Tutankhamen (21 page)

This phenomenon was not confined to Europeans. As New York's
Harper's Magazine
told its readers:

If it was easy to collect human remains, it was less easy to dispose of them. Over time, as they started to decay, or as their owners died or simply moved on to new hobbies, many of their unwanted Egyptians were buried – and immediately forgotten – in Western gardens,
where they still lie today, a potential cause of confusion for the archaeologists of the future. A select few were given more elaborate burials. The decaying mummy of Amenherkhepeshef – who, despite his suspiciously Ramesside-sounding name, had been identified as the infant son of the 12th Dynasty king Senwosret III – was cremated by stalwart Episcopalian George Walcott Mead. Mead interred the remains in his family plot in West Cemetery, Middlebury, Vermont, beneath a gravestone which bore an
akh
, a
ba
bird and a cross. He made his views on the matter quite clear: ‘This was once a human being. It is fitting and proper that it should have a Christian burial.'
¹⁷

More often the unwanted mummies were donated, often stripped of their bandages, and frequently infested with mites and mould, to the local museum. Here they served as interesting but essentially uninformative exhibits to entertain the general public. Few of the mummies could boast a name, provenance or history. They might preserve a few basic facts about the deceased – gender, age, height, hair colour, perhaps even cause of death – but beyond this they were useless, their value limited to the jewellery which had once lain beneath their bandages. These mummies were of little interest to professional Egyptologists, many of whom were linguists rather than archaeologists or scientists. Some felt an instinctive revulsion at being associated with dead bodies (from his lack of interest in Tutankhamen's remains, it seems that Carter may have been one of these). Others regarded the mummies with distaste, as they represented the unfortunate, ‘popular', side of Egyptology. The public, in contrast, were fascinated, and paid to attend mummy unwrappings, or unroll-ings. These were public entertainments rather than proper scientific investigations, although there were some honourable exceptions. The surgeon Thomas Pettigrew, for example, made a good income from buying and publicly unwrapping mummies, but he also kept detailed notes of his work and his 1834
History of Egyptian Mummies
was a popular success.

The discovery of the two royal caches, in the late nineteenth century, heralded a change in attitude. Egyptologists were suddenly faced with a group of well-known, well-provenanced individuals whose bodies might make a real contribution to the understanding of Egyptian history. The royal mummy had crossed the boundary between impersonal artefact and real person. Nevertheless, it was considered entirely appropriate that these mummies be autopsied by Gaston Maspero, a fine Egyptologist and linguist, but a man with no medical training. His autopsies were conducted at a breathtaking pace: Ramesses II, one of Egypt's greatest pharaohs, was stripped in just fifteen minutes, with Maspero cutting straight through the bandages, making no attempt to unwind them. If this unwrapping were to be performed today – which it would not be – it would involve a team of experts and many months of intensive work. The royal mummies were subsequently re-examined by Smith, whose 1912 publication,
The Royal Mummies,
remains the standard authority on this subject.

In the Manchester Museum, in 1908, Margaret Murray, a former pupil of Petrie, did have some medical training. Murray assembled a team of experts to perform a double autopsy on a pair of 12th Dynasty mummies known as the ‘Two Brothers'.
¹⁸
She took a robust approach to those who queried, not her technique, but her right to unwrap the mummies at all:
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Murray's multidisciplinary approach has prospered, and today the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology at Manchester University,
headed by Professor Rosalie David, is dedicated to mummy research. The Manchester experts are engaged in the study of tissue types, parasites and diseases, and they hope that their work will not only explore the health of the long-dead, but also play a part in the eradication of one of Egypt's most persistent modern parasitic diseases, schistosomiasis (bilharzia). Meanwhile, in a curious twist of fate, Manchester Museum, no longer directly involved in mummy studies, found itself at the centre of an Egyptological storm when in May 2008 it decided on ethical grounds to cover the unwrapped and partially wrapped mummies displayed in its galleries. The bandaged mummies were left uncovered. The overwhelming public response was that museum visitors wanted to see the mummies. They did not regard this as voyeurism, or as an abuse of the rights of the dead Egyptians, and a significant number felt that this was what the Egyptians themselves would have wanted. Furthermore, they found the shrouded mummies both sinister and distasteful. After a period of experimentation and consultation the Manchester Museum policy has been modified, with just one stripped mummy remaining partially covered.

Just as Egyptology has advanced over the past century, so have medical techniques. Mummies are no longer routinely unwrapped and only when a mummy is irretrievably damaged – it is rotting beneath its bandages, for example – will biomedical Egyptologists pick up their scalpels. Instead, the experts rely on non-invasive procedures such as 3D X-rays, and the taking of minute tissue samples for DNA and histological analysis.

On 31 October 1925 the exterior trappings of Tutankhamen's mummy, including a floral collar, gold mummy bands, a pair of golden hands holding a crook and flail and a black resin scarab, were removed. The engraved mummy bands – two longitudinal bands and four transverse
bands – had clearly been made for someone else, and were not a good fit. Furthermore:

Carter then attempted to extract the mummy from its innermost coffin, but to no avail. Both the mummy and its golden mask remained obstinately stuck, and Carter could not apply the force necessary to separate them without running the risk of severe damage to the fragile mummy. Hoping that the heat of the sun might soften the resin, Carter enlisted ten strong men to carry the coffin outside the tomb. After two days of sunbathing, Tutankhamen was still glued fast and Carter resigned himself to conducting the autopsy with the king stuck within his mask and inner coffin, which was itself still stuck in the middle coffin.

On 11 November the autopsy took place in the outer corridor of the tomb of Seti II, in the presence of officials from the Antiquities Service and various Egyptian and European guests, who, as Carter's diary reveals, soon got bored with proceedings and became impatient with the need to take frequent photographs. It was conducted by Derry, Professor of Anatomy in the Medical Faculty of the Egyptian University, and by Dr Saleh Bey Hamdi of Alexandria, the former director of the Medical School. Derry had previously worked on the 11th Dynasty mummies recovered from the temple-tomb of Nebhepetre Montuhotep II, but he was not the obvious choice to lead the autopsy and his selection came as a blow to his former teacher Smith, who had been recommended to Carnarvon by Lythgoe of the Metropolitan Museum as ‘the
only
one who should have responsibility of the evidence on that side'. There was a sharp and unpleasant exchange of
letters between Smith and Carter, but Carter would not be swayed from his decision. Certainty that he would be called upon to perform this vital operation had inspired Smith to write for
The Times
as early as 15 December 1922:

Carter had indeed intended to have Tutankhamen X-rayed before his autopsy but the radiographer had died and, with no replacement available, the plan had to be abandoned to allow the autopsy to proceed as scheduled. This was unfortunate.

Having coated the outermost wrappings with melted paraffin wax, Derry made an incision straight down the middle of the mummy, cutting from the lower edge of the mask to the feet, slicing through the outermost sheet, which was bound to the body by linen bandages passing around (what were assumed to be) the ankles, knees, hips and shoulders. He had hoped that he would then be able to lift Tutankhamen from his outer wrappings, so that the autopsy might be conducted in a conventional manner. However, as he peeled back the stiffened linen, he realised that this would not be possible:

Tutankhamen was in a far worse state of preservation than any of the 18th Dynasty mummies recovered from the two royal caches. They had been separated from their original bandages a mere century or so after burial. In Tutankhamen's case, 3,000 years of contact with lavishly applied unguents had had an oxidising effect, charring his skin and reducing his wrappings to the consistency of soot:

Lucas identified this charring as a slow, spontaneous combustion. Physical anthropologist Robert Connolly agrees, and has been quoted as suggesting that Tutankhamen may have been a fire-risk in his own tomb: ‘Huge heat was generated by the resin. If it hadn't been an air-tight coffin, the whole tomb would have likely gone up in flames.'
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In contrast, several authorities have suggested that the charring to the
body may have been caused by Carter and Derry's misguided use of heat to separate the body from its mask and coffin.
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Derry was forced to work on the body from the legs upwards. After five days the torso and limbs had been exposed and he had reached the head, which was still covered by the mask. The two were separated with ‘hot knives', leaving the mask still stuck in the otherwise empty coffin. Derry had extracted the body by dismantling it. Tutankhamen had been decapitated, his arms separated at the shoulders, elbows and hands, his legs at the hips, knees and ankles, and his torso cut from the pelvis at the iliac crest. With the scientific investigation complete he was re-assembled on a sand tray for photographs, and some sections were stuck together with resin to give the appearance of an intact corpse. His head, swathed in cotton, was photographed in a way that suggested it was still attached to the body. Carter's account of the autopsy, written for a general audience, makes no mention of the dismemberment. Whether this should be construed as an act of deliberate falsification – the guilty hiding of a desecration – or simply as a respectful means of allowing some privacy to a damaged king, has become a matter of heated debate.
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