The Shadow King

by Jo Marchant

  But later that year, encouraged by Gad that research techniques had advanced, Hawass changed his mind. He followed his multimillion-dollar agreement with National Geographic with another huge deal, this time with the Discovery Channel, to DNA test the royal mummies in the basement of the Cairo museum. Hawass approached the head of the NRC: he wanted an ancient DNA lab and could pay whatever it would cost to build one.

  As artifacts were cleared out of a large section of the museum’s basement, it fell to Gad, and his colleague Somaia Ismail, to oversee construction of the lab itself. Despite Gad’s long-standing interest in the topic, neither of them had worked with ancient DNA before. So Gad read up on the internationally agreed requirements, and worked with museum engineers to design the space he wanted.

  The result was a network of underground rooms, like an ultramodern version of an Egyptian tomb. In a royal tomb, every chamber has a specific purpose, from the entranceway and storerooms to the burial chamber itself. In Gad’s DNA lab, a small entrance corridor leads to a dressing room, where researchers must don disposable gowns, caps, gloves, and masks before proceeding any further. Then there’s a sequence of other dedicated rooms, with one-way doors between like surgical theaters: a biopsy room for taking samples from the mummies, followed by spaces for extracting, amplifying, and sequencing their DNA.

  To get any further, though, Gad and Ismail would need help. Hawass insisted that the research team had to be all Egyptian, but there wasn’t anyone in the country with the expertise to carry out such challenging research. Someone would have to train the team—in how to take samples from the mummies, and how to analyze the DNA—and then melt into the background.

  The Discovery Channel producer, Brando Quilici, called in a forensic anthropologist and Egyptologist named Angelique Corthals. She had experience in isolating DNA from Inca mummies—frozen bodies recovered in Argentina in the 1990s—as well as Egyptian ones, and was based at the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology in Manchester, UK.

  To find out more, I track down Corthals, who turns out to be a young, forthright woman with bouncy, curly hair. She chats cheerily to me on the phone from her lab in New York, where she now works at the American Museum of Natural History. Since the royal mummies project, she has returned to working on frozen South American bodies, and her main interest is the spread of infectious disease among ancient people, for example, whether they suffered the same kinds of infections as we do today, and how the spread of disease back then relates to what happens now. She tells me she was glad to get out of Egyptology, because of “petty politics,” such as researchers being possessive over mummies, and not wanting to share.

  “Not the Egyptians,” she’s quick to add. But her comments emphasize the smallness and strangeness of Egyptology as a field, especially when it comes to the scientific study of mummies. It’s now illegal to remove any archaeological artifacts from Egypt. That leaves foreign researchers fighting over B-list mummies taken out of the country long ago. Meanwhile Egypt itself, which retains the most important individuals such as the royal mummies as well as all newly discovered finds, doesn’t tend to have the budget, expertise, or equipment needed for high-tech studies—unless funded by foreign TV companies, whose desire for fast results and dramatic storylines does not sit easily with the interests of objective, meticulous science.

  Corthals calls the Cairo DNA lab the “bat cave” and tells me that her involvement in the project entailed an exhausting regular commute between Manchester and Cairo. When she first arrived, in June 2006, the lab had been built, but it was empty. Before starting work, Corthals had to order the necessary scientific equipment and reagents from scratch.

  “The budget was amazing,” she says. “We could order whatever we wanted.” As well as the money from Discovery, the biotech company Applied Biosystems donated a sequencing machine worth half a million dollars, plus its latest forensic kit for extracting and amplifying DNA, including reagents that cost thousands of dollars for just a few thousandths of a liter.

  Corthals taught Gad and his team how to take samples from mummies while minimizing contamination with modern DNA, and causing the least possible amount of damage to the mummy itself. She had previously worked with the Egyptologist Bob Brier, analyzing DNA from the “modern mummy” that he made in 1994.2 Corthals found that even on this modern specimen, it was “futile” trying to isolate any DNA from the mummy’s skin cells. “Embalming has damaged the cells tremendously,” she says. She found that bone samples worked much better—ideally from the flat bones (for example the skull, pelvis, or sternum) or the long bones of the arms and legs. Bone cells are surrounded by a mineral capsule, which she says protects them—and the DNA inside—compared to other tissues.

  But a mummy’s bones aren’t always so easy to get to. “You can’t pierce a hole in the face of Tut, can you?” as Corthals puts it. She developed what she calls the “window technique,” which involves cutting a square somewhere on the mummy that won’t be seen by the public, then pulling out a plug of bandages, skin, and flesh—everything down to the bone. Then she uses a biopsy needle to collect the sample itself, the kind used by doctors on living patients for the painful procedure of taking bone marrow biopsies. It’s kind of a cross between a thick needle (actually a hollow tube, two to three millimeters across) and a drill, which bores a hole, then pulls a sample of powdered bone back into the tube.

  After collecting the bone sample using the biopsy needle, she replaces the square plug back into its hole, so the damage is barely visible. Corthals taught Gad to take four to five samples from different sites on each mummy, a procedure that could take several hours. The team practiced on a couple of anonymous mummies from the museum. Then they moved straight on to their first big project: the search for Hatshepsut.

  Their two suspects came from a small, nonroyal tomb called KV60, located close to Hatshepsut’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings. One of these mummies was found in a coffin labeled as belonging to a wet nurse. The other, nicknamed “the strong one” in the documentary,3 lay naked on the floor in a mess of rags. She was obese, with “huge, pendulous breasts,” but was mummified to a high standard with her left arm bent across her chest. Hawass wondered if the pair might be Hatshepsut and her wet nurse*—perhaps the queen’s body had been hidden in the tomb of her wet nurse to protect her from looters.

  The mummy from the wet nurse’s coffin was already in the Cairo museum, though it took staff several hours of searching to find her. Meanwhile the so-called strong one was still in the tomb where she had been found, so she was flown from Luxor to Cairo, getting her first taste of X-rays as she passed through airport security.

  The plan was to DNA test the two KV60 mummies, as well as Thutmose I* (Hatshepsut’s father) and Ahmose-Nefertari (thought to be Hatshepsut’s great-grandmother), to see if there was a match. Corthals and Gad took samples from the mummies in the sterile biopsy room, with the Discovery camera crew and antiquities officials including Hawass watching anxiously through a window. Corthals describes as “muscle and grit” the procedure of drilling into the mummies’ bones. “I remember we were both sweating, for two reasons,” she says. “It’s physically demanding, although you don’t want to exert too much force or you’ll break the bone. And we were boring holes into Egypt’s most precious national treasure.”

  For the rest of the project, a cameraman sat in the lab eight hours a day, dressed up just like the researchers in a gown and mask, and filmed the team’s every move. When Corthals attempted the first DNA extraction, he moved in for a close-up shot and his camera knocked her hand just as she was trying to pipette a minute amount of extremely expensive reagent. “I was very angry,” she says. “That only happened once, I can tell you that.”

  It put the team under huge pressure, being filmed every step of the way during what was initially meant to be just a practice run while the lab was being established. Gad and his team were still learning, and Corthals says she never promised anything more than preliminary data. But Qui
lici and Hawass were in a hurry for results. “Yehia and I had to impress on both of them that for this kind of work, six months is a short deadline for preliminary results,” says Corthals. “They wanted results in the first fifteen days.” In the end, she says, the team was allowed two months. (Quilici didn’t respond to my requests for an interview, but Hawass denies that he tried to hurry the team, saying he told them to “take your time.”)

  Against all the odds, however, by the end of August, the team did manage to amplify some DNA sequences from the mummies. They were trying to extract two different types of DNA from the mummies’ bones. The first was nuclear DNA. This is packed into the nuclei of cells, and makes up the main part of the genome that we inherit from our mother and father. The second type was mitochondrial DNA, a much smaller string of genes carried inside tiny energy-producing factories called mitochondria, that are present within each cell. These are inherited just from the mother.

  The researchers extracted nuclear DNA from both KV60 mummies, but weren’t able to do the same for Ahmose-Nefertari or Thutmose I, so although this was an impressive achievement—Corthals says she was “ecstatic” at the result—it didn’t tell the team anything about the mummies’ identities.

  Mitochondrial DNA is easier to detect, as there are thousands of copies of it in every cell, compared to just one for nuclear DNA. Here, the team was able to amplify a couple of short fragments from both the “strong” mummy from the KV60 floor, and the mummy identified as Ahmose-Nefertari, for the first time allowing a direct comparison. Here, the data was promising but inconclusive.

  According to Corthals, there was “some degree of similarity” between the DNA of the two mummies, but the data are “not nearly enough scientifically to make any call as to their relationship.” Added to that, we don’t know for sure that the mummy tested is definitely Ahmose-Nefertari,* and we don’t know that Ahmose-Nefertari was definitely Hatshepsut’s great-grandmother. And even if she was and the DNA matched perfectly, the KV60 mummy could be any family member in the same maternal line, not necessarily Hatshepsut.

  Corthals and Gad had made a heroic achievement in getting the DNA lab up and running so quickly, but their work did not ultimately reveal anything about the identity of Hatshepsut’s mummy.

  A second line of inquiry came from Ashraf Selim. He CT scanned the two mummies from tomb KV60, as well as two further candidates from the Deir el-Bahri cache, which it seems were added at this stage to make Discovery’s coverage of the hunt more exciting. In the resulting film, these individuals are dubbed the “screaming one,” referring to a mummy with its face twisted into an eternal open-mouthed shriek, and the “serene one.”

  In November 2006, late at night after the museum had closed to the public, the mummies were removed from their cases and carried outside to the parked CT trailer, where Selim and his assistant Hani Abdel Rahman were waiting. First, Selim scanned the mummies identified as Thutmose I, II, and III. The researchers used the CT scans of their faces to create a “composite family portrait” of what they expected Hatshepsut to look like.

  Then it was the turn of the four Hatshepsut suspects. Selim quickly ruled out the late-entry Deir el-Bahri mummies—the serene one because her straight arms suggested she wasn’t an important royal, and the screaming one because she wasn’t embalmed to a high standard and was aged over fifty, too old for Hatshepsut. He compared the two KV60 mummies against the composite family portrait and concluded that the strong one, from the floor, had the most similar face to Hatshepsut’s relatives. But he couldn’t rule either mummy out.

  Later the same night, at around four in the morning, Selim scanned one last object: a carved wooden trinket box from the Deir el-Bahri cache. It had Hatshepsut’s name on it, and contained what looked like well-preserved organs. Inside the scans revealed a liver and some intestines, but also a surprise—a broken tooth. A local dentist was called in who identified the tooth as a molar, with one surviving root and one root missing. The mummy found in the wet nurse’s coffin didn’t have any suitable space in her mouth where the tooth could have come from, ruling her out as its owner. But her companion from the tomb floor had very bad teeth, with several missing. For one of them, a molar from the upper right of the mummy’s mouth, there was a root still embedded in the gum.

  The CT scans showed that the left-behind root was roughly the right size to fit the Hatshepsut tooth—could the strong one be the tooth’s owner, and therefore the missing queen? Further analysis of the CT scans showed that this mummy was middle-aged when she died and not in good shape, with arthritis, osteoporosis, and a tumor near her abdomen. She seems to have been killed by an infection that spread from an abscess in her mouth, which must have caused agonizing pain and left her unable to open her mouth or eat. It would have been an inglorious end for one of history’s greatest female rulers.

  Secrets of Egypt’s Lost Queen was shown on the Discovery Channel in July 2007. In the film, the DNA results were portrayed correctly as being preliminary and inconclusive. The root and tooth, however, were described as “an exact match,” clinching the mummy’s identity. “This is Queen Hatshepsut,” concludes Selim, albeit somewhat hesitantly. “It’s the kind of proof that almost never happens in a cold case 3,500 years old,” confirms the narrator. “Definitive proof—the kind that solves cases.” The mummy was claimed as the first Egyptian ruler to be positively identified since Tutankhamun.

  If the identification is correct, the study has important implications for the history of the period, suggesting that Hatshepsut died of natural causes, and wasn’t bumped off by her stepson, as some Egyptologists have suspected. Unfortunately, despite the conviction expressed in the documentary, the evidence from the tooth seems pretty flimsy. First, it’s not certain that the contents of the wooden box came from the body of Hatshepsut. Organs from a royal mummy were usually placed into a specific type of marble jar for burial. The wooden box might instead simply contain keepsakes that belonged to the queen while she was alive, perhaps from a relative or loved one.

  What’s more, the root and tooth seem unlikely to come from the same person. One U.S. dentist was quick to point out what he calls “glaring problems” with the Egyptian team’s analysis, not least that upper molars have three roots, while the tooth in the box (from its shape, and the fact that it originally had only two roots) was almost certainly a lower molar, for which there was no gap in the KV60 mummy’s mouth.4 Erhard Graefe, an Egyptologist based at the University of Münster, Germany, has since reached a similar conclusion.5 The CT team maintains, however, that the tooth could still be an upper molar.*

  Most Egyptologists I’ve spoken to are very skeptical that this mummy has anything to do with Hatshepsut, and say they would like to study the team’s evidence. Unfortunately, neither the CT scans nor the DNA results have yet been published in a scientific journal. (Gad and Corthals are quite open about the fact that their DNA results are far too preliminary to publish, and although Selim describes the CT identification of Hatshepsut as “one of our greatest discoveries,” he acknowledges that it has yet to be confirmed by DNA analysis.)

  Despite such reservations, however, it soon became common knowledge around the world that Hatshepsut had been found. Even the highly tentative DNA results morphed into conclusive evidence, thanks largely to Corthals’s institution, Manchester University, which issued a press release announcing: “When the DNA of the mystery mummy was compared with that of Hatshepsut’s ancestors, we were able to scientifically confirm that the remains were those of the 18th Dynasty queen.”6

  Hatshepsut’s discovery was subsequently named one of the top science advances of 2007 by Discover magazine7 (which repeated the claim that the DNA analysis “confirmed” her identification), and featured on the cover of National Geographic.8 Meanwhile, Hatshepsut took her place alongside the other pharaohs in the museum’s Royal Mummy Rooms, with no hint on the accompanying label of any doubt that the mummy is actually hers.

  The Hatshepsut and Nefertiti documentari
es were shown in the United States within two days of each other in July 2007. Hawass was on a high. Results, viewing figures, and cash for the antiquities service were coming thick and fast. And the Tutankhamun museum tour was still breaking attendance records, so much so that a second traveling exhibition of the king’s treasures—Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs—was planned by the same organizers to launch in 2008, “to feed America’s rabid appetite for all things Tut.”9

  Meanwhile, Hawass was still working toward his ultimate aim, a grand project that he hoped would be even more successful than any of the previous mummy studies: DNA tests of Tutankhamun and his closest family. The project would push Gad and his team to their limits, and divide the scientific community. But first, there was another appointment in King Tut’s diary. After more than 3,300 years in his coffin, the mummy was moving home.

  I’M SITTING in the back of a large car, being driven at speed through Luxor’s dusty streets with no idea where we’re going. But I’ve learned this is quite common when meeting Egyptian officials. It doesn’t seem to be the done thing to arrange an interview time in advance, you just have to turn up and fit in your questions along with whatever seems to be going on at the time.

  In the front of the car is Mansour Boraik—the genial head of the antiquities service in Luxor, an area that includes the Valley of the Kings and associated memorial temples on the Nile’s west bank, plus the awesome ruins of Luxor and Karnak temples on the east bank. Boraik is trim and full of energy, with close-to-perfect English and a neat moustache flecked with gray.

  The car pulls up just outside the southwest corner of Karnak temple and Boraik jumps out so I follow, as he walks along the top of what looks like a harbor wall. Which it turns out is exactly what it is.