by Jo Marchant
With so little to go on, we all inevitably bring our own assumptions and inclinations to the table. My favorite interpretation of the king, based on everything I’ve seen and discovered over the past couple of years plus a dose of gut feeling and personal preference, is that he was a fit, boisterous young man who loved sports and hunting and escaping his entourage until one day he took one risk too many. But that’s just me. You’re welcome to choose your own.
Of course, as you’ve probably worked out by now, this book isn’t really about Tutankhamun. Not the ancient king, anyway. I hope I’ve burst a few bubbles, but I shouldn’t think we will ever really know the truth of what happened to him 3,300 years ago. Instead, after tracing the mummy’s turbulent afterlife over the past ninety years, here’s the tale I think it really tells.
It’s the story of the people who have studied Tutankhamun and the other royal mummies—who these scientists were, where they came from, and most importantly, what they were trying to find. But more than that, it’s about all of us—why we are so fascinated with Tut, why we love these stories so much, and why we care so intimately about the fate of a boy who lived millennia ago. In other words, what studying this mummy really illuminates is not Tutankhamun himself but us today: what makes us human and the different things we’re searching for. The more we probe this sorry pile of bones, the more we shine a light deep into our own souls.
In 1927, after studying Tutankhamun’s mummy and the contents of the tomb, Howard Carter concluded: “The mystery of his life still eludes us—the shadows move but the dark is never quite uplifted.”4
That’s still true today. The more we find out about him, the further away the real man seems to be. And I think this is what fascinates us so much about Tutankhamun, because it means that we can see anything we like in him. He’s a mirror that reflects back to us our desires, motivations, and weaknesses. Depending on who you are, he can be a source of treasure, perhaps, or a murder mystery, a route to ancient knowledge, or proof of the superiority of your nation. Some of the themes stay the same, while others change over the decades. In the 1920s, he was a link to the spirit world, or a way to prove the truth of the Bible. Today, he’s a marketing tool, used to sell anything from museum tickets to budget flights.
There’s a well-known quote about Stonehenge, the five-thousand-year-old circle of stones in Wiltshire, England, which has inspired a range of interpretations from religious temple to healing center to astronomical observatory. In 1967, the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes wrote that “every age gets the Stonehenge it deserves—and desires,”5 arguing that the various theories were more a product of the culture of their time than any insight into the prehistoric psyche.
I reckon Stonehenge has nothing on the world’s most famous pharaoh. As I stand in his tomb, I look again at the mummy and see not an ancient king but a set of stones packed full to bursting with human obsessions and desires: a gateway to God, riches, fame, knowledge, peace. The origins of civilization. The economic success of a country. The pride and identity of a race.
For me at least, this bundle of human needs and imaginings is the real Tutankhamun.
I say goodbye and walk back up the steps into the dazzling sun. On the valley floor, small huddles of tourists listen intently to their guides. Kent Weeks sits in his dust-colored caravan. And the mountains rise creamy brown on all sides, rugged and pebbly, dotted with outcrops of cliffs. Behind the entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb, the pyramid-shaped peak of El-Qurn stands tallest of all, protective, watchful, unchanged since the ancient Egyptians came here to lay down their most precious dead.
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* A 1978 book chapter1 about the BBC film of Harrison’s work includes an X-ray image from the project that appears to show a normal left foot. Unfortunately, it turns out this is actually an image of the king’s right foot, flipped and mislabeled.
* The fetuses don’t seem to have suffered any obvious deformity either. They were CT scanned at Cairo University in July 2008 by the radiologist Sahar Saleem. In a paper2 published with Hawass in November 2011, she reports no evidence of major congenital abnormality in either child, with previously diagnosed problems (including the deformed shoulder seen by Harrison, and mild scoliosis reported by Selim) down to postmortem damage. The scans also suggest that the larger fetus had packing stuffed under the skin to bulk out its shape. This is interesting because this technique isn’t otherwise seen until the Twenty-First Dynasty, except in the mummy of Amenhotep III. This has previously been used to argue that this mummy isn’t Amenhotep III at all but a later king, but finding such packing in the fetus too (which is definitely from Tutankhamun’s time) proves that it was used in the Eighteenth Dynasty after all.
AFTERWORD
A BRIEF WINDOW
AS I WRITE THIS IN SEPTEMBER 2012, the ancient DNA lab at Cairo’s Egyptian Museum lies empty, and its CT scanner is unused. Since last year’s political upheavals and the departure of Zahi Hawass, research on the royal mummies has come to a standstill.
Egyptian scientists Yehia Gad and Ashraf Selim say they are still analyzing data from their studies on the mummies, and that they hope to publish more on them in the future. But without the energy and international connections of Hawass, not to mention that the antiquities service now appears to be millions of dollars in debt, it seems that the driving force behind these studies has ebbed away.
Hawass’s current successor is an archaeologist and ex–antiquities inspector called Mohamed Ibrahim. Appointed in December 2011, he kept his seat as antiquities minister when Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party was elected prime minister in Egypt’s first free elections, held in June 2012.
So far, Ibrahim says he has been busy appeasing thousands of poorly paid antiquities service employees, restarting essential conservation work and trying to stem the looting that still afflicts archaeological sites across the country.1 Royal mummy research is not a high priority in such circumstances, and Ibrahim shows no signs of chasing a media profile like that of Hawass. For the time being at least, the era of big-budget mummy documentaries may be over.
The political changes are still fresh, however, and archaeologists across the country are waiting to see how the new regime will affect their work. How Egypt moves forward will determine not just the fate of Tutankhamun, but archaeology here as a whole. The field has been largely defined, perhaps understandably, by reaction against the colonial abuses of the past, including a reluctance to allow archaeological samples to leave the country and a desire for high-profile research to be carried out by all-Egyptian teams. But by rejecting the funding and expertise that foreign collaborations might provide, this approach has arguably taken research on the mummies out of Egyptian hands, because it has ended up being paid for and controlled by U.S. media desires and pressures.
What many researchers dream of now is a new beginning for Egyptology, a chance for the field to become more open, more egalitarian, and more scientific, in spite of the extreme journalistic, political, and commercial pressures focused upon it. “It should be about the ancient Egyptians instead of everyone’s egos,” says Salima Ikram, a mummy expert at the American University in Cairo who has worked in Egypt for the past two decades.
On the other hand, under a Muslim-led government, it is perhaps easy to imagine the antiquities service instead becoming more nationalistic—with Egyptian archaeologists more focused on what they can do with their own talents, even if this means missing out on some of the expertise or technology that’s available in the West. However, there are few signs so far of any hardening toward foreign scientists. Panicky reports (mostly on right-wing blogs) of prominent Muslim clerics pressuring President Morsi to destroy “symbols of paganism” such as the Great Pyramids appear to have been exaggerated. And his Freedom and Justice Party does not share the views of the more hard-line Islamist Salafi party (which gained 25 percent of the vote in the recent parliamentary polls), which advocates covering the faces of ancient Egyptian st
atues with wax.
There’s a third possibility. Some commentators suggest that if Hawass is the only person who can make more big-money deals happen—and bring in tourists, the revenue from whom Egypt so desperately needs—then maybe even his old links to the Mubarak regime won’t be enough to dissuade the government from reappointing him. Hawass himself certainly seems keen on the idea. He told me in 2011, “I’m the only one who can bring the tourists back,” and in July 2012, insisted to the Huffington Post that “because I am clean and honest, I will return.”2
It’s up to Egyptians where they go now, and it is their heritage—but actually it’s more important than that. Not withstanding those sociologists who criticize Westerners for trying to co-opt Egypt’s heritage as our own, this isn’t just about the history of Egypt but of all of us. The archaeological heritage in Egypt is unique. With an estimated one third of the world’s antiquities, a dry climate that preserves even organic materials beautifully, and thousands of years of unbroken history, it is the most important repository we have of information about humanity’s past.
IN THE MEANTIME, the flow of theories regarding Tutankhamun and his family continues. In a paper published in September 2012, London-based surgeon Hutan Ashrafian suggests that Tutankhamun and several of his predecessors—Akhenaten, Smenkhkare, Amenhotep III, and Thutmose IV—suffered from an inherited form of epilepsy, affecting the temporal lobe of the brain.3 Such a condition has been known to alter levels of sex hormones, which Ashrafian says might explain the feminized appearance of statues of kings such as Akhenaten and Tutankhamun.
Ashrafian says that epileptic seizures could have caused the early deaths of Smenkhkare, Akhenaten, and Tutankhamun (and even explain Tutankhamun’s broken leg, if he injured himself during a fit), and might have caused religious visions supposedly experienced by these kings, including a religious experience that Thutmose IV recorded on a stone slab known as the Dream Stele, and of course Akhenaten’s dramatic conversion to the sun disc Aten. In fact, the surgeon goes as far as to suggest that his epilepsy inspired monotheism. (The British tabloid newspaper The Sun has a slightly different take on the study, announcing in its headline, “Tutankhamun’s Death ‘Could be Linked to His Man-Boobs.’”4)
It’s an imaginative addition to the long line of Tut theories, but yet again, there’s no direct evidence for it. As we’ve seen, the strange depictions of Akhenaten may be the result of a royally decreed artistic style, while the curvy statues previously thought to represent Tutankhamun may actually show a female predecessor (perhaps Nefertiti, ruling alongside her husband, Akhenaten). And one neurologist has commented that if you’re looking for a medical explanation for religious visions, you could just as well pick bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or even intoxication from eating the wrong kind of mushrooms.5
Meanwhile, the German Egyptologist Hermann Schlögl has invited two independent geneticists to reanalyze the DNA results published by Albert Zink and his colleagues in JAMA. In a book about Nefertiti published to coincide with the centenary of the discovery of her famous bust in 1912, he presents an alternative royal family tree. Schlögl argues that the mummy of Amenhotep III—identified by the Zink team as the father of the Younger Lady from KV35 and the grandfather of Tutankhamun—has been misidentified.6 Schlögl concludes that this mummy is actually Tutankhamun’s elderly successor, Ay.* This allows him to identify the Younger Lady, Tutankhamun’s mother, as Nefertiti (who has previously been suggested as Ay’s daughter).
Again, it’s a nice idea, but as with the original family tree, this depends on the DNA data being accurate, which is open to dispute. I can’t help thinking that it’s just one more example of our determination to enforce certainty on these mysterious mummies. And it goes to show that the debate caused by the JAMA paper is far from over.
WHAT OF TUTANKHAMUN HIMSELF? How long is his desiccated figure likely to survive? Despite recent conservation efforts, it seems inevitable that before long, the mummy will return to the earth. That fate was sealed when Carter first opened the tomb. The ancient Egyptians came up with the perfect time capsule, which kept its contents fresh for thousands of years—through floods, war, famine, the rise and fall of civilizations—and probably would have done so through thousands more. A glass case, well maintained or not, seems scant protection against such ravages of history.
The risks from war and instability in the region are all too real, as shown by the looting of Tutankhamun’s mummy, presumably during the Second World War, and of the Cairo museum and other archaeological sites during the recent uprising. But perhaps an even bigger danger is from the flash floods that periodically sweep the valley. When torrential rain does occasionally fall on this desert landscape, floodwater flows down the mountain side in ever growing rivulets that meet and stop in the central valley floor, depositing tons of rubble. Howard Carter said he witnessed four such downpours during his thirty-five years in the area: “It will fill up valleys and turn them into seething rivers. In a few moments a ravine may be foaming with innumerable cascades carrying rocks down to its boulder-strewn bed.”7
Rocks deposited by such floods are what kept Tutankhamun’s sealed tomb hidden for so long. But as soon as any tomb is opened, the flooding becomes potentially devastating. For tombs that have stood open for any period of time, the floods have destroyed contents and wall paintings, and left them full of rubble.
With everything that the mummy has been through in just ninety years, I find it hard to see how it will survive many more decades or centuries, let alone millennia. We’re living in a privileged time window during which it is possible to meet our shadow king. For Tutankhamun, this bizarre and eventful afterlife is a mere flash of existence between two types of oblivion, past and future: three thousand years erased from human memory, and the eternal end of physical destruction.
This time round, though, the one thing we really know for sure about Tutankhamun—his name—seems certain to live on.
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*As discussed in chapter 9, James Harris also raised concern over the identity of this battered, odd-looking mummy, suggesting that it might be Akhenaten instead.
CHRONOLOGY OF ANCIENT EGYPT
Dates of reigns given for the kings (or high priests) mentioned in the text.
LE = Lower Egypt only; UE = Upper Egypt
All dates are more or less uncertain prior to 690 BC. Parentheses around a name and date indicate a coruler or rival ruler.
PREDYNASTIC PERIOD
Badarian Culture
5000–4000 BC
Naqada I (Amratian) Culture
4000–3500
Naqada II (Gerzian) Culture
3500–3150
Naqada III Culture
3150–3000
EARLY DYNASTIC PERIOD
Dynasty 1
2900–2720
Dynasty 2
2720–2580
OLD KINGDOM
Dynasty 3
2580–2515
Djoser
2650–2630
Dynasty 4
2515–2405
Dynasty 5
2405–2275
Dynasty 6
2275–2120
Merenre I
2300–2290
FIRST INTERMEDIATE PERIOD
Dynasties 7, 8
2120–2100
Dynasties 9, 10 (LE)
2100–2000
Dynasty 11a (UE)
2080–2010
MIDDLE KINGDOM
Dynasty 11b
2010–1940
Dynasty 12
1940–1760
Dynasty 13
1760–1660
SECOND INTERMEDIATE PERIOD
Dynasty 14 (LE)
1700–1650
Dynasty 15 (LE—Hyksos)
1650–1535
Dynasty 16 (UE)
1660–1590
Dynasty 17 (UE)
1585–1540
Seqenenre Tao
1550–1545
NEW KINGDOM
Dynasty 18
1540–1278
Ahmose I
1540–1516
Amenhotep I
1516–1496
Thutmose I
1496–1481
Thutmose II
1481–1468
Thutmose III
1468–1414
(Hatshepsut)
(1462–1447)
Amenhotep II
1415–1386
Thutmose IV
1386–1377
Amenhotep III
1377–1337
Akhenaten
1337–1321
(Smenkhkare)
(1326–1325)
(Neferneferuaten)
(1326–1319)