The Shadow King

by Jo Marchant

  On page two hundred, Harrison says that “the penis and the scrotum had been removed and were found in the cotton wool underneath the sand tray.” In other words, the king’s crown jewels were never lost. Harrison knew where they were all along—he just didn’t bother to mention them in his paper. Presumably, they were dislodged by the looters and (along with the forearm) were dropped into the coffin beneath the lifted-out tray. In 1968, rather than attempting to replace or reattach Tutankhamun’s genitals, Harrison moved them into the sand, where the Egyptian researchers would later find them.

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  * The field of eugenics advocates policies to “improve” the genetic composition of a population, and today tends to conjure horrific images of Nazi experiments and compulsory sterilization. It was more socially acceptable in the past, however, with advocates including some prominent Egyptologists. Scholars who saw evidence in ancient Egypt for the supremacy of certain races included Flinders Petrie, who worked closely with Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, and Grafton Elliot Smith, who although not a eugenicist himself was convinced that a (light-skinned) racial group behind the pyramids then spread civilization throughout the world. Leslie Hall, archivist of the Eugenics Society (now renamed the Galton Institute), says that after World War II, it focused on promoting academic research, with members broadly interested in issues relating to population, genetics, and society. So Harrison’s membership in the society probably had more to do with its ability to fund research than his political beliefs. “It doesn’t mean he was a neo-Nazi,” she says.

  * This seems to have been Derry’s idea. As early as 1923, he suggested x-raying Tutankhamun so that he wouldn’t need to be unwrapped. But Carter and Carnarvon argued that the mummy couldn’t be left intact as any jewelry in the wrappings would make it a sure target for looters. “Therefore it was decided to unwrap the mummy and no one who knows anything of archaeology will question the wisdom of this decision which saved the King’s body from ruthless desecration,” Derry later wrote in his notebook, rather defensively. In the end, the fact that the mummy was stuck inside the golden coffin and mask—both extremely opaque to radiation—made x-raying it impossible anyway.

  * Johnstone pioneered science and history documentaries for the BBC, helping to make the names of presenters like wildlife-documentary legend David Attenborough. He thought up the idea for an astronomy program called The Sky at Night and headhunted amateur astronomer Patrick Moore as its presenter—it went on to become British TV’s longest-running show, still on the air (with Moore still presenting) more than fifty years later.

  * Harrison was particularly impressed by a detail that hadn’t been noted by Carter—beautifully made silver flanges all around the lid, each embossed with Tutankhamun’s name, which slotted precisely into sockets on the base of the coffin.

  * For example, in a letter to his family now held by the Egypt Exploration Society, Bill Mountain, an engineer with the Royal Air Force, describes entering Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1943—“there he was in his tomb, all covered with a gold plate, beautifully coloured, and well kept”—and photos taken by Eric Budd, of the First Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment, show the golden coffin in its sarcophagus during a visit the same year.14

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SECRETS FROM BLOOD AND BONE

  LYN REEVE, HARRISON’S JOLLY but deathly pale radiographer, had a habit of playing German military marches as he labored in his darkroom. On this occasion, however, his working conditions were rather different from usual. After spending the first day at Tutankhamun’s tomb taking a series of test exposures, Reeve converted a bathroom in the Winter Palace hotel, aided by the “dense blackness of the Egyptian night,”1 into a makeshift darkroom. The hotel’s luxurious bathroom furniture was perfect for the job, allowing him to develop these test films in one receptacle, fix in another, and wash in a third, while other members of the team guarded the doors.

  Optimum exposure times established, the team had just one day left to get all the X-ray images they needed of Tutankhamun’s remains. Here the mummy’s dismembered state was an advantage, as it could be x-rayed piece by piece. Harrison grasped each fragment in turn and carried it over to the rickety X-ray machine: a foot; a black, clawlike hand; the famous head. He propped the pieces into position under the machine’s steel dome with bits of plastic and rolled up cardboard. Reeve then planned to take these crucial films back to Liverpool, to develop in an actual darkroom. Harrison would have to wait a while to find out what they showed.

  Meanwhile, it was Leek’s turn. Leek was a small, spritely man with a mischievous smile and seemingly boundless energy, who always wrote in green ink. After retiring early from dentistry, he applied his professional knowledge to his hobby, Egyptology.* He had examined the teeth of thousands of ancient Egyptian skulls in various collections around the world, finding for example that although the Egyptians didn’t suffer from tooth decay (thanks to a low-sugar diet), their teeth were horribly worn from grit in their bread, sometimes all the way down to the pulp.2, 3

  Leek was in Luxor to take a dedicated X-ray image of Tutankhamun’s teeth. The tricky part was that he wouldn’t be able to open the rock-hard mummy’s mouth to do it. So before the trip, Leek worked with staff at the UK’s Atomic Energy Authority, developing a method that used a hypodermic needle to inject a tiny bead of a radioactive X-ray source, Iodine-125, through the underside of Tutankhamun’s chin. The idea was that X-rays would then flood out of the mummy’s mouth, making a detailed image of its teeth on a film wrapped around its jaw.4

  Leek was proud of the pioneering technique, and carried his precious radioactive nugget all the way to the Valley of the Kings in a small cardboard box. But when his big moment came, he found that the area under the king’s chin was covered in a shiny, brittle layer that the needle couldn’t puncture. His carefully worked-out plan had to be abandoned.

  It wasn’t until Leek got home and checked Derry’s autopsy report that he realized what must have happened. Derry had described the mummy’s wisdom teeth, using them to help establish Tutankhamun’s age. How did he do it without X-rays to look inside the clamped-shut mouth? Leek concluded that Derry must have subjected Tutankhamun to an extra procedure, not mentioned in his report. There’s a technique routinely used in postmortems to examine a corpse’s teeth when rigor mortis makes it impossible to open its mouth: you cut out the entire floor of the chin, and push down the tongue with a spatula to see the teeth. Derry must have done exactly this, then put back the cut-out flesh and covered his damage with a brittle layer of resin.5 A few years later, Leek demonstrated the method on a human mummy held at the University of Manchester, UK.*, 6

  The team flew home from Cairo on December 11, Harrison carrying a small piece of Tutankhamun’s skin packed in an envelope, so that Connolly could test the mummy’s blood group. After a four-in-the-morning start, the plane was late arriving, and they had a long wait on the plane before taking off—one member of the film crew was convinced it was all connected with the curse. But once they were finally airborne, said Harrison afterward, “We could hardly have had a more pleasant flight home.”7

  Back in Liverpool, Reeve got to work on the X-ray films, while Connolly tackled the skin sample, looking for evidence that Tutankhamun and the mummy from tomb KV55 were from the same family. Harrison’s examination so far supported the idea that the pair were closely related. Both were of similar height, had similar skulls, and died at similar ages. And the X-rays showed that both men had a hole through each humerus (upper arm bone), just above the elbow joint, an inherited condition called epitrochlear foramina.

  But a matching blood group would provide an independent line of evidence. The established method to test someone’s blood group—whether a long-dead mummy or a living patient—is called the agglutination technique. Each antigen on the surface of a person’s cells causes an immune reaction in someone who doesn’t have that antigen (this is why blood transfusions between people have to be closely matched)
. The immune reaction causes the cells to clump together, or “agglutinate.” In the test, you mix the cells you’re testing with extracts, or antisera, derived from people with different blood groups to see which ones trigger a reaction.

  It worked on the Rhyl mummy, and on the KV55 skeleton. Connolly had confidently told his boss that using a modification of this method, he’d be able to determine Tutankhamun’s blood group too. But when the young lecturer saw the skin sample that Harrison had brought back, he was dismayed. It was tiny. The agglutination technique needs a sugar-lump sized piece of tissue to work, around a gram. Connolly had just ten milligrams to work with—one hundredth of the usual amount.

  Harrison wasn’t going to take no for an answer though, and the BBC were counting on the blood result for their film. Connolly had to come up with another way. He had been researching antigens and immunity, for example, trying to identify the molecules on the surface of pollen that cause hay fever. So he was good at handling red blood cells, and he knew that under the right conditions, antigens spontaneously stick onto them if you mix the two together.

  That gave him an idea. He would stick the antigens from Tutankhamun’s mummy onto modern human blood cells, to give himself a larger sample to test. In effect, he would bring the pharaoh’s blood type back to life.

  It sounds simple, but it took months to get it to work. Connolly himself was blood group O, meaning that his own blood cells didn’t have any of the relevant antigens attached. They would make the perfect clean slate for a mummy’s ancient molecules. First, he tried out his idea on an anonymous mummy held at Liverpool University. In an experiment that would surely make the perfect starting point for a mummy-related horror film, Connolly took a tissue sample from the mummy, purified the antigens from it, and mixed them with his own blood.8

  It worked, reviving the Egyptian’s ancient blood type and converting Connolly’s O blood into group A. Then Connolly moved on to the pharaoh himself, this time using control panels of modern blood helpfully provided by the Blood Transfusion Service.* When he tested his Tutankhamun-ized blood using the agglutination technique, he found that it was A2/MN—just the same as the KV55 mummy.

  Previous studies on mummies suggested that this was a rare blood type among ancient Egyptians—one study of twenty-three mummies from the New Kingdom found that only two were blood group A.9 So Harrison concluded that the identical blood group was unlikely to be a coincidence. Tutankhamun and Smenkhkare must be closely related—father and son, perhaps, but Harrison thought they were most likely brothers.10

  CONNOLLY IS NOW in his seventies and an honorary lecturer in anatomy at Liverpool University. As the last surviving member of Harrison’s team, he is the guardian of all the X-ray images and tissue samples from the Tutankhamun project, so I take the train to Liverpool to see him. “I’ll be wearing a brown suit with yellow tie and pocket square,” he texts, and meets me on the platform, holding a copy of the British science journal Nature.

  His office in the anatomy department is a little box of a room with a sloping ceiling and walls lined with crowded bookshelves. On his deep, dusty windowsill, a collection of blackened skulls sits just behind the kettle. Around the room, family photos are interspersed with boxes of tiny bones, old-fashioned Cadburys tins, a picture of an armadillo, and a box of Royal Ceylon tea.

  I’ve asked Connolly to show me what Harrison saw, once Reeve had developed his precious X-ray films. He slides the black-and-white transparencies out of a series of stiff A3 envelopes, and clips them to a light box, one by one.

  A series of Tutankhamun’s disembodied parts flicker to life in front of us. A bright, perfectly focused foot, floating in darkness where it ends at the ankle; then a femur, with the desperately thin layer of flesh that coats it barely visible. Next, we look at a side-on view of Tutankhamun’s head, nicely showing the teenager’s protruding top teeth, and a delicate, pointed chin (see photo insert). Immediately obvious are two dense shadows inside the skull cavity, one at the top and one at the back, which together form a right angle or L-shape. Connolly explains that these represent layers of solidified resin. After removing his brain, the pharaoh’s embalmers must have poured in molten resin and allowed it to set on two separate occasions, once with the body lying on its back, and once with the head hanging upside down, perhaps with the body on its front, its top half hanging off the end of a table.

  Another detail stands out—a faint smear of white at the back of the skull cavity. Connolly tells me it’s a piece of bone. At first, Harrison figured it was dislodged when the embalmers poked their hook up the king’s nose to remove his brain. But on closer examination, he thought the fragment was fused to the skull, so he guessed that it was from a depressed skull fracture (where a bit of broken bone gets pushed inward) at the back of the head, which had subsequently begun to heal over. If so, whatever blow caused the fracture didn’t kill him immediately, but perhaps it triggered a brain hemorrhage that finished him off several weeks later.

  Harrison also noted a second suspicious feature in this image: an area at the base of Tutankhamun’s skull that looks unusually thin. Such “eggshell thinness,” as he put it, can be caused by a tumor or brain hemorrhage, either of which could put pressure on the skull and cause the bone to become thinner over a period of weeks. He suggested that Tutankhamun (and perhaps Smenkhkare, too) might have suffered from an inherited disorder called a congenital aneurysm, where a weak spot in the wall of one of the arteries supplying the brain causes it to bulge like a balloon. These can burst—often in young adulthood—causing a fatal bleed. Or, such a hemorrhage could also have been caused by a blow to the head.

  Last up on Connolly’s light box is Tutankhamun’s torso, with ribs sprouting left and right from a slightly curved spine. His chest cavity looks cloudy white—not the evidence of major lung cancer but where the embalmers packed it with rolls of cloth soaked in resin, now rock hard. The spine looks healthy, says Connolly, ruling out tuberculosis as a cause of death, as the advanced disease usually eats away at the vertebrae. Toward the bottom of the image there’s an ominous gap, where Carter and Derry cut the entire torso in two. And there’s a scattering of white spots—tiny beads, presumably the last remnants of that stolen bib.

  Then Connolly points out something truly dramatic. Tutankhamun’s heart and chest—his sternum and the front part of his ribs—are completely gone. Harrison didn’t comment on the cause of this gigantic omission, apart from describing the damage as “post-mortem.” Perhaps he assumed that the ribs were sawn off by Carter, or by looters in their efforts to remove the beaded bib. Today, however, some experts, including Connolly, think that by refusing to consider the mummy’s absent chest, Harrison missed the most important clue of all to determining Tutankhamun’s cause of death.

  But we’ll come to that later. X-ray tutorial over, there’s one more thing I’ve come to Liverpool to see. “So, do you want to see the bits?” Connolly says, eyes twinkling. He opens a drawer in a small chest on his worktop and pulls out a thin cardboard box, inside which is a collection of glass screw-cap tubes with yellowed labels. One of them says Smenkhkare, but it’s empty—a few years ago, Connolly gave this mummy’s toe back to the Egyptian government. Then the one I’m looking for, scrawled with the name of Tutankhamun, containing what’s left of the sample that Harrison brought home from the Valley of the Kings more than forty years ago.

  Today, it’s unthinkable that a British professor could walk off with such a prize. The Egyptian authorities are understandably very defensive about their heritage being taken abroad, and it’s illegal to remove any archaeological sample from the country—particularly from something as precious as a royal mummy. I peer into the tube, and right at the bottom I spot some tiny brown-black fragments of Egypt’s most famous ever king. They look just like toast crumbs.

  HARRISON IS STANDING in his plush office, wearing a black suit, and speaking to the camera in clipped, plummy tones. This is Johnstone’s film, Tutankhamen Post Mortem, and when it was origi
nally shown, on BBC2 on October 25, 1969, it was watched by nearly a million and a half people—an exceptionally large audience for that channel on a Saturday night.

  This is the moment during which one of the most persistent and popular myths about Tutankhamun was created. Harrison stands next to the X-ray image of the skull that Connolly showed me. He points to the bit that’s eggshell thin and says the following: “This is within normal limits. But in fact it could have been caused by a hemorrhage under the membranes overlying the brain in this region. And this could have been caused by a blow to the back of the head, and this in turn could have been responsible for the cause of death.”

  Within that convoluted mouthful was the story that the world’s media had been waiting for. No one really cared who may or may not have been Tutankhamun’s brother, or about the identity of some little-known mummy from tomb KV55. But the violent death of Egypt’s favorite pharaoh—that was news. From the New York Times to the Sydney Morning Herald to the South China News, in Dutch, Arabic, Spanish, and French, giant headlines splashed the same story: “Tutankhamun Met with Violent End” . . . “Tutankhamun Murdered” . . . “Teoria sobre la Muerte de Tutankamon.”

  The story turned Tutankhamun into a global celebrity all over again, injecting new life into the story of the boy king and sparking fevered speculation about his death. Maybe he fell from a chariot, or was kicked in the head by a large beast. But the most popular theory was murder. Because Tutankhamun died so young and was eventually succeeded by a general, journalists around the world jumped to the conclusion that he had been assassinated in an army coup.