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He has been stripped and broken, prodded and sampled, scanned and DNA tested. We have filmed him, argued over him, and visited him in our millions. If King Tut was looking for some peace and quiet in the afterlife, he must be sorely disappointed.
When British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun's treasure-filled tomb in 1922, he described its sumptuous but jumbled contents as like "the property-room of an opera of a vanished civilization." But the greatest prize was the king himself. His mummy, found dripping with gold, sparked a worldwide obsession with King Tut that continues today: his mask is used to sell everything from museum tickets to budget flights, and his curse has spawned an entire genre of films.
In my new book The Shadow King: The Bizarre Afterlife of King Tut's Mummy, I've investigated the story of the mummy since Carter's discovery, from its shadowy role in international politics to the secrets of its DNA.
Here are some of my highlights from the intriguing modern life of King Tut:
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Tut was buried in a coffin made of solid gold, so heavy it took eight strong men to lift it. But when Howard Carter and his colleague, anatomist Douglas Derry, tried to take the mummy out, they had a problem. Sticky black unguents poured over Tut during his funeral had turned rock hard over the centuries, gluing the mummy to the bottom of the box. Attempts to melt the resin in the sun didn’t work, so Carter and Derry broke off the mummy’s arms and legs, cut off its head and sawed the body in two – then scraped out the pieces with hot knives.
Carter did a great job of rearranging the pieces before replacing the king in his tomb. But in 1968, when Ronald Harrison, an anatomist from Liverpool University, UK, opened the coffin to X-ray the mummy, he found it in a sorry state. Thieves had rifled through the pieces and ripped off the only pieces of jewelry that Carter left in place – a delicate skullcap and golden beaded bib. The crime may have taken place during World War II, when security in the Valley of the Kings fell apart. “Somebody presumably paid a large bribe to see the mummy, saw there was some jewelry still there, and thought, ‘I’ll have that’,” says Aidan Dodson, an Egyptologist at the University of Bristol, UK.
One thing the thieves didn’t take was Tut’s penis. It is wrapped in bandages and measures (in its desiccated state) just over two inches long. Present and correct in the 1920s, it appeared missing in 1968. This sparked fears that the royal member had been snaffled by looters, but in 2005, CT scans confirmed it had simply fallen into the sand. Radiologist Ashraf Selim, who analyzed the scans, seems perplexed by media interest in Tut’s most precious possession. “It’s of no clinical importance for us,” he told me. But according to Mansour Boraik, head of antiquities for the region, it’s worth a look, with a straw down the middle to keep it erect, perhaps to emulate the over-sexed god of the dead, Osiris.
Derry and Harrison both noted that at well over six inches across, Tut’s skull is impressively broad. This suggests he’s related to a mysterious pharaoh found in a nearby tomb, whose skull is almost as wide. Discovered in 1907, this tomb contained a jumble of burial goods plus a mysterious mummy with a golden collar bent round its head to make a crown, and the face and name crudely scraped from its coffin. Some think this is the defiled body of Akhenaten, the pharaoh who threw out Egypt’s traditional religion in favor of a single god. Shortly afterwards, Tut reversed those changes. The skull measurements gave the first clue that these two kings were closely related – perhaps father and son, or brothers.
Shortly after Tut’s tomb was discovered, Carter’s patron Lord Carnarvon died from complications following an infected mosquito bite. The newspapers ran heated arguments over whether he was finished off by vengeful spirits: the pharaoh’s curse was born. After murderous ghosts fell out of fashion, explanations for the curse included booby traps, from laser guns to cyanide poisoning, laid by the ancient Egyptians with the help of alien visitors. A more scientific suggestion made in the 1950s was that a killer fungus got the earl: perhaps Histoplasma, which grows in bat guano and had claimed several cavers in southern Africa. Locals confirmed that when Carter first opened Tut’s tomb, it did indeed become infested with bats until he sealed it with a solid door.
As well as X-raying King Tut in 1968, Harrison collected a scrap of the mummy’s skin and took it home in an envelope. He gave it to his colleague Robert Connolly, who developed an ingenious technique to work out Tutankhamun’s blood type. He purified the relevant molecules from the mummy’s cells and mixed them with modern human blood, in effect bringing the pharaoh’s blood group back to life. The result was A2MN, the same as the anonymous pharaoh found nearby, providing further evidence for their close relationship. Connolly still has the leftover pieces of Tut in a plastic screwcap tube, which he keeps – along with samples that Harrison collected from several other royal mummies – in a drawer on the corner of his desk.
When the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York organized a touring exhibition of Tut’s treasures in the 1970s, its director Thomas Hoving became concerned about taking responsibility for so many priceless items and tried to cancel. President Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, called the museum’s chairman. The show was “a vital part of the Middle East peace process,” he said. If the Met didn’t go ahead, the government would be “disturbed." Nixon was keen for political stability in the Middle East, and apparently saw the exhibition as a way to cement links between Egypt and the US. The tour ran from 1976-9, smashing attendance records and inspiring a hit song by Steve Martin. The Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty was signed in March 1979.
During the 1990s, two Mormon researchers, Scott Woodward and Wilfred Griggs from Brigham Young University in Utah, DNA tested several royal mummies from the 18th Dynasty – the period when Tut ruled. They aimed to reconstruct family relationships from this mysterious period of Egyptian history, but the authorities cancelled the project before they could test Tut. The official story is that his mummy was too precious to disturb. But some Egyptologists have claimed it was because of fears that they hoped to prove the pharaohs were Jewish. In 2000, a Japanese team gained permission to test Tutankhamun’s DNA, but the project was again cancelled at last minute due to “national security."
One of scientists’ main concerns has been to work out why King Tut died so young – around age 18. In 1968, Harrison saw a faint double line at the base of his skull: possible evidence of a brain haemorrhage. He announced that the king may have been hit on the head, and the story of Tut’s cruel murder made headlines worldwide. The theory spawned films and books such as the 1998 bestseller The Murder of Tutankhamun: a true story. But like so many ideas about Tut’s life and death, it is based on illusion. The double line was an artifact of the imaging process, created because the skull was X-rayed at a slight angle. It’s virtually impossible to prove that King Tut wasn’t murdered. But there isn’t a scrap of evidence that he was.
CT scans and DNA tests recently carried out by Egyptian researchers have thrown up several theories for what killed the king, including a chariot fall that broke his leg; a weak constitution caused by his parents being brother and sister; and malaria. Other experts have refuted all these, however, so in the absence of any single convincing explanation, here’s my favorite theory. The mummy’s heart and chest are missing. Some experts think they were removed by Carter or the looters. But some, including Benson Harer, a Seattle-based physician who is one of the few people outside Egypt to gain access to the CT scans, insist that the body was mummified this way. This suggests the king died in an accident that destroyed his chest. The most likely cause of such an injury, says Harer, is a charging hippo.
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