Broken bones, explosive embalming and a missing heart: the mysterious death of Egypt’s boy king is the ultimate cold case – and it’s far from closed
THE autopsy was brutal. Once the mummy’s decayed wrappings were removed, his neck was severed, his body cut in two and his limbs separated at almost every joint. Bracelets were pulled from his arms and a golden mask, stuck fast with resin, was prised from his face. His ears were destroyed, his penis broken off and a hole was punched through the bottom of his skull. When the team was done, they rearranged his fragmented skeleton in a tray of sand, wrapped it in cotton wool, and returned him to his tomb. Cause of death: unknown.
Ever since King Tutankhamun was first unwrapped in November 1925, his fate has been one of the biggest mysteries in archaeology. Many ideas have been put forward, from birth defects to murder, but none has ever stood up to scrutiny.
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Now modern science is taking its turn. In 2005, Egyptian officials authorised a suite of tests on the mummy, including 3D X-rays and DNA analysis. These culminated in a report in 2010 that claimed to have finally established the cause of death: Tutankhamun was an inbred weakling who died of malaria.
The announcement was met with loud and largely uncritical press coverage. Behind the scenes, however, the studies have sparked fierce arguments, with independent researchers warning that the conclusions are flawed and that alternative sources of evidence paint a very different picture.
Tutankhamun came to the throne in 1333 BC, one of the last pharaohs of the powerful 18th dynasty. He reigned for just nine years. Little is known about him because he and his predecessor (and probable father) Akhenaten – a heretic who dropped the traditional religion in favour of monotheism – were erased from official records.
“Little is known about Tutankhamun because he and his father were erased from the official records”
In life, Tutankhamun was an unremarkable pharaoh. In death he has become perhaps the most famous, thanks largely to the discovery of his tomb in 1922, the only intact royal tomb found from ancient Egypt. When British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered it hidden beneath the sand in the Valley of the Kings, its cramped rooms were piled high with treasure.
The 1925 autopsy, carried out by Carter and Douglas Derry of the Egyptian University in Cairo, found a lightly built young man around 165 centimetres tall. From his bones and teeth, Derry put his age at death at just 18. But there were no clues to what killed him.
The next study didn’t happen until 1968. Ronald Harrison, an anatomist at the University of Liverpool, UK, X-rayed the body using a portable scanner squeezed into the tomb. He also took a skin sample, from which his colleague Robert Connolly determined Tutankhamun’s blood group.
Harrison was mainly interested in Tutankhamun’s relationship to a mysterious mummy, KV55, from a nearby tomb. Like Tutankhamun, it had an elongated skull suggesting that they were related. Connolly found that both had the same blood group (), lending support to this idea. Harrison concluded that the mummy was the pharaoh Smenkhkare, who may have ruled for a short time before Tutankhamun and could have been his brother.
As for Tutankhamun’s death, Harrison found that the mummy’s sternum and much of his ribcage were missing, as well as, strangely, his heart – the one organ that ancient Egyptian embalmers always returned to the body. He also noticed a thinning of the bone at the back of the skull, which he said could have been caused by a haemorrhage resulting from a blow to the head. This throwaway comment triggered years of speculation that Tutankhamun met a violent end, possibly murder.
In 2002, Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities got a new chief, Zahi Hawass, who decided it was time to end all the speculation. He authorised two major studies on the mummy, both partly funded by TV companies. First, in 2005, Tutankhamun’s body was scanned using 3D X-ray computed tomography (CT) scans. This involved taking more than 1700 images of the mummy from different angles then using a computer to produce a 3D reconstruction of the mummy’s insides.
Hawass invited three consultants, including , head of the Swiss mummy project at the University of Zurich, to discuss the scans. Together, they confirmed what many had suspected – that there was no sign of a blow to the head. What Harrison had seen was down to the body being at an angle when he X-rayed it. The murder theory was dead.
The team also reported that Tutankhamun’s chest had been removed after death, either by embalmers or by Carter and Derry. Then they made a surprise discovery: a previously unnoticed broken leg.
Tutankhamun’s skeleton is fractured in many places due to careless handling since 1925. But a break in the left thigh bone is different. It is ragged, like a break to living bone, whereas the post-1925 fractures are clean. There are no signs of healing, and embalming fluid has seeped into the cracks, suggesting that the break happened shortly before or after death (Annales du Service des Antiquités de l’Égypte, vol 81, p 159).
Some team members, including Rühli, believed the break happened when the pharaoh was still alive, perhaps triggering fatal bleeding or infection. Others were convinced that it occurred after death, possibly during the embalming process. Yet the 2005 National Geographic documentary film King Tut’s Final Secrets put aside this uncertainty, and was unequivocal: Tutankhamun died of complications following a broken leg.
Like most theories about Tutankhamun’s death, however, this one didn’t last long. In the second project, this time overseen by Albert Zink of the EURAC Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy, and Carsten Pusch of the University of Tübingen, Germany, Hawass’s team analysed the CT scans in more detail. They also took DNA samples from Tutankhamun’s leg bones to check for genes from disease-causing organisms and to compare his DNA with that of 11 other royal mummies in the hope of producing a family tree. The work was partly funded by the Discovery Channel, which filmed the project for its documentary King Tut Unwrapped.
“Like most theories about Tutankhamun’s death, the one about the broken leg didn’t last long”
The results, published early last year, downplayed the significance of the broken leg. This time, the headline conclusion was that the king was an inbred, deformed and sickly youth who died of malaria (). The CT scans indicated that Tutankhamun had diseased bones in his right foot, a club foot on the left and a cleft palate. From the DNA the team confidently concluded that the mummy Harrison had identified as Smenkhkare was Tutankhamun’s father, and hence was actually Akhenaten. Tutankhamun’s mother was Akhenaten’s sister, making him the product of incest (see diagram).
Finally, the team announced that his DNA tested positive for malaria. “Tutankhamun’s death was most likely a result of the malaria coupled with his generally weak constitution,” Hawass announced.
To support this new theory, the team drew attention to objects found in his tomb, including 130 walking sticks, an image of the pharaoh leaning on a cane, and plants that could have been medicinal. They also found blemishes on the mummy’s skin that might conceivably have been mosquito bites.
If you think that sounds like a stretch, you are not alone. Last June, a series of letters to The Journal of the American Medical Association attacked almost every part of the research. Brenda Baker at Arizona State University in Tempe, who studies ancient bones, complained that the mystery mummy was much too young to be Tutankhamun’s father. James Gamble, an orthopaedic surgeon at Stanford University in California, criticised the diagnosis of club foot. Most of the deformities could have been caused by the mummification process, he told żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ.
Meanwhile, Christian Timmann and Christian Meyer of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, Germany, pointed out that an adult surviving to Tutankhamun’s age in ancient Egypt would have been semi-immune to malaria.
The DNA analysis caused the most concern. Several researchers specialising in ancient DNA contacted by żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ have misgivings about the findings. “I am not convinced,” says Eline Lorenzen of the Centre for Geogenetics at the Natural History Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, who co-wrote one of the letters ().
There are two main reasons for scepticism. The first is the condition of the DNA. Although DNA has been recovered from mammoth and Neanderthal remains that are tens of thousands of years old, it is not expected to last as long in a warm environment. Carter famously reported feeling a blast of warm air when he opened the tomb, and palaeobiologist Ian Barnes at Royal Holloway, University of London, has calculated that in such conditions DNA would last a few centuries at most.
The second concern is contamination. The team used the polymerase chain reaction to amplify the DNA in their samples – and this technique is known to be susceptible to picking up traces of modern material.
Barnes is also sceptical about the malaria diagnosis. He says the test the team used is only 75 per cent successful on living patients, and questions whether it could detect the pathogen in a 3000-year-old mummy. “How likely is it that enough malaria DNA would end up deep in the bone?” he says.
Royal relatives
The method used to reveal Tutankhamun’s family ties has raised eyebrows too. Researchers working with such difficult samples generally start by trying to detect mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), as cells contain around a thousand times as many copies of it as of genomic DNA. But Pusch and his colleagues used genomic DNA.
Hawass and his team stand by the results. Zink and Pusch argue that the embalming process, including the use of a salt mixture called natron to dehydrate the body, would have protected the DNA. “We knew for sure we would find something,” says Zink.
Pusch adds that extensive precautions were taken to avoid contamination. “I don’t understand people’s harshness,” he says. “This is pioneering work.” But the critics have yet to be swayed. “This is not a rigorous or convincing study,” says Lorenzen.
As doubts grow over Tutankhamun’s “official” cause of death, some researchers are building up a different story. Connolly, who has digitally enhanced the 1968 X-rays, discounts the idea of Tutankhamun as a weakling. Instead, he sees him as an active young man who was killed in an accident.
Although most of Tutankhamun’s ribs have been cut, Connolly says that some are broken in a manner that suggests they were damaged while Tutankhamun was still alive. “I think they were already broken when the body arrived in the hands of the royal embalmers,” he says. His full re-analysis of the 1968 chest X-rays will be published in a future issue of The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology.
Connolly believes that Tutankhamun died in an accident some distance from home, which meant that by the time the embalmers got the body it was already decaying. He speculates that the embalmers cut the chest away to remove the decomposing organs as quickly as possible. This also provides a possible explanation for Tutankhamun’s missing heart: it had putrefied.
There are two further pieces of evidence indicating that the embalmers were dealing with a decaying body, says Connolly. First, he says, the X-rays show that the ethmoid bone, which separates the nasal cavity from the rest of the skull cavity, is intact. This means that the embalmers cannot have extracted the brain through the nose, as they normally did. “The brain would have started to liquefy, so I think they drained it out,” he says. Hawass’s team reported in 2005 that the ethmoid bone was damaged, but Connolly says this could easily have happened since 1968.
What’s more, when Derry and Carter unwrapped Tutankhamun, they found that the mummy appeared charred. This was most likely due to a heat-producing reaction in the resin that the embalmers poured over the body, Connolly says.
Embalmers normally applied the resin in layers, he says. But with Tutankhamun’s rotting corpse he thinks they must have slapped it all on at once, which would have subjected the body to unusually high temperatures. “Huge heat was generated by the resin,” Connolly says. “If it hadn’t been an airtight coffin, the whole tomb would likely have gone up in flames.”
The idea of Tutankhamun as an active, military king is further supported by recently discovered carvings from a temple in ancient Thebes (now Luxor). Raymond Johnson, director of the University of Chicago’s epigraphic survey in Luxor, says these clearly depict the pharaoh engaged in military campaigns (KMT, vol 20, number 4, p 20). He also points to weapons, armour and chariots found in the tomb that probably belonged to Tutankhamun and show clear signs of wear and tear. “He was an active young man,” Johnson concludes.
Unsurprisingly, Connolly’s theory has also been met with scepticism. Rühli says he is open to the idea but “very cautious”, arguing that a fatal accident would have damaged other parts of the skeleton such as the backbone or arms.
Far from solving the case, the latest studies illustrate the difficulty researchers face when extracting information from such battered remains. Working on ancient Egyptian mummies is always “a minefield”, Rühli says, because the aggressive embalming process makes it almost impossible to tell the condition a body was in when the embalmers got hold of it. With Tutankhamun, researchers are also battling against damage inflicted in modern times – not to mention the pressures of film-makers keen for dramatic revelations.
Rühli says he is now questioning even the conclusions he reached in 2005. “At that stage I thought that the leg fracture was the most likely cause of death. But the older I’m getting, the more cautious I am.”
The prospect of further progress looks poor. Some researchers have called for the raw data from the recent projects to be shared and discussed, but the man who could make it happen, Hawass, describes his studies as “the final word” on Tutankhamun’s death.
In the meantime Rühli recommends not getting too carried away with either stereotype. “My gut feeling is that he was probably just average,” he says, though he warns that it is still impossible to say anything for certain. If Hawass’s research really is the final word, it seems Tutankhamun’s death will remain forever shrouded in mystery.
