by Jo Marchant
* It would require both Yuya and Tjuiu to have inherited both the A2 blood groups from only one of their parents and O from the other, and for Tiye to have inherited the O group from both of them.
* The process he started ultimately led to the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty, signed by Sadat and the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in March 1979, after a series of 1978 meetings—the Camp David Accords—facilitated by U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
CHAPTER TEN
LIVING IMAGE OF THE LORD
HOW’S THIS FOR A DRAMATIC REVELATION: Tutankhamun was none other than Jesus Christ himself. With so much popular interest in King Tut, I guess it was only a matter of time before someone made the claim. And in 1992, an Egyptian historian named Ahmed Osman did the honors, publishing a lengthy (and bestselling) account of how this ancient king was actually the son of God.
This is just one of many strange theories that cling to Tutankhamun. Perhaps it’s because he’s ultra-famous, yet we know so little for sure about him. He has become a sort of universal blank slate, onto which people from different backgrounds and cultures can project their own beliefs and desires without having to take too great a risk of being proved wrong.
This has happened ever since the tomb was discovered, of course. But between the 1970s and 1990s, the imaginations of Tut enthusiasts ran particularly wild. With Tutankhamun’s coffin unopened after James Harris’s visit in 1978, there were no new scientific data regarding the mummy to feed people’s interest in the king. The headlines had to come from elsewhere, and they centered on three crowd-pleasing themes. There was Tutankhamun’s curse, and his murder, and we’ll look at both in the next chapter. But the biggest one was God, with multiple claims of links between the Egyptian royal mummies and high-profile religious figures such as Jesus and Moses—much to the disquiet of the authorities in Cairo.
Scholars and amateurs alike have tried to link archaeological information coming from discoveries in ancient Egypt with biblical accounts since long before Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered. In the West at least, the Bible was the only reference point that many people had for this time period and part of the world. The accounts in it were assumed by many Christians to be literally true, so there was intense interest in a second source of evidence that might help to confirm the details.
Egypt is frequently mentioned in the Old Testament, with several key figures ending up close to the Egyptian royal family. The most important is Moses, seen as a lawgiver and prophet by Christians and Muslims alike. In the Bible, the Book of Exodus describes a time when the Israelites were a tribe living in Egypt as slaves. Their numbers were multiplying, so the pharaoh ordered all newborn Hebrew boys to be drowned. Moses’s mother hid him in a basket and floated it down the Nile, after which he was found and adopted by the Egyptian royal family.
Moses later fled the country after killing an Egyptian, but returned many years later, when a new pharaoh was on the throne, to demand the release of his people (after receiving instructions from God, in the form of a burning bush). It took the Ten Plagues to persuade the pharaoh to agree, after which Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and across the Red Sea (some experts say this is a mistranslation of a smaller body of water called the “Reed Sea”). Going back on his promise, the pharaoh chased with his army. God divided the waters to allow the Israelites to pass safely, but when the Egyptian army followed, the waters returned and drowned them. After much wandering in the Sinai desert, the Israelites finally reached their promised land.
Unfortunately for those trying to prove that these were actual historical events, the religious texts describing them don’t tend to give definite dates, or identify the rulers concerned; the Bible describes them all simply as “Pharaoh.” And strangely (or not, depending on your views on the veracity of the Bible), none of this seems to have made much impression on the Egyptians. There’s no hint of these events in the extensive record we now have from ancient Egypt, not even of the supposedly devastating plagues, and only one mention of Israel, on a black granite slab from the reign of Merenptah in the Nineteenth Dynasty.
So when Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered, scholars were excited about the insight it might provide into their biblical heroes. Several experts, including Egyptologist Arthur Weigall (previously the chief inspector of antiquities at Luxor), believed the tomb would prove that Tutankhamun himself was the pharaoh of the Exodus.1 They argued that Akhenaten’s monotheistic revolution must have been inspired by Moses, when he was a prominent figure in the Egyptian court. So Tutankhamun, who reversed those religious changes, was clearly the one who chased Moses out.
Unfortunately, the tomb, with its lack of written records, didn’t offer a scrap of evidence for the theory. And now, most historians and archaeologists reject the idea that biblical stories represent actual historical events. Some dismiss the story of the Exodus completely, or consider it to be a distorted account of Ahmose I’s expulsion of the Hyksos. Others suggest that waves of migration occurring over long periods of time later became condensed and dramatized into a single narrative. Such a movement of people may have occurred on a grand scale, but the individuals named are metaphorical, not real.
Despite this, however, there’s no shortage of people who remain convinced that the characters described in the Bible—and related accounts in Jewish and Islamic texts—did exist. Not only that, but their mummified bodies are still with us, on display for all to see.
One of them was Maurice Bucaille. A French medical doctor who died in 1998, he was brought up as a Catholic in the little town of Pont l’Évêque. After studying various religious texts, he became convinced that the Qur’an represents a scientifically accurate description of the world, including hints of facts not discovered until centuries after the text was written, for example that the universe is expanding, or that man would one day travel into space. In the Bible, on the other hand, he saw major scientific errors, such as the claim that humans had only been around for six thousand years, or that the animals of the earth were created before the birds.
His conclusion was that while the Bible contains many details that can’t be trusted, the Qur’an is the true word of God, and should therefore be embraced by Christians. In 1976, he published a book on his ideas called The Bible, the Qur’an and Science,2 which became a best seller. The practice of using science to try to prove the truth of religion, particularly Islam, is still known as “Bucaillism.”3
Bucaille took a great interest in the royal mummies, including Tutankhamun, and in 1990 published another book called Mummies of the Pharaohs: Modern Medical Investigations.4 My copy has a red stamp: “Discarded by the Kalamazoo Public Library,” which I imagine to be quite an achievement.
In it, he repeated for a much wider audience Leek’s account of the sorry state of Tutankhamun’s mummy. But he went much further than Leek, claiming that Carter had willfully destroyed the body, then “lied blatantly”5 to cover up the damage he caused. He also accused a whole line of other Egyptologists since of assisting in the deception, by glossing over the mummy’s condition in their accounts of Carter’s work. According to Bucaille, the story of Tutankhamun’s mummy could be summarized as: “33 centuries of the sleep of the dead—a week of dismembering—a quarter of a century of misleading narratives.”6
There’s no doubt that the mummy did suffer at Carter and Derry’s hands, with the loss of valuable information. And their failure to disclose exactly what they did—from cutting the torso in two, to fixing up areas such as the chin and skull with resin—has caused complications and confusion for later scholars trying to piece together the details of Tutankhamun’s life and death from the state of his body.
But I don’t think that Carter was engaged in outright deception. It seems more likely that he just wasn’t very interested in the body itself, and didn’t see such details as particularly relevant. It’s also important to judge Carter and Derry by the standards of their own time. Only a few years previously, archaeologists were destroying mummies out
of curiosity or in the hunt for gold without making any proper records. Several royal mummies were unwrapped in as little as fifteen minutes each, whereas Carter and Derry took eight meticulous days. Some of the details make us cringe today, but the pair set the standard for how such a mummy should be treated, at a time when archaeology was only just turning from a treasure hunt into a science.
Beyond his rant about Tutankhamun, Bucaille’s main interest was identifying the pharaoh of the Exodus, by comparing the royal mummies held in the Egyptian Museum with details of the story given in the Bible and Qur’an. He focused on two prime suspects: Rameses II and his son Merenptah. In the Exodus story, Egypt controlled a vast empire, which fits the period that followed Rameses II’s conquests. It even mentions a city called Rameses. Almost all of the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Dynasty pharaohs have been implicated as the pharaoh of the Exodus at one time or another, but most scholars to express an opinion have plumped for one of these two kings.
Largely due to his friendship with President Sadat’s wife (he successfully treated a member of her family), Bucaille was given permission to study the royal mummies in the 1970s. He was shocked to find that many of the mummies were rotting away. The bodies were surrounded by bits of dead insects, covered with colonies of whitish fungus, and emanated various sour smells. The accepted method of conservation appeared to be spraying them every so often with insecticide.
Bucaille described lifting the lid of one particular case that lay on a pedestal in the well of a staircase. Inside, he found a badly damaged mummy exuding an “indescribable stench of putrefaction. . . . The woman from the museum who had accompanied us implored us to finish photographing as quickly as we could, because the air was becoming quite unbearable. Before the cover was replaced on the sepulchre the mummy was sprayed with a cloud of goodness knows what from an extremely ancient-looking can.”7 When he consulted the museum inventory, it turned out that the mummy was thought to be that of Merenre I, who reigned in the Sixth Dynasty, around a thousand years before Tutankhamun—the oldest and most complete royal mummy in the museum.*
Other experts, including Harris, argued that conditions for the mummies weren’t as bad as Bucaille claimed. But in September 1976, after the Frenchman raised the alarm, the museum’s most prized mummy was sent to Paris for urgent conservation. Rameses II was flown by the French Air Force and given full military honors on his arrival: the first and only trip of an Egyptian pharaoh outside Egypt (if you don’t count the crumbs that went to Liverpool).
Researchers there found that Rameses was infested with fungus. After much discussion about what to do—there were concerns that chemical or heat treatment might damage the mummy, though it’s hard to imagine what could be worse than decades of insecticide—it was decided to sterilize him using gamma rays. Scientists at the French Atomic Energy Commission carried out a series of trials on less valuable mummies, to make sure, for example, that their hair didn’t fall out. Then the pharaoh was placed into a smart new case and irradiated, before being flown back to Cairo the next May.
Rameses survived the treatment unscathed, but unfortunately his display case, made of an advanced type of Plexiglas, had been wiped with a cleaning product just before the irradiation. This caused the gamma rays to react with the glass, which became cracked and yellowed. After the entire lengthy rescue process, poor Rameses wasn’t fit for display.
Meanwhile, Bucaille decided that he wasn’t happy with Harris’s X-ray plates, and worked with staff at the museum to x-ray, again, several royal mummies including Rameses II and Merenptah. He concluded that Rameses II was an old man when he died and suffering from excruciating pus-filled abscesses in his teeth, so was unlikely to have taken off across the desert chasing the Israelites shortly before his death.
Merenptah, on the other hand, had a hole in his skull—evidence of a blow to the head that killed him. Bucaille took this as proof that Merenptah came to a tragic end, and must therefore be the king he was looking for. You might think that someone swallowed up by the extensive waters of the Red Sea is unlikely to have been retrieved and mummified in order to end up in the Egyptian Museum. But Bucaille found a passage in the Qur’an that says the body was recovered—saved by God “to act as a sign for future generations.”
This would mean that Rameses II, Merenptah’s father, was the pharaoh who originally ordered the killing of Jewish babies, and subsequently welcomed Moses into his court. Bucaille got quite carried away when looking at Rameses II’s face, noting that the embalmers had removed his eyes: “Those eyes had enabled one of antiquity’s greatest sovereigns to see one of the greatest figures of religious history—Moses . . . Having looked at those closed eyelids, I was certain beyond the shadow of a doubt that Rameses II knew Moses personally.” It’s a quote that seems to sum up Bucaille’s scientific approach rather well.
Other authors have identified Moses himself from among the pharaohs. The prime candidate is Tutankhamun’s predecessor Akhenaten, who thanks to his religious revolution has been often described as the world’s first monotheist. Back in 1939, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud suggested in his final book, Moses and Monotheism,8 that Moses was inspired by Akhenaten’s devotion to the Aten. Then in 1990, Ahmed Osman went one step further, claiming in a book called Moses and Akhenaten9 that the heretic king was in fact Moses himself.
Osman is an Egyptian-born writer and self-taught historian, now based in London. He had previously argued that Yuya, the smiling elderly mummy found with his wife, was none other than Joseph, famous for his multicolored coat. The Book of Genesis tells how Joseph was sold into slavery by his jealous brothers. He ended up in an Egyptian prison, but used his God-given talent for interpreting dreams to become the most powerful man in Egypt next to the pharaoh. He’s also highly regarded by Muslims, with a whole chapter of the Qur’an dedicated to him.
Most modern biblical scholars date the story in its current form to the fifth century BC at earliest. Osman’s alternative theory is based largely on convoluted wordplay and coincidences. For example, he sees in Yuya’s name the shortened form of the Hebrew Yahweh, God of the Israelites, and concludes that Yuya was a foreigner in Egypt, nicknamed after his God.
Then, in 1992, Osman went even further and in a mind-bending re-interpretation of accepted history, decided that Tutankhamun was Jesus. In Jesus in the House of the Pharaohs,10 Osman follows a trail of clues of which Dan Brown* would be proud. For example, he points out that the biblical word Messiah comes from the Hebrew Mashiach, which he claims can itself be traced back further to ancient Egypt, to a word meaning crocodile. Meanwhile, the English name Christ derives from the Greek Christos, meaning the Anointed One, or King. It was an Egyptian custom to anoint kings not with oil but the fat of the holy crocodile. So, Christ must have been an Egyptian king.
But which king? It could only be Tutankhamun, says Osman, because his birth name—Tut-Ankh-Aten—translates as “Living image of the Lord.”† Osman isn’t concerned by the fact that Tutankhamun lived more than 1300 years before the supposed birth of Christ. He concludes that Judaism and Christianity derive from an ancient Egyptian mystery cult that was later suppressed and transformed by the Roman authorities in a triumph of fictional propaganda. In other words, the roots of the entire Western religious belief system lie in Egypt, with biblical personalities simply fictitious versions of various Egyptian kings.
Sound far-fetched? As you might expect, the idea of a divine Tut has been largely ignored by conventional academics. But scholars have felt the need to rebut Osman’s work in publications such as the Biblical Archaeology Review,11 while his ideas have been covered positively in leading Egyptian newspapers including Al Ahram.12 And he has sold a lot of books. We all love a good cover-up.‡
ON THE EDGE of the Faiyum oasis, in the desert around eighty miles southwest of Cairo, is an early Christian cemetery called Fag el-Gamous. In the early 1990s, two scientists were excavating there: Scott Woodward and Wilfred Griggs from Brigham Young University in Utah. Griggs i
s an archaeologist and Woodward is a geneticist; both are high-ranking members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, otherwise known as the Mormons.
Woodward was a pioneer of the new field of ancient DNA research, and around this time he published a groundbreaking paper in the U.S. journal Science, reporting DNA from an 80-million-year-old dinosaur15 (though read Chapter 15 before you get too excited about this). In Egypt, he was using his cutting-edge techniques to isolate DNA from the mummies at Faiyum.
In 1993, Nasry Iskander of Egypt’s antiquities service asked Woodward to test six intriguing mummies held in the Cairo Museum. Known as the “Akhmim” mummies after the site north of Luxor where they were found, they dated from Dynasty Four or Five. Two were of grandparent age, two were of parent age, and two were children. X-ray images revealed broken necks—they had all been hanged. Using DNA, Woodward was able to confirm the mummies’ sex, and show that they represented three generations of the same doomed family.16
The success of that work led to an even more exciting project. After Bucaille’s complaints about the conditions in which the royal mummies were being kept, they were all being moved into new climate-controlled cases, designed by the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles. With Iskander’s permission, Woodward used the opportunity to take samples of the royal mummies’ DNA. Like Harris, he hoped to tease out the murky family relationships of the Eighteenth-Dynasty kings. His work was featured in a U.S. documentary series called Secrets of the Pharaohs, shown on PBS in 2000. He collected scraps of loose tissue from the mummies (he wasn’t allowed to use more invasive methods) and took them back to Utah for lab tests.
Woodward hoped to test Tutankhamun too, but his project came to an abrupt end, after coming what he later described as “tantalizingly close” to sampling the boy king.17 The PBS documentary says that the authorities decided Tutankhamun was “too precious to disturb.” But Egyptologists widely believe the termination of the project was triggered by concerns of an ulterior—religious—motive.