The Shadow King

by Jo Marchant

  While Zahi Hawass’s scientists were redefining Tutankhamun as a frail, inbred cripple, scholars elsewhere painted a picture of a very different kind of king. One of them was Ray Johnson of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, based in Luxor. For the last twenty years, Johnson has worked in Luxor Temple, painstakingly copying and publishing the reliefs inscribed on its walls.

  In 2010, he published a dramatic new finding relating to Tutankhamun.1, 2 He had been studying hundreds of broken wall fragments that were later reused in nearby medieval buildings. He found sandstone blocks from Tutankhamun’s additions to Luxor Temple, but he also found blocks—recognizable as Tutankhamun’s from the carving style and the presence of his name—from a different temple. The images he found on them revealed an unprecedented insight into Tutankhamun’s reign, including scenes of offerings, barge processions, rituals, and war.

  The fragments were made up of small blocks called talatat, originally used by Akhenaten for constructing buildings quickly. After some investigation, Johnson was able to reconstruct their long and checkered history. Akhenaten had originally used them in a building at nearby Karnak dedicated to his god, the Aten, before Tutankhamun dismantled it and reused the blocks for his own mortuary temple, which was completed after his death by his successor, Ay. Later, the next pharaoh, Horemheb, dismantled the mortuary temple and reused the blocks for himself, to fill in a gateway at Karnak. In medieval times, the blocks were quarried yet again and used for buildings in front of Luxor Temple. Through it all, the reliefs originally carved by Tutankhamun had survived.

  Fitting the scenes back together from these scattered blocks was like attempting the ultimate jigsaw. Johnson and his colleagues copied the markings from individual blocks then used a computer to fit them together. Particularly surprising were two sets of battle scenes. One shows a Nubian campaign in the south, while the other shows Tutankhamun in a chariot leading Egyptian forces in Syria. The images include a royal flotilla returning triumphantly up the Nile, with a manacled Syrian prisoner hanging in a cage from the sail yard of the king’s barge. Other blocks show Tutankhamun receiving prisoners, booty, and the gory hand kebabs—a detail that hasn’t been seen anywhere else in Egyptian art.

  Battle scenes were already known on some items from Tutankhamun’s tomb, for example a painted wooden casket that shows him fighting against the Syrians. These had been interpreted as symbolic, stylized images that would be used to show any king triumphing over his enemies. Experts assumed that Tutankhamun was too young to have actually led his troops in battle. But Johnson thinks the reliefs on the temple blocks are more than that: “The originality of such scenes strongly suggests that they could only have been observed and recorded on the battlefield,” he wrote,3 so Tutankhamun’s presence in the images could mean that he was actually there after all. He points out that Egyptian art at this time stressed truthfulness, and argues that the wear on objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb, such as armor, weapons, and chariots, proves the king was strong and active: “He was certainly old enough to participate in the manly art of war by ancient standards of maturity.”

  So, far from being a crippled, inbred weakling, Tutankhamun may have been a military leader who went into battle at least twice. If he did break his leg, Johnson thinks that rather than falling over on his cane, he could have fallen from his chariot while on a military campaign: “It is clear from [the battle scenes] that the young king was considerably more active than has been assumed, and it is also possible that this cost him his life.”4

  Unfortunately for Johnson, his reinterpretation of Tutankhamun was published just as the JAMA paper5 appeared, supposedly showing exactly the opposite. The CT scans seemed to prove that there was no way this king would have made it into a chariot, in battle or otherwise. But the doubts subsequently cast on the idea of Tutankhamun’s crippled foot have effectively reopened the case. What’s more, recent reinterpretations of both Harrison’s X-rays and Selim’s CT scans support the idea of a strong, active king—as well as introducing a new, completely unexpected cause of death.

  After CT scanning the royal mummies, the Egyptians guarded their raw data very closely. Independent experts were frustrated by not being able to verify the conclusions reached by Hawass’s team, and even the foreign consultants, such as Rühli, were only allowed to take a few selected images home with them. But there’s one man who did manage to get access to the scans: a retired obstetrician from Seattle.

  Benson Harer is one of those people who questions everything and doesn’t take no for an answer. Intellectual energy spills out in all directions—he’s a philanthropist, the author of the awesome Law of Social Physics (which states that “the emotional intensity in the expression of an opinion is inversely related to the validity of the data supporting it”), and alongside a successful career in medicine is also a respected amateur Egyptologist, not to mention creator of one of the most extensive collections of ancient Egyptian artifacts west of the Mississippi.

  Harer started excavating in Egypt in 1978—working with Kent Weeks as he set up the Theban Mapping Project—and has been back nearly every year since. As a physician, Harer is particularly interested in the medical aspects of Egyptology, and when he heard about the CT study of Tutankhamun, he was desperate to get a look at the scans. He started nagging Hawass, whom he says he has known since 1978, “when he was at the bottom of the pyramid.”

  It took Harer two years to persuade Hawass to let him see the data—“he kept promising and then falling through,” but he finally got his wish in 2008. The data were only kept in one place—the computer in the CT trailer, parked in the Egyptian Museum courtyard, so he had to look at them there. He spent several hours going through the scans—like the previous foreign consultants, he wasn’t allowed to take the information away, so he took as many photos as he could of the screen with his digital camera.

  His conclusions were quite different from those of the original CT team. He didn’t attach much significance to the supposed fractured leg or deformed foot. But he did notice several things that were weird about the way that Tutankhamun was treated by his embalmers—oddities not shared by any of the other royal mummies of the New Kingdom—which he felt provided a string of clues to the circumstances of the king’s death. Several of the details had been noted before, but no one had brought them together or commented on what they might mean.

  First was the position of Tutankhamun’s embalming incision. This is the cut that the embalmers made in a corpse’s tummy, so they could pull out the intestines. It’s usually quite a long cut, positioned on the left, from the groin up past the hip toward the waist. But in Tutankhamun, it’s shorter and higher, running from the navel almost to the left hip. Derry had noted this, but didn’t comment on it particularly.

  Secondly, Tutankhamun’s diaphragm was intact. Normally when the embalmers reach in through the embalming incision, they have to cut through the diaphragm to reach the lungs, but in this case, they didn’t bother.

  Third, and strangest of all, Tutankhamun had no heart. Some of the other details could perhaps be put down to differences between embalming schools, but a missing heart is a fundamental omission. Whereas the Egyptian embalmers tended to discard the brain, they saw the heart as the center of a person’s intellect and personality. Other organs were removed and mummified separately, but the heart was deliberately left in the body. Its owner was going to need it at the weighing-of-the-heart ceremony, held to determine whether the person was worthy of eternal life.

  Mummies are sometimes found without their hearts, and in these cases, perhaps the embalmers messed up and pulled it out by accident. After all, you can find mummies in pretty much any condition—with missing body parts, or extra body parts (not necessarily human); one unfortunate man was even found wrapped up facing the ground, with his mask on the back of his head. But the ancient priests generally took more care with royalty. According to Harer, the CT scans of the royal mummies show that Tutankhamun is the only one of them known t
o have been mummified without his heart.

  The heart couldn’t have been lost or stolen in modern times, he says, because Tutankhamun’s chest is packed full with resin-soaked—now rock hard—linen. Anyone who wanted to remove the heart would have to dig into this solidified packing, and even if they managed to put it back afterward, there would still be a gap where the heart once was. There’s no hole in the packing, suggesting that the heart was never there.

  The list of anomalies goes on. Tutankhamun’s arms were found folded over his lower abdomen, not crossed over his chest, as is traditional for pharaohs. His skull is weird too, with those two layers of solidified resin—one settled in the back of the skull, and one at the top. It seems most likely that the resin was applied twice—once through the nose with the body lying on its back, and once through the base of the skull (an opening called the foramen magnum) with the body on its front, with the head end tipped upside down over the end of a table.* This is unusual—in almost all other royals, the nasal passage is the only route opened into the skull. In Ahmose, the embalmers used the foramen magnum instead. Tutankhamun is the only mummy in which they seem to have used both.

  And, of course, there is that missing chest. The front part of Tutankhamun’s ribs are gone, as is his sternum, and the left side of his pelvis is badly damaged too. Derry (without the benefit of X-rays) didn’t notice this, while Harrison and the CT team both concluded that this damage was done in modern times, by Carter, or subsequent looters.

  Rather than make any assumptions, Harer zoomed in on the ends of the ribs left behind, to look for clues. He noticed three things. First, although some of the ribs were clearly broken, others were cut smoothly. Second, they weren’t cut in a straight line—all the ribs were slightly different lengths. Third, the rock-hard linen packing immediately beneath the cut or broken ends of the ribs was undisturbed.

  Harer argues that these three details prove the ribs were removed in ancient times, not modern. First, he says, the ribs can’t have been cut through with a horizontally held blade, say a hacksaw, because then they would have been cut in a straight line. Instead each individual rib is severed in a slightly different place, suggesting the use of a narrow, vertically held blade, such as a saber-type saw. But such a blade can’t have been used in modern times because it would have dug into the packing beneath the ribs, leaving telltale marks.

  Second, he argues, it would be pretty much impossible to cut through Tutankhamun’s ancient bones today and leave a smooth edge. The bones are now so brittle and fragile, they would snap before you could cut all the way through, leaving a partly broken surface. He tested this idea using some leftover pork ribs (after leaving them for a few months to dry out). No matter how carefully he tried to saw through them, he always ended up with a spike where the last bit of the bone snapped. To create the clean edge seen on Tutankhamun’s ribs, they must have been cut through when the body was still fresh, says Harer.

  Because some of the ribs are broken and some are cut, Harer concludes that the king suffered a devastating injury that smashed the front part of his chest. The body presumably arrived at the embalming house with much of the chest already missing, so all the embalmers could do was to trim some of the ribs around the injured area to try to tidy it up.6, 7

  This scenario nicely explains the other anomalies in how Tutankhamun was embalmed. The priests couldn’t leave his heart in place because it was already missing or seriously damaged before they received the body. And they didn’t need to cut through the diaphragm to reach the lungs because they could lift them straight out of the gaping hole in Tutankhamun’s chest. That meant they positioned the embalming incision slightly differently because they only needed to access organs and intestines from the lower abdomen. The arms were placed low, below the injury, rather than folded across the damaged area.

  When it comes to the skull, Harer thinks the embalmers must have tried to extract the brain through the nose as usual, but that this proved unsatisfactory—perhaps because the caved-in chest made it difficult to position the body on its front as necessary to drain the contents of the skull through the nose. So after pouring in some molten resin through the nose (with the body on its back, so the resin would settle in the back of the skull), they turned the body back over onto its front, and made a second large hole into the skull cavity through the foramen magnum. After the brain was completely removed, they poured in a second layer of resin with the head hanging upside down.

  Once the chest was packed with resin-soaked linen, Harer thinks the priests placed the blue-and-gold-glass-beaded bib directly over the opening, perhaps to protect it. This might explain why Carter was unable to remove it, because the beads were stuck directly to the resin, rather than being laid on top of bandages or skin.* The surface of the packing on the mummy today is ragged and bumpy, where whoever removed the bib literally had to chisel it off. Harer also thinks the injury might explain why the embalmers piled so many layers of protective amulets and jewelry over Tutankhamun’s chest area. As there are no other equivalent royal burials to compare him to, however, we don’t know if this was normal practice.

  Harer’s scenario of a fatal chest injury has support from another source too. Robert Connolly, the anatomist in Liverpool, has been looking again at Harrison’s 1968 X-ray images, and independently sees a similar picture.

  Connolly worked with radiographers in Liverpool to digitize and enhance Harrison’s old X-ray plates, before reanalyzing them.8 He agrees that the best explanation for the king’s absent heart is that it was already missing or destroyed before the embalmers got hold of the body. He also noticed the combination of broken and cut ribs and concludes that some were broken in an accident, with the embalmers later trimming away the rest for fast access to Tutankhamun’s internal organs. “I think Tutankhamun died in an accident, some distance from home,” he told me. “After a few days transporting the body at that temperature, putrefaction would have started. They would have wanted to get the odiferous gut out as quickly as they could.”

  So what could have ravaged the king’s chest and pelvis in such a strange way? Apart from the possible broken leg (Harer says he’s skeptical that this happened before death: “The embalming material inside the alleged fracture is very subtle if it’s there at all”), Tutankhamun doesn’t have any other major injuries, for example to his arms, skull, or spine. So something smashed up his front, but only his front.

  In an article published in June 2012,9 Harer goes through some of the possibilities, mostly wild animal related. He discounts a lion attack, arguing that the king would never have traveled or hunted without an entourage. So even if he were set upon by a lion, the animal wouldn’t have time to claw open and devour his chest before Tutankhamun’s men intervened.

  The now-extinct aurochs—a larger ancestor of today’s domestic cows, with fearsome horns—is another contender. An aurochs bull could easily kill a man, but to be gored in the chest, the king must have stood facing the charging bull like a matador, which seems unlikely. It’s also thought that the aurochs may have been extinct in Egypt at the time of Tutankhamun’s death—no hunts in Egypt are recorded after the reign of Amenhotep III.

  There’s the old chestnut of Tutankhamun falling from (or being struck by) a chariot, but this would have caused multiple injuries from tumbling, perhaps breaking his arms, legs, neck, or back. Or he could have been kicked in the chest by a horse, but that would presumably result in a much more localized injury.

  If the king was fowling in the marshes and lost his balance, he might have fallen in the water and been attacked by a crocodile. But a biting croc, with rows of razor sharp teeth on its upper and lower jaws, would cause equal damage to both sides of the body. There is another watery predator, however, that Harer claims could cause just the sort of injury seen in Tutankhamun: the hippo.

  Although it seems lumbering, and perhaps even cute (in a big-boned kind of way), the hippo is often cited as Africa’s most deadly animal—not counting the malaria-carrying m
osquito. They can grow up to three tons, are surprisingly fast in water and on land, and although vegetarian, have huge saber-like teeth in their bottom jaw, which they’re quick to use if they feel threatened.

  Harer argues that when an angry hippo attacks, it typically catches its fleeing victim and clamps them in its mouth, with one or both saber teeth impaling the unfortunate person from the front. A twist of the hippo’s head disembowels the victim, or rips out their chest, depending on the positioning of the teeth.

  Connolly also favors the idea of a hunting accident, though he doesn’t think there’s enough evidence to speculate on the exact culprit. Other experts have expressed caution about the hippo idea, skeptical that the pharaoh would ever have been exposed to such a danger, and that such a huge animal could have destroyed Tutankhamun’s chest and pelvis without leaving a series of injuries elsewhere on his body.

  But when I asked hippo specialists, they were cautiously positive that Harer’s scenario is at least possible. Erustus Kanga of the Kenya Wildlife Service confirms that hippo bites can cause clean-cut piercing or stab wounds, while David Durrheim, a public health expert who has reviewed hippo fatalities in South Africa, says that although most of the human deaths he came across were due to people getting trampled, hippo bites do also cause more localized injuries. “A well-placed hippo foot could certainly crush a human chest and a penetrating lower incisor could disembowel an unfortunate victim,” he says.

  Pharaohs from the Old Kingdom at least are known to have hunted hippos. Legend has it that King Menes, the first king of a unified Egypt, was killed by one. Hunting these animals was seen as an act of religious significance, as the hippo, associated with the god Seth, epitomized the forces of chaos—which it was the pharaoh’s role to quell. Perhaps the eighteen-year-old Tutankhamun would have relished such an adventure, suggests Harer, particularly during a period when he was keen to restore order to the land after the disruption of Akhenaten’s Aten heresy.