The Shadow King

by Jo Marchant

  Then the million-dollar scanner shuddered to a halt.

  CT SCANS (sometimes known as CAT scans) are routinely used in medicine for checking inside patients’ bodies for problems such as brain tumors and internal injuries. The technique is now bringing a mini-revolution to archaeology and paleontology too, where it’s also useful to look inside precious objects without cutting them open. Instead of producing a flat image like an old-style X-ray plate, a CT scanner sends X-rays through an object from hundreds of angles, then crunches the numbers by computer to produce a 3D virtual reconstruction of that object’s insides. (Or as Hawass puts it, characteristically bending the English language to his will, “this machine can change the dead to be alive.”8) Researchers can move the resulting reconstruction around on the computer screen to inspect it from any angle, zoom in to see tiny details, or even fly straight through to admire complex internal structures.

  In the last decade or so, paleontologists have used CT as an alternative to breaking fossils open with a hammer and chisel—revealing for example previously unknown insect species hidden in opaque chunks of amber, the cleavage patterns inside billion-year-old worm embryos, and the spacing of vertebrae in a four-ton mummified dinosaur.9 Archaeologists have used the method to study everything from the writing on ancient scrolls too delicate to unfurl, to the intricate gearing inside a two-thousand-year-old clockwork device called the Antikythera mechanism.10

  Tutankhamun was getting the full medical treatment, in an advanced machine designed for living patients.* There was an hour of nervousness in the windswept valley as technicians tried to get the halted scanner working again. It turned out that the delicate machinery had overheated, because sand had blocked its cooler fan. Two plastic electric fans were obtained from a nearby office, and the scanning resumed. In less than half an hour, the machine’s work was done. It had produced more than 1,700 images of the pharaoh’s body.

  Tutankhamun was returned to his coffin, while back in the trailer, the computer, operated by Siemens’ specialist Hani Abdel Rahman, built up the X-ray slices into a three-dimensional model. As the king’s fragile body was brought to life on the screen, Hawass finally sank back in his chair and smiled. But it was just the start of a busy night—the team had five more mummies to scan after Tutankhamun, including the three mummies—the Elder Lady, Younger Lady, and Boy—from the side room of KV35.

  FRANK RÜHLI is a paleopathologist (an expert in the injuries and diseases of long-dead things, for those who prefer plain English) at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. In 2005, he was in his early thirties, but he was already one of the world’s foremost mummy researchers. He had studied ancient Egyptian mummies held in collections around the world, in countries from Switzerland to Australia, but never in Egypt itself.

  In late February 2005, Rühli received an email from National Geographic. Egyptian researchers analyzing the CT scans of Tutankhamun’s mummy were having trouble agreeing on certain points. Time was short but could he fly to Cairo the next week to provide a second opinion? Rühli is passionate about his subject and despite its perhaps nonurgent nature, he doesn’t like to hang around. He talks fast and fluently and sends staccato emails with the minimum number of words necessary to get his point across. He said yes immediately.

  Hawass’s Egyptian team, led after Badeir’s departure by Mervat Shafik, a senior radiologist at Cairo University, had spent two months scrutinizing the CT scans, followed closely by the National Geographic film crew. A press conference to announce the researchers’ results was already scheduled for the beginning of March. They would need to finalize their report before then.

  Rühli was invited to study the scans along with two other foreign experts, Eduard Egarter-Vigl and Paul Gostner, a pathologist and radiologist, respectively, from Bolzano, Italy, who were known for their work on Ötzi the Iceman, a 5,300-year-old mummy found frozen in the Alps in 1991 (and now kept in Bolzano). The three of them had a week to plough through the hundreds of images, squeezed into the small CT trailer—now parked around the side of the Egyptian Museum—with the Egyptian team members squashed in behind. They weren’t allowed to take images or data away from the trailer, but discussed their findings in the evenings over beer in the luxurious garden of the nearby Marriott hotel. For Rühli, getting a privileged view inside the body of such a famous historical figure was a dream come true. “It was one of the best weeks of my life,” he told me.

  But interpreting the clues inside a three-thousand-year-old body isn’t easy, especially one that has been gutted by ancient embalmers, dismembered by modern archaeologists, and thrown about by looters. If you see some damage, how do you know if it reflects an injury or condition that affected the person during life, was caused by the mummification process, or was inflicted in modern times? The researchers couldn’t all agree, so toward the end of the week, reinforcements were called in again, in the shape of Ashraf Selim. He wasn’t experienced in studying mummies, but was a senior professor of radiology at Cairo University, and head of Egypt’s largest private radiology institute.

  Selim says he received a phone call out of the blue from Hawass himself: “At the time I didn’t know him except on the news.” Hawass asked him to judge between the two teams’ findings and help to finalize a report. Because of the looming press conference, Selim would have only one day to look at the CT images. Selim refused, saying he was too busy, but Hawass wasn’t about to take no for an answer, telling him: “It’s very important to Egypt.” Selim says he sat with the images until three o’clock in the morning before meeting with the Egyptian and foreign teams the next day. “I solved the conflict between both teams,” he tells me. That’s not quite how the others see it, however, and several disagreements were included in the final report, which all of the researchers duly signed.

  The press conference was held on March 8, 2005, with the results—seen as a matter of national importance—announced to the world by President Mubarak’s culture minister, Farouk Hosni.

  Several of the findings matched what previous investigators had seen. Overall, the scans showed a slightly built young man, who was “well-fed and healthy and suffered no major childhood malnutrition or infectious diseases.”11 Tutankhamun’s teeth were in excellent condition (apart from an impacted wisdom tooth), with large, front incisors and an overbite also seen in other kings from the same family line. As well as a slightly receding chin, Tutankhamun had a mild cleft palate, though he probably wasn’t aware of it and there wouldn’t have been any external signs. Like Harrison, the team noticed a slight curve in the king’s back, but agreed that his spine looked normal and the body was probably just laid out this way by the embalmers.

  The team noted at least five different types of embalming material in the body and skull, concluding that the priests had mummified Tutankhamun’s body with great care. And, of course, they found the king’s penis, to the delight of journalists around the world. “I don’t know why the media got so excited,” says Selim. “It’s of no clinical importance for us. It’s very dry. It just broke off and fell in the sand.”

  So what about the cause of death? After scrutinizing the skull, the researchers all agreed that there was no sign of a blow to the head. “This was one of the big mysteries that I solved personally,” Selim told me. He says he determined that the bone fragments in the skull came from the top of the spine (as Grey, Boyer, and Rodin had previously suggested).

  The team also concluded, like Harrison, that Tutankhamun’s missing chest was a red herring with no relevance to the king’s demise, arguing that with such a serious injury, you’d expect to see damage elsewhere on the body, perhaps on the vertebrae or arms. The ribs appeared to have been cut with a sharp instrument, suggesting that someone had removed them after death, but who? The team was divided as to whether this was done by the ancient embalmers for some unknown reason, or in modern times, by whoever stole the missing beaded bib. Playing to pro-Egyptian sentiment, Hawass blamed it squarely on the British archaeologist Carter—clai
ming that counter to the records the archaeologist left, he must have chiseled the bib from the mummy’s chest, taking the ribs with it, before placing the body back in the tomb.

  Several of the researchers saw a clue to the king’s death elsewhere: Tutankhamun had a fractured left femur (thigh bone). Derry and Harrison had both noted this but didn’t think it was important—the mummy’s fragile bones are broken in countless places, due to their handling during and since the mummy’s unwrapping. But this break looks a bit different from the others. It has ragged rather than sharp edges, and the scans hint at a dense material inside, perhaps embalming fluid that has seeped into the crack. A fracture in this location—right at the end of the bone just above the knee—is well known in young men in their late teens.

  Some of the team, including Selim and Gostner, believe this is likely to be a fracture that Tutankhamun suffered during his life. Because embalming materials seem to have seeped in, they argue that the wound was still open when the body was embalmed, suggesting the injury happened just before Tutankhamun’s death. A broken leg on its own wouldn’t kill him but bleeding or infection that followed it might. The team came up with a new scenario for the king’s death: he suffered an accident, perhaps while hunting, in which he badly broke his leg; then an infection set in that killed him a few days later.

  Rühli, on the other hand, slows right down when it comes to drawing such conclusions, arguing that trying to tell the difference between damage that occurred before or after death is “a minefield.” He argues that the evidence isn’t strong enough to say that Tutankhamun broke his leg while he was alive. He points out that the mummy is damaged at the site of the fracture, leaving the bones exposed. Just by looking at the mummy, “you can clearly see the fracture and the material inside,” he says. So the dense material inside the crack could easily have been inadvertently pushed there by Carter and Derry, for example when they painted the mummy with a protective coat of melted wax. He adds that the CT scans show no signs of a hemorrhage or bleed, which you would expect if the bone had been broken during life.*

  The press release did a good job of acknowledging the disagreements within the team, although Hawass felt there was certainty enough. “These results will close the case of Tutankhamun,” he said. “The king will not need to be examined again.”12

  A COUPLE OF MONTHS LATER, the antiquities service put out another press release, this time on efforts to reconstruct from the CT scans what Tutankhamun would have looked like.13 It wasn’t the first time anyone had tried to re-create Tutankhamun’s face. In the 1960s, the BBC commissioned a sculptor to produce a clay bust from Harrison’s X-rays (he took on the time-consuming task for free, hoping that the publicity would boost his career, and was sorely disappointed when all mention of his masterpiece was cut from the final film). In 2001, the ex–FBI agents, Cooper and King, commissioned another bust based on the same X-rays, which was made by a physicist in London and delivered to them in a cardboard box.

  This time, three separate faces were created by independent artist-scientist teams from the United States and France (both chosen and sponsored by National Geographic), as well as Egypt (selected by the antiquities service).

  The French and Egyptian teams knew they were working on Tutankhamun and referred to ancient images to guide their reconstructions, which presumably allowed for a fair bit of subjectivity in the final result. The Egyptian team’s version, perhaps not surprisingly, is kingly and handsome, with a broad, angular face, high cheekbones, and strong jaw. The American team worked blind, with no idea whom they were re-creating, so their bust is probably the most insightful. They identified the racial type as Caucasian, specifically North African. Their face is quite similar to the French version and shows a weaker-looking man than that produced by the Egyptian team, with a ski-jump nose and receding chin.

  Hawass, ever the salesman, said the faces created by the teams were remarkably similar to a famous statue of Tutankhamun as a child, in which his perfectly round, wide-eyed head is shown rising out of a lotus blossom. I’m not sure I see it myself.

  National Geographic’s documentary on the CT project, called King Tut’s Final Secrets, aired on May 15, 2005, accompanied by a cover story in the June issue of National Geographic magazine. In the film, the uncertainty over the cause of Tutankhamun’s death has disappeared, with no mention of Rühli’s doubts over the timing of the fractured femur. The conclusion—described by the film’s narrator as “a turning point in the history of the boy king”—appears unequivocal: Tutankhamun died from complications following a broken leg.

  But the CT project was about much more than just a documentary and magazine article. These were curtain raisers, which stoked excitement for the main event: a touring international exhibition that it was hoped would beat even the blockbuster tour of the 1970s.

  After Hawass took charge of the antiquities service, Tutankhamun became the centerpiece of his strategy to bring in tourists—and money—to Egypt. In 2003, Hawass and the culture minister Hosni secured a law that allowed the Tutankhamun treasures to leave the country once more (such travel had been banned after a statue in the previous tour was damaged in Germany in 1981). This paved the way for two related exhibitions.

  The first, called “Tutankhamen: The Golden Hereafter,” visited Basel in Switzerland, and Bonn in Germany, in 2004. While the 1970s exhibition was intended to soften American attitudes toward Egypt during negotiations with Israel, this tour grew out of more modern political concerns, including the war on terror.

  Egypt openly promoted it as a peace initiative. President Mubarak’s wife, Suzanne, went to Basel for the grand opening, noting rather dubiously that the “magnificent Egyptian heritage is in itself evidence that since the dawn of history Egypt has embraced a culture of peace.”14 Mubarak himself attended the Bonn launch, accompanied by the German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. The Egyptian leader stressed the exhibition as a way to combat conflict between different cultures and religions, and used the occasion to push for international cooperation to combat the worsening crisis in Darfur, Sudan, and to address the root causes behind the growing phenomenon of terrorism.15

  Some commentators say this shielded a slightly more self-interested motive. Egypt was heavily dependent on income from tourism, but visitor numbers had dropped sharply after a series of attacks by Islamist terrorist groups, the worst being a massacre at Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahri in 1997, in which gunmen brutally murdered sixty-two people before fleeing into the hills and committing suicide in a cave. Most of the victims were tourists from Switzerland and Germany. As Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times put it: “Tut was sent to invite them back.”16

  The show was a huge commercial success; in Basel, more than 600,000 people saw the show in six months. For Hawass, it was an early lesson in the power of Tutankhamun’s popular appeal. “The people at that time did not know the value of what King Tut can do,” he told USA Today.17 “We know this now.”

  The second leg of the tour, revamped by National Geographic and renamed Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,* went to the United States, starting at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in June 2005. It ended up making the 1970s tour look like a quaint educational effort, breaking the mold for museum exhibitions in that it was a completely commercial venture, aiming quite openly to make as much money up front as possible. It was sponsored not by a museum but by three commercial companies: National Geographic, AEI (Arts and Exhibitions International, a relatively new company formed to create profit-making extravaganzas for museums), and AEG (Anschutz Entertainment Group, which makes family movies, owns sports teams, and produces rock concerts).

  Egypt too would take a hefty cut. In negotiating the deal, Hawass hoped to earn about $10 million from each U.S. city, to go toward antiquities as well as a hugely expensive Grand Egyptian Museum, planned to be built in Giza.18

  The show was assembled and presented by the antiquities service and the sponsors, leaving the museums themsel
ves with no say over the content or presentation of the exhibits they were hosting—or the cost of tickets. According to the New York Times, the exhibition did no less than redefine the role of museums, by outsourcing their traditional job—curating content—to commercial companies.19 Or as one arts blog more succinctly put it: “LACMA curators have effectively left the building.”20

  Scientific studies on Tutankhamun’s mummy were key to marketing the exhibition, providing fresh results that earned headlines around the world. The National Geographic–sponsored CT study was timed perfectly to promote the big U.S. opening. The tour ended up lasting another six years and visiting seven U.S. cities (as well as London, UK, and Melbourne, Australia).

  The exhibition consisted of fifty objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb. The gold mask and coffin were still not allowed to leave Egypt, but the show did include his golden crown, one of the gold coffinettes that had contained his internal organs, and a lifelike wooden torso, perhaps used as a dress model. These were joined by seventy objects from other royal tombs of the Eighteenth Dynasty, including a sensuous unguent spoon shaped like a swimming woman and a painted leather collar from a royal hunting dog. The last gallery of the exhibition proudly presented the big finale: the results of the CT scans.

  This was Tutankhamun done up for Hollywood. LACMA rolled out the red carpet for its glamorous opening night gala, while inside, the museum was transformed as if for a movie set, with plywood pillars, flowing drapes, and scorpion-shaped wall lights. The galleries featured sand-colored carpets and walls, with enlarged photos of desert landscapes and slanting doorways reminiscent of stone gateways and tomb entrances. As visitors first entered the exhibition, a set of heavy black curtains opened to reveal a film featuring Zahi Hawass, with a voice-over by an old friend, Egyptian actor Omar Sharif.