by Jo Marchant
The team concluded that the troublesome KV55 mummy was the son of Amenhotep III and Tiye—most probably Akhenaten—and the father of Tutankhamun. The computer analysis seemed unarguable. The calculated probability that the KV55 mummy was Tutankhamun’s father, for example, was a slam-dunk 99.99999981 percent.
The DNA analysis seemed to confirm Selim’s controversial suggestion that the Younger Lady from tomb KV35 was Tutankhamun’s mother. And to the great surprise of pretty much every Egyptologist with an interest in the period, she appeared to be another—previously unknown—child of Amenhotep III and Tiye. In other words, Tutankhamun’s parents were brother and sister.
The incomplete data on the fetuses weren’t enough for a definitive identification but supported the idea that they were indeed Tutankhamun’s stillborn daughters. And there was another surprise: the partial DNA profile of one of the mummies found in tomb KV21 suggested that she could be their mother—presumably Tutankhamun’s wife Ankhesenamun. If Egyptologists were surprised to find Tiye and Tutankhamun’s mother in a side room of Amenhotep II’s tomb, the idea that Ankhesenamun had been lying unnoticed in KV21 seemed even weirder, because there was nothing else in the tomb to hint that it had anything to do with Tutankhamun’s reign. It seemed an incredible stroke of luck that Hawass had included these unpromising mummies in the study.
Most of the tests for disease DNA came out negative. But the researchers did detect DNA from Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes the most virulent form of malaria, in Yuya, Tjuiu, and Tutankhamun.
Selim presented the latest results of the CT scans. Surprisingly, there was plenty new to say about Tutankhamun, even though this study had already been reported once. In fact, much of the updated analysis contradicted conclusions that the team had reached the first time around.
Rather than the well-fed, healthy youth suggested by the initial study, Selim now argued that the young king was riddled with minor ailments and weaknesses. For example, Selim diagnosed scoliosis of the spine in Tutankhamun—as well as in his mother, grandmother, and two stillborn children. What previous investigators had agreed was simply a result of how Tutankhamun’s body was laid out by his embalmers was now an inherited disorder affecting almost every member of the family.
Selim also concluded that Tutankhamun had a badly deformed left foot. As well as a clubfoot, the accompanying JAMA paper reported, the king had been born with a missing toe bone, and one of his metatarsals was being eaten away by necrosis, a disease in which a lack of blood supply causes the bone tissue to die. The team diagnosed clubfoot in KV55 and the two KV21 mummies too, and reported (among other things) that Yuya, Tjuiu, and Tiye were affected by festering surgical wounds.
In summary, the royal family was a sickly bunch, with Tutankhamun in the worst shape of all—a frail, limping cripple who needed a stick to walk. He was hardly the type you might expect to have met his end falling from a speeding chariot, as had been suggested in 2005.
The one thing Tutankhamun didn’t suffer from, apparently, was a gender disorder. This might sound a bit random, but Egyptologists and medics alike had been speculating about this for decades. The debate was triggered mostly by those bizarrely curvaceous statues of Akhenaten, but there are some rather feminine figures of Tutankhamun, too.
Some experts think this was just part of the Amarna art revolution, with Akhenaten determined to show himself (and perhaps his family members) as strikingly different from their predecessors, with attributes of both the father and mother of all creation. But many scholars have seen evidence of an inherited disorder, passed from father down to son.
Speculation about Akhenaten’s medical condition started early, soon after his strange statues were discovered. In 1855, Auguste Mariette, founder of the antiquities service, suggested that the king had been taken prisoner in Sudan and castrated. Another French Egyptologist, Gustave Lefebvre, wondered in 1890 if he was a woman masquerading as a man.
In 1907, the anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith accredited the pharaoh’s peculiar physique to Fröhlich syndrome: a rare childhood metabolic disorder characterized by obesity, retarded growth, and delayed development of genital organs. But the syndrome also causes infertility, and it was hard to reconcile this with the fact that Akhenaten had apparently fathered six daughters (and perhaps some sons too). The Egyptologist Cyril Aldred subsequently suggested in the 1960s that perhaps Akhenaten was born normal, allowing him to father children, but later suffered from a tumor affecting his pituitary gland, which caused his symptoms later in life.4
In the 1970s, British medics focused on Tutankhamun himself, after seeing gilded figures of the king in the British Museum’s touring exhibition that showed him with a sagging tummy and pert breasts.* In a series of letters to top medical journal The Lancet, various experts diagnosed poor Tutankhamun with a dizzying range of conditions, including an adrenal tumor; Klinefelter’s syndrome (in which men carry an extra X chromosome in their cells); Wilson’s disease (in which there’s too much copper in the body’s tissues); or even a “Tutankhamun syndrome” new to medical science.6 Eventually Ronald Harrison felt obliged to write in, pointing out that as the only expert who had actually studied Tutankhamun’s mummy, as opposed to simply admiring statues in an exhibition, he could confirm that there was no evidence the king had any of the suggested disorders.7
That didn’t stop the speculation though. In 1980, a doctor from Philadelphia named Bernadine Paulshock suggested that because certain statues of Amenhotep III, Akhenaten, Smenkhkare, and Tutankhamun all show signs of breasts, this could represent a genetic disorder running in the family.8 She suggested pseudohermaphroditism, where males also exhibit female characteristics, a condition that she argued was common in families with a long history of inbreeding.
In the 1990s, Bob Brier suggested that Akhenaten, with his elongated head and spindly limbs, suffered from Marfan syndrome, a disorder of the connective tissue that holds muscles and bones together.9 And in 2009, scientists from Yale University came up with yet another suspect: a hormonal disorder called Antley-Bixler syndrome, in which a single mutated gene causes an elongated skull as well as overproduction of the sex hormone estrogen.10
Selim and his colleagues looked for signs of some of these disorders, but like Harrison found no evidence that either Tutankhamun or the KV55 mummy suffered any such problems. Their skulls, although very wide, weren’t pathological. Tutankhamun’s penis, albeit detached from his body, looked normal too. They concluded that the womanly appearance of the statues was probably “a royally decreed style,” and that neither Tutankhamun nor Akhenaten actually had a significantly bizarre or feminine physique.
To summarize, then, Tutankhamun was a full-blown male, at least. But he was no longer an active youth who perhaps died in a hunting accident. Instead he was a weak, inbred cripple, afflicted by a series of congenital disorders. Oh, and he was infected with malaria.
As supporting evidence for the king’s diseased state, the team pointed to various foodstuffs found in Tutankhamun’s tomb, including fruits, seeds, and oils that had possible medicinal uses. For example, the tomb contained thirty-six baskets of date-like fruit from the Zizyphus or Christ’s-thorn tree, which was primarily eaten as food, but also prescribed to treat stomach complaints, fever, and pain. Coriander seeds, found in eight baskets, could be used to treat gastrointestinal complaints, infected wounds, or “demonic” diseases of the head.
The researchers also pointed out that more than a hundred “walking sticks” were found in the tomb, and argued that the blemish on the mummy’s left cheek might be an inflamed bite from the malaria-carrying mosquito. Finally, they cited images of Tutankhamun that showed him “performing activities such as hunting while seated.” For example, an ornamented chest from his tomb shows him sitting on a stool with his queen at his feet while he shoots arrows from his bow.
In the JAMA paper, the team came up with a scenario for how he died that impressively managed to include all of these factors, as well as the broken le
g reported in 2005 (which has now mysteriously transformed from a mere possibility into a confirmed fact): “The project believes that Tutankhamun’s death was most likely a result of malaria coupled with his generally weak constitution. The CT scan of the pharaoh earlier confirmed the presence of an unhealed break in the king’s left thigh bone; the team speculates that the king’s weakened state may have led to a fall or that a fall weakened his already fragile physical condition.”
Meanwhile Hawass focused on the revelation that Tutankhamun was the product of incest. The union between Akhenaten and his sister “planted the seed of their son’s early death,” he wrote in National Geographic.11 “Tutankhamun’s health was compromised from the moment he was conceived.”
The resulting documentary, called King Tut Unwrapped, showed over four hours on the Discovery Channel a few days later. A New York Times reviewer described it as “CSI: Egypt,”12 and while he wasn’t captivated by repeated shots of scientists in lab coats peering at test tubes and computer screens, the film certainly got the attention of the world’s press, for example National Geographic daily news, which announced “King Tut Mysteries Solved: Was Disabled, Malarial and Inbred,”13 or the Daily Mail’s rather less concise “Unmasked: The Real Faces of the Crippled King Tutankhamun (Who Walked with a Cane) and His Incestuous Parents.”14
The success of the latest project was stunning, and its dramatic findings soon became, as one blogger put it, “accepted cocktail-party fact.”15 But it wasn’t long before cracks started to appear. In June 2010, JAMA published five letters16 from scientists in various fields, attacking the Tutankhamun paper on a series of fronts. Each seemingly clear conclusion was suddenly dragged into a mire of academic uncertainty.
One letter, from Brenda Baker, an expert in ancient human skeletons at Arizona State University, complained that the KV55 mummy couldn’t be Akhenaten, as pretty much everyone who had studied it, from Elliot Smith to Derry to Harrison, as well as a more recent examination by a physical anthropologist named Joyce Filer, had concluded that this individual was in his early twenties at most when he died (based on fusion of the ends of his bones, and the state of his wisdom teeth), whereas Akhenaten was thought to be at least in his mid-thirties.*
Selim says his CT scans show that the mummy’s age at death was considerably older than previously thought, supporting the identification of Akhenaten. Pinning him down on the details proves difficult, though. The reasoning behind this conclusion isn’t given in the JAMA paper, and Selim has given various age ranges at different times. In the paper itself, he concludes that the mummy was aged thirty-five to forty-five, in the accompanying press release, he says, “between forty-five and fifty-five,”17 and in a documentary that features the CT study he says, “forty-five to fifty-five, even sixty.”18
When I asked him to clarify in an interview in November 2011, he couldn’t remember exactly what age range he had concluded. He says that assessing the age of any fully grown skeleton is a “very subjective judgment,” but argues that the age at death of the KV55 mummy must be significantly older than early twenties because of signs of age-related decline such as arthritis in the spine and joints.
Filer says she’s confident from her examination that there is no sign of arthritis on the bones, and cautions that even if there were, arthritis on its own doesn’t give an accurate indication of age. In line with Derry and Harrison, she believes that the individual is most likely to be the younger Smenkhkare. Selim is sticking with Akhenaten, arguing that CT scans show details that aren’t necessarily clear in a visual or X-ray examination.
A second letter questioned the team’s suggestion of malaria as the primary cause of Tutankhamun’s early death. Christian Timmann and Christian Meyer, molecular biologists from Hamburg, Germany, pointed out that as adults, Tutankhamun, Yuya, and Tjuiu were very unlikely to have died of malaria. In areas where malaria is endemic, as it presumably was in ancient Egypt, malaria tends to kill young children; anyone surviving to adulthood would almost certainly be semi-immune to the disease.*
The third letter was from Irwin Braverman of Yale Medical School and his colleague Philip Mackowiak, the scientists behind the previous suggestion that Akhenaten suffered from a variant of Antley-Bixler syndrome. The Egyptian team had ruled this out, saying there was “no evidence” of female breasts in the KV55 mummy or Tutankhamun. Braverman and Mackowiak pointed out that as KV55 is just a skeleton and Tutankhamun’s entire chest is missing, this is a pretty meaningless statement. In their view, the case for Antley-Bixler (in both individuals) is still open.
Then, there was skepticism over Tutankhamun’s supposedly crippled left foot. James Gamble, an orthopedic surgeon at Stanford University, argued that although the foot is in a slightly twisted position, the individual bones each look perfectly normal, ruling out clubfoot. He thinks it’s much more likely that the foot just got scrunched up when bandaged by the embalmers, while the missing toe bone has probably just fallen out of the mummy during its various trials since 1925. Meanwhile, other experts have questioned the diagnosis of necrosis, pointing out that embalming materials applied to the body after death could have eaten away at the bone over time.
Egyptologists too have poured cold water on the idea that Tutankhamun was crippled. For example, Marianne Eaton-Krauss, an independent scholar based in Germany, who has published extensively on Tutankhamun’s burial, describes the JAMA paper as “aggravating” and complains that it shows little knowledge of relevant Egyptological discussions.19 She rejects the idea that sticks found in the tomb suggest Tutankhamun needed help to walk, arguing that staffs and staves were a sign of prestige in ancient Egypt, and would be a key part of any pharaoh’s tomb contents. Rather than being intended as crutches, she points out, many of them were used in hunting or hand-to-hand combat, or to handle snakes.
She isn’t persuaded by the “seated while hunting” argument either. She points out that the scene on Tutankhamun’s ivory chest shows him fishing from a folding stool, a situation in which it’s perfectly reasonable to sit down.* Similar images are known for other pharaohs, for example, a depiction of the Fifth-Dynasty king Sahure from the causeway of his pyramid complex at Abusir, which shows him seated while fowling.
Selim stands by his conclusions, claiming that the abnormalities seen in Tutankhamun’s foot “could never have happened after he died.” If the damage had occurred after death, he argues, you would expect to see breaks or damage in the other toe bones too. The Italian radiologist Paul Gostner, who advised on the study, supports Selim’s diagnosis, arguing that the foot matches the diagnostic criteria for “grade 1 clubfoot” and that the CT images the team has published “aren’t sufficient for a conclusive evaluation when viewed on their own.”
Overall, however, some scholars remain concerned that many of the abnormalities diagnosed again and again in these royal mummies, including scoliosis and clubfoot, are simply side effects of mummification. Selim and his team are talented radiologists, they argue, but aren’t experienced in the particular challenges of studying ancient mummies (as of course very few researchers are). Interpreting damage to a three-thousand-year-old mummified body is very different from diagnosing a living patient, or carrying out an autopsy on a fresh corpse.
There was one more letter, and because of my background in genetics, this is the one that intrigued me the most. It seemed to tear apart the flagship part of the paper, the multimillion-dollar DNA analysis.
The authors of the letter, Eske Willerslev and Eline Lorenzen, come from the Centre for GeoGenetics at Denmark’s Natural History Museum in Copenhagen, one of the world’s most respected ancient DNA labs. They claim that “in most, if not all, ancient Egyptian remains, ancient DNA does not survive to a level that is currently retrievable,” before concluding: “We question the reliability of the genetic data presented in this study and therefore the validity of the authors’ conclusions.”
For an academic publication, this is about as strongly worded as scientists will get. Roughly
translated, it basically means, “We don’t believe a word of it.” Yet this seems to be a robust, careful study, with a huge budget, state-of-the-art equipment, and well-respected international consultants. It’s published in an authoritative journal, and the team appears to have followed the internationally accepted list of guidelines for ancient DNA to the letter. How can it have upset these other experts so much? I call Lorenzen and Willerslev, and then a string of other ancient DNA experts around the world, to find out what’s going on, and immediately feel a little like Alice going down the rabbit hole. It turns out that in the field of ancient DNA, particularly when it comes to Egyptian mummies, very little is as it seems.
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* In case you’re interested in the details, Zink says they used a method called gel electrophoresis. This involves injecting the sample into a slab of gelatin, then applying an electric current to pull the charged components (including DNA) through the gel. Smaller molecules travel faster through the matrix of the gel than larger ones, so this separates the different components in the sample by size. The researchers then cut out the piece of gel where they expected the DNA to end up, and washed and purified it from there.
* The mummy once thought to be Thutmose I, sampled during the Hatshepsut project.
* According to Egyptologist Aidan Dodson of the University of Bristol, UK, author of Amarna Sunset: Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb, and the Egyptian Counter-Reformation,5 these statues are now recognized as actually representing the female king Neferneferuaten, a co-ruler and possible successor of Akhenaten. It seems likely that she was none other than Nefertiti, who disappears from view just as Neferneferuaten appears in the record.