The Shadow King

by Jo Marchant

  He was passionate about Oxford and its traditions, and was one of the last professors there to lecture in Latin. A member of the British Eugenics Society,* he initially specialized in research into fertility and contraception, writing papers on subjects like what happens to guinea pig testicles when you freeze them.2 Harrison moved to Liverpool University in 1950, to take over an anatomy department left crippled by bombing during the Second World War, and thanks to his charismatic speaking style became something of a minor celebrity there. His lectures were jam-packed, and he was much in demand as an after-dinner speaker, addressing groups such as the Egremont Housewives Club and Liverpool’s Hundred Best Ladies.

  His interest in ancient Egypt seems to have started thanks to his friendship with one of his colleagues at Liverpool, the Egyptologist Herbert Fairman (usually known as H. W.). Fairman had worked at Amarna in the 1930s and had a strong interest in the tangled events that occurred at the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty.

  In 1961, Fairman became the latest Egyptologist to study the inscriptions on the coffin found in the KV55 Amarna cache, and decided that it was originally made for Meritaten, the eldest daughter of Akhenaten and wife of his successor Smenkhkare.3 He reckoned that Meritaten’s body had been later taken out from the coffin and her husband buried in it instead, apparently not an unusual practice for the time. This suggested that the body wasn’t Akhenaten but Smenkhkare—as Derry and Engelbach had earlier concluded, albeit by a different route. After the success of Harrison’s work on the Rhyl case, Fairman asked him to examine, again, the mysterious remains of the mummy from KV55.

  It was Harrison’s first trip to Egypt, in December 1963, and he had a blast. He was treated like royalty—invited to lavish dinners, and even taken down the Nile on the luxury yacht that had belonged to King Farouk. (Farouk himself was in exile by this time. He was deposed by a revolution in July 1952 led by a young colonel named Gamal Abd el-Nasser, who became Egypt’s most famous leader of modern times.) Harrison examined the KV55 bones in the Egyptian Museum, as Elliot Smith and Derry had done before him. Then he took them to the hospital at Derry’s old medical school, now at the University of Cairo, to x-ray them.

  It wasn’t the first time that anyone x-rayed an Egyptian pharaoh. In 1903, just eight years after the discovery of this revealing form of radiation by the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen, Elliot Smith and Carter tried it out on Thutmose IV. In a forerunner of Derry’s favorite student theft, they surreptitiously slipped the rigid mummy out of the museum, put it in a horse-drawn cab, and took it to the only nursing home in Cairo that had an X-ray machine. They were able to estimate his age at around forty to fifty years, saw that his chest was packed with linen, and found some small pieces of jewelry in the wrappings that had previously been missed.4

  Carter originally hoped to x-ray Tutankhamun’s mummy too.* He arranged the procedure with a British pioneer of medical radiography, Archibald Douglas Reid, before the mummy was even found, but Reid died suddenly in February 1925, while recuperating from illness in Switzerland (and not, as several curse advocates later claimed, on his way home from x-raying the mummy). Then in 1932, Derry x-rayed Amenhotep I, the beautifully wrapped pharaoh that Maspero couldn’t bear to spoil.5 He found a middle-aged man whose hands and feet had been torn off by thieves. And that was it until Harrison looked at KV55 in 1963.

  He reached very similar conclusions to Derry regarding the king’s young age at death.6 He estimated that the mystery monarch was a rather small man despite his enormous skull, around 5 feet 7 inches tall. He also reconstructed the king’s face based on the X-rays, and was struck by the resemblance to images of Tutankhamun. Harrison agreed with Fairman, Derry, and Engelbach that the mystery body was Smenkhkare.

  Harrison had one more tool at his disposal. Since the Rhyl case, he had taken on a young lecturer and researcher, Robert Connolly, who specialized in determining blood groups. Harrison carried one of the skeleton’s toes home with him to Liverpool and gave it to Connolly to test.

  Blood groups are determined by molecules called antigens on the surface of red blood cells. Which antigens are present determines what blood group you are. There are various different classes of blood group, but two of them involve antigens that stand a chance of surviving in a three-thousand-year-old mummy. One is the commonly known ABO system, in which you can be A, B, AB (if you have both types of antigen), or O (if you have neither). To complicate matters slightly, A comes in two versions—A1 or A2. The other class Connolly tested was the MN system, in which you can be M, N, or MN. Both involve molecules that are present on cells all over the body, not just blood cells, and that can survive for long periods of time.

  Connolly took the toe and duly worked out the blood group: A2/MN. This didn’t tell Harrison much on its own, though. To conclude anything about the identity or family relationships of the king from KV55, he needed someone else to compare it against. Harrison was now desperate to get his hands on an even bigger prize—the mummy of Tutankhamun.

  But Tutankhamun was holed up in his tomb, shut away in the gold-plated coffin where Carter had left him in 1926. You couldn’t just walk in and take a chunk. To get to this king, Harrison knew he’d need allies on the ground in Egypt. So he played a long game. He took on Egyptian students in his department in Liverpool, who later returned to influential positions at the University of Cairo. They included Ali Abdalla, whom he met in Cairo on his 1963 trip and soon afterward took on as a PhD student. Abdalla was sweet, hardworking, and devoted to his British mentor and Harrison’s wife, June. “I can hardly keep the tears from my eyes,” Abdalla wrote after he and his own wife returned to Egypt. “We’ll always think of you as the best friends we have.”7

  Harrison set Abdalla to work, pulling strings and working contacts in the antiquities service to secure the go-ahead to study Tutankhamun. But even if they could get permission, another difficulty was where to x-ray the mummy. It wasn’t clear if there was any suitable radiography equipment in the whole of Luxor, let alone in the Valley of the Kings. Undaunted, Harrison suggested that the authorities might save themselves the trouble of policing Tutankhamun’s tomb if they moved the coffin and mummy to the Egyptian Museum. They didn’t take him up on his offer.

  Harrison also needed funds. The project didn’t form part of his official duties at Liverpool, where he was supposed to be teaching anatomy. So he approached the BBC. In May 1967, a senior producer named Paul Johnstone,* agreed to fund the project, which Harrison estimated shouldn’t exceed £400. They sealed the deal over a tasty lunch on London’s Kensington High Street.

  Johnstone wanted to film the project for a prestigious archaeology series called Chronicle—one of the first documentaries ever to be filmed in color. Initially, Johnstone and Harrison agreed to carry out the project that December, but had to postpone as “things were boiling up in the Middle East” after President Nasser’s brief but ill-advised war with Israel.8 And Abdalla still hadn’t gotten written permission for the project from the antiquities service. “If you could procure this as soon as possible I would be more than grateful,” Harrison wrote to him in December 1967, as if he was asking him to pick up some milk from the shops.

  With the Suez Canal and half of its oil production in Israel’s hands, Egypt was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and riven by protests. Harrison received dramatic reports that Luxor was overrun with wild, rabies-infested dogs, and that hospitals in the area were lacking even basic supplies. In March 1968, he decided to delay the project again—much to the relief of Johnstone, who was in the middle of filming at a prehistoric earthwork near Stonehenge, in a pioneering project to film a complete excavation from start to finish.

  At the end of March, Abdalla finally came through with written permission from the antiquities service, but there was a snag. The permit included the condition that “the mummy should not be removed from its place.” In other words, Tutankhamun could not be taken out of his tomb. Harrison would need to take an X-ray machine to the mummy, and hope th
at the electricity supply in the tomb was up to the job.

  He didn’t have the budget to fly heavy equipment from the UK—a hugely expensive undertaking in those days—so he wrote to Abdalla again, who eventually tracked down a portable machine in Cairo University’s anatomy department. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a vintage contraption dating from the 1930s—presumably the one that Derry had used to x-ray Amenhotep I. Luckily, Harrison enjoyed the services of Lyn Reeve, his department’s photographer and radiographer. Reeve was brilliant at improvising with mechanical devices, and at getting broken things to work.

  By the beginning of December, everything was finally in place. The team flew to Luxor: Johnstone and his film crew, Harrison, Reeve, and an enthusiastic couple named Mr. and Mrs. Leek. Frank Leek was a retired dentist from Hemel Hempstead, and he had plans for Tutankhamun’s teeth.

  The group stayed in luxury in the Winter Palace hotel, right on the Nile, where Carnarvon had once had a suite. They would have just two days to study the mummy, and were not allowed to close the tomb or disrupt the flow of visitors. On the morning of Wednesday December 4, they crossed the river and drove to the Valley of the Kings in a green minibus, cameras rolling and spirits high. Harrison, despite the bright sunshine, had for some reason attired himself in a bright-red woolen jumper and white hat (at least on the resulting film it’s easy to tell which one is him). None of them suspected that when they arrived at the tomb and finally opened Tutankhamun’s coffin, they would find that someone else had gotten there first.

  HARRISON’S LIFTING of the lid wasn’t quite as dramatic as Carter’s opening ceremony. But it was chaotic, tense, and brightly lit. The baking-hot burial chamber was filled to bursting with a crowd of men and boys—inspectors, workmen, hangers-on—in traditional robes and white turbans. Between their feet, a mess of cables snaked to floodlights squeezed up against the ancient stone. The work was supervised by Zaki Iskander, Alfred Lucas’s successor as scientific director of the antiquities service. Meanwhile, the camera crew, a few passing tourists, and Leek’s wife, Phyllis, looked down on the melee from a wooden gallery, built where the sealed doorway from the antechamber had once been.

  Some of the workers held up electric lights, while others grabbed round every square inch of the great glass sheet that covered the sarcophagus. Easing it off was no easy task in such a cramped space, so perhaps it’s impressive that all they broke was the corner (the plate was later replaced free of charge by Pilkington Glass).

  There was another burst of activity, with Iskander at one point climbing into the huge sarcophagus alongside the golden coffin, as the workmen reached down to grasp the handles around the sides of the coffin lid, lifted it amongst much hubbub and shouting, and laid it on the floor to one side.* The sweet, almost sickly smell of resin once again floated through the tomb.

  With Harrison a hovering red blob in the background, Iskander’s men used ropes to lift out a small, flimsy-looking wooden tray, and laid it across the top of the sarcophagus to inspect its contents. What they saw was, frankly, a mess. Thick clumps of cotton wool were placed roughly over Tutankhamun’s blackened remains, fixed on with just a few strips of bandage that were tied around the tray. On top was a small card signed by Carter, giving the date that the mummy had been reinterred.

  When Harrison and Iskander lifted off the cotton wool, they were shocked to see that the mummy was in pieces. This was the first time anyone realized that Carter hadn’t put the mummy back whole, as he and Derry fudged this detail in their published accounts. A reporter for the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram was present in the tomb for Harrison’s opening, and the next day the paper ran a front-page splash, slamming Carter for decapitating Egypt’s king, then putting his remains in a tray that had been used for storing sugar. Carter’s disrespect soon became worldwide news, with headlines like: “Britain Accused of Cutting Off Boy King’s Head” and “Head of Pharaoh Found in Sugar Box.”

  But the damage Harrison uncovered seems to go far beyond anything inflicted by Carter. Before the mummy was placed back in the tomb in 1926, Burton photographed it in the sand tray (see photo insert).9 Although the picture has no date or caption, this portrait is widely assumed to show the condition of Tutankhamun’s body as Carter replaced it. Considering that the corpse is in several pieces, it looks pretty good—carefully laid out with each piece in its place, right down to the fingers and toes, and its bony arms folded neatly across its tummy. The skin is pale gray, and you can see even delicate details of the king’s youthful face.

  The mummy shown in photos and footage taken by Harrison’s team is in a much sorrier state (see photo insert). The remains are charcoal black, and they look ragged and battered. The mummy’s arms are by its sides. The head is tilted instead of straight. The ears, previously almost intact, are mostly destroyed, the eyes are punched in, and the eyelids and eyelashes are gone.

  Harrison also found pieces of the mummy scattered around the tray and its wrappings. For example, the right thumb and left hand were lying in the base of the tray, a collection of bones including a clavicle and femur were lined up in the sand next to the mummy’s head, and the left forearm wasn’t in the tray at all, but in a layer of cotton wool placed underneath it.

  Mohamed Saleh, a member of Iskander’s team who was to become director of the Cairo museum, later told Al Ahram that once the group had finished their study, they spent hours trying to find and return all the pieces to their proper position.10

  That wasn’t all. Two pieces of jewelry were still on the body in Burton’s portrait: the beaded skullcap and wave-patterned bib. Carter says in his diary that he didn’t try to remove the skullcap because it would have disintegrated, so he painted it over with wax and left it in place. It seems likely that he treated the fragile bib in the same way. But when Harrison opened the coffin, both items were gone. Only a few traces of colored pigment from the skullcap remained, and some scattered beads from the bib.

  Strangely, Harrison never seems to have spoken about the mummy’s poor state. He doesn’t comment on it in the papers he published on the project apart from noting which body parts were found where. And in the resulting BBC film, the narrator talks only of the team’s “excitement at the completeness of the mummy.”11

  The obvious—though little publicized—conclusion, however, is that modern-day looters broke into the coffin sometime between 1926 and 1968 and stripped the mummy of its remaining jewelry, in the process further damaging the body and scattering some of its parts. The first to suggest this in writing seems to have been John Harris, then Professor of Egyptology at Copenhagen University in Denmark, after Leek described the condition of the mummy in a letter to him in 1972.12 He replied to Leek: “There can, I think, be no doubt that the coffin was opened and the remains mishandled at some unspecified date between Derry’s examination and Harrison’s. How else can the hands and forearms have been displaced, and how else can the beaded skull cap have been removed?”

  The idea is now generally accepted by Egyptologists. As Aidan Dodson, an expert in Tutankhamun’s burial who is based at Bristol University, UK, told me: “Somebody presumably paid a large bribe to see the mummy, saw there was some jewelry still there and thought, ‘I’ll have that.’” It has even been suggested that Tutankhamun’s eyes were punched in on purpose by superstitious thieves, to prevent him from “witnessing” their crime.13

  The looting may have taken place during the Second World War, when security in Thebes was practically nonexistent. European inspectors had been phased out or called up for service (Egyptologists, because of their expertise in arcane languages, were particularly in demand as code-breakers), and the Egyptian inspectors who remained were demoralized.

  Consequently, there was severe plundering and vandalism of the region’s tombs and antiquities. Harrison’s Liverpool colleague Fairman worked for the British embassy during the war, and reported back from Luxor that antiquities were being stolen from local storehouses, and reliefs hacked from the walls of nobles’ tombs
, presumably with the knowledge of the local guards. Fairman didn’t mention the royal tombs, but they were easily accessible too—a favorite tourist attraction for British servicemen on leave from fighting German and Italian troops in the north of the country.*

  When Harrison opened Tutankhamun’s coffin in 1968, the mummy was covered with cotton wool, so someone had at least gone to the trouble of crudely restoring its rewrappings. Dodson suggests that local officials had an incentive to cover up the theft, as admitting it “would have been the end of someone’s career,” so after they discovered the plundered body, they may have tidied it up as best they could and placed it back in the coffin.

  Who carried out the daring theft—local looters and British servicemen have both been accused—is something we’re unlikely to ever find out. There’s one small mystery I can solve for you though: the whereabouts of Tutankhamun’s penis. It is a distinctive feature in Burton’s photos of the mummy but is nowhere to be seen in pictures from 1968, and Harrison doesn’t mention it in the BBC film, or in his published papers on the project. The missing member has since sparked a raft of conspiracy theories that the looters made off with this too, perhaps stealing it to order for some eccentric private collector. (The mind boggles—a fan of desiccated genitalia? Creator of the ultimate virility potion?)

  Decades later, in 2005, Egyptian researchers reported finding what they described as “probably” the penis in the sand of the mummy’s tray.15 But no photos or details were released, leaving many unconvinced that their identification was correct, or even that the organ’s apparent recovery wasn’t simply a face-saving publicity stunt.

  So does Tutankhamun still have his penis or not? In the end, I found the answer in an unexpected location: a cardboard box in Liverpool. The box is part of the archive of Harrison’s papers, held at the university. Among other things, it contains a thick pile of yellow handwritten pages: the draft manuscript of a book on Tutankhamun, that Harrison wrote but never published.