in a chilling smile. There were traces of a cord around her neck, and on the floor next to her stood an empty bottle of disinfectant and some flypaper.
Harvey was arrested, and soon found herself at the center of one of the murder trials of the decade. As the trial progressed through the summer of 1960, the British press went wild over the case of the mummy in the cupboard. They ran stories of secret lab tests revealing gruesome embalming rituals, and speculated about whether she had been pickled in a bath of saltwater, or plunged into a vat of pitch. Meanwhile, holidaymakers poured off trains and buses at the sleepy coastal town. Armed with ice creams and box cameras, they queued around the block to get into the courtroom for the trial and catch a glimpse of the murderous grandmother.
The mummy wasn’t like anything the local pathologists had seen before. The woman’s flesh was as hard as stone; she had to be soaked in glycerin for a week before they could even do a postmortem. They called in a medical expert to help with the corpse: Ronald Harrison, anatomy professor at the University of Liverpool. He had a long-standing interest in Egyptian mummies and was tasked with helping to identify the victim, plus offering an opinion on how she was killed, how long she had been in the cupboard, and how she was preserved.
Harrison compared the corpse’s condition to various reports on Egyptian mummies, to glean clues about the origins of their Welsh cousin. Despite the speculation in the newspapers, he saw no signs of artificial embalming; the state of the corpse was closer to the naturally dried remains previously studied by Douglas Derry. It must have taken the body a while to dry out, though, as it had started to decay before the tissues stabilized. Dead maggots filled the mummy’s skull, and there was a gaping hole where her anus once was (Harrison speculated that gases produced inside the body as it decomposed had forced part of the alimentary canal out through the rectum, where it had been eaten away by maggots or bacteria).1
The woman’s mummification was a freak accident caused by the location of the cupboard she was found in, Harrison concluded. It was next to a chimney flue, causing a draught of warm air to circulate, which had slowly dried the body before it could fully decompose.
The police thought that the victim was most likely a previous lodger of Harvey’s, a divorcée named Frances Knight, who hadn’t been seen for twenty years. Harrison found that the victim’s height and physical attributes match
ed Knight’s records. He clinched the identification by testing the blood group of the mummy and matching it with the blood of Knight’s relatives. It was cutting-edge science for the time. He carried out the tests with the help of scientists at the British Museum in London, who sent him the necessary antiserum on ice on the 12:20 P.M. train from Euston.
But Harvey was acquitted of murder. Despite the cord—a cotton stocking—twisted tight around the victim’s throat, the prosecutors were unable to prove how she died. Harvey claimed that wrapping a warm stocking round your neck is a well-known remedy for the common cold, and that when her sickly lodger died suddenly, she panicked and hid the body in case she got accused of murder. She did go down for fraud though—it turned out that she had been claiming the woman’s two pounds per week maintenance for the entire twenty years that she had been missing.
For Harrison, the case cemented his interest in mummies, and showed him the potential—very much ahead of his time—for using molecular techniques to reveal family relationships of the long dead. It was the perfect approach for studying royal mummies.
WHEREAS CARTER WAS always a bit awkward, defensive even, when it came to authority, Harrison was full of charm, supremely self-confident, and relished being part of the establishment. He wasn’t born into it though. The son of a stationmaster, he was brought up fairly modestly in England’s pretty Lake District, then won a scholarship to Oxford University and went on to become one of its youngest ever dons.