by Jo Marchant
To the observers at Carter’s ceremony, this seemed far more than a mummy case; it felt as if they were in the presence of the actual body of some great golden person lying in state. In the world above, empires had risen and fallen; wars and natural disasters had wracked the land; civilizations had sprung up, developed, and disappeared; major religions had come into existence and been superseded by others. Through all of it, just a few feet beneath the earth, this forgotten king had lain here in his sarcophagus, his golden face and obsidian eyes staring up toward the sky.
IT WAS AS CLOSE as Carter would get to Tutankhamun for over a year. The day after the opening of the sarcophagus, he had arranged for the wives of his team to view the coffin, but early that morning he received a letter from Pierre Lacau, who had succeeded Maspero as head of the antiquities service in 1914, saying that the government forbade the women’s visit. For Carter and his colleagues, who already felt that the government was doing everything possible to hinder rather than assist them, it was one insult too far. Carter posted a note on the notice board of the Winter Palace hotel.
“Owing to impossible restrictions and discourtesies on the part of the Public Works Dept and its antiquity service, all my collaborators, in protest, have refused to work any further upon the scientific investigations of the discoveries of the tomb of Tutankhamun.”15
In other words, they were on strike.
Carter had the keys to the tomb, but the government responded by putting its own locks on the door, meaning that no one could get in. In the meantime, the heavy sarcophagus lid remained suspended precariously above the golden coffin. A few days later, the antiquities service and police forced open the tomb doors with chisels, crowbars, and hacksaws, lowered the lid, and changed the locks.
A lengthy court case followed. Although Carter’s strike was triggered by a fairly petty dispute involving his team’s wives, the real problems ran much deeper. As well as the issue of how many visitors should be allowed in the tomb, and who owned the press rights, there was an argument over who would end up with its treasures. Under Maspero, foreign private excavators such as Carnarvon had commonly kept half of the antiquities they recovered in return for paying for excavations. Lacau was keen to clamp down on this practice, much to the horror of foreign archaeologists from both sides of the Atlantic.
Various parties were desperately trying to negotiate a settlement, figuring that in the end the two sides had to work things out. Carter couldn’t continue his work without the permission of the authorities. And the antiquities service had no one else who possessed the skills or inclination to take on such a huge task as the tomb. In March 1924, Lady Carnarvon gave up any claim to the tomb’s contents, and the two sides seemed close to agreement. But then Carter’s lawyer, speaking in court, likened the antiquities service’s actions in breaking into the tomb to the action of “bandits.” It was an unfortunate choice of word. In Egyptian culture, this was considered a mortal insult, and all negotiations subsequently broke down.
Meanwhile, Carter sailed to the United States on the Berengaria to lecture on Tutankhamun—his Norfolk accent helping to dispel Americans’ widespread belief that he was in fact American. He lectured to thousands in sellout events, for example at Carnegie Hall in New York, where he speculated about the state in which Tutankhamun’s mummy would be found—he predicted that Tutankhamun was about eighteen years old when he died, and that the king’s body would be “not wrapped but literally canned in gold.”16 He must have been wondering if he would ever get back into the tomb to find out.
In December, Carter finally signed an agreement with the Egyptian government to restart his work, and headed straight for the tomb to check its contents. Everything was in order except for a few tools missing from the antechamber and a linen pall, studded with gold rosettes, that had originally hung over the roof of the second shrine. It had been left on the ground outside the laboratory tomb and was now hopelessly charred and decayed.
Carter spent the end of that season conserving objects already removed from the tomb and packed off nineteen more cases of objects to Cairo before heading home to London. He returned in October 1925 with just one aim in mind. At last, he would reveal Tutankhamun’s mummy.
THE LID OF THE GOLD-COVERED COFFIN was slowly hoisted without mishap to reveal a second coffin similar to the first, except that its gold coating was inlaid with colorful glass: tiny arrow-shaped blues and reds that imitated turquoise, carnelian, and lapis lazuli. Carter’s men raised the outer shell and second coffin out of the sarcophagus together—a huge weight, much heavier than Carter had thought possible—then slid wooden planks underneath and laid it on top of the sarcophagus.
The second coffin had no handles, and fit so closely into the outer shell that you couldn’t even slide a little finger between them. It took some ingenuity to figure out how to extract it. In the end, Carter eased out some bronze pins by which the second coffin’s lid was fastened down, just by a quarter of an inch, and tied wire around them. He used the wire to hold that coffin in midair while he lowered the outer shell back into the sarcophagus, then quickly slipped a wooden tray under the suspended weight. Removing the second coffin lid revealed a third coffin of similar shape. For three millennia, a nest of four gilded wooden shrines, a quartzite sarcophagus, and three tightly fitting coffins—his own miniature cosmos*—had protected Tutankhamun’s mummy from an alien future. Now, only one layer was left.
The innermost coffin was different from the others. Just over six feet long, it was made of solid gold. It was an enormous mass of pure bullion, and an extravagance that the archaeologists had never dreamed of. It also explained why the second coffin had been so heavy to lift. Based on the fact that it took eight strong men to raise it, Carter estimated that the inner coffin alone weighed at least eight hundred pounds. The body was elaborately carved and inlaid, and the golden face was topped off by a blue beard, cobra-and-vulture headdress, and a necklace glinting red, blue, and gold. Covered in protective decoration, this coffin looked snug and safe at the same time as impressive. It was the perfect spaceship for time travel.
Carter raised the lid to reveal—at last—the mummy itself. It was neatly wrapped and decorated with a network of golden straps and bands, another necklace, and a pair of golden hands, sewn to the linen wrappings, which held a crook and flail.
And, of course, it was wearing a solid gold mask. Well, it’s a helmet more than a mask, as it covers the entire head as well as the top of the shoulders and chest. Ancient Egyptians used to call this the “head of mystery.” It allowed the wearer to see in the afterlife and to drive away any enemies or hostile forces that might attack him, as well as giving the dead person divine attributes—wearing it was described as “seeing with the head of a god.”17
The golden face had eyes made of aragonite and obsidian, and eyelids inlaid with blue glass to imitate lapis lazuli. The mask bore a blue-and-gold striped headdress as well as a sad but tranquil expression, with its gaze set firmly on the heavens. The features are recognizably those of Tutankhamun, but as with the three coffins, they’re also meant to show him as a god—specifically Osiris, the ruler of the underworld.
Osiris was the prototype mummy. In Egyptian mythology, he was a king whose jealous brother Seth killed him by putting him in a box—the first coffin—and throwing it in the Nile, before later chopping his body up and dispersing the pieces across Egypt. Osiris’s devoted wife and sister Isis tracked them all down and put him back together again; then the jackal-headed god Anubis wrapped the body in bandages and resurrected him. Osiris went on to become ruler of the underworld and judge of the dead. By associating himself with Osiris, Tutankhamun hoped to share his fate of resurrection, before joining Ra on his journey through the heavens.
On the second floor of today’s Cairo museum is a side room with black-painted walls and a dusty, arched window, through which you can see the city’s rooftops and hear the bustle of nearby Tahrir Square. This is where Tutankhamun’s most precious treasures are now
held. In the middle of the room, displayed at eye height on a dramatically lit pedestal, is his mask. It is without doubt the most recognizable image of this king; as a symbol of Egypt, it is rivaled only by the Great Pyramids.
And yet, when you look into this iconic face, the familiarity fades away—as do the urgent honks of gridlock traffic. It’s truly beautiful, with a well-proportioned nose, gorgeous full lips, and the eternal blackness of those obsidian eyes, which stare right through you with placid resolve. I don’t know if it’s the rare experience of staring at so much solid gold, or the serene, exquisitely crafted features, but suddenly it’s not so hard to believe in Tutankhamun as a god, still riding through the sky each day with the sun.
Back in 1925, though, it wasn’t at all clear that the mask would ever make it to Cairo. During Tutankhamun’s funeral, bucketfuls of sticky anointing resin had been poured over the mummy, which over the centuries congealed into a black, rock-hard mass. Thanks to this extremely effective glue, the mummy and mask were stuck fast inside the innermost gold coffin, which was in turn stuck inside the second coffin. The coffins and their contents were immovable. They might as well have been encased in a block of cement.
So Carter’s next challenge was how on earth to get the mummy out. Lucas experimented on the black material in his lab but couldn’t find anything that dissolved it easily; then he discovered that it melted with heat. It was time for Tutankhamun to fulfill his wish and come face to face with Ra. The workmen carried the two glued-together coffins up the tomb’s sloping corridor, and left the whole lot in the blazing sun.
Safe underground, the mummy had enjoyed a constant environment of around 80°F for millennia. Now, its temperature soared to a roasting 150°F, atoms jangling in the heat. But Tutankhamun wasn’t so keen on leaving his golden home. After several hours, the glue hadn’t softened at all. It seemed there was only one way that the mummy was going to leave its coffin: in pieces.
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* But not always: a Sixth-Dynasty official, Meni, warned any potential tomb violator that the crocodile will be against him in the water, and the snake on land. This punishment was to come from the gods, though, not Meni himself.
* Ironically, the word “sarcophagus” derives from the Greek for “flesh-eater,” after a kind of limestone that the Greeks believed would consume or decompose the flesh of a corpse interred within it, and hence was used for coffins.
† As described in a private letter from the anatomist Douglas Derry, who later carried out an autopsy on the mummy, to his son Hugh.
* The gods are described in ancient Egyptian inscriptions as having golden flesh.
* In his 2010 book Egyptian Mummies, John Taylor, a specialist in ancient Egyptian funerary archaeology at the British Museum in London, argues that an Egyptian mummy’s coffins were endowed with powerful symbolic meaning that helped the occupant to be resurrected and to flourish in the life after death. They provided a sacred environment for the eternal life of the occupant—a dwelling, shrine, body of the mother-goddess Nut, and even a miniature replica of the entire cosmos.
CHAPTER FIVE
A BRUTAL POSTMORTEM
IT WASN’T YOUR AVERAGE AUTOPSY. Laid out in the dark, narrow entrance corridor to the tomb of Seti II, the subject was tightly glued inside his coffins, overlooked by impressively carved religious reliefs, and enveloped in the sweet, woody smell of resin.
A few feet away, the anatomist Douglas Derry stood upright, smartly dressed in a white jacket and spotted bow tie, and looked steadily into the camera. Alongside him, most of his companions were smiling—in particular Howard Carter, eyes gleaming, had the air of gleeful schoolboy struggling to contain himself. But Derry showed no hint of excitement; instead he looked solemn to the point of sternness. Which perhaps isn’t surprising, seeing as he was about to cut open one of the world’s most famous historical figures.
Maybe he was thinking of the time the royal mummy found in the nearby Amarna cache largely disintegrated at American excavator Theodore Davis’s touch, with the loss of vital information about the identity of that king. Here the stakes were even higher. No one had ever seen an Egyptian pharaoh in his original burial trappings and finery. Probably no one ever would again. One wrong move from Derry and the only chance in history to study an intact royal mummy could be ruined.
The appointed day was November 11, 1925. At 9:45 A.M., the group had filed into this converted laboratory tomb, where Carter had laid out the mummy the day before, its coffins protected by a surgical-looking white sheet. This was a more modest affair than Carter’s previous grand openings of the tomb and burial chamber, which had been full to the brim with royals and other notables and besieged by journalists desperate for a glimpse of the action. On this day, Carter and Derry were joined only by the big-bearded antiquities chief Pierre Lacau, anatomist Saleh Bey Hamdi,* the chemist Alfred Lucas, and a handful of Egyptian officials in fezzes and dark suits. But the glare of world’s media was only a telegram away. And Harry Burton, hidden behind his bulky wooden camera, was capturing each important moment for posterity in black and white.
Once the first photo pose was over, the men gathered around the coffin. Derry removed his jacket and waistcoat—the powerful electric lights had pushed the temperature in the tomb well above 80°F—and hung them carefully over the back of a chair. He took out a blue school exercise book, and filled in the blanks on the front in neat pencil.
NAME: Tut Ankh Amon
CLASS: Royal
SUBJECT: Anatomy
SCHOOL YEAR: 1356 BC–1925 AD
The mummy was enclosed in an outer linen sheet, held in position by bandages passing round the shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles. But Derry saw immediately that he couldn’t simply peel them off. The fabric was so badly decomposed, it crumbled to the touch. At Carter’s suggestion he strengthened the wrappings by coating them in paraffin wax, and waited for it to cool.1 It was time to make the first cut.
Nerves might have got to most people at this point. But it’s unlikely that Derry allowed his hand to shake. During the First World War, he had served in the Royal Army Medical Corps; on the Western Front, in Belgium, he rescued wounded men under heavy shellfire with such gallantry and coolness that he was awarded the Military Cross. And when it came to studying mummies, Derry was a world expert. He had arrived in the anatomy department of Kasr Al Ainy Medical School (now part of University of Cairo) in 1905 under the professorship of Grafton Elliot Smith, a brilliant but eccentric Australian anatomist who was pioneering the study of ancient human remains. As well as finding that the mummy from the Amarna cache was male—despite Davis’s firm belief that it was Queen Tiye—Elliot Smith had carried out a tediously detailed but badly needed survey of all the royal mummies held in the Cairo Museum.2
One of Derry’s first postings was with the Archaeological Survey of Nubia, in a remote area on Egypt’s southern border, working with Elliot Smith and another young anatomist called Frederic Wood Jones. The project was a race against time to salvage as much archaeological information as possible about the ancient civilizations that had lived there, before the entire area was flooded by the raising of the first Aswan Dam across the Nile in 1907.
Between 1907 and 1911, the three anatomists worked in the barren heat of the desert, surrounded by evil swarms of dust and flies. Much to the bemusement of the Nubian locals, few of whom had ever seen a white person before, they used metal calipers to measure skeleton after skeleton excavated from the thousands of shallow graves that lined the Nile, noting the results on cards that were tinted blue to protect their eyes from the glare of the sun. In four seasons, living mainly on rice and canned sardines, the tiny team studied more than 20,000 sets of human remains. They noted the age, sex, and ethnic origins of the people who had lived there millennia before; cultural practices such as circumcision and attempts at embalming; and their causes of death, from childbirth and leprosy to beatings and battle wounds.
Two particularly gruesome trenches yielded the bod
ies of more than a hundred young men, hanged by the Romans, some with the noose still around their necks. The injuries they suffered caused the team to join the debate over the most humane methods of hanging, which at the time was raging back in Britain, with Wood Jones later carrying out a series of clandestine experiments that involved dropping cadavers down the lift shaft of St Thomas’s Hospital in London.
When Elliot Smith subsequently took a job in London, Derry took over his professorship at the medical school in Cairo and soon became Egypt’s go-to expert for any human remains discovered by archaeologists in the country, gradually amassing one of the largest collections of desiccated body parts in the world. He was particularly excited by his work at Giza, site of the Great Pyramids—he measured hundreds of mummies and skeletons in the nobles’ graves there, and wrote enthusiastically to his ex-mentor about what he found.3
Elliot Smith was fascinated, if not obsessed, by the racial origins of these pyramid builders, because he saw them as the original creators of human civilization, who spread their cultural practices around the world. (Unfortunately for his theories, he didn’t know that the pyramids and mummies being unearthed in other regions such as South America were separated from their Egyptian counterparts by thousands of years.) So Derry became very interested in such questions too. Unfortunately, his studies didn’t say much about the origins of civilization. But he did find among other things that the eye orbits in the nobles’ skulls were markedly elliptical—meaning that the slanted eyes shown in the artwork of their tombs weren’t just an aesthetic style or the result of over-enthusiastic application of eyeliner, they reflected how the ancient Egyptians really looked.
When Carter needed someone he could rely on to unwrap King Tutankhamun, he chose Derry as the principal anatomist in Egypt—much to the annoyance of Elliot Smith, over in England, who thought he should have been asked ahead of his ex-student. Cheeks glistening with sweat, Derry leaned over and pushed his scalpel into the mummy’s chest, just below the hefty golden mask, and slowly slid the blade all the way down to its toes. He peeled the two resulting flaps outward, and immediately saw the glint of gold.
