The Shadow King (11 page)

Nerves might have got to most people at this point. But it’s unlikely that Derry allowed his hand to shake. During the First World War, he had served in the Royal Army Medical Corps; on the Western Front, in Belgium, he rescued wounded men under heavy shellfire with such gallantry and coolness that he was awarded the Military Cross. And when it came to studying mummies, Derry was a world expert. He had arrived in the anatomy department of Kasr Al Ainy Medical School (now part of University of Cairo) in 1905 under the professorship of Grafton Elliot Smith, a brilliant but eccentric Australian anatomist who was pioneering the study of ancient human remains. As well as finding that the mummy from the Amarna cache was male—despite Davis’s firm belief that it was Queen Tiye—Elliot Smith had carried out a tediously detailed but badly needed survey of all the royal mummies held in the Cairo Museum.2

One of Derry’s first postings was with the Archaeological Survey of Nubia, in a remote area on Egypt’s southern border, working with Elliot Smith and another young anatomist called Frederic Wood Jones. The project was a race against time to salvage as much archaeological information as possible about the ancient civilizations that had lived there, before the entire area was flooded by the raising of the first Aswan Dam across the Nile in 1907.

Between 1907 and 1911, the three anatomists worked in the barren heat of the desert, surrounded by evil swarms of dust and flies. Much to the bemusement of the Nubian locals, few of whom had ever seen a white person before, they used metal calipers to measure skeleton after skeleton excavated from the thousands of shallow graves that lined the Nile, noting the results on cards that were tinted blue to protect their eyes from the glare of the sun. In four seasons, living mainly on rice and canned sardines, the tiny team studied more than 20,000 sets of human remains. They noted the age, sex, and ethnic origins of the people who had lived there millennia before; cultural practices such as circumcision and attempts at embalming; and their causes of death, from childbirth and leprosy to beatings and battle wounds.

Two particularly gruesome trenches yielded the bodies of more than a hundred young men, hanged by the Romans, some with the noose still around their necks. The injuries they suffered caused the team to join the debate over the most humane methods of hanging, which at the time was raging back in Britain, with Wood Jones later carrying out a series of clandestine experiments that involved dropping cadavers down the lift shaft of St Thomas’s Hospital in London.

When Elliot Smith subsequently took a job in London, Derry took over his professorship at the medical school in Cairo and soon became Egypt’s go-to expert for any human remains discovered by archaeologists in the country, gradually amassing one of the largest collections of desiccated body parts in the world. He was particularly excited by his work at Giza, site of the Great Pyramids—he measured hundreds of mummies and skeletons in the nobles’ graves there, and wrote enthusiastically to his ex-mentor about what he found.3

Elliot Smith was fascinated, if not obsessed, by the racial origins of these pyramid builders, because he saw them as the original creators of human civilization, who spread their cultural practices around the world. (Unfortunately for his theories, he didn’t know that the pyramids and mummies being unearthed in other regions such as South America were separated from their Egyptian counterparts by thousands of years.) So Derry became very interested in such questions too. Unfortunately, his studies didn’t say much about the origins of civilization. But he did find among other things that the eye orbits in the nobles’ skulls were markedly elliptical—meaning that the slanted eyes shown in the artwork of their tombs weren’t just an aesthetic style or the result of over-enthusiastic application of eyeliner, they reflected how the ancient Egyptians really looked.

When Carter needed someone he could rely on to unwrap King Tutankhamun, he chose Derry as the principal anatomist in Egypt—much to the annoyance of Elliot Smith, over in England, who thought he should have been asked ahead of his ex-student. Cheeks glistening with sweat, Derry leaned over and pushed his scalpel into the mummy’s chest, just below the hefty golden mask, and slowly slid the blade all the way down to its toes. He peeled the two resulting flaps outward, and immediately saw the glint of gold.

Unlike the cached royal mummies, reburied with scarcely a scrap of jewelry, this king was smothered from head to foot in an awesome array of precious items, each precisely placed according to ancient beliefs and rites. Unfortunately, the bandages beneath the wax were in an even worse state of decay than those of the top layer. They resembled black crumbly charcoal, which made the operation a messy business—less orderly unwrapping, more treasure hunt in a barrel of ash.

It was a big disappointment. Derry had unwrapped mummies seven hundred years older than Tutankhamun, with bandages that were still so strong he couldn’t tear them. And because the king had never been disturbed, hopes had been high that he might be pristine. The deterioration seemed to be caused by an unfortunate combination of damp conditions—from plaster still wet when the tomb was sealed and floodwater that had leaked in over the millennia—and the huge quantities of oils and unguents poured over the mummy at the funeral, which as well as gluing it inside the coffin, had eaten away at the bandages.*

Derry started at the feet and over the next five days worked slowly up toward the mummy’s neck, delving through its protective cocoon layer by layer as Carter brandished his magnifying glass in delight. The economic value of the trinkets they unearthed was incalculable but what had Carter so enthused was their meaning—an unprecedented insight into the magic and rituals with which the ancient Egyptians sent a king to his grave.

Tutankhamun’s feet sported gold sandals, with individual toe stalls engraved with nails and joints. Over his legs were gold bangles, a ceremonial gold apron, and, to Carter’s surprise and excitement, a beautifully decorated gold dagger with an iron blade still bright and rust-free after three thousand years. It was one of three iron objects found on the mummy, which were the earliest examples of iron ever found in Egypt. The discovery suggested that iron was introduced into Egypt by the Hittites in Tutankhamun’s time—an early indication of foreign influence, and as Carter saw it, an omen for the future: “one of the first steps in decline of the Egyptian Empire—the greatest empire of the Age of Bronze.”4

Around Tutankhamun’s waist was another golden girdle, and tucked under it, another dagger, this time with a golden blade. The king’s arms, instead of being crossed over his chest in the traditional pose seen in other royal mummies, were folded over his tummy, the left hand slightly higher than the right. Bangles were hidden in the wrappings just above his elbows, including one carved with a distinctive bird. Carter, always keen to link the Egyptians’ religious beliefs with the wildlife he saw around him in the Valley of the Kings, identified it as the Egyptian swift. These birds lived in huge colonies in the cliffs at the edge of the desert, as he noted in his journal. The swifts flew down to the Nile at sunrise, screaming, and headed home, even louder, as the sun set. Maybe the Egyptians associated them with the transformation of the sun god, he mused, or the souls of the dead, which come forth by day with the sun and return at night.

The mummy’s slender forearms were coated from elbow to wrist with chunky gold bracelets, all of different designs, some inlaid with semiprecious stones and glass. Each finger and thumb was individually wrapped in fine strips of linen, then enclosed in a gold sheath. Over its wrists were clusters of finger-rings made of gold, lapis lazuli, white and green chalcedony, turquoise, and resin.

The chest was even busier—a gleaming jungle of thirty-five objects placed at thirteen different layers within the wrappings. Four magnificent gold collars featuring vultures, snakes, and hawks were piled on top of one another. Two golden hawks covered the lower part of the chest, with their wings extending up under the king’s armpits, as well as three more collars made up of hundreds of individual pieces of gold and inlaid glass. There was another series of gold bangles, and nearer the body, personal jewelry that showed signs of having been worn during life. Three beautiful blue scarabs (dung beetles) made of lapis lazuli held the disks of the sun and moon in their forelegs. And underneath everything, close to the skin, was an elaborate bib, made of tiny beads threaded together in a pattern of golden waves on a blue background.

Around Tutankhamun’s neck was a profusion of amulets and sacred symbols intended to protect and guide him on his journey through the underworld, each separated by layers of bandaging. They included a red jasper teyet charm (shaped like an ankh symbol with droopy arms) to ensure the protection of the goddess Isis, and an inscribed gold djed pillar, which depending on whom you ask might be intended as a tree trunk, or as Osiris’s backbone, and symbolizes stability and durability. There was a tiny scepter made of green feldspar symbolizing power and eternal youth; a red carnelian snake’s head to protect Tutankhamun’s spirit against the snakes that infested the tunnels of the underworld; and figures of several gods including the baboon-headed Thoth, jackal-headed Anubis, and falcon-headed Horus.

Suspended on a long gold wire was one of the most important items of all—a large black-resin scarab, its wing cases inlaid with a Bennu bird, or heron, in multicolored glass. This is thought to have been Tutankhamun’s heart scarab (normally placed over the heart, but in this case it was closer to his navel).

The ancient Egyptians saw the heart, rather than the brain, as the seat of intelligence and knowledge, and the final challenge for any soul wishing to pass into eternal life was to have it weighed. The heart was placed on a set of scales before Osiris, with a feather representing Ma’at (a concept encompassing truth, order, and justice) on the other side. If your pans balanced, you would live happily ever after. If your heart was heavier, indicating that you hadn’t lived your life in accordance with Ma’at, it was fed to a monster called “The Devourer,” a lion-hippo-crocodile hybrid that crouched waiting, and your spirit would be cast into darkness. A mummy’s heart scarab played a key role, rather like a “get out of jail free” card, preventing the deceased’s heart from testifying against them and thus guaranteeing a positive outcome.

The number and richness of Tutankhamun’s amulets brought home to the investigators just how much the ancient Egyptians must have feared the dangers of the underworld. The other overwhelming impression was that this mummy seemed to have been wrapped with no expense spared, not to mention oodles of care, love, and respect.

According to the Book of the Dead,* when these charms were placed on the mummy, magic spells associated with them were to be uttered “in solemn voice.”5 Now Carter and Derry put the careful work of the embalmers into reverse, transforming the divine, protected king back into a fragile, mortal corpse. Along the way, they turned his magic into science. At each layer, after brushing away the charred bandages, they carefully labeled each item with a letter, while Burton took photos to record the exact position in which each was found.

In all, they unearthed 143 items, wading through the jewelry all the way down to Tutankhamun’s gray skin, which was brittle as eggshell and laced with cracks. Here, Carter lost interest somewhat. He was desperate for biographical information about the king’s life—his age, for example, or cause of death—to shed some light on the mysterious Amarna period. Otherwise, the body itself paled into insignificance beside the glorious treasures that adorned it. With the amulets gone, it was little more than an obstacle to retrieving the gorgeous gold coffin and mask into which it was glued.

Derry, on the other hand, was now in his element. He took the autopsy slowly and carefully, noting each tiny detail in neat pencil in his exercise book. As he had feared from the carbonized wrappings, the body itself was in a poor state too, horribly fragile and shrunk until little more than skin and skeleton remained. When some flesh on one leg flaked away down to the bone, the whole thing—what had once been plump muscle, tendons, fat, and skin—was no thicker than cardboard.

The left kneecap came away at Derry’s touch, exposing the lower end of the mummy’s femur. This provided crucial information about the king’s age because in children and adolescents, long bones like the femur are still growing, so the bulb of the bone isn’t yet fused to the shaft (instead it’s attached by cartilage). The end of Tutankhamun’s femur was still free from its shaft, so Derry concluded that he died young—as Carter had thought—at perhaps no more than eighteen.

No pubic hair was visible but the king’s penis was easy to spot. Bandaged in the erect position, it measured around five centimeters long. And on the left side of Tutankhamun’s tummy, running from his navel toward his hip, was a ragged opening through which the embalmers had pulled out his internal organs.

Assisted by Hamdi, Derry cleaned the limbs and body, took as many measurements as possible, and painted the whole thing with more hot paraffin wax to stop it crumbling any further. By the morning of November 16, they had stripped the entire mummy down to the skin—and in some cases the bones—apart from the head and shoulders, which were still stuck fast inside their golden helmet.

In case you’re imagining the body neatly laid out beneath the mask, though, the truth is rather more brutal. Carter glossed over this minor detail in his diary and published account. But Derry’s notes, written as the examination was taking place,* are more revealing. Because the mummy was stuck to the bottom of the coffin with resin, the team weren’t able to remove much of the jewelry. So they took drastic action, pulling the mummy’s limbs apart to slide free the bracelets, and then cutting the body completely in two, like magicians at work on an unlucky assistant, before using a hammer and chisel to scrape out each dismembered piece.

This procedure revealed that the body cavity was filled with a tightly packed mass of resin-soaked linen, now caked into a solid black. It also had the happy side effect of exposing the ends of various other bones that helped Derry to determine the body’s age, so he was able to firm up his previous estimate of eighteen. Finally, the coffin was empty except for Tutankhamun’s head and neck, stuck inside the mask, its wide, obsidian eyes staring straight up toward the painted vultures that circled on the tomb ceiling.