The Shadow King (20 page)

At the time, commentators scratched their heads over why this particular exhibition was causing such a sensation—was it the appeal of buried treasure, the intrigue of a murder mystery, or that fascinating story about the curse? One theologist described the exhibition as “an antidote for America’s cultural amnesia,” which appealed to a universal thirst for knowledge about human origins. The story of the royal mummies fascinates people, he said, because it isn’t just the genealogy of a single family, but “the collective genealogy of the human race.”20

Unfortunately, not everyone in Egypt shared America’s enthusiasm for the pharaohs, or for peace in the Middle East. Under Nasser, Egypt had been an icon of Arab nationalism, and many in the Arab world now saw Sadat as a traitor for talking to Israel. On October 6, 1981, Sadat sat in a viewing stand in front of the pyramid-shaped Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, surrounded by layers of security as well as dignitaries from around the world. They were there to watch the interminably long victory parade held annually to celebrate the war with Israel in 1973.

As the crowd’s attention was distracted by a flyby of air force jets, an army truck stopped in front of the stand and a group of soldiers jumped out. Expecting a salute, Sadat rose to greet them but instead they riddled his body with gunfire and threw hand grenades into the stand, killing him and at least seven others. Their leader, Lieutenant Khalid al-Islambouli, only stopped shooting when he ran out of bullets. Then he shouted: “I have killed the pharaoh.”21

Sadat was succeeded by another army general, his vice president, Hosni Mubarak, who had been sitting next to him when the assassination took place. In coming decades, Mubarak’s regime would be intimately involved with a new generation of multimillion-dollar studies on Tutankhamun and his family that would bring unprecedented sums of money pouring into Egypt, and turn the mummies into international TV stars.

But Tutankhamun would be making plenty more headlines before then.

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* Aidan Dodson, Egyptologist at the University of Bristol, explains that the other reason Maatkare was thought to have died in childbirth was her distended abdomen and large breasts. “Comparison of Maatkare’s mummy with that of her brother, the high priest Masaharta, quickly explains her apparently ‘pregnant’ physique,” he told me. “The pontiff was a man of massive girth closely resembling a ‘Michelin man.’ A family tendency toward obesity, together with the Twenty-First Dynasty practice of packing the body during embalming, is the most likely origin of Maatkare’s appearance. Had the ‘baby’ not existed, it is unlikely that there would ever have been a diagnosis of pregnancy.”

* Loret initially thought the Younger Lady was a man, as her head was shaved, but Elliot Smith corrected him in his 1912 report. “It requires no great knowledge of anatomy to decide that the excellently preserved naked body is a young woman’s,” he wrote, witheringly.

* We inherit our blood group from both of our parents. As far as the ABO system is concerned, if Tutankhamun was A2 (in other words, he had the A2 antigen but no B antigen), this could mean that either he inherited the A2 antigen from both parents, or that he got A2 from one parent and O (i.e., no antigen) from the other. If the former, his children would have to inherit the A2 antigen. But if the latter, his children would have a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting from him either A2 or O (in addition to whatever they inherited from their mother). For the MN system, if Tutankhamun was MN, then he must have inherited the M antigen from one parent and the N antigen from the other. This means that he would pass on either M or N to his children.

* It would require both Yuya and Tjuiu to have inherited both the A2 blood groups from only one of their parents and O from the other, and for Tiye to have inherited the O group from both of them.

* The process he started ultimately led to the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty, signed by Sadat and the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in March 1979, after a series of 1978 meetings—the Camp David Accords—facilitated by U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

HOW’S THIS FOR A DRAMATIC REVELATION: Tutankhamun was none other than Jesus Christ himself. With so much popular interest in King Tut, I guess it was only a matter of time before someone made the claim. And in 1992, an Egyptian historian named Ahmed Osman did the honors, publishing a lengthy (and bestselling) account of how this ancient king was actually the son of God.

This is just one of many strange theories that cling to Tutankhamun. Perhaps it’s because he’s ultra-famous, yet we know so little for sure about him. He has become a sort of universal blank slate, onto which people from different backgrounds and cultures can project their own beliefs and desires without having to take too great a risk of being proved wrong.

This has happened ever since the tomb was discovered, of course. But between the 1970s and 1990s, the imaginations of Tut enthusiasts ran particularly wild. With Tutankhamun’s coffin unopened after James Harris’s visit in 1978, there were no new scientific data regarding the mummy to feed people’s interest in the king. The headlines had to come from elsewhere, and they centered on three crowd-pleasing themes. There was Tutankhamun’s curse, and his murder, and we’ll look at both in the next chapter. But the biggest one was God, with multiple claims of links between the Egyptian royal mummies and high-profile religious figures such as Jesus and Moses—much to the disquiet of the authorities in Cairo.

Scholars and amateurs alike have tried to link archaeological information coming from discoveries in ancient Egypt with biblical accounts since long before Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered. In the West at least, the Bible was the only reference point that many people had for this time period and part of the world. The accounts in it were assumed by many Christians to be literally true, so there was intense interest in a second source of evidence that might help to confirm the details.

Egypt is frequently mentioned in the Old Testament, with several key figures ending up close to the Egyptian royal family. The most important is Moses, seen as a lawgiver and prophet by Christians and Muslims alike. In the Bible, the Book of Exodus describes a time when the Israelites were a tribe living in Egypt as slaves. Their numbers were multiplying, so the pharaoh ordered all newborn Hebrew boys to be drowned. Moses’s mother hid him in a basket and floated it down the Nile, after which he was found and adopted by the Egyptian royal family.

Moses later fled the country after killing an Egyptian, but returned many years later, when a new pharaoh was on the throne, to demand the release of his people (after receiving instructions from God, in the form of a burning bush). It took the Ten Plagues to persuade the pharaoh to agree, after which Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and across the Red Sea (some experts say this is a mistranslation of a smaller body of water called the “Reed Sea”). Going back on his promise, the pharaoh chased with his army. God divided the waters to allow the Israelites to pass safely, but when the Egyptian army followed, the waters returned and drowned them. After much wandering in the Sinai desert, the Israelites finally reached their promised land.

Unfortunately for those trying to prove that these were actual historical events, the religious texts describing them don’t tend to give definite dates, or identify the rulers concerned; the Bible describes them all simply as “Pharaoh.” And strangely (or not, depending on your views on the veracity of the Bible), none of this seems to have made much impression on the Egyptians. There’s no hint of these events in the extensive record we now have from ancient Egypt, not even of the supposedly devastating plagues, and only one mention of Israel, on a black granite slab from the reign of Merenptah in the Nineteenth Dynasty.

So when Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered, scholars were excited about the insight it might provide into their biblical heroes. Several experts, including Egyptologist Arthur Weigall (previously the chief inspector of antiquities at Luxor), believed the tomb would prove that Tutankhamun himself was the pharaoh of the Exodus.1 They argued that Akhenaten’s monotheistic revolution must have been inspired by Moses, when he was a prominent figure in the Egyptian court. So Tutankhamun, who reversed those religious changes, was clearly the one who chased Moses out.

Unfortunately, the tomb, with its lack of written records, didn’t offer a scrap of evidence for the theory. And now, most historians and archaeologists reject the idea that biblical stories represent actual historical events. Some dismiss the story of the Exodus completely, or consider it to be a distorted account of Ahmose I’s expulsion of the Hyksos. Others suggest that waves of migration occurring over long periods of time later became condensed and dramatized into a single narrative. Such a movement of people may have occurred on a grand scale, but the individuals named are metaphorical, not real.

Despite this, however, there’s no shortage of people who remain convinced that the characters described in the Bible—and related accounts in Jewish and Islamic texts—did exist. Not only that, but their mummified bodies are still with us, on display for all to see.

One of them was Maurice Bucaille. A French medical doctor who died in 1998, he was brought up as a Catholic in the little town of Pont l’Évêque. After studying various religious texts, he became convinced that the Qur’an represents a scientifically accurate description of the world, including hints of facts not discovered until centuries after the text was written, for example that the universe is expanding, or that man would one day travel into space. In the Bible, on the other hand, he saw major scientific errors, such as the claim that humans had only been around for six thousand years, or that the animals of the earth were created before the birds.

His conclusion was that while the Bible contains many details that can’t be trusted, the Qur’an is the true word of God, and should therefore be embraced by Christians. In 1976, he published a book on his ideas called The Bible, the Qur’an and Science,2 which became a best seller. The practice of using science to try to prove the truth of religion, particularly Islam, is still known as “Bucaillism.”3

Bucaille took a great interest in the royal mummies, including Tutankhamun, and in 1990 published another book called Mummies of the Pharaohs: Modern Medical Investigations.4 My copy has a red stamp: “Discarded by the Kalamazoo Public Library,” which I imagine to be quite an achievement.

In it, he repeated for a much wider audience Leek’s account of the sorry state of Tutankhamun’s mummy. But he went much further than Leek, claiming that Carter had willfully destroyed the body, then “lied blatantly”5 to cover up the damage he caused. He also accused a whole line of other Egyptologists since of assisting in the deception, by glossing over the mummy’s condition in their accounts of Carter’s work. According to Bucaille, the story of Tutankhamun’s mummy could be summarized as: “33 centuries of the sleep of the dead—a week of dismembering—a quarter of a century of misleading narratives.”6

There’s no doubt that the mummy did suffer at Carter and Derry’s hands, with the loss of valuable information. And their failure to disclose exactly what they did—from cutting the torso in two, to fixing up areas such as the chin and skull with resin—has caused complications and confusion for later scholars trying to piece together the details of Tutankhamun’s life and death from the state of his body.

But I don’t think that Carter was engaged in outright deception. It seems more likely that he just wasn’t very interested in the body itself, and didn’t see such details as particularly relevant. It’s also important to judge Carter and Derry by the standards of their own time. Only a few years previously, archaeologists were destroying mummies out of curiosity or in the hunt for gold without making any proper records. Several royal mummies were unwrapped in as little as fifteen minutes each, whereas Carter and Derry took eight meticulous days. Some of the details make us cringe today, but the pair set the standard for how such a mummy should be treated, at a time when archaeology was only just turning from a treasure hunt into a science.

Beyond his rant about Tutankhamun, Bucaille’s main interest was identifying the pharaoh of the Exodus, by comparing the royal mummies held in the Egyptian Museum with details of the story given in the Bible and Qur’an. He focused on two prime suspects: Rameses II and his son Merenptah. In the Exodus story, Egypt controlled a vast empire, which fits the period that followed Rameses II’s conquests. It even mentions a city called Rameses. Almost all of the Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Dynasty pharaohs have been implicated as the pharaoh of the Exodus at one time or another, but most scholars to express an opinion have plumped for one of these two kings.

Largely due to his friendship with President Sadat’s wife (he successfully treated a member of her family), Bucaille was given permission to study the royal mummies in the 1970s. He was shocked to find that many of the mummies were rotting away. The bodies were surrounded by bits of dead insects, covered with colonies of whitish fungus, and emanated various sour smells. The accepted method of conservation appeared to be spraying them every so often with insecticide.

Bucaille described lifting the lid of one particular case that lay on a pedestal in the well of a staircase. Inside, he found a badly damaged mummy exuding an “indescribable stench of putrefaction… . The woman from the museum who had accompanied us implored us to finish photographing as quickly as we could, because the air was becoming quite unbearable. Before the cover was replaced on the sepulchre the mummy was sprayed with a cloud of goodness knows what from an extremely ancient-looking can.”7 When he consulted the museum inventory, it turned out that the mummy was thought to be that of Merenre I, who reigned in the Sixth Dynasty, around a thousand years before Tutankhamun—the oldest and most complete royal mummy in the museum.*

Other experts, including Harris, argued that conditions for the mummies weren’t as bad as Bucaille claimed. But in September 1976, after the Frenchman raised the alarm, the museum’s most prized mummy was sent to Paris for urgent conservation. Rameses II was flown by the French Air Force and given full military honors on his arrival: the first and only trip of an Egyptian pharaoh outside Egypt (if you don’t count the crumbs that went to Liverpool).