The Shadow King

by Jo Marchant

  Excavations over the past few years have revolutionized archaeologists’ view of Karnak, a huge temple complex dedicated to Thebes’s main god, Amun. The digs have revealed a hefty embankment running in front of the sacred site, as well as here, at the start of a sphinx-lined avenue that stretches nearly three kilometers from the temple wall all the way toward the temple at Luxor.

  It’s a vivid insight into what this place must have looked like in Tutankhamun’s time. Water lapped up against the temple walls, enabling huge ceremonial barges to carry visitors—kings and queens, or statues of the gods—right up to the gates. You can still see the holes in the stone-block embankment wall where the boatmen moored their vessels, and the wide steps that allowed royal visitors to step elegantly out of their boats, no matter what the level of the Nile, and walk up to the temple gates. “We think Karnak was like Venice,” says Boraik.

  In fact, archaeologists are realizing that the whole area around Thebes, on both sides of the river, was crisscrossed with man-made lakes and canals.10 This was far from dry, dusty desert living, even when the Nile was at its lowest. The waterways played a central role in religious festivals and processions, and were probably also crucial for moving supplies around, including the huge stone blocks used for temples and colossi on both sides of the river.

  Much of this watery landscape was first engineered by Tutankhamun’s predecessor, Amenhotep III. He’s famous for his enormous palace, Malkata, which featured a nine-hundred-acre artificial lake as well as a large T-shaped harbor that linked his residence to the Nile. Amenhotep also built the avenue of sphinxes (though later pharaohs added to it), and the excavation Boraik shows me reveals that the embankment wasn’t just a feature of Karnak itself, but ran alongside these sphinxes too.

  He thinks an ancient waterway must have run right along the avenue all the way to Luxor temple, but he’s unlikely to get the chance to check that any time soon. Since Egypt’s revolution, when archaeological work here stopped, local people have been backfilling the excavations—using “Sphinx Alley as a rubbish dump” and a nearby Ptolemaic* settlement as a soccer field. When I ask why, Boraik just shrugs. “They don’t need to see monuments,” he says.

  Back in his office, in a building tucked behind the Luxor Museum, I drink tea out of a tiny glass while Boraik chain-smokes, me trying to get a word in edgewise as his phone rings constantly and an endless procession of people comes in and out on various errands, their ripples of Arabic washing over me like a stream.

  Finally, we get around to the reason I’m there—I want to hear about the day that Tutankhamun’s mummy was moved from the coffin and sarcophagus in which he had lain for more than three thousand years, into a brand-new glass case.

  The move was made in an effort to protect the mummy from deterioration. Although conditions inside Tutankhamun’s tomb preserved its contents for thousands of years, once the tomb was open to the public, it became a much more damaging environment. The temperature inside varied considerably, and moisture breathed out by the hundreds of people who visited each day pushed relative humidity in the tomb to 95 percent—perfect for the growth of microbes and mold.

  The antiquities service, under Hawass, decided that Tutankhamun urgently needed a climate-controlled home that would keep the mummy stable and sterile. His new case, built by German glassmakers Glasbau Hahn, would be filled with nitrogen (in which microbes can’t grow) and keep humidity within strict limits. It would also, by putting the mummy on show for the first time, be a powerful magnet for visitors.

  Tutankhamun made his move on November 5, 2007, overseen by Boraik, Hawass, and a handful of specialist Egyptian conservators, as well as workmen, representatives from Glasbau Hahn—and the obligatory National Geographic camera crew.11

  The tomb was closed for the operation, Boraik tells me, and it took all day to prepare both the case and Tutankhamun himself. The mummy was left lying in its wooden tray of sand, but covered from neck to ankles with a beige linen shroud “to preserve the king’s dignity.” According to Boraik, visitors aren’t missing much: “the only good parts are the face and feet.” The rediscovered penis does sound worth a look though—Boraik says it has a straw through it to keep it stiff, emulating the god of the underworld, Osiris, who played an important role in fertility and rebirth and was often portrayed with a permanent erection.

  Boraik says that his encounter with Tutankhamun’s mummy—his first view of one of the most precious items he is responsible for protecting—was a profoundly moving experience. “I just said hello,” he says. “It was a strange feeling to see his face after three thousand years. It took me back to his time. I saw a young king, and the sadness in his family.” Boraik says he stayed for two minutes in silence, kneeling next to the mummy’s head. Then he went outside to smoke.

  When the new case was ready, the mummy was walked over to it in a process that had been carefully choreographed the day before—just in time for a photo opportunity during which Hawass enthused to the watching press about Tutankhamun’s “beautiful buck teeth.”

  The king’s outer coffin still lies in its stone sarcophagus in the center of the painted burial chamber, its head pointing west toward the setting sun and its golden face staring up toward the sky. But Tutankhamun—until that day the last Egyptian pharaoh still in his original sacred burial position—is no longer inside. He is now tucked into a modest corner of the tomb’s antechamber, at roughly waist level for convenient viewing, surrounded by glass and illuminated by a spotlight that springs like an alien antenna from the end of his case. The final step in his journey from divine pharaoh to museum exhibit is complete.

  _____________

  * The Egyptologist Elizabeth Thomas had tentatively suggested this back in the 1960s.

  * If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll remember that James Harris raised serious doubts over the identity of this mummy in the 1970s, which are shared by most experts today. The researchers don’t appear to have taken this into account, though in the end it didn’t matter too much for the Hatshepsut study as they didn’t get any genealogical information from his DNA anyway.

  * The mummy identified as Ahmose-Nefertari is one of two bodies found together in a coffin labeled with this queen’s name, rescued from the Deir el-Bahri cache in 1881. Gaston Maspero and Émile Brugsch concluded that this mummy was Ahmose-Nefertari only after the other one—previously the prime candidate because it was in much better condition—turned out to be male.

  * Although there does seem to be some confusion over this. When I asked Selim about the critics’ concerns, he said that despite the impression given in the documentary that the tooth in the box originally had just two roots (one surviving and one missing), it actually has two remaining roots (making three in total), suggesting it is an upper molar after all. But Paul Gostner, a radiologist who advised the Egyptian team and has also studied the original CT scans, told me that the tooth does have just one remaining root, though he suggested that it might still be an upper molar if a third root has broken off and become lost.

  * A dynasty of Greek origin founded by Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great’s generals, in 305 BC, which ended abruptly in 30 BC when Queen Cleopatra famously killed herself rather than be captured by the Romans.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  FINGERPRINTS, FORENSICS, AND A FAMILY TREE

  I MEET YEHIA GAD at his suggestion in the leafy, sunlit garden of the Marriott hotel in Zamalek, Cairo, where we’re served iced tea by scrupulously polite waiters. He’s a small man, in his fifties, with courteous manners and a wry smile. Scholarly debate and success in Egypt is often highly dependent on authority, perhaps sometimes to the expense of talent, with prominent figures like Hawass and Selim not slow to advertise their considerable attributes and achievements. Gad is different. He’s modest and thoughtful, and when he talks about what he’s done, it feels as though his aim is not to impress you with his experiences but to share them with you.

  Hidden beneath that mild exterior, though, is
the spark of a revolutionary. After Friday prayers on January 28, 2011, Gad marched with his sons-in-law from his local mosque to join the crowds pouring into Tahrir Square, in protest against President Mubarak’s repressive regime. He shows me videos of the clashes taken on his mobile phone, and proudly tells me about the birth of his grandson, Ali, who arrived into a newborn Egypt on February 11, just two hours after Mubarak finally stepped down. He calls 2011 “the year of hope.”

  But back to our story: I’ve met up with Gad to hear about his work on Tutankhamun. Following his lightning-fast training with Angelique Corthals, Gad entered the king’s tomb on February 24, 2008. It was his first day taking bone samples alone, and he faced the world’s most famous mummy. His mentor was three hundred miles away in Cairo, watching via a live video link. Hawass needed home support for the project—from archaeologists, antiquities officials, and the press—so his team had to be seen to be all Egyptian. Corthals stayed away, and Gad was on his own.

  Gad had flown to Luxor the day before. Late that night, he got a phone call. “Are you sure? Will you be able to take it?” said the voice at the end of the line. “Insha’Allah,” replied Gad. With God’s will.

  The next morning, he first took samples from the Elder and Younger Ladies in tomb KV35. Then it was time to open Tutankhamun’s glass case. He stood on one side of the mummy, with his colleague Somaia Ismail next to him, a watchful Hawass standing directly opposite, and Discovery’s cameras zoomed in as close as they’d go. “You could feel the tension coming up, up, up from everybody,” says Gad. If he applied too much pressure, one of Tutankhamun’s fragile bones could easily snap. “But I put my faith in God, and we did it.” His haul consisted of six tiny bone samples, three from each of the mummy’s legs.

  When he was done, Corthals asked for a close-up shot on the video link. The fragments looked charred, and not as clean as the samples that she and Gad had previously taken in the biopsy room. Tutankhamun was not going to be an easy mummy to deal with. She just had to hope Gad had taken enough samples that something was going to work.

  With the Tutankhamun samples safely back in Cairo, Corthals left the royal mummy project. She says she wasn’t able to spend enough time in Egypt on top of meeting her teaching responsibilities in the UK. To continue to guide the Egyptian team’s work, she recommended Albert Zink, head of a specialist mummy research center at the EURAC Institute in Bolzano, Italy, and author of a string of papers identifying DNA from ancient mummies up to five thousand years old. Like Corthals, he was particularly interested in studying the infectious diseases people suffered thousands of years in the past.

  He in turn recommended a second expert, Carsten Pusch of the University of Tübingen in Germany. Pusch had previously worked on mummies held in a collection in the Tübingen museum, testing out different methods to extract DNA from them. So Zink and Pusch each began the grueling commute between their day jobs in Europe and the Cairo museum. Although Gad and his Egyptian team would do the work of analyzing Tutankhamun’s DNA, Zink and Pusch would design and oversee the study.

  Unlike the Hatshepsut project, which had been a test run for the team, everyone was keen that the data from the Tutankhamun project should be rock solid, and capable of convincing experts around the world. A crucial part of the international guidelines for working on ancient DNA, particularly from humans, is that all results should be replicated in a second, independent lab. That way, if you get the same result in both places, you can be hopeful that it’s a true result from the ancient DNA, and not due to modern contamination within the lab. So in June 2009, a second DNA lab was opened, also paid for by Discovery, at Cairo University’s Faculty of Medicine. It was staffed by a second Egyptian team, headed by a young geneticist named Sally Wasef.

  Eleven mummies were included in the project. The first nine are familiar: Tutankhamun, the mummy from KV55, Amenhotep III, Yuya, Tjuiu, the two fetuses from Tutankhamun’s tomb, and the Elder and Younger Ladies from KV35. Added into the mix were two female mummies from a small nonroyal tomb called KV21. Pottery found in this tomb suggested that it dated from earlier in the Eighteenth Dynasty, and most Egyptologists assumed that the two unidentified women inside were noblewomen or courtiers. But they had bent left arms, so Hawass felt they could be relatives of Tutankhamun.

  The plan was to compare the DNA of all these mummies to come up with a family tree. The researchers hoped that this would finally solve mysteries such as the identity of the KV55 mummy, Tutankhamun’s parents, and the fetuses from his tomb. The team would also test the mummies for DNA from the microbes that cause plague, tuberculosis, malaria, leishmaniasis, and leprosy, to see if they suffered from any of these diseases.

  Meanwhile, Selim and his team continued CT scanning all of the mummies, and reanalyzed the scans of Tutankhamun. They were looking for any inherited characteristics or disorders that might run in the family, and of course, clues to how the various individuals died.

  Gad and his team were testing for several different types of DNA. They were trying to amplify fragments of mitochondrial DNA (which is passed down the maternal line), as well as DNA from the male-determining Y chromosome, which is inherited from father to son.

  But the main plan was to do genetic fingerprinting on the DNA that is passed down from both parents. This is a good way to look at family relationships without having to sequence the whole genome. We share almost all of our DNA with every other person on the planet; it’s what makes us human as opposed to chimps or grapes. But there are some small variations, which can be used to identify us.

  DNA fingerprinting homes in on one specific type of variable region called microsatellites. If you look at enough different microsatellites, you end up with a “fingerprint” that’s unique for that particular person. In the royal mummy study, Zink and the team looked at eight microsatellites across the genome, with unwelcoming names like D13S317 and CSF1PO (which always makes me think of C3PO, the camp robot in Star Wars). You can use the details of a fingerprint to draw conclusions about family relationships, because we inherit our microsatellites (as the rest of our DNA) from our parents—half from one and half from the other.

  Working conditions in the ancient DNA lab were now quite different from the Hatshepsut project in several respects. This time, the cameras had to stay outside. Hawass banned them after complaints from the team that the film crew was contaminating the lab—much to the annoyance of the Discovery producers, who after all had paid for the entire setup so that they could film the work done inside. Zink and Pusch also insisted that the researchers were given enough time to do their work properly.

  And they took months. One problem, particularly for Tutankhamun, was that black resins and other materials used in the embalming process had crept right into the mummy’s bones. Normally, when you purify DNA from a sample, you end up with a clear solution. But to Zink and Pusch’s dismay, in Tutankhamun’s case, the samples turned out inky black. They couldn’t get rid of the impurities, which clung tight to the king’s DNA, blocking any subsequent reactions. According to Zink, it took six months of hard work to figure out how to remove the contaminants, but finally the precious DNA was ready for amplifying and sequencing.*

  In Discovery’s film about the project,1 there’s a scene in which Zink and Pusch scrutinize a row of colored peaks on a computer screen. There is a dramatic pause. “My God!” whispers Pusch, the muffled words just audible from behind his surgical mask. Then the two hug and shake hands, accompanied by the laughter and applause of Gad and his Egyptian colleagues. The geneticists have just achieved their first successful result.

  Except that they haven’t. As cameras weren’t allowed in the lab, the real moment of discovery wasn’t captured on film. The researchers were asked to stage a reenactment, weeks later, for the cameras. But they insist that their excitement in the dummy scene is real. The first DNA to show up from the mummies was from the Y chromosome. It showed that Amenhotep III, KV55, and Tutankhamun all belonged to the same male line, whereas an unrela
ted male mummy,* included as a control, did not. It was an important sign that the analysis was working well.

  After that, the team moved on to the more challenging task of genetic fingerprinting. According to Zink, they painstakingly repeated the test twenty to thirty times on each mummy. Then they used a computer program to compare all of the fingerprints and come up with the all-important family tree.

  Although popular with TV viewers, Hawass’s previous mummy studies had met with some skepticism among academics, partly because they weren’t first published in academic journals, meaning that other scientists had no chance to scrutinize and check the results. He didn’t want any such doubts with this study: Discovery would have to wait until the results were properly published. On February 17, 2010, the team published a ten-page paper in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).2 The same day, Hawass held a triumphant press conference at the Cairo museum. Gad, Selim, Hawass, and Pusch sat in a row to announce the results, their heads just visible over a forest of microphones carrying logos from TV companies all over the world.

  What they had to say was dramatic, and appeared to change our historical understanding of the period. After decades of inconclusive results, the team at last offered some certainty. The study answered questions about Tutankhamun and his ancestry that had foxed archaeologists for decades, identified several anonymous mummies as being famous figures from the Amarna period, and completely changed our view of the boy king. The journalists loved it. But scientists watching from around the world weren’t so sure.

  Impressively, the researchers said they had isolated DNA from every single mummy they tested. Seven mummies yielded a complete fingerprint across all eight microsatellites, while the two anonymous mummies from tomb KV21, and the two fetuses, produced partial data sets. Zink and Pusch used these results to construct a five-generation family tree, with the elderly couple Yuya and Tjuiu at the top. The DNA appeared to confirm that the Elder Lady was indeed Yuya and Tjuiu’s daughter Queen Tiye, as originally suggested by James Harris, and supported by Selim’s CT scans. (I can’t help wondering if perhaps Pusch was just a tiny bit influenced by the mummy’s striking looks, when he told journalists that her genetic material was “the most beautiful DNA that I’ve ever seen from an ancient specimen.”3)