The Shadow King (12 page)

The hammer and chisel technique didn’t work on the head, so finally Derry extracted it by sliding hot knives between the bandages and the metal, to soften the resin and work the head free. Inside the mask, the head lay on an iron headrest, which according to the Book of the Dead would help the mummy rise up from its supine state and overthrow its enemies.

On the head, under a few layers of bandages, was one of the most impressive items found on the mummy—a gold and carnelian crown with cobra and vulture heads standing to attention in the front, and more snakes sweeping downward like ribbons at the back. Down through a few more layers of bandages, Derry found a band of burnished gold, and further down still, fitting tightly over the king’s shaved head, was a skullcap made of linen, embroidered in a snake design with tiny gold and faience beads. The fabric of the cap had deteriorated, meaning that trying to remove it would scatter the beads in all directions. So Carter decided to leave it in place on the king’s head, coating it in yet more wax.

It was time to reveal the king’s face. Derry removed the final wrappings carefully, brushing away the last decayed scraps with a sable brush. At last, they saw the man himself: long eyelashes, nose squashed into a triangle by the bandages, pierced ears, and parted lips, which revealed slightly protruding upper teeth. The flesh of Tutankhamun’s face had dried and contracted, leaving prominent cheekbones. On his left cheek was a round scab, like a large spot or mosquito bite that had yet to heal.*

Carter described “the serene and placid countenance of a young male … refined and cultured, features well formed, especially clearly marked lips.”6 I guess that’s all true, though I can’t help seeing in him a slightly awkward, goofy teenager.

Derry estimated Tutankhamun’s height in life as 5 feet 6 inches tall, exactly the same height as the two guardian statues that had stood either side of the sealed door to the burial chamber. Meanwhile, Lucas took samples from plugs in the mummy’s nostrils, white spots on its shoulders, and some reddish material in its right eye, and analyzed them to see what they were (linen, salt, and resin respectively). His methods, though pioneering at the time, seem today like a series of school chemistry experiments—testing whether a sample was soluble in alcohol or benzene, whether it left a greasy stain on paper, or whether it melted with heat.

Much to Carter’s disappointment, neither Derry nor Lucas came up with any clues to the cause of Tutankhamun’s early death. The autopsy did reveal one other important detail, though. Afterward, Derry wrote to his son Hugh at boarding school in England, telling him all about the tomb and the mummy.7 Derry described the richness of the jewelry he had retrieved, and explained how he calculated the king’s age from the ends of his bones. Then he added mysteriously: “I also made another discovery which is of great interest and which may help to make the history of that time clearer, but I am not permitted to make it public and Carter will eventually do so I expect.”

He was probably talking about the shape of Tutankhamun’s skull, which he recorded in his notebook and was later included in the second volume of Carter’s book on the tomb.8 Back in 1907, Derry’s mentor Elliot Smith had examined the mummy from the KV55 Amarna cache, then thought to be Akhenaten. One of his key findings was that the skull was quite exceptional—it stuck out a long way at the back, and at 154 centimeters across, was one of the widest skulls ever discovered in Egypt.

When Derry made his measurements, he found that Tutankhamun’s skull closely matched the unusual shape of the KV55 skull. In fact, it was even broader, at nearly 157 centimeters wide. Derry concluded that Tutankhamun must have been closely related to the KV55 king, perhaps his brother, or his son.

This was a big surprise. Until then, archaeologists had assumed that Tutankhamun became heir to the throne when he married Ankhesenamun, King Akhenaten’s daughter. But Derry’s finding suggested that Tutankhamun was himself of royal blood. For historians of the period, with so little information to go on, it was a huge discovery, and required much rewriting of textbooks. It explained why Tutankhamun had ended up on the throne at such a young age—he was the heir in his own right. But it raised a question that still exercises experts today: Who were his royal parents?

Derry finished his examination on the morning of November 19, and appears to have seen no reason to hang around. He and Hamdi left for Cairo straight after lunch.

CARTER AND LUCAS were left with the “terrible job,” as Carter described it,9 of separating the two stuck-together coffins. With the mummy out of the way, it was time for extreme measures, not to mention nerves of steel. They lined the inside of the gold coffin with thick plates of zinc, then suspended both coffins upside down on trestles. They covered the outer coffin with wet blankets. Then they put several Primus paraffin lamps under the hollow of the gold coffin and set them burning full blast.

For several hours, nothing happened, despite the gold coffin reaching a temperature of nearly 1000° F. Then it shifted an inch. At last, the resin was starting to melt.

Carter and Lucas turned off the lamps and left the coffins suspended on the trestles. After another hour or so they began to fall apart, and eventually they were free, albeit covered in a dripping mass of what looked like gloopy molasses. Even then, the gold mask was still clinging steadfastly to the inside of the coffin. They pulled it away, and cleaned off the sticky mess with a blast lamp and cleaning solvents.

The heat caused the glass inlay to come away from the mask; weeks later they were still replacing the tiny pieces. But on New Year’s Eve, they were finally finished and sent the mask and inner coffin—the largest golden relic ever unearthed from the ancient world—on the night train to Cairo. Meanwhile, the mummy itself stayed in the converted lab tomb, its pieces collected in a tray of sand.

Newspapers had followed the whole process. The solid gold coffin and mask brought home to everyone around the world just how wealthy Egypt was in the Eighteenth Dynasty. Even the wildest funeral extravagances of Rome and Byzantium hadn’t gone beyond marble and alabaster coffins. Confirmation of the mummy’s young age also helped to fill out a romantic tale of a king who came to power as a child and died while still a teenager. Some liked to end this tale with a suitably tragic death from tuberculosis, but murder was a popular theory too. As well as Ay, suspicion fell on Horemheb, the general of Tutankhamun’s armies. The elderly Ay only reigned for a few years before he died and was succeeded by Horemheb, who ruled for at least fourteen years and laid the foundation for the great military empire that was the Nineteenth Dynasty.

Work on the jewelry and other coffins continued until early May; then Carter returned home for the summer. When he returned to Egypt in late September, he was horrified to find that rats had burrowed under the entrance to the laboratory tomb. It was pure luck that they spared the dismembered king.

Carter prepared the mummy for reburial—carefully arranging its pieces in the sand to give the appearance of an intact body, folding its arms across its chest, and calling Burton to take one last photo before covering it in wads of cotton wool. On October 23, 1926, he placed the whole tray into the outermost of the three coffins and put that back into the sarcophagus, which still stood in the middle of the burial chamber. Finally he placed a large glass plate over the sarcophagus instead of its original lid, so visitors to the tomb could look down on the king’s golden face.

There was no ceremony or fuss. Carter regularly waxed lyrical in his diary about how overwhelmed he was at certain key moments, such as first entering the tomb, or revealing the golden coffins, but he appears to have been little moved by reinterring the king. His words on this occasion were curt: “The first outermost coffin containing the King’s Mummy finally rewrapped, was lowered into the sarcophagus this morning. We are now ready to begin upon the investigation of the Store Room” (i.e., the treasury).10

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.)

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.