by Jo Marchant
Hawass’s approach reminds me of the senior adviser* to President George W. Bush who scoffed at the “reality-based community” in 2004. U.S. journalist Ron Suskind wrote in the New York Times magazine that the aide defined this community to him as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.”11 Suskind took this as a compliment until the aide continued: “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
Suskind argued that Bush and his closest circle acted according to a “faith-based” reality, based on gut instinct and moral or religious positions, in which factual data or evidence are all but irrelevant. “Open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value,” he said. “It may in fact create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker.”
Similarly, when Hawass pronounces on camera that a particular mummy is Queen Hatshepsut, or Tiye, or Akhenaten, or that Tutankhamun was a cripple who died of a broken leg, he is creating that most precious commodity: certainty. The actual truth—generally the doubt—that underlies the headlines is seen as irrelevant, even counterproductive. The royal mummy studies have fulfilled their purpose—created the dramatic narrative needed to sell the TV documentaries and museum exhibitions. Where would be the point in undermining that? At least until the next study, which will create a new story and a new wave of interest.
Of course, it’s not just Hawass. This is pretty much the history of Tutankhamun’s mummy since its discovery, with precious few studies carried out without a film crew in tow. His identity has flipped from one extreme to another, with stories created by journalists, Egyptologists with books to sell, filmmakers, politicians, and scientists. Because that’s what we—the audience—all like to read and watch. When something moves from dusty academia into popular culture, it’s rare that you’ll hear someone make the one true statement: “Actually, we just don’t know.”
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* Fortunately, this wasn’t the case—the heads turned out to be from anonymous mummies, seen as unimportant, which were used to calibrate the CT scanner.
* University of Cambridge scholar Megan Rowland paints a similar picture in a 2011 report8 on the political sigificance of Egyptian antiquities. “Egyptological research . . . is subject to heavy censorship,” she concludes. “Many Egyptologists have been victims of smear campaigns at the hands of SCA [antiquities service] officials when their research findings and theories have clashed with the ‘authorised’ discourse of the Egyptian officials—and the approval of these authorities is imperative if one hopes to obtain excavation permits in Egypt. Thus, in recent years the Egyptological community has become withdrawn and conservative in terms of its openness to publish findings that are critical of the shortcomings of Egyptian heritage management.”
* The quotes in this paragraph are from additional interviews conducted by phone and e-mail in January 2011 and January 2013. All other quotes in this chapter are from our meeting in Cairo in October 2011.
* Since claimed to be Karl Rove.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
AUDIENCE WITH THE KING
IDON’T RECOGNIZE IT UNTIL I SEE THE SIGN. The entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb today looks nothing like the steep, stone passageway shown in Harry Burton’s black-and-white photos from the 1920s. Instead, just beneath the grand square doorway to the tomb of Rameses VI is a brick wall, neat and low, with a cream-painted grill gate. It leads to a room with some dated information boards, cubbyholes for cameras, and a bored-looking guard.
The original entrance tunnel, the one excavated by Carter, slopes down from the back right corner of this room. Modern visitors are helped down by sturdy banisters and metal steps that lead onto a wooden ramp. But the passage is still steep, narrow, and claustrophobic, giving a sense of how tough it must have been for Carter and his team to maneuver Tutankhamun’s thousands of fragile possessions up and out of the tomb.
I emerge into a small, bare box with roughly cut walls and ceiling and a wooden platform for a floor. This is the antechamber that gave Carter his first candlelit glimpse of those wonderful things. Now it feels cramped and scruffy, totally ordinary, with no sense of the glamor and history conveyed in Burton’s pictures. Straight ahead is a low opening that leads down to the annex, where an excited Carter and Carnarvon once crawled underneath a golden monster-headed couch to peep through to the jumble of treasures beyond. Mohammed, the tomb’s gaffir (guardian), helpfully points his flashlight inside for me, but there’s nothing to see, just a bare stone space.
To the right, the wall has been knocked down and replaced by a wooden banister that overlooks the burial chamber. This is the loftiest room in the tomb because its floor is lower than the antechamber, while its ceiling is just as high. It’s also the only decorated space. There on the yellow-painted walls are Tutankhamun’s mummy in procession to the tomb; Ay in his leopard-skin cloak; twelve crouching baboons representing the twelve hours of the night—all pockmarked with reddish-black spots of long-dead fungus. The far right corner of the burial chamber holds a metal grill gate: the entrance to the treasury, where the great jackal Anubis once stood guard.
From this standpoint, you can look down onto Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus and coffin. They’re not exactly shown off to best advantage, surrounded by a raised chipboard platform draped with trailing wires and lights mounted on metal rigs, and some scruffy workmen’s bags and tools. Yet they manage to transcend this mundane backdrop, forming a golden island that at last gives me some sense of Carter’s awesome discovery.
The sarcophagus is often described as pink granite but to me the color looks closer to terracotta. It’s nearly five feet high and nine feet long, but only when seeing it for real do I realize how enormous that actually is. The chest’s huge size emphasizes the delicacy of the lovely goddesses carved onto each corner, wingtips just touching in the whisper of a kiss. Inside, the king’s gold-covered coffin stares up at the rough ceiling. Black unguents still cover its toes, you can see a few drips trailing down toward its ankles—if you can pull your gaze for long enough from the magnetic attraction of those huge, godlike eyes.
It’s February 2012. Tourist numbers have yet to rebound since the revolutionary events of last January, and so far I’ve had the tomb to myself (and Mohammed). But now a small group joins me on the balcony to admire the view. They’re not quite as impressed as I am. “It’s all fake,” a tall man in a baseball hat announces to his companions, who nod appreciatively. “His real sarcophagus is in Cairo.”
Tutankhamun’s mummy, in contrast to the glittering contents of the burial chamber, is barely noticeable. I find its glass case tucked in a corner, against the left wall of the antechamber as you enter the tomb, protected by a wooden rail. A linen cloth covers the body from neck to ankles, leaving a floating black face that’s cracked like parched earth.
The figure is desperately underwhelming: an almost-absence that draws you in like a vacuum. It has no ears. Its eyes are sunken pits. Its nose is flattened. There’s hardly any bulk under the sheet, just a shallow mound for the tummy and the barest hint of stick legs. Peeking out of the bottom are his black feet. They glisten like ash, with splayed, bony toes that look like they could crumble to dust any second.
The mummy is modestly lit, so it’s hard to make out details in the blackness of its skin. There are no answers here, just an enigmatic hole in linen-colored space.
I ask Mohammed, who is clearly wondering why I’m still in the tomb after half an hour when most tourists are in and out in less than five minutes, what he thinks of the king. After all, he spends more time with him than most. He shrugs. “He’s just a boy.” That’s the feeling I get too. I’m struck more than ever by the surreal, almost cruel, juxtaposition between the hugely powerful international persona of “King Tut”—Hollywood star, master of marketing and brand recognition, key player in interna
tional politics—and this frail twig.
Here, taking my own audience with the ancient king, I’ve reached the end of my archaeological adventure. I’ve followed the twists and turns in this mummy’s story from its dramatic awakening in 1925 through a battery of X-rays and CT scans and DNA tests to this fragile vigil in a museum case. So does it leave us any closer to understanding the truth about Tutankhamun?
After unpeeling the layers of claim and counterclaim over the last ninety years, it’s possible to understand where the different myths and stories come from, and to assess the strength of evidence for the various different versions of Tutankhamun with which we’ve been presented.
To take the surest ground first, the conclusions that Douglas Derry reached during his 1925 autopsy still stand. Tutankhamun was male, of slight build, around five foot six inches tall, with buck teeth and a particularly large head just like that of the king found in tomb KV55. And I haven’t found anyone who doubts Derry’s estimate of the king’s age of death at around eighteen.
Derry also found no obvious sign of any illness or deformity—which is clearly at odds with the most recent CT analysis, and the conclusion that Tutankhamun had a mangled left foot. I would argue that Derry was right on this one too.
CT team members Ashraf Selim and Paul Gostner are convinced that the damage they see—a twisted club-like foot, missing toe bone, and bone damage that resembles necrosis—all affected Tutankhamun during his life. Other experts are skeptical, arguing that these signs could easily be damage sustained by the mummy after death. Selim and his colleagues argue that unpublished scans prove their case, but unless they make these available, it’s impossible for anyone else to verify their conclusion.
There might be another way out of this impasse, however. If Tutankhamun’s foot really shows such serious deformities, they should show up in the X-rays taken by Ronald Harrison in 1968. Perhaps Harrison can help to solve the mystery.
Anatomy professor Robert Connolly, who now holds all of Harrison’s Tutankhamun data, is convinced that in Harrison’s X-ray plate, the left foot was perfectly normal, suggesting that the damage picked up in the CT scans has occurred since 1968. Frustratingly, Harrison never published this X-ray image,* and the relevant plate is now missing from Connolly’s collection.
I checked Harrison’s archives at Liverpool University, but there’s no X-ray plate of the left foot there either. On page 215 of his never-published book manuscript, however, Harrison briefly describes what his X-rays of the feet showed: “There is no evidence of major deformity such as hallux valgus (bunion), as the metatarsal and proximal phalanx of the big toe are in a perfectly straight line.”
Harrison was an experienced anatomist, and it seems unlikely to me that in ruling out any “major deformity” in the feet, he would have missed such significant problems as clubfoot or a missing bone. This suggests that either this damage has indeed occurred since 1968, or that Harrison saw it but believed it was postmortem. Then I found another telling detail on page 164.
“The recent investigating team noticed that the toes of the left foot are free of resin and consist of little more than their skeletal framework,” Harrison wrote. “One of the guides in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings remarked that he had been present at the earlier opening of the tomb and recalled one of Howard Carter’s team using a blow lamp to remove some resin from the foot of the mummy, in order that it could be analyzed chemically!”
It makes you wonder what else Carter and his team did that isn’t noted in their official reports. Anyway, if the left foot was manhandled in this way, it seems to me that this could easily account for the damage seen by Selim and Gostner. The heat from the blow lamp could damage the surface of the bones in a way that might give the appearance of necrosis. Melting and scraping off the resin could help to twist the foot (if the mummy’s tight bandaging hadn’t already done this job). And once the delicate toe bones were exposed, it wouldn’t be that difficult for one of them to fall out.
The idea of a healthy, active young man fits better with items found in Tutankhamun’s tomb, from the slingshots and fire-starter kit of the boy, to the weapons, armor, and chariots of the grown man. And there’s one other hint of supporting evidence. André Veldmeijer, an expert in ancient Egyptian leather based at the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo, has studied the extensive footwear from Tutankhamun’s tomb. He tells me that the king’s shoes and sandals (including those worn during life) show no obvious difference between the left and right sides, which is perhaps not what you’d expect for someone with a clubfoot.
In the absence of convincing data otherwise, therefore, I think it’s safest to assume that Tutankhamun’s feet were just fine. I can’t see any strong reason to conclude that he was lame or walked with a stick.
When it comes to the DNA evidence and what it tells us about Tutankhamun’s family relationships, I think we have to treat this with caution too, at least until more evidence comes to light or the team publish further details. That goes especially for findings that go against the archaeological clues—for example, that Tutankhamun’s mother was Akhenaten’s sister, or one of the mummies from tomb KV35—or medical ones, for example, that the king survived malaria as a child only to be struck down as an adult. In the meantime, all we can really say is that Tutankhamun was almost certainly of royal birth, and closely related to the KV55 mummy, which from its age seems perhaps more likely to be Smenkhkare than Akhenaten (although working out the age of such ancient mummies is fraught with difficulty, so we can’t rule out either of them). Regarding the fetuses, it does seem most likely that they were Tutankhamun’s children, but there isn’t actually any direct evidence for this.*
So what killed Tutankhamun? With no compelling evidence that he was in fact ill, crippled, or inbred, I don’t think Hawass’s conclusion that a fall struck down an already weakened king has much going for it. That he broke his leg shortly before death is possible at least, but by no means certain—any death scenario based on it is fun speculation but not much more.
One of the few things experts do agree on is that there’s no physical evidence of murder—though this doesn’t mean Tutankhamun wasn’t subjected to poisoning or strangling or some other method that doesn’t leave a mark on a three-thousand-year-old body. There’s also some archaeological evidence suggesting that although Tutankhamun may have died suddenly, he wasn’t murdered, at least not in any kind of planned attack on the throne. Ironically, it’s the very evidence that investigators such as Bob Brier have previously used to build the case for foul play.
Brier based his conclusions heavily on the Hittite letters, in which an Egyptian queen, probably Ankhesenamun, wrote to the Hittite king after the death of her husband, begging him to send a son for her to marry. Brier argued that Ankhesenamun’s words show she was under threat from someone close to home as she struggled to find a successor for Tutankhamun, and, as we’ve seen, concluded that her chief adviser Ay murdered the king so he could seize power himself. But another Egyptologist named Robert Hanawalt has since argued precisely the opposite.3
First, points out Hanawalt, the Hittite king didn’t initially believe Ankhesenamun, sending his envoy to check if she was telling the truth about having no successor to the throne. In other words, Tutankhamun’s death caught the Hittites by surprise. This suggests he was healthy, and his death unexpected. If the Egyptians’ king was ailing—ill or crippled—their mortal enemies the Hittites would presumably have known about it.
Second, the very fact that there wasn’t immediately a successor in place suggests that Tutankhamun’s death was not part of a premeditated attempt to seize the throne. Hanawalt points out that if you’re going to mastermind a coup, the number one thing you need to have is a plan for a swift takeover of power—that’s the whole point, after all. Yet the Hittite letters suggest that no candidate came forward for months, until Ankhesenamun’s desperate plan to marry a Hittite prince failed, and the elderly Ay finally stepped into the breach.
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p; I find Hanawalt’s argument quite persuasive. But it’s still speculation, and I feel obliged to point out here that although Tutankhamun’s widow, Ankhesenamun, is seen as the most likely candidate for the author of the Hittite letters, not all experts agree that it was definitely her.
If not murder, one possible cause of death might be the plague, which is known to have been rife in Egypt at this time. When the Hittite king learned that the son he had sent to Egypt to marry Ankhesenamun was killed on the way, he got his revenge by attacking Egyptian territory in Canaan and northern Syria. Unfortunately for him, the prisoners his army brought home carried with them a plague that ravaged the Hittite land and eventually killed both the king and his successor. Scholars believe that this plague was a problem across Egypt at this time, and may have affected the royal family there. Plenty of Tutankhamun’s family members certainly seem to have been dying off at this time—he is thought to have had at least two short-lived predecessors in just a few years after Akhenaten’s death. And whoever the KV55 mummy is, something killed him as a young man too.
Alternatively, a violent accident remains a realistic possibility. Accidents (including car crashes) are by far the most common cause of death in young men today, and if Tutankhamun enjoyed activities such as hunting and charioteering, as suggested by the objects in his tomb, he must have confronted some physical risks. In line with this idea, Benson Harer’s conclusion that Tutankhamun’s chest was crushed before his body even arrived at the embalmers is for me among the most thoughtful and persuasive theories out there, and neatly ties up several oddities regarding the mummy that have been ignored by most other investigators. Whether it was a hippo that caused the injury is of course a very speculative suggestion. But I’d love to believe it. And to be honest, it’s as good as anything else we’ve got.