by Jo Marchant
Back in 1923, Carter had blocked the entrance to the treasury with wooden boards so that his team wouldn’t be distracted by its contents while they worked in the burial chamber. As he pulled them down, he could never have predicted what he would soon find inside. Tutankhamun was not alone in his tomb.
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* Ex-director of the Kasr Al Ainy Medical School in Cairo, where Derry was professor of anatomy.
* It’s still unclear whether Tutankhamun’s unguent-pourers were particularly enthusiastic in this respect or whether other Eighteenth-Dynasty pharaohs were smothered as liberally. If the latter, the other royal mummies may only have escaped similar damage because they were stripped of their original coverings at a fairly early date—in a sense, the tomb robbers may have done them a favor.
* A collection of spells, introduced shortly before the New Kingdom, that was often included in tombs to help the spirit safely navigate the dangers of the underworld.
* It took me a long time to track Derry’s original notebooks down, but I eventually found them in the archive of University College London.
* Curse enthusiasts loved the fact that the blemish on the mummy’s left cheek could conceivably be an inflamed mosquito bite. Perhaps the vengeful pharaoh had knocked off Lord Carnarvon in the very manner in which he himself died. (Though you’d think that someone who had the power to carry out such an act three thousand years after his own death might have managed to avoid dying from a mosquito bite in the first place.)
CHAPTER SIX
PALM WINE, SPICES, AND MYRRH
THE BIG BLACK JACKAL that greeted Carter when he unblocked the door to Tutankhamun’s treasury is probably my favorite object in the whole of the Egyptian Museum. It no longer wears its linen cloak and scarf, or the collar of blue lotus and cornflowers that adorned it when the tomb was first opened. But if anything, it’s more striking without them.
The dog rests on a high wooden sled, lying on its tummy with head facing forward and paws out flat in front. I love its shape: the long, fluid lines of its neck, back, and haunches, and oversized nose and ears that should be faintly ridiculous but instead make the animal look hyperalert and ready to spring to life. The wood has been coated with a chalky primer called gesso and then painted jet black: a jackal-shaped hole in the universe, save for the gentlest sheen.
This is the god Anubis. His silhouette is punctuated with ears and eyes of gold and claws of silver, appropriately enough for one whose job is to watch over and guard the dead. In early Egyptian times, Anubis was the principal god of the dead, patron deity of embalmers and the Egyptians’ most important symbol of death and the transition to the afterlife. He was probably envisioned as a jackal because these scavengers were often seen prowling around tombs (and would happily dig up shallowly buried corpses if given the chance).
During the Middle Kingdom, Osiris—the first mummy—usurped him as king of the underworld, and Anubis was rewritten in myths as the inventor of mummification. If you died as an ancient Egyptian, Anubis would preside over your embalming and guard your tomb. He would watch over the weighing of your heart, too, a job he apparently took very seriously, checking to make sure that the scales balanced exactly, and making sure that your heart was safely returned to you afterward.
Although there are many thousands of objects to see in the Cairo museum, there’s something about this representation of Anubis that seems to lay the souls of the ancient Egyptians bare. It powerfully articulates emotions that are just as strong today: the fear of death, and the desire to have a powerful yet loyal companion who will watch over and defend us through whatever might lie ahead. If I could design such a guardian from scratch, I’d be very happy to end up with something like this great jackal.
Carter was fascinated by the figure too, not least because he was intrigued by whether the features of this god were inspired by actual jackals that roamed the Valley of the Kings in ancient times. The jackals in modern Thebes were smaller and brown, but on just a couple of occasions in the decades he spent in the Valley, Carter caught sight of a much taller, black animal, with a long muzzle and large, pointed ears, perhaps a throwback to an ancient variant now almost extinct.
ONCE THE JACKAL was carried out of the tomb, it was time to investigate the rest of the treasury. Along its south wall, to the right as you look in, were rows of black sinister-looking chests. Carter had been wondering what was inside them since 1923, and now he got to find out: a multitude of miniature gods and kings. Stacked on top of these chests were piles of model boats, beautifully detailed, complete with cabins, lookouts, and thrones. On the opposite side of the room were more boats, the piled-up pieces of two hunting chariots, a row of treasure caskets decorated with ivory, ebony, and gold, and some white-painted wooden boxes. They contained jewels and other treasures, such as an ostrich-feather fan with an ivory handle.
At the back of the room—almost touching the ceiling—was the large gilded shrine protected by four gorgeous goddesses (Isis and her friends, just as on the sarcophagus) that contained the miniature golden coffins that held Tutankhamun’s internal organs.
But the room also held some surprises, of which there had been no hint when Carter first briefly surveyed the room in 1923. In the far northeast corner, on top of a pile of black boxes, was a small wooden coffin, about two and a half feet long. Inside were three smaller coffins, nested like Russian dolls, and inside the last one, carefully folded in linen and bearing the name and titles of Queen Tiye, was a plaited lock of hair. Carter figured it must have been passed down the family as an heirloom, until when Tutankhamun died, the last in the line, it was buried with him; a sad symbol of the end of a dynasty.
Even more tragic were the contents of a wooden box just next to it. Two more tiny coffins were stuffed inside (literally, one of them had its toes hacked off to allow the lid to close), placed head to toe. Each contained a second gilt coffin, and inside them, surrounded by heaps of small, dead beetles, one of the most intriguing finds of the whole tomb: two mummified fetuses. One of them wore a small gilt mask several sizes too large for its tiny head.
Carter unwrapped one of the fetuses, then sent both to Derry, who later examined them in his lab in Cairo. Neat, blackened bundles, they were wrapped just like full-size mummies. They were beautifully preserved, both female, at around five and seven months gestation, respectively. They looked like little fragile aliens, with giant heads far too heavy for their skinny, wilted bodies, big dark holes for eyes, and pointed chins.
Carter concluded that they must be the stillborn offspring of Tutankhamun and his wife, the result of two miscarriages. If so, this shed light on why the king had died without an heir, a situation that ultimately led to the fall of the Eighteenth Dynasty and the rise of the Nineteenth, with its succession of strong military leaders including the mighty Rameses II. “Was that the result of an abnormality on the part of the little Queen Ankhesenamun,” Carter asked (presumably the idea that the father’s contribution might be anything less than perfect hadn’t penetrated 1920s thinking), “or was it the result of political intrigue ending in crime? Those are questions, I fear, which will never be answered, but it may be inferred that had one of those babes lived there might never have been a Rameses.”1
In November 1927, Carter finally got to perhaps the most daunting task of clearing the tomb: the jumbled, chaotic annex. Though necropolis officials had made a cursory attempt to tidy up other parts of the tomb after the break-ins, when it came to the annex, they didn’t even try. It was a topsy-turvy tangle of bedsteads, chairs, footstools, game-boards, fruit baskets, vases, wine jars, toys, weapons, and pretty much anything else you care to think of. It was here, with the contents of boxes and caskets still callously strewn all over the floor, that Carter found it easiest to visualize the robbers’ hurried scramble for loot. Inside some of the jars of sticky oil, he found fingermarks where the contents had been scooped out. The lid of one white-painted box still bore the bare footprints, dirty and black, of one of the t
hieves.
The annex floor was about three feet below that of the antechamber. There was nowhere to stand, so to clear floor space initially, Carter adopted the ungainly strategy of leaning in headfirst, with a rope under his armpits held by three or four men standing behind. This chamber seemed to be a storeroom that contained supplies for Tutankhamun’s spirit in the afterlife, such as oils, unguents, wine, and food. Various other objects that wouldn’t fit elsewhere in the cramped tomb were then stacked messily on top.
These included the king’s personal possessions, which started to paint a picture of the actual man (or boy) behind all the golden rhetoric. One sturdy wooden chest was made up of complicated partitions and drawers, each with a sliding lid. These were stuffed full of what seemed to be knickknacks and playthings from Tutankhamun’s youth—anklets and bracelets, pocket game boards made of ivory, slings for hurling stones, a fire-lighter,* some leather archer’s “bracers” (used to protect the left wrist from the blow of the bowstring), mechanical toys, some samples of different minerals, and a set of pigments and paints. Turning a knob on the front of the box locked its lid—perhaps the earliest automatic fastening that had ever been discovered.
The collection gives a touchingly familiar impression of the joys of boyhood, or as Carter put it: “The sense of manliness imparted by possession of implements in connection with fire, hunting, or fighting . . . was evidently as pleasing to the youth of those days as to the boy of our era.”2 Other items found in the annex told of this adventure-loving boy turning into a man. There was a large collection of sticks and staves—several of them forked, for fending off snakes—as well as clubs, throw sticks, boomerangs, bows and arrows, shields, and armor.
It took another three years to finish emptying the antechamber—the work was interrupted several times due to more arguments with the Egyptian government. But by November 1930, it only remained for an exhausted Carter to remove the great gilded panels of the shrines, which had been stacked against the antechamber wall (he had to widen the entrance to get them out), and to sweep the tomb clean, in time for the peak of the tourist season the next January.
Press attention naturally turned to what Carter was going to do next, and he obliged by telling journalists that he knew just where to search for the tomb of Alexander the Great.3 It’s unclear whether he seriously intended to look for it or was just telling reporters what they wanted to hear. After the publication in 1931 of his third and final popular volume on Tutankhamun’s tomb, Carter was wiped out, physically and emotionally, and never embarked on another significant excavation.
He spent his summers in London haunting dealers’ shops, and his winters in Luxor, living quietly in his house on the hill. Dressed in a three-piece suit and Homburg hat, he used to sit alone on the veranda of the Winter Palace hotel, eager to tell the story of his grand discovery to any passing visitor. His health quickly deteriorated and he died in his London home in March 1939, of what would now probably be diagnosed as Hodgkin’s disease.4
In all, Carter had found a staggering 5,398 objects in Tutankhamun’s tomb. He always promised to publish a detailed academic report on them all, but it never appeared, and once he died, there was no one else who could do it for him. Instead, the legacy of his giant excavation is held in the Griffith Institute’s underground archive, with details of the unique objects he uncovered scribbled on more than 3,500 note cards and hundreds of journal pages.
Jaromir Malek, the archive’s keeper until his retirement in September 2011, spent more than fifteen years overseeing a project to scan and transcribe every word and image that Carter and his team produced from the tomb, and to post the whole thing online. He says he started thinking about it in the early 1990s, “when the Web was just a baby.” He realized that although there have been countless glossy publications on Tutankhamun, fewer than a third of the objects from the tomb had ever been properly studied and published, a situation he describes as “not acceptable” for such an important archaeological find.
The project was recently completed,* and Malek says he hopes that making the information available will spur Egyptologists into studying the artifacts from the tomb, as well as making the entire discovery—the thousands of objects behind that famous golden mask—more accessible to the public.5 “This doesn’t belong to Egyptologists only,” he says. “It doesn’t even belong to Egypt only. The discovery belongs to everybody.”
Sitting in front of those gray rolling stacks, Malek tells me that after going through every single page of Carter’s excavation notes, he has a new appreciation of the archaeologist’s strength of character. “He was not easy to work with,” he says. “He was quite often short tempered, perhaps not always tactful. But what I find really impressive is that there was this massive task, and in spite of all the difficulties, he finished it.”
AFTER WORK ON Tutankhamun’s tomb was completed, Lucas and Derry each continued to live and work in Egypt—Lucas as the antiquities service’s consultant on chemical matters, and Derry at the Kasr Al Ainy Medical School, which by this time was part of the University of Cairo. One interest they shared was trying to decode the process of mummification—working out how the ancient Egyptians managed to preserve such lifelike corpses over millennia.
The word “mummy” simply means a body for which at least some of the soft tissues become preserved—skin, flesh, and so on—as opposed to just a bare skeleton. Mummies can be made naturally—frozen in permafrost, for example—or artificially, when a body is purposefully embalmed to stop the normal process of decomposition. The oldest mummies in Egypt—including some of the remains Derry studied in Nubia—formed naturally. Buried in shallow graves in the fetal position, these bodies dried out before they could decompose, thanks to being in direct contact with the hot, dry sand. These corpses were preserved intact, even delicate structures like the eyes and brain, and ended up tough and brown like old leather.
The idea of trying to preserve the body forever probably came from the Egyptians’ occasional discovery of these perfectly mummified corpses. This evolved into the belief that if someone’s body could be prevented from decomposing, their soul* could reinhabit it, essentially resurrecting the person in the afterlife.
As the Egyptians started burying their dead with the supplies and possessions thought necessary for the afterlife, it became essential to protect the body in the grave from theft, for example by burying the body deeper, or in the chambers of an underground tomb. But once they were no longer enveloped in the hot, dry sand close to the surface, bodies started to decompose.
This seems to have led to attempts to preserve the dead artificially. In the first two Dynasties, the Egyptians tried wrapping bodies in strips of bandage, and placing them in wooden coffins. The results weren’t pretty. In the Third Dynasty, they started opening the body to remove the decomposable internal organs, and packed the cavity with linen. The organs were wrapped separately and placed in stone vessels (called canopic jars) near the body.
This worked better. But these early mummies still had a tendency to decay, so the embalmers reproduced certain key parts (the face and genitals being deemed particularly important) in linen or a resinous paste. In 1934, Derry was excited to be sent part of the foot of a Third-Dynasty pharaoh named Djoser, who lived around 2600 BC. The French Egyptologist Jean-Philippe Lauer explored the granite burial chamber of Djoser’s famous Step Pyramid at Saqqara, a revolutionary structure that basically started the whole pyramid-building craze, and found the foot, which had probably been torn off the rest of Djoser’s mummy by robbers stealing its anklets. When Derry studied it, he found that within the bandages, the foot had been faithfully represented in resin-soaked linen, even the tendons running to the toes.
Later on, the embalmers got better, until the art of mummification reached its peak in the Eighteenth Dynasty with some mummies that are today still strikingly lifelike and full of character, for example the amiable Yuya and Tjuiu. But exactly how they achieved this has been subject to much debate among Egy
ptologists. Unfortunately, beyond a few instructions for things like what order to wrap the limbs in, or what spells to say when, the ancient embalmers didn’t leave any how-to manuals.
The best we have is an account by Herodotus, a Greek traveler and historian, who described his impressions of mummification when he visited Egypt in the fifth century BC.6 He’s the only classical writer who described the process while it was actually practiced, but he visited relatively late in Egypt’s history, in the Twenty-Seventh Dynasty, when much of the art had long since declined.
Herodotus said there were several different ways to mummify a body, depending on how much you wanted to pay. The most expensive sounds a bit like a gourmet recipe. First, draw the brain out through the nostrils using an iron hook. Then cut open the abdomen using a sharp Ethiopian stone and take out its contents. Clean the body cavity; rinse with palm wine and ground-up spices; fill the belly with myrrh, cassia, and other spices (but absolutely not frankincense, apparently); and sew it up again. Cure the body with salt for seventy days.* Wash the corpse, wrap it in linen bandages, and cover the whole thing with gum or resin. Finally, put it in a human-shaped wooden case, fasten it, and store it upright against a wall until the funeral.
If you couldn’t afford that, though, there was a cheaper method, though it’s not for the faint-hearted: syringe a strong solution of “oleo-resin” (a mixture of oil and resin produced by some trees, a bit like turpentine) into the rectum and leave for several days. When you drain the liquid out, it will bring the dissolved organs with it.†
Herodotus included one particularly telling (if gruesome) detail. Normally, the mummification process was begun as soon as possible after a person died, because in Egypt’s hot climate, a body would quickly start to decompose. But Herodotus claimed that high-status or beautiful women weren’t given to the embalmers until three or four days later, “in order that the embalmers may not abuse their women, for they say that one of them was taken once doing so to the corpse of a woman lately dead.” Elliot Smith, Derry, and Wood Jones were reminded of this during their studies in Nubia. In later mummies in particular, they saw signs of decomposition such as long-dead maggots and beetles much more often in women than men, leading them to conclude that Herodotus’s statement regarding the embalmers’ necrophiliac tendencies may have had good foundation.7
