by Jo Marchant
The whole episode reminded Dean of the infamous death of Lord Carnarvon, shortly after entering Tutankhamun’s tomb. Could cave disease be responsible for the legendary Pharaoh’s Curse?
In 1974, after hearing of Harrison’s work on Tutankhamun’s mummy, Dean wrote to him in Liverpool to ask if bats had ever infested Tutankhamun’s tomb. Harrison checked with Gamal Mokhtar, chairman of the Egyptian antiquities service, who in turn asked “old people who were present at the time.”5 The elderly witnesses confirmed that for the first six months after the tomb was opened, it was protected only by a temporary iron door made of bars. Bats flew in at night, to the extent that Carter’s workmen had to clear them out each morning. (It’s quite surreal to think of bats roosting and pooing on the precious artifacts—not something Carter mentioned in his official accounts.) Dean subsequently published a paper suggesting that Carnarvon was killed by the Histoplasma fungus.6 The theory explained why Carnarvon, with his weak lungs, was affected, but not, for example, Howard Carter, who as an experienced archaeologist might well have been immune to the disease already.
In 1993, scientists came up with another deadly mold that could have finished Carnarvon off. An Italian doctor named Nicola Di Paolo treated a farmer’s wife from Siena who felt dizzy and had trouble breathing after sieving wheat stored inside a cold barn. The granary had been closed for two years, and some of the wheat had gone moldy. She subsequently developed acute kidney failure, but recovered after six weeks in hospital.
After putting some guinea pigs and rabbits into a cage with the suspect wheat (several of them died, almost all suffered severe kidney or liver damage), Di Paolo diagnosed the culprit as a fungus called Aspergillus, which produces a poison called aflatoxin.7 Di Paolo happened to be an amateur Egyptology enthusiast, and subsequently suggested that Aspergillus growing in Tutankhamun’s tomb was responsible for Lord Carnarvon’s death. In several more studies carried out during the 1990s—mostly for TV documentaries, and unfortunately not published in the academic literature—various Aspergillus species were apparently found growing on Egyptian mummies (as they had been on the unfortunate Rameses II, on his trip to Paris in 19768).
You can be at risk from Aspergillus even if you’ve been nowhere near a tomb. In 2007, a British gardener died of kidney failure after inhaling spores of the fungus while dispersing bags of rotting mulch in his backyard.9 But the most dramatic example of Aspergillus’s deadliness is the case of Casimir IV, who was King of Poland from 1447 to 1492. If anyone deserves their own curse myth, it’s him.
The remains of Casimir and his wife, Elizabeth, were interred in a tomb in the chapel of Wawel Castle in Krakow, Poland. In 1973, with the consent of the Archbishop of Krakow (who later became Pope John Paul II), a team of twelve scientists entered the royal vault—the first time it had been opened since the king’s funeral. They aimed to examine the remains to decide how best to restore them and the tomb. Inside, they found rotting wooden coffins containing what was left of the king and queen.
Within weeks, ten of the twelve researchers were dead.10 When one of the survivors, Boleslaw Smyk, tested samples taken from the tomb, he found several species of fungus including Aspergillus.
These mold-related explanations for the curse are ingenious, and certainly a big improvement on evil spirits and ancient aliens. They have been taken seriously by the academic community: for example, the idea that Carnarvon was killed by Aspergillus toxin, perhaps from fungus growing in stores of grain in the tomb, was discussed in a series of letters to the medical journal The Lancet in 2003.11 But it seems unlikely to me that Tutankhamun’s tomb could have hosted a hefty enough dose of spores or toxin to cause any medical problems.
In the Urungwe caves, the piles of fungus-laden bat guano were up to six feet deep. And Aspergillus needs damp conditions to grow. There was some humidity in Tutankhamun’s tomb at intervals over the millennia, probably from small amounts of floodwater seeping through the rock, but when Carter and his team entered, it was desert dry. Carter’s chemist, Lucas, tested various small fungus colonies found in the tomb (for example, some brown spots on the walls of the burial chamber) and concluded that all were long dead by the time the tomb was opened.12 In the absence of any direct evidence whatsoever for a fungal killer, the most plausible explanation still seems to be that Carnarvon’s death had nothing to do with Tutankhamun’s tomb, and that he succumbed, as stated on his death certificate, from the complications of his infected mosquito bite.
In 2002, an epidemiologist named Mark Nelson, from Monash University in Australia, took a different approach to the curse—using science not to explain it but to debunk it. It wasn’t the first time this had been tried. After Carnarvon’s death, the press blamed every tenuously related death on the curse, including Richard Bethell, Howard Carter’s private secretary, found dead in a club in Mayfair, London, in 1931; his father, Lord Westbury, who jumped out of a window in his grief; and a boy who was subsequently knocked over by the Lord’s hearse. In 1934, the Metropolitan Museum Egyptologist Herbert Winlock decided it was time to take action, after journalists started hounding the family of his seriously ill colleague Albert Lythgoe.
“The Boston hospital in which he is a patient has been so harassed by so many persons telephoning about the Tut-ankh-Amen superstition that others with legitimate business to transact can hardly get in touch with the hospital,” Winlock wrote angrily.13 “Mrs. Lythgoe’s privacy is disturbed at all hours.” Winlock put together a chart, published in the New York Times, of forty people present in the tomb when various parts of it were opened, of whom only six had died in the intervening years. If there was a curse, it certainly didn’t seem to be a very powerful one.
Nelson went one step further, designing a formal trial of the curse based on protocols for testing the efficacy (or determining the side effects) of medical drugs. He compared people who were in the tomb at four key times—the openings of the burial chamber, sarcophagus, and coffins, and the examination of the mummy—with people who were in Egypt at the time but not in the tomb. In total, he included forty-four people in the study, who had received anything from 0 to 4 “doses” of the curse, and compared how long they all lived.
He concluded what many might say was the blatantly obvious—that being in the tomb did not significantly hasten death.14 The average survival time was 20.8 years for those “exposed” to the tomb, compared to 28.9 years for the controls, but this difference was mainly due to the fact that there were more women (who tend to live longer) in the control group. The exposed group—twenty-four men plus Lady Evelyn—lived to an average age of seventy-five, not bad for men born late in the nineteenth century, who had a life expectancy of a little over fifty years.
But like Winlock, Nelson hasn’t succeeded in banishing the curse myth, which remains perennially popular—a quick Google search for “curse” and “pharaoh” returns nearly 4 million results, for example. And in a way, such efforts miss the point. Tutankhamun’s curse has always been a social phenomenon, not a medical one, far more influenced by people’s unspoken, instinctive feelings and concerns than any amount of logic or scientific evidence. Besides, it really does make for a great movie plot.
LORD CARNARVON’S DEMISE wasn’t the only source of dramatic stories constructed from evidence that some might consider rather thin. Attention also focused on Tutankhamun’s own death, or to be more specific, his murder. The idea that the king was violently killed started with Ronald Harrison and the “eggshell thinning” he saw at the base of the mummy’s skull. But in 1996, thanks to a parapsychologist turned Egyptologist named Bob Brier, Tutankhamun’s murder hit the big time.
After making his human mummy in 1994, Brier, of Long Island University, was asked to make what he thought would be a low-profile documentary about Tutankhamun for the Learning Channel. But the resulting film caused a storm of interest, so Brier followed it with a book in 1998, called The Murder of Tutankhamen: A True Story, which itself became a best seller.15
What was s
o explosive? As part of his research, Brier had persuaded Robert Connolly, in Liverpool, to send him a copy of Harrison’s X-ray image of Tutankhamun’s skull. Brier showed the X-ray image to Gerald Irwin, a trauma specialist at nearby Winthrop University Hospital. Irwin scrutinized the area of eggshell thinness noted by Harrison, and agreed it could be caused by a brain hemorrhage. He also saw a faint line just above the affected area, which he interpreted as a hardened membrane that had formed over the hemorrhage. Such membranes are slow to form, suggesting that if the bleed was caused by a blow to the head, Tutankhamun had lingered on for weeks.
If so, reasoned Brier, the injured king must have been conscious for most of that time and able to eat and drink; otherwise, he would have died of dehydration or starvation before the membrane had time to form. The site of the supposed bleed was a very unusual one for such an injury—a well-protected spot at the back of the head, right where the neck joins the skull. The king must have been struck from behind, perhaps while sleeping on his front or side. Brier then added a large dose of dramatic imagination to these hints in order to construct what is still probably the most widely known version of Tutankhamun’s death. After the king went to bed alone, the door to his room silently opened and a man crept through:
Stealthily the night intruder made his way to Pharaoh’s bed, the sound of his steps perhaps obscured by the drip, drip of a water clock. He found the king sleeping on his side, his head supported by an alabaster headrest. From under his clothes the man drew out a heavy object, possibly an Egyptian mace that joined a solid three-inch stone to the end of a substantial two-foot stick. After a single deep breath, he swung the heavy object at Tutankhamun’s skull.16
The next morning, continues Brier, servants discovered the unconscious but not yet dead pharaoh and summoned a physician who regretfully announced that there was nothing he could do. Tutankhamun regained consciousness but then gradually weakened over the following weeks, and despite drinking wine laced with powdered eggshells (so that his damaged skull would heal smooth as an egg), he finally succumbed to his injury.
Following this account, Brier considered who could have been behind the brutal attack, including Tutankhamun’s young wife, Ankhesenamun, and his two successors, the grand courtier Ay, and the chief army general Horemheb, before finally pinning the blame on Ay.
The most senior official in Tutankhamun’s government, the elderly Ay had the uniquely privileged title of “God’s father.” He had served under Amenhotep III before Akhenaten moved everyone to his new city at Amarna. When Tutankhamun moved the court back to Thebes, records of most of the officials serving at Amarna disappear—their names aren’t found in subsequent records at Thebes. But Ay continued his career. Brier interprets this as evidence of Ay’s great influence over the king, and his willingness to switch his allegiance, even change his religion, as circumstances required.
Brier finds his smoking gun in a collection of records known as the Hittite letters. Excavations in Turkey have yielded thousands of clay tablets from the Egyptians’ archenemies, the Hittites, which record everything from land deeds to military exploits. At the beginning of twentieth century, archaeologists unearthed some tablets chronicling the reign of the Hittite king Suppiluliuma. They mention an Egyptian king named Nibhuriya, which is thought by most experts to be the Hittite transliteration of Tutankhamun’s throne name, Neb-kheperu-re.
The tablets quote an extraordinary pair of letters from a queen named Dahamunzu (probably the Hittite version of the generic Egyptian phrase meaning “the king’s wife”). The queen writes that her husband is dead, and asks the Hittite king to provide one of his sons for her to marry, so that he might become king of Egypt. As the king is thought to be Tutankhamun, the queen writing the letter is presumably his widow, Ankhesenamun. A skeptical Suppiluliuma sent his chamberlain to verify the story, who eventually returned with a second letter and an envoy from Egypt, who confirmed that the queen indeed had no heirs and wished to marry a Hittite prince. Finally (some ninety days after the first letter), the king sent a son, but he mysteriously died on the way. Ay became the next pharaoh.
In her second letter, Ankhesenamun hints that she is under pressure, if not in danger, from someone in her court. “Never shall I pick out a servant of mine and make him my husband,” she says. “I am afraid.” But according to Brier, this is exactly what happened. In 1931, the Egyptologist Percy Newberry came across a faience ring found in a Cairo antique shop, which featured the royal names of Ay and Ankhesenamun, suggesting that she had married the old man and become his queen. Newberry copied the design and sent it to Carter, but didn’t buy the ring, and it subsequently disappeared. As decades passed, some Egyptologists began to doubt it even existed, but in the early 1970s, another ring sporting the same two names was purchased by the Egyptian Museum in Berlin.
This is the last known mention of Ankhesenamun. Ay died after four years on the throne but the artwork in his tomb shows only his first wife, Tiy.* The whole thing was masterminded by an evil Ay, suggested Brier, who was desperate to become king before he died. He had ordered the murders of Tutankhamun, the Hittite prince (perhaps with some help from general Horemheb), and finally Ankhesenamun—after marrying her to cement his claim to the throne.
Brier says he was completely unprepared for the popularity of his 1996 documentary, which was covered in the New York Times, and then by newspapers around the world, with headlines like: “Professor Proves Boy-King Murdered”: “Documentaries about Egypt are common, but the idea that this 18-year-old pharaoh was murdered touched the public,” he wrote afterward.17
His book, published two years later, set off an even broader wave of interest. But this time he wasn’t surprised: “By now I realized that the story had all the elements of an Agatha Christie murder mystery.”18 These included a spectacular backdrop of temples and palaces; a cast of characters including young, orphaned lovers and a deceitful prime minister desperate for power;
and, of course, the discovery of the greatest archaeological treasure of all time. The Murder of Tutankhamen was translated into more than a dozen languages, inspired a gaggle of other documentaries and, Brier claims, created a new interest in the study of Tutankhamun.
One of the films inspired by Brier was The Assassination of King Tut,19 shown on the Discovery Channel in 2002. It featured a couple of ex–FBI agents, Greg Cooper and Mike King, who stomped through Tutankhamun’s tomb, attempting to reassess the clues surrounding his death. Heavy-set Americans with big, chubby heads and suits to match, the pair were billed as expert criminal profilers, used to dealing with homicides. After much talk about crime scenes, victim profiling, and a rather baffling “Tutankhamun risk continuum,” they cited the Hittite letters to reach a very similar conclusion to Brier: Tut was murdered, and the culprit was Ay.
Cooper and King had medical experts too: Richard Boyer, Ernst Rodin, and Todd Grey of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Connolly sent them copies of several of Harrison’s X-ray plates, whereas Brier’s expert had worked from a single photograph. Grey was a pathologist who had worked with Cooper and King on cases before. He found no clear evidence for foul play, but thought that the features noted by Harrison and Brier—the bone fragment at the back of the skull, and the thinned region—were suspicious enough that murder was possible (a possibility that suddenly becomes fact in the film’s subsequent narration).
Meanwhile, neuroradiologist Boyer saw something else odd in the X-ray images—the vertebrae at the very top of Tutankhamun’s spine were fused to his skull. Boyer diagnosed a rare congenital disorder known as Klippel-Feil syndrome, which would have left the king unable to able to bend or turn his neck. “His head is like it’s on the end of a broomstick,” he commented in the film. This added a new dimension to the dramatization of Tutankhamun’s death. The condition would have made the young king particularly unsteady on his feet—perhaps all that the assassin needed to do was to push him over.
The next year, however, Boyer, Rodin, and Grey publis
hed an academic paper including the X-ray images of Tutankhamun’s skull, and disowning the conclusions they reached in Cooper and King’s documentary.20 The academics complained that the film crew gave them only a few hours to look over the X-ray images on the day that their interviews were filmed. There was no time for a detailed examination, and no chance to compare notes.
Once the experts studied the images properly, they realized that all of the strange-looking features had perfectly normal explanations. Tutankhamun didn’t suffer from Klippel-Feil syndrome—his vertebrae were fused not because of a congenital disorder but because of the glue and resin that Carter and Derry had used to stick the mummy’s skull back onto its spine.
The bone fragment turned out to consist of two bits of bone, not one. After a suggestion from Connolly, the researchers matched these to pieces missing from the vertebra at the very top of the mummy’s spine. So they weren’t caused by a skull fracture at all. Instead, Derry must have dislodged them in 1925, when he poked through the back of the skull to have a look inside. Further evidence for this came from the fact that Harris’s 1978 X-ray images of the skull show the fragments in a different position to Harrison’s, proving that they are loose in the skull. This means they must have broken off after Tutankhamun was mummified; otherwise, they’d be embedded in the resin that the embalmers poured into the king’s cranium.
The eggshell thinning that Harrison had seen, and the ghostly second line noted by Brier’s expert, had nothing to do with a brain hemorrhage. They were an optical illusion, caused by the fact that the skull was at a slight angle when Harrison x-rayed it. This meant that the two sides of the floor of the skull were at slightly different heights in the resulting image, so instead of one thick line, they appear as two thin ones.
