by Jo Marchant
To one reviewer, the mysterious lighting, curtains, and waiting invoked “the atmosphere of an amusement park where you know that things are fake, while trying hard to look real. [It] creates the expectation that the Tutankhamun torso will burst out in the ancient Egyptian rendering of ‘It’s a small world after all.’”21
The exhibition itself was well received by critics, who agreed that the objects on display were exquisite. But in general, media attention was quite negative—there was much criticism of the commercial organization of the event, while groups of protestors, upset by light-skinned depictions of the king, maintained that “Tut is back and he is black.”22 The final CT gallery was initially meant to house a bust showing Tutankhamun’s reconstructed face, but after protests that it looked too “un-African,” it was removed and replaced with a photo.
It didn’t matter though. Just as in the 1970s, visitors came in droves—the exhibition was ultimately seen by nearly 8 million people worldwide—leaving marketers enthusing over Tutankhamun’s “huge brand recognition.”23 Memorabilia on sale this time included a plastic Tut mask tissue dispenser and a Tut-themed olive oil gift set, while one industrious bar-owner invented the Tutini cocktail in the pharaoh’s honor.
The exhibition also focused attention on Hawass himself, with publications around the world rushing to profile the charismatic king of archaeology. The New York Times described him as “part Indiana Jones, part P. T. Barnum,”24 while the Los Angeles Times called him “the Arab equivalent of a first-class Irish yarn spinner.”25
But these articles also highlighted his supposed darker side. Critics claimed that he regularly took credit for the work of others and was intolerant of dissenting views to the point of stifling academic debate, not hesitating to suspend antiquities service employees or evict foreign archaeologists who failed to toe the line. Hawass emphatically denies these accusations, as I was to find out when I later visited him, but he failed to convince Britain’s Sunday Times. “He rules Egyptology with an iron fist and censorious tongue,” its correspondent concluded. “Nobody crosses Zahi Hawass and gets away with it.”26
Hawass’s media-hungry style came in for more criticism too, including his handling of the CT study, which Thomas Hoving, the ex-director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, who had coordinated the 1970s tour, dismissed as a media stunt rather than serious scholarship. Even one of Hawass’s friends described him (in the nicest possible way) as “a media whore . . . who understands how to talk to people at the lowest possible level.”27
“I’m not doing this for fame. I’m already famous,” Hawass responded. “I’m not doing this for power. I don’t need power. I’m doing this because I’m the only one who can do it. It’s the first time that Egypt is being explained to the public.”28 And thanks to him, more people knew Tutankhamun’s name than ever before.
HOW TO FOLLOW the commercial success of CT scanning the boy king? Hawass’s next big documentary followed another dramatic storyline: the search for the lost queen Nefertiti. Nefertiti and the Lost Dynasty,29 made by National Geographic, first aired in July 2007. It focused on the CT scans of the two mysterious women from the side room of tomb KV35.
Both women had previously been considered as candidates for Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s beautiful wife. An Egyptologist named Susan James suggested in 2001 that the Elder Lady has a pronounced physical resemblance to the famous Berlin bust of the ancient queen, including a square jaw, elongated neck, and pronounced filtrum (the little vertical groove underneath your nose).30 Like Harris, who thought that she might be Hatshepsut before changing his mind to Queen Tiye, James noted the Elder Lady’s bent left arm, a pose associated with female royalty.
Another Egyptologist, Joann Fletcher of the University of York, UK, subsequently suggested (in a 2003 documentary followed by a 2004 book31), that Nefertiti was instead the Younger Lady.* Her claim proved controversial among some Egyptologists, not least Hawass, who described her as “nuts” and “an amateur,”32 and accused her of breaking rules by publicizing her work without running her results past the antiquities service first. Fletcher denies this, arguing that she did submit a report as required, although this didn’t stop the antiquities service, led by Hawass, from temporarily banning her from working in Egypt. They even issued a report saying that the mummy was male, though this was conveniently forgotten by the time of the CT study.
In Nefertiti and the Lost Dynasty, Selim’s CT scans are presented as ruling out both women as Nefertiti, but provide drama for the TV cameras by then suggesting them as other prominent members of Tutankhamun’s family. Based on mild degeneration in the Elder Lady’s spine and knees, Selim and Rahman decided that she was aged between forty and sixty when she died, just the right age for Queen Tiye, as Harris had suggested. Some Egyptologists have since pointed out that this evidence is hardly conclusive—after all, Nefertiti could have been that age too. In the film, Hawass chooses his words carefully. He pronounces merely that the mummy could be Tiye. But no alternatives are presented, and there’s something so persuasive, almost hypnotic, about his delivery that the casual viewer is left in no doubt that the true identity of this enigmatic mummy has at last been found.
Meanwhile, scans of the Younger Lady showed that she died in her thirties, possibly a more likely age for Nefertiti. But Selim concluded that of two right arms found near the mummy, a straight one fit her best, rather than a bent one with clenched fist favored by Fletcher. (One of the problems with the royal tombs is that there are sometimes several dismembered body parts left lying around by the ancient looters, so it can be hard to know what belongs to whom.) Selim and Hawass decided that she wasn’t an important royal after all, so she couldn’t be Nefertiti.
According to Selim, this mummy’s skull is asymmetrical at the back, and has an unusual extra fragment between the two plates at the rear of the skull. Of the royal mummies, only Tutankhamun has similar anomalies, Selim claims. In the film (none of this has been published in a formal academic paper), Hawass and Selim reach a surprise conclusion: the Younger Lady could be none other than Tutankhamun’s mother.
Because the study hasn’t been published, it’s hard for other radiologists to give a second opinion. But some Egyptologists are skeptical about this too—after all, Tutankhamun’s mother was probably a queen herself, so if a straight arm rules out Nefertiti, wouldn’t it rule her out too? Several of them, such as Aidan Dodson of Bristol University, UK, argue that the rush to identify these women as key missing persons from Tutankhamun’s time ignores the archaeological context of the tomb. As Loret noted back in 1898, the royal mummies found in Amenhotep II’s tomb had all been carefully rewrapped and labeled, whereas the two women were found naked on the floor in another room. Dodson argues that however much we’d like to believe otherwise, these mummies probably aren’t famous royals at all, but relatives of the tomb’s owner, Amenhotep II.
THE ELDER AND YOUNGER LADIES have since been moved from the KV35 tomb to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, so I make a trip there to visit them. I’m keen to see for myself these two women who have prompted so much heated argument and speculation. The Valley of the Kings has yielded plenty of anonymous mummies, so what is it about this pair that causes so much fascination?
I try the Royal Mummy Rooms first, but it turns out they haven’t made it into these specially designed chambers, or into the climate-controlled cases that the pharaohs enjoy. Instead I find them, alongside the bones of the unnamed king from KV55, in a deserted walkway just outside.
Like the other royal mummies, both are covered neck to toe with a sheet. The younger woman has a small frame and gray-black skin, with a shaved head, closed eyes, and a delicate, flattened nose. She’d look peaceful, pretty even, if it wasn’t for the huge hole ripped out of her face (experts still argue over whether this wound killed her, or the damage was done later, by tomb robbers).
The elder woman is gray too. She must once have been beautiful, with high cheekbones, a delicate chin, and long, dark, wavy hair
with a slight auburn tint. One eye is open, the other closed, and the top of her left hand is just visible above the top of the sheet, held over her throat with clenched knuckles and a thin thumb sticking out, as if she once held a scepter or staff.
She looks dignified but sad. I lean over the case to look down on her (something that isn’t possible with the taller cases in the Royal Mummy Room, where you can only look in from the side). The pharaohs are fascinating to see but an anticlimax in a way, dried and dead and leaving me dispassionate. I’m not really the type to get too carried away by these things. Yet looking square into the face of the Elder Lady, I am suddenly confronted with the emotional power that Egyptian mummies can have. It’s as though she’s still there, her open eye staring straight at me with something between disdain and accusation, and quite unexpectedly I get that butterflies feeling of leaning over a cliff edge, when you scare yourself and have to step back.
Of all the royal mummies, the Elder Lady demands respect, making me feel as if I’m truly in the presence of someone who once ruled an empire at the height of Egypt’s military might. It’s all subjective, of course; my reaction has more to do with the emotional wiring of the human brain and the mummy’s excellent state of preservation than anything relating to this woman’s actual identity. And yet, staring into her open eye feels like gazing straight into a chasm that stretches three thousand years into the past. Suddenly, I’m not surprised that so many others have seen in her an ancient queen.
I’m jolted back to the present by the implausibly loud roar of low-flying planes passing directly overhead. It’s October 6, and Egypt is once again celebrating Victory Day.
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* Although the details are murky—Hawass now claims that starting with Tutankhamun’s mummy was actually Badeir’s idea.
* A Siemens SOMATOM Emotion 6, if you’re interested in that kind of thing.
* In the National Geographic documentary about this study, King Tut’s Final Secrets, much is made of apparent signs of healing within the break, which Egarter-Vigl and Gostner say prove that the injury happened while Tutankhamun was alive, probably between one and five days before his death. Rühli does not see any evidence that the break had begun to heal (though this wasn’t mentioned in the film). When I interviewed Gostner by email in 2012, he had changed his mind too, saying that there are no signs of healing, although because of the apparent presence of embalming material in the wound, he still believes the break represents an injury that occurred at the end of the king’s life.
* Before this exhibition, the alternative spelling, Tutankhamen, was more common, but Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs cemented the spelling with a u.
* This idea was first suggested by Marianne Luban in 1999, although Fletcher’s claim was higher profile.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE THIRD DOOR
THE MUSEUM OF EGYPTIAN ANTIQUITIES in Cairo, commonly known as the Egyptian Museum, is a huge pink-and-white neoclassical building adorned with arched windows and flags, which reminds me (a tiny bit) of a giant piece of Battenberg cake. Thousands of visitors each day pass through security at its main entrance, a huge doorway set between two lofty columns right in the center of the building’s grand façade. They’re greeted by high ceilings, giant statues, and century-old glass cases that house the most impressive collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts in the world.
Most of them probably don’t notice a much plainer wooden door, all the way over to the right. This is the “backstage” entrance, used by staff and visiting archaeologists, and it takes you to the parts of the museum that the public doesn’t get to see. There are no turnstiles here, just a sleepy guard at a desk who asks you to sign your name in an old notebook. Inside is a maze of dimly lit, dusty corridors with low vaulted ceilings, a hum of Arabic, and a large director’s office furnished with sofas and ornate clocks. Stone stairs lead down to the museum’s mysterious basement, off-limits to all but the most privileged, and stuffed to the brim with tens of thousands of forgotten objects that the curators don’t have room to display.
If you ignore that entrance too, though, and turn the corner around the building to your left, you’ll come to a third option. After the history-filled spaces beyond the first two doors, crossing this threshold is like entering another world, or at least jumping a century or two forward in time. A flight of stairs takes you down to a metal double door, secured with multiple layers of locks that admit only authorized personnel. On the other side, there are no ancient artifacts, nor even a speck of dust. Instead, you’ll find a series of rooms with shiny floors, UV lights, and sterilized walls, filled with high-tech laboratory equipment and workers unrecognizable beneath hats, masks, gloves, and gowns.
This is Egypt’s first ever ancient DNA lab. It’s the site of the next (and last) phase of Zahi Hawass’s investigations of Tutankhamun and the royal mummies: the most ambitious—and controversial—studies they have ever been subjected to. The lab was built in 2006, and its first project was another TV-friendly tale: the hunt for the mummy of the audacious Hatshepsut.
Toward the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty, 150 years or so before Tutankhamun’s reign, lived a queen who dared to be king. Hatshepsut was the eldest daughter of a pharaoh, Thutmose I, but as power was inherited through the male line, she didn’t take the throne when her father died; instead it went to her younger half-brother. He became Thutmose II, and Hatshepsut married him. When he died too, Hatshepsut—still just a teenager—became queen regent to his toddler son by another wife.
At first, Hatshepsut performed her role as expected, guiding and supporting her young stepson, Thutmose III. Before long, however, she started performing kingly functions, such as making offerings to the gods and raising obelisks, on her own behalf. Eventually, she went the whole hog and took the role of the pharaoh for herself, with her stepson relegated to second-in-command. As there was little precedent for a female ruler in Egyptian history, she depicted herself as a male king, with a royal headdress and false beard.
She ruled for seven years as regent and another fourteen as king, ably watching over a strong Egypt and commissioning hundreds of temples and monuments in her name, including the awesome mortuary temple built into the foot of the Deir el-Bahri cliffs. When she died, her stepson finally got his own stab at power and became one of Egypt’s great pharaohs, with a string of wives and victorious military campaigns that extended Egypt’s dominions to their greatest ever extent, stretching from northern Syria to the heart of the Sudan. Later in life, he set about wiping his stepmother’s name from history, smashing her statues and chiseling away her image and name wherever they were found.
Hatshepsut is one of the few Eighteenth-Dynasty rulers for whom a mummy was never located—she didn’t turn up in either of the royal mummy caches found at the end of the nineteenth century. Archaeologists have discovered two tombs bearing her name, prepared at different stages of her life, but neither contained her mummy.
It was possible that priests had hidden it for safekeeping, like the other pharaohs. So the idea of the Hatshepsut project was to CT scan and DNA test various anonymous individuals from around the Valley of the Kings that Hawass thought might be Hatshepsut, then compare them with identified royal mummies related to the missing queen. Of course, this assumed that her mummy had survived at all, which was a long shot, especially considering her stepson’s campaign to erase all trace of her as king.
In charge of the DNA project was a mild-mannered Egyptian geneticist named Yehia Gad, who had dreamed of investigating the royal mummies for well over a decade. Based at the National Research Centre (NRC) in Cairo, Egypt’s main government-funded research institute, he initially specialized in disorders of sex development. Then in the early 1990s, he traveled to the United States and learned about a recently invented technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR)—also being used around this time by the Mormon ancient DNA researcher Scott Woodward—that can amplify tiny scraps of DNA into large enough amounts
to be studied. One of its uses is in genetic fingerprinting, a method that can identify related individuals based on their DNA. After Gad returned home, his lab became one of the first in Egypt to offer DNA fingerprinting, for cases such as paternity and immigration disputes.
But he really wanted to be doing something else. Over the years, he saw growing numbers of studies from around the world, like Woodward’s, that used PCR to extract DNA from ancient specimens, and he harbored a farfetched desire: that he would one day open a lab in Egypt capable of extracting DNA from Egyptian mummies. Ancient DNA was (and still is) an extremely difficult field to work in, however. Researchers have to study tiny amounts of very degraded DNA, which are easily swamped by modern DNA molecules (from bacteria in the air, for example, or the investigators themselves). Keeping the two apart requires hugely stringent—and expensive—precautions against contamination, including working in a dedicated lab that has never been used for studying modern DNA.
Gad faced a catch-22. He couldn’t build such an ambitious lab without generous funding, but he couldn’t convince a funding agency to give him the money without a track record of scientific publications in the field—for which he needed a lab. To work on mummies, he would also need the support of the antiquities service, and this was not forthcoming. Gad watched the abortive attempts by foreigners to DNA test the royal mummies during the late 1990s and in 2000, and saw the bad press that this generated within Egypt. Perhaps an Egyptian-led DNA project would be different. But in 2002, when Hawass took charge of the antiquities service, the idea seemed further away than ever.
Hawass had previously rejected the idea of DNA testing the royal mummies, arguing that samples were too easily contaminated, which would lead to inaccurate results, and that it was better to concentrate on “more beneficial research,” such as the cause of Tutankhamun’s death.1 As late as March 2005, after Tutankhamun was CT scanned, he insisted that the mummy would not be disturbed again.
