What Killed Tutankhamun?

*The text below was submitted to BBC History Magazine for a commissioned article entitled ‘What Killed Tutankhamun’, which was published, in its final, edited form, in the August 2014 issue. The magazine has not (as at 28 October) responded to my requests for a pdf of the final version. What Killed Tutankhamun? Chris Naunton In 1922, Howard Carter and his team made what would become perhaps the greatest archaeological discovery of all time: the intact tomb of an Egyptian Pharaoh of the 18 Dynasty: Tutankhamun. The ‘boy‐king’ has since become one of the most famous figures from the ancient world and his face, more particularly that of his golden death mask, provides us with one of the most iconic and instantly recognizable images from anywhere, and at any time. th The Valley of the Kings was the burial place of the pharaohs throughout the great era we now call the New Kingdom (1550‐1069 BCE), and its use as such helps to define the period; it seems to have been inaugurated by the third king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Tuthmosis I, but fell out of use as the country split into two at the end of the Twentieth. Spectacular discoveries were a relatively frequent occurrence in the Valley during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries CE. A map made by Napoleon’s scientific expedition in the first few years of the nineteenth century recorded the position of sixteen tombs, but by the time of the First World War, the number had risen to sixty‐one. The great American lawyer and patron of work in the Valley, Theodore Davis, was responsible for many of the more recent of these discoveries, but in 1914, after a couple of disappointing seasons he declared the Valley to be ‘exhausted’. Carter, however, thought otherwise, believing there still to be tombs left undiscovered, including that of Tutankhamun. Under the patronage of the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon he began excavations in the Valley in 1917. After a few unproductive seasons, and with Carnarvon’s patience very nearly at an end, the greatest discovery of them all was made. Although he does not appear in any contemporary king‐lists scholars were at least aware of Tutankhamun prior to the discovery of the tomb, and that he had reigned at least into a ninth year. He was believed, correctly, to have been a king of the Amarna Period, and indeed his role in reintroducing the worship of the god Amun, following the Atenist heresy of Akhenaten, was revealed by the king’s having changed his name at a certain point from Tutankhaten to Tutankhamun. A scattering of decorated blocks bearing his inscriptions showed that he had been a builder, but otherwise little more was known. Although the contents of the tomb are still astonishing in terms of their quantity and quality, the truth is that they have not generally led to any great leaps forward in terms of what we know about Tutankhamun or his times, leaving Carter to lament that “of what he was and what he did we are still sadly to seek.” The one element of the discovery that had the potential to tell us most about the life and death of the king was his mummified body. The remains of Tutankhamun have been studied at first‐hand on four occasions. First, on 11 November 1925, two weeks after the lid of the third coffin had been removed, the body was examined by Carter and a team of forensic experts led by Douglas Derry, an anatomist at the Government School of Medicine in Cairo. A second examination took place in 1968 when a team from Liverpool University, led by Dr Rex Harrison, produced a series of X‐ray images of the mummy facilitating a more detailed study than had been possible previously. In 1978 Dr James Harris conducted a closer examination of the skull and teeth made possible by new X‐rays. Finally in 2005, a team led by Dr Zahi Hawass, performed a CT‐scan of the mummy generating the most details images of the body yet. Collectively, these studies have provided the information and images which have since been used by countless Egyptologists and others to draw conclusions about the king. There is little doubt that he died between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, more or less as Carter and Derry had concluded, and was between 1.6 and 1.7m tall. Beyond this very little is certain. There has been much speculation about the various medical conditions that may have afflicted him during his lifetime and to what event these may have contributed to his death. Possibilities suggested over the years include: general physical weakness perhaps caused by in‐breeding within the real family (which almost certainly did occur though whether it brought about any ill‐effects in this case is unclear); pectus carinatum, or pigeon chest; Klinefelter’s Syndrome; Froehlich’s Syndrome; Marfan’s Syndrome; and even “Tutankhamun syndrome” consisting of breast development, sagging abdominal wall and flat feet. Further hypotheses have also been based on secondary evidence such as the presence of a number of walking sticks in the tomb, and Tutankhamun’s representation in the art of the times. The debate has also been influenced by depictions of his predecessor and probable father, Akhenaten, who was often shown as being somewhat grotesque, almost deformed, although whether this was an artistic convention rather than an attempt by the artists to capture the likeness of a king genuinely suffering from some kind of illness is also the subject of much speculation. Foremost among the theories that Tutankhamun may have suffered some sort of traumatic injury, at least in terms of the amount of attention it has gathered, is the idea that Tutankhamun may have been the victim of foul play. During the 1968 investigation Harrison observed a small piece of bone inside, and apparently detached from, the skull. This led him to suggest that the king may have suffered from a blow to the head, and others to conclude that this was evidence that the boy‐ king was murdered. In light of further scrutiny of Harrison’s X‐rays and the 2005 CT scan data most agree now that the detached bone was the result of a post‐mortem and nothing whatsoever to do with the king’s demise, and indeed, Harrison’s own belief was that a degree of healing evident in the skull suggested that he had recovered from any such injury. But the idea that Tut was murdered had taken hold. Dr Hawass’ investigations in 2005 led to a new theory gaining traction. The CT scans revealed that the king had suffered a fracture to the left femur. Perhaps more important was the observation that an amount of embalming fluid had entered the fracture, suggesting that the wound that caused it was still open at the time of death, and also that there were no signs that it had started to heal. On this basis, whatever caused the fracture probably happened in the last few days of the king’s life. While this alone could not have caused the king’s death, the team have suggested that it may have become infected, and that it was this that finally finished him off. Even this has failed to persuade everyone however, and in a recent book on the subject, Hawass notes that was not the view held by all of the members of his team. When I began thinking about the issue with colleagues recently, we made a very conscious effort to disabuse ourselves of all previous theories, and to look at the evidence presented by the mummy as if for the first time. I wasn’t convinced we would be able to find anything new, however, it quickly became clear that there were things which, to my mind, hadn't received sufficient attention and were worthy of further investigation. It is worth emphasizing just what an unusual case the mummy of Tutankhamun is. It is true that his remains have been subjected to more investigations of various kinds than those of any other individual from ancient Egypt and also that the techniques of mummification were constantly evolving throughout Egyptian history. Nonetheless, certain aspects of the process had become standardized and many consider the later Eighteenth Dynasty to have been a time at which the techniques in use reached something of a peak. Tutankhamun's mummy displays a series of highly unusual features, particularly around the torso: a number of the ribs and a section of the left pelvis are completely missing; the embalming incision through which certain internal organs would have been removed ‐ as was standard ‐ is in the wrong place and considerably larger than normal; much of the soft tissue inside the chest cavity was removed and replaced with rolls of linen; the arms were crossed in an unusually low position; and finally, the heart, which would not normally have been removed and which was crucial for the survival of the individual into the afterlife, was missing. It was very clear that the torso was the area that warranted most attention and that if these anomalies were the result of some kind of injury, they might well provide the clues as to the cause of death. One of the questions which has been applied to almost all the apparent evidence for the injuries Tut may have suffered is to what extent it might rather have been caused by Carter and his team when they removed the mummy from its nest of coffins. Carter’s notes on the process, which are freely accessible online thanks to the magnificent efforts of our colleagues at the Griffith Institute in Oxford (http://www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/gri/4tutjournals.html), are full of references to the difficulties in separating each of the coffins, first of all from the sarcophagus and subsequently from one another, so snugly were they fitted together in a kind of Russian doll type arrangement. Similarly, the mummy itself was a very snug fit for the innermost coffin, and was in fact stuck fast to the inside by a layer of embalming oil which had been poured over the king’s body. The team tried various methods to loosen it, and even left it out in the sun in the hope that the heat would help to melt the oils but nothing worked. Derry’s autopsy had, in the end, to be carried out while the mummy was still in the coffin and the death mask still in place. Tutankhamun’s body was adorned with jewels and other precious paraphernalia, much of which the team also had difficulty in removing. At the time the body was reinterred in the tomb, having finally been unwrapped and lain on a sand bed, the king was still wearing a skull‐cap and a beaded necklace. By the time of Harrison’s examination in 1968 both were missing. Harrison’s X‐rays showed clearly the damage to the thorax and missing ribs, but this was something that Derry had not observed. This has led some to suggest that at some indeterminate point the mummy was illicitly disturbed in order that the skull cap and necklace could be stolen, and that the robbers removed a section of the human remains including the missing ribs in order to free the booty. However, it is by no means implausible that Derry was unaware that the ribs were missing given he did not have the benefit of the X‐rays. Moreover there is some evidence that they were removed in ancient times: while some of the ribs were broken, others were cut smoothly, and the linen packing beneath them was undisturbed. W Benson Harer argues that the direction of the cuts suggest they could only have been made prior to the body having been packed, and also that the bones must have been fresh when this took place as older bone cannot be cut so cleanly. Harer suggests that the torso was damaged in some kind of massive accident which did so much damage that the embalmers were forced to remove the ribs, heart and perhaps other parts of the soft tissue in order to give the body a superficially normal appearance in preparation for mummification. This is very persuasive. But what kind of accident could have brought this about? The damage seemed to be concentrated around the left hand side of the torso, from the clavicle downwards, as far as the pelvis. We were looking for a blunt object, long and tall in shape, which would have struck the king with considerable force. No weaponry we knew of could have caused the necessary injury, but we felt that another story which has been used to explain the king’s death would be worth reinvestigating: the possibility that he died in a chariot accident, and specifically that the injuries were caused by the impact of a chariot wheel, whose edge would provide the impact we were looking for. In order the test the possibility we approached Advanced Simtech, a company which, among other things, provides computer generated simulations of car crashes for the UK courts. Mike and his team used a replica New Kingdom chariot to model the maneuverability and maximum speed that could be achieved using one of these vehicles, several of which were found in Tutankhamun’s tomb and which were a common feature of the iconography of kingship during the New Kingdom. Using this information, and what is known of the king’s own height and likely weight etc. we tested a series of accident scenarios to establish whether any could have produced the injuries Tutankhamun sustained. Given the forces involved it was not difficult to create a situation which would have led to serious injury. In almost all cases, however, the most serious injury sustained would have been to the head and neck, and as we have seen, the mummy presents no clear evidence of any such trauma. However, one scenario did appear to result in precisely the injuries we had observed in the mummy. Had the king been kneeling or crouching down and struck by the wheel of the chariot, he would he would undoubtedly have suffered massive injuries to his torso; and crucially, although the head would, on impact, have been thrown violently forward, it would, at the last moment, have been pulled away before striking the wheel. The victim would undoubtedly have suffered from whiplash but by this point that would hardly have mattered. To confirm that the injuries sustained in such an accident would have been enough to cause the king’s death we enlisted the help of several colleagues at Cranfield University. We wanted to know what the effect of a chariot wheel impacting the human rib cage at high velocity would be. The team modelled the forces involved and conducted a test using the rib cage and flesh of a pig procured from a local butcher. Unsurprisingly the test showed that the impact would puncture the ribs and that the wheel would have penetrated the soft tissue underneath by at least an inch or two, enough to cause massive internal damage. In modern times, had the paramedics been on hand quickly enough, there is a chance that the victim of such an accident could survive. In New Kingdom Egypt this would not have been the case. We can only speculate as to how the king might have come to be come to be in such a position. He may have fallen out of his own chariot and been picking himself up when another close behind came careering into him. One possible element of the story which had been excluded until recently was that this could have happened in battle. It had been thought for a long time that he had never been actively engaged in war; there was no clear evidence for it but that has now changed. Dr Raymond Johnson of the University of Chicago has spent many years studying the decorated blocks scattered throughout the temple complexes at Karnak and Luxor which represent the remains of now dismantled temples. Many of these appear to have come from monuments erected by Tutankahmun and after years of painstaking work piecing together these vast jigsaw puzzles Dr Johnson has concluded that in fact the young king may well have been actively engaged on the battlefield. Several scenes have emerged apparently showing a military campaign in Nubia and another in which Tutankhamun is shown in a chariot leading the Egyptian forces against a Syrian‐style citadel, strengthening the possibility that Tutankhamun may have been injured in an chariot accident that took place on the battlefield. We cannot know for certain that this is what happened, but it is as credible as any other hypothesis put forward so far, and provides an explanation for the most puzzling anomalies displayed by the mummy. We have no idea in fact how the vast majority of Egyptian kings died but it’s perhaps worth noting also that in most other cases relatively few people have cared enough to ask the question. Tutankhamun continues to fascinate us. In terms of his life and achievements, the king remains almost as obscure as he was before his tomb was revealed, and yet its contents, including the remains of the man himself, have, more than 3,000 years after his demise, made him among the most famous individuals ever to have lived. It is the disparity between the stereotypical vision of a weakling king who died young and relatively obscure, and the sensation surrounding the discovery of his tomb, that prompts us to ask, ‘who was he, and what happened to him?’ Like all ancient Egyptians, Tutankhamun would have wished for that very Egyptian immortality encapsulated in the phrase ‘to cause his name to live’. Whatever his Earthly achievements, whatever the circumstances of his life and death, he has perhaps been more successful in this than anyone else from that great civilisation. Dr Chris Naunton is an Egyptologist and Director of the Egypt Exploration Society. Chris originally presented the research outlined above in ‘Tutankhamun: The Mystery of the Burnt Mummy’ (Blink Films / Channel 4, 2013). DISCOVER MORE Books: Jo Marchant’s The Shadow King (Da Capo Press, 2013) is an excellent and readable overview of the various investigations of Tutankhamun’s mummy and theories about his death. For a comprehensive study of the tomb and its discovery, see Nicholas Reeves’ The Complete Tutankhamun (Thames & Hudson, 2007). Online: Howard Carter’s copious notes, the official excavation photographs and many other documents relating to the discovery of the tomb are freely accessible online via the Griffith Institute website: http://www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/discoveringTut/