The Shadow King (22 page)

An antiquities service inspector named Zahi Hawass, who was in charge of the Giza Pyramids, was one of those who took this view: “I have refused in the past to allow foreign teams to carry out such tests on the bones of the Pyramids builders,” he said, “because there are some people who try to tamper with Egyptian history.”24

The plans were rescheduled for February 17, 2001, but at a press conference a couple of days later, Yoshimura announced that the Egyptian government had abruptly canceled the project, citing “security reasons.”25 According to the newspaper Al Ahram, this happened just an hour before the researchers were due to begin taking their samples.26

Like Woodward, Yoshimura declined to speak to me about what happened. But many archaeologists believe that this project was ultimately stopped for similar reasons to Woodward’s earlier attempt. There’s no suggestion that Yoshimura himself had any hidden religious motive. But the editor of Archaeology magazine, Mark Rose, wrote that the work was canceled “due to concern that results might strengthen an association between the family of Tutankhamun and the Biblical Moses.”27

“There was a fear it would be said that the pharaohs were Jewish,” agrees another Egyptologist with close links to the antiquities service, speaking to me off the record.

But if the Egyptian authorities harbor a certain defensiveness, or even paranoia, about their history being co-opted by other cultural groups, perhaps that’s understandable after the unbridled treasure hunts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some sociologists argue that Europeans took not just physical artifacts, but have been stealing the intellectual heritage of the ancient Egyptians ever since, with western press coverage, museum exhibitions and books all claiming Egyptian civilization as “universal,” belonging to all humanity, rather than being anything particularly to do with Egypt.28

The royal mummies have been at the heart of that battleground, with many different groups—racial as well as religious—keen to claim the pharaohs as their own. Robert Connolly’s blood group results are still the focus of bitter arguments on certain online forums, with far right groups claiming, however erroneously, that the pharaohs’ blood groups prove that the civilization that built the pyramids was “white Nordic.”29

Others have been equally desperate to define the pharaohs as black African—the 1970s Tutankhamun exhibition triggered widespread demonstrations that the king’s African heritage was being denied, for example, while decades later in 2005, a reconstruction of Tutankhamun’s face had to be removed from a Los Angeles exhibition after protests that it was not sufficiently “black,” and therefore disrespectful to Egypt’s African roots. “We do not need modern scientists to reconstruct the bust and tell us what to see,” Los Angeles historian LeGrand Clegg told the news agency AFP.30 “Do not deprive black children of their heritage.”

It’s hard to think of any other group in history with whom so many people are so keen to identify themselves. Owning the pharaohs, it seems, means getting to lay claim to a privileged place in history—to being the founders of civilization, and to somehow being better than everyone else.

Well, except where being related to the pharaohs is intended as a mortal insult. In 2009, a few months after Barack Obama was inaugurated as the first black president of the United States, a bonkers but nasty crop of videos started doing the rounds that showed images of Akhenaten and members of his family morphing into photos of Barack Obama and his wife and daughters. The makers of these videos claimed a family resemblance that supposedly proved Obama was a secret clone of the heretic pharaoh—with the implication that he could be counted on to betray his country in the same way.31

“Was the First Family created in test tubes using DNA from Akhenaten, his daughters, and Queen Tiye?” asked one.32 Which has to be the strangest story of all.

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* On the other hand, other Egyptologists now consider it to be a later (New Kingdom) body subsequently buried in the king’s pyramid, and thus not a royal mummy at all. Today it is on display in the Imhotep Museum at Saqqara.

* Author of the bestselling 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code.

† Other Egyptologists point out that “Aten” actually means not Lord, but “globe of the Sun.”

‡ Osman isn’t the only one to claim that Tutankhamun was Jesus. In 1997, a Cairo-based author named Moustafa Gadalla published a book called Tutankhamun: The Living Image of the Lord13, in which he claims Christianity as “the world’s greatest conspiracy and cover-up, which recreated the character of Jesus, living in another time (Roman era) and another place (Palestine, Israel).” As late as 2008, a Canadian-based online magazine called The Ambassadors issued a public letter to a hundred scholars14 challenging them to respond to Gadalla’s hypothesis. Judging from the lack of mention of the topic in subsequent issues, they did not answer the call.

* This claim has helped the Church to convert huge numbers of people in Central and South America, and the Pacific Islands. But it has caused controversy in recent years,18 since studies of native peoples in the Americas show no sign of the DNA markers that are found in Jewish people throughout the world. According to their DNA, the ancestors of Native Americans came from Asia, not the Middle East. The finding has caused some prominent figures, such as Australian biochemist Simon Southerton, to leave the Church. By contrast, Scott Woodward has been a high-profile proponent of a controversial explanation called the Limited Geography model, which says that rather than the Hebrew tribe being the principal ancestors of Native Americans as had previously been claimed, they must have represented a relatively small number of people in just one part of Central America, which is why there is no trace of their DNA left today.

WHEN THE ANCIENT PRIESTS closed Tutankhamun’s tomb for what they hoped would be eternity, they left behind a daunting series of booby-traps intended to punish any future intruder with a quick and painful death. After carefully locating the tomb in a remote site particularly susceptible to harmful cosmic radiation, and designing its chambers to magnify the earth’s magnetic field in a way guaranteed to drive unlucky visitors to madness, they lined its floor with radioactive uranium. Then, they drenched the mummy’s bandages in cyanide extracted from peach pits, and laced its surroundings with liquid mercury and scorpion venom. To make extra sure, they armed the tomb with laser guns.

By the 1970s, the myth of Tutankhamun’s curse had evolved somewhat. The idea itself was as popular as ever, providing inspiration not just for novels and horror films but a continuing stream of supposedly factual books and documentaries. But instead of the revenge-seeking spirits and walking dead favored by 1920s séance enthusiasts like Marie Corelli and Arthur Conan Doyle, the focus shifted to physical mechanisms by which the Egyptians might have booby-trapped a tomb—with all of the above ideas, as crazy as they might sound, being suggested.

The basic draw of the curse was no longer the fearsome power of the spirit world, which had fallen out of fashion. Like the myth of Atlantis, the curse fed instead on a thirst for lost knowledge, the idea that ancient civilizations had access to sophisticated technology that is long forgotten in the modern world.

Such ideas were made popular partly by Erich von Däniken, a Swiss writer who has sold more than 60 million books, starting with Chariots of the Gods?1 in 1968, which argued that Earth was visited thousands of years ago by intelligent extraterrestrials. Using an artful blend of exaggeration, insinuation, and a tiny bit of fact, he suggested that these aliens built many ancient monuments, including the Great Pyramids at Giza, and provided ancient civilizations with sophisticated technology (such as the electric light-bulb, which von Däniken sees represented in ancient Egyptian reliefs), as well as providing the inspiration for their gods.

Accordingly, some of the explanations put forward for the curse were barely less magical than the idea of murderous ghosts. For example, following in von Däniken’s footsteps in 1975 was a book called The Curse of the Pharaohs2 by Philipp Vandenberg (described by his publishers as “an internationally acclaimed archaeological writer”).3 With a similar ability to build tall tales upon the shakiest of foundations,* he suggested a range of enticing yet implausible ways in which the pharaohs might have ensured the death of future intruders, from pyramids that induce mental imbalance to uranium-lined tomb floors.†

But such wild stories soon gave way to a more scientific approach, in which curse-related deaths were explained not by the murderous abilities of the ancient Egyptians, but by a new kind of culprit altogether.

First on this particular bandwagon was Geoffrey Dean, a doctor in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. When he read about Ronald Harrison’s work in Tutankhamun’s tomb, it brought back memories of a strange medical case. In November 1955, Dean was asked to take a patient who was desperately ill with pneumonia. The patient, John Wiles, was a geologist, and five weeks earlier, he had spent the day in a complex of caves in the Urungwe Reserve in what’s now Zimbabwe. These caves were home to thousands of bats, and Wiles wanted to see if the huge piles of guano inside could be used as fertilizer.

Two weeks after entering the caves, Wiles started to feel ill, with severe fever and headaches, and trouble breathing. By the time Dean saw him, Wiles was desperately sick, but blood tests for parasites came back negative, and antibiotics had no effect, suggesting a bacterial infection wasn’t to blame either.

Dean was at a loss to explain Wiles’s condition, until a retired colonel from the British South African Police, Alexis Surgey, insisted on seeing him. The officer told Dean how two members of his police staff had died mysteriously thirty years earlier. Local witchdoctors, or njanga, had been stirring rebellion among the local Africans, claiming that their magic was more powerful than the white man’s. As proof, the witchdoctors pointed to local bat-infested caves, which they said were bewitched, and that anyone who was not a njanga and went down into the caves would die.

To break the spell, one of Surgey’s African constables entered the caves. Three weeks later, he became ill and breathless, and in another three weeks he was dead. A few months after that, a Londoner joined Surgey’s staff. Dismissing the idea of black magic, he went down into the caves and collected some of the bones used by the witchdoctors for their ceremonies. He also became ill, and died six weeks after his visit.

Surgey had never solved the mystery, but his story reminded Dean of a talk he once heard, in which a microbiologist described the fate of an unfortunate group of caving enthusiasts called the Transvaal Speleological Society. Most new members became ill with a pneumonia-like illness shortly after joining, and several of them had died. But once a member recovered, they did not get ill again.

The illness was eventually traced to a fungus called Histoplasma capsulatum, which grows in bat guano. Inhaling the fungus-laden dust that filled the region’s bat-infested caves generally ensured an episode of potentially fatal disease. But a victim lucky enough to recover would be immune to further attacks.

Dean tested Wiles for histoplasmosis (or “cave disease” as it had been dubbed), and sure enough the result was positive. After that, the patient slowly recovered, though his lungs were permanently scarred. When Dean next visited Zimbabwe, he interviewed two njanga, who told him that witchdoctors were given great power and wealth, including several wives and many cattle. Anyone who wanted to join their ranks had to attend a meeting down in the caves. Many aspirants died afterward, but those who recovered from their illness were rewarded with njanga status.

The whole episode reminded Dean of the infamous death of Lord Carnarvon, shortly after entering Tutankhamun’s tomb. Could cave disease be responsible for the legendary Pharaoh’s Curse?

In 1974, after hearing of Harrison’s work on Tutankhamun’s mummy, Dean wrote to him in Liverpool to ask if bats had ever infested Tutankhamun’s tomb. Harrison checked with Gamal Mokhtar, chairman of the Egyptian antiquities service, who in turn asked “old people who were present at the time.”5 The elderly witnesses confirmed that for the first six months after the tomb was opened, it was protected only by a temporary iron door made of bars. Bats flew in at night, to the extent that Carter’s workmen had to clear them out each morning. (It’s quite surreal to think of bats roosting and pooing on the precious artifacts—not something Carter mentioned in his official accounts.) Dean subsequently published a paper suggesting that Carnarvon was killed by the Histoplasma fungus.6 The theory explained why Carnarvon, with his weak lungs, was affected, but not, for example, Howard Carter, who as an experienced archaeologist might well have been immune to the disease already.

In 1993, scientists came up with another deadly mold that could have finished Carnarvon off. An Italian doctor named Nicola Di Paolo treated a farmer’s wife from Siena who felt dizzy and had trouble breathing after sieving wheat stored inside a cold barn. The granary had been closed for two years, and some of the wheat had gone moldy. She subsequently developed acute kidney failure, but recovered after six weeks in hospital.

After putting some guinea pigs and rabbits into a cage with the suspect wheat (several of them died, almost all suffered severe kidney or liver damage), Di Paolo diagnosed the culprit as a fungus called Aspergillus, which produces a poison called aflatoxin.7 Di Paolo happened to be an amateur Egyptology enthusiast, and subsequently suggested that Aspergillus growing in Tutankhamun’s tomb was responsible for Lord Carnarvon’s death. In several more studies carried out during the 1990s—mostly for TV documentaries, and unfortunately not published in the academic literature—various Aspergillus species were apparently found growing on Egyptian mummies (as they had been on the unfortunate Rameses II, on his trip to Paris in 19768).

You can be at risk from Aspergillus even if you’ve been nowhere near a tomb. In 2007, a British gardener died of kidney failure after inhaling spores of the fungus while dispersing bags of rotting mulch in his backyard.9 But the most dramatic example of Aspergillus’s deadliness is the case of Casimir IV, who was King of Poland from 1447 to 1492. If anyone deserves their own curse myth, it’s him.