The Shadow King (19 page)

Harris also became intrigued by the mummy identified as Amenhotep III, which showed a few unusual features. This mummy was smashed to pieces before being rewrapped by the Twenty-First-Dynasty priests, suffering far more than the damage usually inflicted by tomb robbers. It also showed signs of a special embalming process—with stuffing under the skin of its legs, arms, and neck, a method that wasn’t otherwise seen until much later mummies. Harris concluded that the owner of this mummy would have been a strange-looking figure (rather like the KV55 mummy)—short, with a very large head for his body—and thought his face looked a lot like surviving statues of Akhenaten. Was he not Amenhotep III at all, but his son, the heretic king?

Harris suggested various complicated schemes to reshuffle the mummies’ identities to try to explain the inconsistencies he found, but there was no single theory that fit all the facts. It didn’t help that the methods he was using to compare the mummies’ faces and estimate their ages at death were themselves subject to error, and raised almost as many questions as answers. In most cases, the mummies in the museum are still labeled with their original identities, and the doubts Harris raised are on their way to being forgotten.

REMEMBER THOSE THREE naked mummies that Victor Loret found in a side room of Amenhotep II’s tomb? There were two women, nicknamed the Elder Lady and the Younger Lady,* and a boy with a cheeky face and a long sidelock of hair. Elliot Smith had described them in 1912 as part of his survey of the royal mummies. But no one had paid them much attention since.

Egyptologists had previously assumed they were included in Amenhotep II’s tomb as part of his original burial, and were probably minor members of his family. But Harris and Wente wondered if they might be more important than anyone realized. In particular, they were interested in the haughty-looking Elder Lady, whom Elliot Smith described as “a middle aged woman with long, brown, wavy, lustrous hair.”4 Her left arm was bent over her chest, a pose that had been seen in Egyptian queens, so perhaps she was an important queen herself.

When Harris was x-raying the mummies in the Egyptian Museum, he was particularly keen to add the Elder Lady to his collection. But she wasn’t anywhere to be found, and the museum staff had no idea what had become of her. Eventually, Harris tracked her down hundreds of miles away in Luxor, still lying in the side room of tomb KV35 with her two companions.

In 1975, he got permission to open this side chamber and x-ray the Elder Lady. Initially, Harris had suspected that she might be the female pharaoh, Hatshepsut. But when he compared her facial structure with all the other female mummies studied, he found that she most resembled Tjuiu, the mother of Queen Tiye. In fact, the faces of these two mummies were more similar than any other two women in the study. The images revealed that this woman died in her forties, about the right age for Tiye. Could the Elder Lady be this missing queen?

Based on this result, Harris persuaded the antiquities department to give him a sample of the Elder Lady’s hair, as well as a tiny piece—three hairs, flown from Cairo to Ann Arbor—from the lock of Tiye’s hair found in Tutankhamun’s tomb. In the summer of 1976, he analyzed both with a scanning electron microprobe, a technique in which you bounce a beam of electrons off the hair. This causes the hair to emit X-rays at frequencies that depend on the elements it contains, in effect giving you a chemical fingerprint.

The two samples matched almost perfectly: Harris announced that Queen Tiye had been found.5

SOHEIR AHMED, A YOUNG MOTHER teaching anatomy at the medical school in Cairo, was suffering from some of the same problems as Derry had, two decades earlier. It was a far cry from the conditions she had enjoyed when working for Harrison in Liverpool. “The students don’t have enough bodies to dissect,” she wrote to him in 1974.6 “We have 40 students on one limb … we need traffic wardens not teachers in the dissecting rooms!”

But she found time, at Harrison’s request, to search for Tutankhamun’s mummified fetuses. Derry’s successor, Professor Batrawi, had died suddenly in 1964. And no one else in the anatomy department had ever heard of the tiny body that Batrawi had shown Harrison. Ahmed scoured the mummies held in the old collection, many of which had lost their labels, but couldn’t find it. Then in November 1975, she finally tracked it down—the larger fetus, in a wooden box with a handwritten label: Tomb of Tutankhamun. There was no sign of the child’s smaller companion.

The next obvious step was to x-ray the fetus. Ahmed was able to organize this almost immediately, but getting the resulting radiographs to Harrison in Liverpool was more difficult, as posting the bulky scans to Britain was prohibitively expensive. She first hoped to send them in December, with a university professor who was flying to Scotland for a meeting, but she missed him when her diabetic husband, Samir, became seriously ill with hepatitis.

In the end, the scans had to wait until Harrison visited Cairo again in September 1976, but when he got home, he wrote with bad news—the scans weren’t clear enough and would have to be repeated. In the meantime, Ahmed had given Harrison a tiny piece from the fetus’s head, but Connolly was having trouble getting any results from it. She would also need to send a second sample.

Soon she had riots to worry about, too. As a country, Egypt was struggling, with nine out of ten Egyptians living in poverty and half of the male population unemployed. The president, Anwar el-Sadat (one of Nasser’s generals, who took over in 1970 after Nasser died from a heart attack), went to the International Monetary Fund for help with the country’s spiraling debts. In January 1977, the IMF imposed austerity measures that ended generous subsidies on flour and other basic supplies. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, with Cairo’s Tahrir Square, right next to the museum, one focal point for the protests.

“I’m sorry to hear of the troubles in Cairo,” Harrison wrote to Ahmed. “I saw a film of the riots last night on TV—attacking a VW car. I hope it wasn’t yours.”

Ahmed finally sent another sample of the fetus and a second set of X-ray images to Harrison in September 1977. He concluded that the infant had suffered from a congenital deformity called Sprengel shoulder, in which one shoulder is higher than the other, perhaps shedding some light on why she didn’t survive. But was she Tutankhamun’s daughter?

When Connolly saw the piece of the tiny mummy, he was again dismayed by what he had to work with. The sample had been packed in wool-fiber for transport and on the way had crumbled almost to dust. He had to use a microscope to pick out the individual fragments, piece by piece. But by December he had a result, concluding that the fetus was group O/M.7 It was indeed possible that Tutankhamun, with blood group A2/MN, was the father.*

Throughout all of this, Harrison and Harris were aware of each other’s work, but didn’t collaborate, and don’t seem to have held each other in particularly high esteem. In 1972, when trying to arrange to x-ray Yuya, Tjuiu, and Amenhotep III, Harrison wrote to Abdalla,8 saying that although “a man called Harris from Canada” had apparently x-rayed some of the mummies already, “I think it would be necessary to do this ourselves.” Harris felt similarly, complaining that Harrison’s X-rays of Tutankhamun weren’t aligned in a way that enabled him to take anything useful from the data.9

In 1978, Harris decided to repeat the job, and x-rayed Tutankhamun for himself. It was a brief, low-profile project, with no press present as far as I’ve been able to determine, probably the most anticlimactic opening ever of Tutankhamun’s coffin. Harris stayed only long enough to x-ray the mummy’s head, and to add his details to Carter’s little record card. Microfilms of the two resulting images are included in a 1980 academic publication, An X-ray Atlas of Royal Mummies;10 if you get it out from the library you can find them stuffed in a little pocket in the back. They are barely mentioned in the book itself though, and Harris never separately published any results on Tutankhamun. It seems he couldn’t add much to Harrison’s study after all.

Meanwhile, Harrison had set his sights on Harris’s newly identified queen. In November 1976, when Harrison heard about Harris’s claim to have identified Tiye, he immediately added the Elder Lady to his wish list—he wrote to Ahmed asking if she could get him a sample of that mummy as well.

The Elder Lady was more difficult to access than the mummies in the Egyptian Museum as, like Tutankhamun, she was still in Luxor, so taking a sample required special permission to open the tomb. It took Ahmed months to persuade Gamal Mokhtar, the head of the antiquities service, to approve the project. In the end, Mokhtar decided that if anyone was going to take a sample it would be him, which he did in the summer of 1977.

When Connolly worked out her blood group, it was O/N.11 This wasn’t what Harrison expected for Tiye. Her parents were both A2/N, so although the N fit, he had assumed that she would be A2 also. Finding this blood group would have been strong supportive evidence for Harris’s identification. Finding a group of B, on the other hand, would have ruled the Elder Lady out as Tiye. Group O was annoyingly inconclusive. It was possible for Tiye,* but it wasn’t a ringing endorsement of Harris’s result. (Further doubt was cast on the hair result a few years later, when a German scientist argued that any hair sample tested by the method Harris used would have looked the same, in other words, all the electron probe study did was to produce a chemical fingerprint for “hair.”)12

In February 1982, Harrison went to Egypt to reexamine the mummy of Queen Tiye. When he got home, he wrote to Ahmed.13 The weather is “very cold,” he said. “I wish I was back with you in Cairo.” But he never visited Egypt again. He died on New Year’s Eve 1982, aged sixty-one, from a tumor in the frontal lobe of his brain—possibly caused by regular use of an X-ray microscope, a contraption that enabled him to look at a light image of a sample at the same time as the equipment took an X-ray, giving him a beam of radiation right between the eyes.

If I’d a known they would’ve lined up just to see ’im; I’d a saved up all my money, and bought me a museum!

—STEVE MARTIN, 197914

“IT’S MORE THAN A HULA-HOOP,” remarked a Los Angeles storeowner in March 1978.15 “Tutmania is going to go on for years.”

While Harrison and Harris vied for supremacy over the royal mummies in Egypt, Tutankhamun had been taking America by storm. The touring exhibition of the king’s treasures that had been so popular in Britain a few years earlier was now making waves across the United States too, after opening in Washington DC in November 1976.

It almost didn’t happen. When Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which eventually organized the tour, first applied to Egypt to host the treasures, he was turned down. The Egyptian government wasn’t at all keen on America, friend of its archenemy Israel. After the exhibition finished its run in London, Egypt instead sent the artifacts to its long-standing ally, the Soviet Union.

But President Sadat was keen to reposition his country after the socialist years of Nasser. He threw Soviet troops out of the country in 1972, and after a brief war against Israel in 1973 (in which he regained the territory Nasser had lost in 1967, making him a hero in Egypt), he started talking to the United States, and indicated his willingness to negotiate toward a peace treaty with Israel.*

President Nixon, dependent on Middle Eastern oil, was keen for political stability in the region (and to strengthen his own influence there), and he saw the Tutankhamun exhibition as a way to cement links between Egypt and the United States. He visited Egypt in 1974 and personally asked Sadat to allow the treasures to travel to America—with one more city, and several more objects, than had been included in the Soviet tour.

Sadat agreed, but then the Metropolitan Museum had second thoughts, concerned about taking responsibility for so many priceless items. It turned out that withdrawing from the exhibition wasn’t an option. The chair of the museum’s board received a phone call from Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, who told him that the show was “a vital part of the Middle East peace process.” If the Met didn’t organize the tour, he said ominously, the government would be “disturbed.”16

The resulting exhibition triggered a frenzy of excitement across the United States, with sold-out tickets, long lines, and overcrowded galleries, and it smashed attendance records for a temporary museum show. Between 1976 and 1979, cities including Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, and New York saw more than a million visitors each—of whom it was estimated that more than a quarter had never set foot in a museum before.

The episode forever changed the way that U.S. museums did business. It also sent journalists rushing for appropriate superlative comparisons. According to the New York Times, “Egyptian fever is spreading faster than Asian flu,” with sellers of Egyptian-inspired artifacts “proliferating faster than aspirin manufacturers.”17 Department stores and newly opened specialist Tut shops offered Egyptian motifs on bed linen, clothing, wallpaper, and furniture, along with Tut-inspired jewelry, appointment books, jigsaw puzzles, and paint-it-yourself funeral masks. A custom car show in Los Angeles featured a $10,000 car with a fiberglass grill in the shape of Tutankhamun’s head, a cobra-head stick shift, and sphinxes adorning the running board.18 At a specialist store in Seattle, you could buy a vibrating King Tut pillow that plugged into the wall.

The comedian Steve Martin wrote a parodic song about the phenomenon (which went on to sell more than a million copies), while women wore T-shirts featuring twin images of Tutankhamun’s golden mask, and the slogan “Hands off my Tuts!”

Sociologists now cite this exhibition tour as a key moment in defining the “King Tut” we know today. Melani McAlister, a cultural historian at the Elliot School of International Affairs in Washington DC, says the press coverage and trinkets created Tut as a “significant cultural phenomenon,” noting among other things the unique alliance it forged between “the high-culture world of museum exhibits and the popular traffic in celebrity icons.”19