The Shadow King (16 page)

But the damage Harrison uncovered seems to go far beyond anything inflicted by Carter. Before the mummy was placed back in the tomb in 1926, Burton photographed it in the sand tray (see photo insert).9 Although the picture has no date or caption, this portrait is widely assumed to show the condition of Tutankhamun’s body as Carter replaced it. Considering that the corpse is in several pieces, it looks pretty good—carefully laid out with each piece in its place, right down to the fingers and toes, and its bony arms folded neatly across its tummy. The skin is pale gray, and you can see even delicate details of the king’s youthful face.

The mummy shown in photos and footage taken by Harrison’s team is in a much sorrier state (see photo insert). The remains are charcoal black, and they look ragged and battered. The mummy’s arms are by its sides. The head is tilted instead of straight. The ears, previously almost intact, are mostly destroyed, the eyes are punched in, and the eyelids and eyelashes are gone.

Harrison also found pieces of the mummy scattered around the tray and its wrappings. For example, the right thumb and left hand were lying in the base of the tray, a collection of bones including a clavicle and femur were lined up in the sand next to the mummy’s head, and the left forearm wasn’t in the tray at all, but in a layer of cotton wool placed underneath it.

Mohamed Saleh, a member of Iskander’s team who was to become director of the Cairo museum, later told Al Ahram that once the group had finished their study, they spent hours trying to find and return all the pieces to their proper position.10

That wasn’t all. Two pieces of jewelry were still on the body in Burton’s portrait: the beaded skullcap and wave-patterned bib. Carter says in his diary that he didn’t try to remove the skullcap because it would have disintegrated, so he painted it over with wax and left it in place. It seems likely that he treated the fragile bib in the same way. But when Harrison opened the coffin, both items were gone. Only a few traces of colored pigment from the skullcap remained, and some scattered beads from the bib.

Strangely, Harrison never seems to have spoken about the mummy’s poor state. He doesn’t comment on it in the papers he published on the project apart from noting which body parts were found where. And in the resulting BBC film, the narrator talks only of the team’s “excitement at the completeness of the mummy.”11

The obvious—though little publicized—conclusion, however, is that modern-day looters broke into the coffin sometime between 1926 and 1968 and stripped the mummy of its remaining jewelry, in the process further damaging the body and scattering some of its parts. The first to suggest this in writing seems to have been John Harris, then Professor of Egyptology at Copenhagen University in Denmark, after Leek described the condition of the mummy in a letter to him in 1972.12 He replied to Leek: “There can, I think, be no doubt that the coffin was opened and the remains mishandled at some unspecified date between Derry’s examination and Harrison’s. How else can the hands and forearms have been displaced, and how else can the beaded skull cap have been removed?”

The idea is now generally accepted by Egyptologists. As Aidan Dodson, an expert in Tutankhamun’s burial who is based at Bristol University, UK, told me: “Somebody presumably paid a large bribe to see the mummy, saw there was some jewelry still there and thought, ‘I’ll have that.’” It has even been suggested that Tutankhamun’s eyes were punched in on purpose by superstitious thieves, to prevent him from “witnessing” their crime.13

The looting may have taken place during the Second World War, when security in Thebes was practically nonexistent. European inspectors had been phased out or called up for service (Egyptologists, because of their expertise in arcane languages, were particularly in demand as code-breakers), and the Egyptian inspectors who remained were demoralized.

Consequently, there was severe plundering and vandalism of the region’s tombs and antiquities. Harrison’s Liverpool colleague Fairman worked for the British embassy during the war, and reported back from Luxor that antiquities were being stolen from local storehouses, and reliefs hacked from the walls of nobles’ tombs, presumably with the knowledge of the local guards. Fairman didn’t mention the royal tombs, but they were easily accessible too—a favorite tourist attraction for British servicemen on leave from fighting German and Italian troops in the north of the country.*

When Harrison opened Tutankhamun’s coffin in 1968, the mummy was covered with cotton wool, so someone had at least gone to the trouble of crudely restoring its rewrappings. Dodson suggests that local officials had an incentive to cover up the theft, as admitting it “would have been the end of someone’s career,” so after they discovered the plundered body, they may have tidied it up as best they could and placed it back in the coffin.

Who carried out the daring theft—local looters and British servicemen have both been accused—is something we’re unlikely to ever find out. There’s one small mystery I can solve for you though: the whereabouts of Tutankhamun’s penis. It is a distinctive feature in Burton’s photos of the mummy but is nowhere to be seen in pictures from 1968, and Harrison doesn’t mention it in the BBC film, or in his published papers on the project. The missing member has since sparked a raft of conspiracy theories that the looters made off with this too, perhaps stealing it to order for some eccentric private collector. (The mind boggles—a fan of desiccated genitalia? Creator of the ultimate virility potion?)

Decades later, in 2005, Egyptian researchers reported finding what they described as “probably” the penis in the sand of the mummy’s tray.15 But no photos or details were released, leaving many unconvinced that their identification was correct, or even that the organ’s apparent recovery wasn’t simply a face-saving publicity stunt.

So does Tutankhamun still have his penis or not? In the end, I found the answer in an unexpected location: a cardboard box in Liverpool. The box is part of the archive of Harrison’s papers, held at the university. Among other things, it contains a thick pile of yellow handwritten pages: the draft manuscript of a book on Tutankhamun, that Harrison wrote but never published.

On page two hundred, Harrison says that “the penis and the scrotum had been removed and were found in the cotton wool underneath the sand tray.” In other words, the king’s crown jewels were never lost. Harrison knew where they were all along—he just didn’t bother to mention them in his paper. Presumably, they were dislodged by the looters and (along with the forearm) were dropped into the coffin beneath the lifted-out tray. In 1968, rather than attempting to replace or reattach Tutankhamun’s genitals, Harrison moved them into the sand, where the Egyptian researchers would later find them.

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* The field of eugenics advocates policies to “improve” the genetic composition of a population, and today tends to conjure horrific images of Nazi experiments and compulsory sterilization. It was more socially acceptable in the past, however, with advocates including some prominent Egyptologists. Scholars who saw evidence in ancient Egypt for the supremacy of certain races included Flinders Petrie, who worked closely with Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, and Grafton Elliot Smith, who although not a eugenicist himself was convinced that a (light-skinned) racial group behind the pyramids then spread civilization throughout the world. Leslie Hall, archivist of the Eugenics Society (now renamed the Galton Institute), says that after World War II, it focused on promoting academic research, with members broadly interested in issues relating to population, genetics, and society. So Harrison’s membership in the society probably had more to do with its ability to fund research than his political beliefs. “It doesn’t mean he was a neo-Nazi,” she says.

* This seems to have been Derry’s idea. As early as 1923, he suggested x-raying Tutankhamun so that he wouldn’t need to be unwrapped. But Carter and Carnarvon argued that the mummy couldn’t be left intact as any jewelry in the wrappings would make it a sure target for looters. “Therefore it was decided to unwrap the mummy and no one who knows anything of archaeology will question the wisdom of this decision which saved the King’s body from ruthless desecration,” Derry later wrote in his notebook, rather defensively. In the end, the fact that the mummy was stuck inside the golden coffin and mask—both extremely opaque to radiation—made x-raying it impossible anyway.

* Johnstone pioneered science and history documentaries for the BBC, helping to make the names of presenters like wildlife-documentary legend David Attenborough. He thought up the idea for an astronomy program called The Sky at Night and headhunted amateur astronomer Patrick Moore as its presenter—it went on to become British TV’s longest-running show, still on the air (with Moore still presenting) more than fifty years later.

* Harrison was particularly impressed by a detail that hadn’t been noted by Carter—beautifully made silver flanges all around the lid, each embossed with Tutankhamun’s name, which slotted precisely into sockets on the base of the coffin.

* For example, in a letter to his family now held by the Egypt Exploration Society, Bill Mountain, an engineer with the Royal Air Force, describes entering Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1943—“there he was in his tomb, all covered with a gold plate, beautifully coloured, and well kept”—and photos taken by Eric Budd, of the First Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment, show the golden coffin in its sarcophagus during a visit the same year.14

LYN REEVE, HARRISON’S JOLLY but deathly pale radiographer, had a habit of playing German military marches as he labored in his darkroom. On this occasion, however, his working conditions were rather different from usual. After spending the first day at Tutankhamun’s tomb taking a series of test exposures, Reeve converted a bathroom in the Winter Palace hotel, aided by the “dense blackness of the Egyptian night,”1 into a makeshift darkroom. The hotel’s luxurious bathroom furniture was perfect for the job, allowing him to develop these test films in one receptacle, fix in another, and wash in a third, while other members of the team guarded the doors.

Optimum exposure times established, the team had just one day left to get all the X-ray images they needed of Tutankhamun’s remains. Here the mummy’s dismembered state was an advantage, as it could be x-rayed piece by piece. Harrison grasped each fragment in turn and carried it over to the rickety X-ray machine: a foot; a black, clawlike hand; the famous head. He propped the pieces into position under the machine’s steel dome with bits of plastic and rolled up cardboard. Reeve then planned to take these crucial films back to Liverpool, to develop in an actual darkroom. Harrison would have to wait a while to find out what they showed.

Meanwhile, it was Leek’s turn. Leek was a small, spritely man with a mischievous smile and seemingly boundless energy, who always wrote in green ink. After retiring early from dentistry, he applied his professional knowledge to his hobby, Egyptology.* He had examined the teeth of thousands of ancient Egyptian skulls in various collections around the world, finding for example that although the Egyptians didn’t suffer from tooth decay (thanks to a low-sugar diet), their teeth were horribly worn from grit in their bread, sometimes all the way down to the pulp.2, 3

Leek was in Luxor to take a dedicated X-ray image of Tutankhamun’s teeth. The tricky part was that he wouldn’t be able to open the rock-hard mummy’s mouth to do it. So before the trip, Leek worked with staff at the UK’s Atomic Energy Authority, developing a method that used a hypodermic needle to inject a tiny bead of a radioactive X-ray source, Iodine-125, through the underside of Tutankhamun’s chin. The idea was that X-rays would then flood out of the mummy’s mouth, making a detailed image of its teeth on a film wrapped around its jaw.4

Leek was proud of the pioneering technique, and carried his precious radioactive nugget all the way to the Valley of the Kings in a small cardboard box. But when his big moment came, he found that the area under the king’s chin was covered in a shiny, brittle layer that the needle couldn’t puncture. His carefully worked-out plan had to be abandoned.

It wasn’t until Leek got home and checked Derry’s autopsy report that he realized what must have happened. Derry had described the mummy’s wisdom teeth, using them to help establish Tutankhamun’s age. How did he do it without X-rays to look inside the clamped-shut mouth? Leek concluded that Derry must have subjected Tutankhamun to an extra procedure, not mentioned in his report. There’s a technique routinely used in postmortems to examine a corpse’s teeth when rigor mortis makes it impossible to open its mouth: you cut out the entire floor of the chin, and push down the tongue with a spatula to see the teeth. Derry must have done exactly this, then put back the cut-out flesh and covered his damage with a brittle layer of resin.5 A few years later, Leek demonstrated the method on a human mummy held at the University of Manchester, UK.*, 6

The team flew home from Cairo on December 11, Harrison carrying a small piece of Tutankhamun’s skin packed in an envelope, so that Connolly could test the mummy’s blood group. After a four-in-the-morning start, the plane was late arriving, and they had a long wait on the plane before taking off—one member of the film crew was convinced it was all connected with the curse. But once they were finally airborne, said Harrison afterward, “We could hardly have had a more pleasant flight home.”7

Back in Liverpool, Reeve got to work on the X-ray films, while Connolly tackled the skin sample, looking for evidence that Tutankhamun and the mummy from tomb KV55 were from the same family. Harrison’s examination so far supported the idea that the pair were closely related. Both were of similar height, had similar skulls, and died at similar ages. And the X-rays showed that both men had a hole through each humerus (upper arm bone), just above the elbow joint, an inherited condition called epitrochlear foramina.

But a matching blood group would provide an independent line of evidence. The established method to test someone’s blood group—whether a long-dead mummy or a living patient—is called the agglutination technique. Each antigen on the surface of a person’s cells causes an immune reaction in someone who doesn’t have that antigen (this is why blood transfusions between people have to be closely matched). The immune reaction causes the cells to clump together, or “agglutinate.” In the test, you mix the cells you’re testing with extracts, or antisera, derived from people with different blood groups to see which ones trigger a reaction.