Heart pounding, Howard Carter stands in front of a door that hasn’t been opened for 3,000 years. It is November 26, 1922.
For seven years, the British archaeologist has painstakingly sieved the sands of the desert of the Valley of the Kings, obsessed with the idea of finding the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamen. Other archaeologists had previously uncovered evidence that the king was buried here, including a ceramic cup with his name above it, and now Carter has finally found what he’s been so determinedly looking for. he hopes.
Under a pile of rubble, Carter found a stairway leading to a bricked-up doorway underground. Here it is now with his chisel, barely daring to breathe. He begins to hack into the masonry.
When the opening is finally large enough, he carefully places a candle through the hole. Warm air flows from the burial chamber and causes the candle to flicker.
At first, Carter can’t see anything. But then, as his eyes adjust to the dim light, he falls back from sight: treasures of the purest gold glitter everywhere.
“Wonderful things,” he snaps.
When the hole in the wall is large enough, Carter crawls into the grave, where he makes his biggest discovery a few weeks later.
In a room deep in the tomb, find a sarcophagus containing a chest of gold. Lifting the lid, his gaze is met by a surprisingly vivid pair of eyes staring at him from a fabulous gold death mask.
The mask, weighing 11 kilos, depicts the face of Tutankhamun. But now, 100 years later Carter’s discovery the mask has fallen: through DNA analysis and scans, scientists have exchanged the glossy image of a brilliant ruler with a sick pharaoh crippled by inbreeding.
Mummy sawn to pieces
“The most brilliant discovery in all of Egyptology.” “A cave of Ali Baba.”
Newspapers around the world rejoice over Tutankhamun’s tomb, which with its many treasures, over 3300 years old, surpasses anything the world knows.
In stark contrast to enchanted treasures, however, the mummy is a black, desiccated bundle impotently trapped in a layer of solidified embalming fluid.
To extract the king’s remains from the coffin, Carter has to play tough. He brutally cuts off the arms, legs and head: the pharaoh ends up in 13 pieces in total.
The mask is nearly fused to the face, and the archaeologist removes it with red-hot steel wire and knives.
While Carter focuses on the tomb’s treasures, other scholars reflect mainly on the cause of Tutankhamun’s death in 1323 BC: who – or what – took the life of the young king, only 19 years old, while he was on the throne?
The femur is broken
It appears that the teenager was killed in a fierce battle for the throne. And this suspicion is confirmed by the first X-ray examinations of the mummy in 1968.
The scans show two bone chips in the skull. A hard blow to the back of the head could have produced injuries, or they could have been caused by a fatal fall from a wagon.
The murals depict the pharaoh hunting animals and enemies from his two-wheeled chariot. Who knows, maybe he fell off racing, says archaeologist Chris Naunton of the Egypt Exploration Company.
In 2005, CT scans revived the theory of a fall: shortly before his death, the pharaoh broke his left thigh. As the tissue around the fracture had not yet healed, the injury must have occurred a few days before the monarch’s death.
The fracture itself was not fatal, but Egypt’s chief archaeologist at the time, Zahi Hawass, who is leading the investigation, believes it may have created an infection that killed Tutankhamun in an age without antibiotics.
There is no evidence for murder. The head wounds must have occurred after the king’s death, when the body was embalmed or, more likely, when Howard Carter brutally freed the mummy from its coffin.
DNA indicates family ties
Only in 2010 did researchers manage to put an end to nearly 100 years of speculation. Death can have many causes, but in Tutankhamun’s case it is not a matter of murder or accident: his fate was already sealed at the moment of conception.
With drills and needles, German and Egyptian researchers dug their way deep under Tutankhamun’s skin and into the royal bone marrow.
From this they extracted DNA more than 3,300 years old to shed light on the pharaoh’s family ties and ailments – and the two turn out to be closely linked.
Bone samples containing small amounts of DNA were also taken from 15 other mummies in the Valley of the Kings as part of the investigation. Some of them are known – including Amenhotep III, who ruled Egypt 20 years before Tutankhamun – while the identities of many others are unknown.
The family freaks out
One of the more enigmatic mummies comes from Tomb 55 in the Valley of the Kings. The name on the coffin had been cut off, apparently in an attempt to disguise the identity of the deceased.
But when scientists compare the mummy’s DNA to that of Amenhotep III, it’s 99 percent likely that the dead man is his son.
With this knowledge, researchers can give the mummy in Tomb 55 a name and a face: it must be Akhenaten, a hated pharaoh who, a few years before Tutankhamun’s accession, replaced the many Egyptian gods with one, the Aten.
Written records say nothing about Tutankhamun’s parentage, but when scientists compare Akhenaten’s DNA to Tutankhamun’s, the pieces fall into place: they are father and son.
And the surprises continue to pile up in the laboratory: Akhenaten’s first wife was the beautiful Nefertiti – even though genetic studies show that, contrary to what was thought, she was not Tutankhamun’s mother.
The boy king’s DNA matches that of an unnamed mummy who has been christened the “Younger Lady”. She turns out to be the mother of Tutankhamun, but also the sister of Akhenaten.
Baffled, the scientists determine that Tutankhamun’s parents were brother and sister and that the pharaoh was the result of what we now call incest.
Inbreeding was widespread among the ancient pharaohs. A monarch was considered a god and could do whatever he wanted, such as have children with his sister or daughter to maintain power in the immediate family.
Tutankhamun’s family tree turns out not to be a trunk with symmetrical branches, but rather a bush with tangled branches going in all directions.
Tutankhamun continued the tradition and started it with his half-sister, daughter of Nefertiti and Akhenaten.
The young couple had two children, but both were stillborn, possibly due to consanguinity. Their mummies were buried with Tutankhamun.
The bones of the foot lack blood
Tutankhamun’s innate lineage brought him kingship, but it was also a curse on his health.
Scans show his teeth were crooked and protruding, and images of Tutankhamun’s feet show he must have been severely crippled.
In the left foot, several bones were almost crumbled, and the big toe next to the big toe was especially deformed.
The scientists, led by Zahi Hawass, believe the bone loss may have been caused by Köhler’s disease, a condition in which the tiny bones in the foot don’t get enough blood and die.
As a child, Tutankhamun likely had severe pain in his left foot and shifted weight to the right, which scans showed became flatfoot.
The deformities may have forced the boy to walk with a cane: Archaeologists have found more than 130 canes in the tomb, many of which show signs of heavy use.
Köhler’s disease is probably hereditary and, in the case of the young pharaoh, probably the result of inbreeding, but the condition by itself would not have killed the king.
The most likely cause of death lurked deep in the frail monarch’s bone marrow.
Mug nekt de monarcha
In the bone marrow, the team found DNA from malaria parasites, including a very deadly species, Plasmodium falciparum.
Thus Tutankhamun suffered from the dreaded tropical disease, which is transmitted to humans through mosquito bites. His last days were probably hellish, with high fevers and chills.
Malaria parasites destroy red blood cells, causing anemia. With falciparum malaria, the sufferer runs the risk of dying within a few days.
So the most famous pharaoh ever was probably bitten by a mosquito, though the complicated femur fracture and debilitating bone condition may have pushed the frail monarch over the edge.
By the time of his death – after about 10 years in power – Tutankhamun had managed to cover the tracks of his father, the heretic king Akhenaten, who had abolished the gods to the anger of the Egyptians.
Tutankhamun reversed the religious revolution, but according to the Egyptologist Salima Ikram and others, the hatred of the Egyptians for Akhenaten was so deep that Tutankhamun had to atone for his father’s sins.
Tutankhamun’s heirs erased his name and memory, and in time the Egyptians forgot everything about the pharaoh, even the fearsome tomb robbers in the Valley of the Kings.
So Howard Carter was lucky. While the tombs of other pharaohs had already been looted in ancient times, Tutankhamun’s tomb remained virtually intact.
For more than 3,000 years, peace reigned in the final resting place of the child king, until one November day 100 years ago when Howard Carter broke the seal and saw “wonderful things”.
