As we waited by the entrance to the tomb, a long line of men advanced up the Valley towards us in a modern-day version of the ancient funerary procession that brought all the equipment the deceased would require in the Afterlife. But this time there were no coffins, no funerary figures or jars of food and drink, no ostrich feather fans, perfumes, wigs or jewels. Instead, the large red chest contained computer equipment and the metal boxes housed the X-ray machine; the wooden crates were filled with bright blue lead aprons and the long lengths of metal would support a camera rather than a funeral pall. And then of course came all the lights, the wires and the strange-looking bits of kit the television crew and still photographers would be needing over the next few days as they scrutinised us scrutinising the mummies.
In fact it took a total of twenty-two men to deliver everything our team would need down to the burial chamber, and once there, everything had to be set up before the wall could once again be pulled down. Accompanying the long line of porters were Neil Staff and Andy Gaskin from the Xograph company, who would be operating the cutting-edge imaging equipment that had been so carefully adapted for the task ahead. While they were hard at work putting together all the computers beneath the star-spangled ceiling of the 3500-year-old burial chamber, the rest of us waited in the shade of the tourist shelter outside the tomb entrance.
Don, Stephen and I discussed the logistics with Alastair and Andrea, and I tried to set the scene with the help of the tomb plans provided at the entrance for tourists. Pointing out where the three mummies were in relation to the rest of the tomb, I answered their questions as best I could without giving too much away, explaining why the three were still in there and what their relationship was to the tomb owner. Summing up the mummies’ convoluted history over the last three thousand years, not to mention trying to explain why I was so interested in them, required considerable mental gymnastics while trying to remain as objective as possible.
Far more used to working with the living, Alistair and Andrea saw the prospect of X-raying three long-dead Egyptians in the Valley of the Kings as something of a change. And whilst Don had been studying ancient bodies from all over the world for the last forty years, he too was visiting the Valley of the Kings for the first time.
As we waited in the rapidly shrinking shade we were joined by a very glamorous lady in a fur-trimmed jacket, lipstick and wonderful earrings. Samia el-Merghani, conservator at the Cairo Museum, was a key member of our expedition, sent by Dr Hawass to ensure that the project was ‘undertaken under the full control and supervision of the Supreme Council of Antiquities’. Although we would simply be taking X-rays, a technique which causes the minimum disturbance to the mummies themselves, it would still be necessary for Andrea to place the digital detector plate beneath each body. Samia would be there to oversee the delicate process.
As Andy and Neil completed the fine-tuning of the state-of-the-art equipment we went down into the burial chamber and took in the scene, the two of them in lab coats standing behind a bank of computers flanked by ancient images of Amenhotep II and the gods. Even they, for all their mystical powers, had surely seen nothing like this! The temperature had already begun its inexorable rise to over 100°F, and we all watched and held our breath to see if the heat and humidity, or indeed the long journey, had had any effect on the delicate balance of the equipment. But as the power was switched on, the computer screens suddenly lit up and whirred into life. They seemed not to mind their unusual surroundings in the slightest, much to our relief. Since the Valley’s electricity supply was somewhat erratic – surely little different from the day it was installed a century earlier – an extra generator had been brought in to ensure that the power source would not cut out part way through the work.
Then it was time to repeat that moment when the wall came down bit by bit and the black hole began to grow. Delighted to see the mummies again, I was also keen to have the team’s first impressions of the three extraordinary individuals who awaited us.
‘Who wants to come and have a look?’
As a man who lives and breathes human remains, Don was there like a shot. Taking it all in, he agreed that although all three were rather dusty, they were in a very good state of preservation.
We put on our lab coats and face masks, and Samia led the way as we began to brush away the fine grey dust which clung to the three mummies. Carefully working our way down each one as the dusty layers of centuries gave way to hidden features, we finally arrived at the mass of linen wrappings which still surrounded the Younger Woman’s legs. Samia held a section up to the light, appreciating its fine, semi-transparent quality. It was obvious that it was incredibly high-status linen.
‘Only for kings,’ she pointed out.
Then, as she picked up another section, we noticed something lying underneath the wrappings, close beside the right leg.
‘What’s that under there?’ I asked her. ‘Fingers! There are some fingers here.’
And as she gently pulled away the linen, the right arm was slowly revealed in a fine haze of mummy dust swirling gently up into the light. Lost for almost a hundred years, here was the missing limb. I was so delighted I hugged her!
So Smith had seen it back in 1907, a right hand and forearm just as his report said, with flexing at the elbow and the hand in a clasped posture, still clutching at a long-gone sceptre. Having been hidden in the wrappings for a century it was far cleaner than the dust-covered bodies surrounding it, and there seemed to be a reddish stain, maybe henna, around the nails. Don believed from the proportions that it was a woman’s arm, and since the original bent up position described by Smith was indicative of a pharaoh the importance of the find was self-explanatory.
But it also meant our Younger Woman now had two right arms, and before getting too carried away we would have to X-ray both this bent arm and the detached extended arm which still lay beside the body to see which one ‘fitted’ – if indeed either of them did. When the three mummies and their assorted arms and loose feet were finally dusted down it was time to set up the aluminium frame which had been specially made to hold and manoeuvre the X-ray machine over each body in turn. And this was probably the most nerve-racking part of all – one tiny slip and the mummies would be crushed, either by the rig collapsing or by the X-ray machine above them crashing down.
Yet once again Andy and Neil performed their hi-tech duties with great dexterity, as if setting up an X-ray rig over ancient mummies in a hot, cramped tomb was something they did every day. Then, with everything ready to go, the two men came back out into the burial chamber to operate the computers while Andrea, Alastair and Samia put on their lead aprons and climbed into the side chamber with the mummies.
Beginning with the Elder Woman, Andrea and Samia carefully slid the detector plate into position beneath her head and shoulders while Alastair checked the settings on the camera. As the rest of us stood outside, looking in, Andrea lined up the machine directly over the Elder Woman’s face and pressed the button. A split second later the image flashed up before us on screen, revealing the superb bone structure responsible for creating such a wonderful face. As Andrea took a further series of X-rays of the skull we crowded round the screens and Don scrutinised each image in turn, commenting on her ‘noticeable upper incisor overjet’ – the 18th dynasty royals’ characteristic buck teeth – together with ‘well-defined but small frontal sinuses’.
He then asked Neil to zoom in to the area at the top of the nose, where the embalmers traditionally inserted a long metal probe to break through the ethmoid bone to extract the brain. But there was no evidence of any damage here at all; indeed, Don then pointed out the decomposed brain tissue within her skull cavity. Clearly the Elder Woman’s brain hadn’t been removed, which was just what we’d seen with the Boy and Younger Woman on our previous visit – a further link reinforcing the idea that they were all exhibiting a break with traditional mummification procedures.
As Andrea continued to take X-rays down the Elder Woman’s body, we suddenly noticed a dark object on the screen. What on earth could it be? Some sort of strange amulet, perhaps? We zoomed in and turned the image around, but our excitement soon died down when we realised that this was simply one of the nails that Loret’s carpenters had used when building the board to support the body. But there was something else there, too, and as Stephen craned forward he pointed out what looked like small white blobs which had started to appear inside the body and which Don described as a ‘snowflake effect’. The quality of the digital images offered clear evidence to Stephen that a distinctive type of embalming fluid had been used to mummify the Elder Woman. And as the images continued down the body, the snowflake effect continued too, raising intriguing questions as to what exactly the embalmers had been trying out here.
Looking at the bones themselves, their condition revealed that this was someone who had suffered no periods of illness or malnutrition – more evidence of a high-status, well cared for individual. And because the long bones had all fused we were certainly dealing with an adult. Since ‘the pubic symphysis (the front surface between the two halves of the pelvis) appears to be reasonably flat and the teeth are moderately worn’, Don suggested the woman was perhaps thirty-five to forty-five or even older, her middle age ‘confirmed by the moderate osteophyte development on the lowest two lumbar vertebrae’ – so a bit of back pain in later life, perhaps.
Another useful feature of the digital imaging was that we could take accurate measurements on screen, from the thickness of the bones to the dimensions of various features, including the tops of each arm. The woman’s right arm was straight down and her left one bent up, which explained why the head of the right humerus appeared to be almost a centimetre wider than the left, since the bent position of the left arm had presented a narrower angle on the X-ray image.
There was also a certain amount of damage to some of the bones, although this was almost certainly post-mortem damage. Possibly caused during the mummification process, when the embalmers didn’t always take the greatest of care with their uncomplaining clients, it may also have occurred during the grave-robbing or when transporting the mummy over some distance.
Yet X-rays of the left foot revealed that the robbers had missed something. As Andrea later noticed, there was definitely something flat and metallic, most likely a piece of gold foil, stuck between the toes. Gold caps were sometimes placed on the individual fingers and toes of the elite to preserve the nails during mummification, although her suggestion of ‘foil’ also brought to mind the gold mummy wrappings inscribed with Tiy’s name and reportedly recovered from the Amarna Royal Tomb, and those which had covered the KV.55 body. So was this an example of the Amarna practice of wrapping dead royals in sheet gold?
As the lead-clad Andrea, Alastair and Samia took a well-deserved break from the suffocating side chamber we continued to pore over the images, completely immersed in our various scenarios and possibilities. Then, with the rig and camera carefully adjusted over the body of the Boy, the central mummy of the three, Andrea began the process all over again and the first image flashed on to the screen.
His exceptionally wide skull was clear to see, its dimensions really only comparable with those of the skulls of Amenhotep III, Tutankhamen and the mysterious body from KV.55 that some believe to be Akhenaten.
Don then turned to his teeth. ‘Hmmm . . . erupted permanent canines . . . second molars almost completely formed . . . partly erupted, and his third molar crowns only partly formed.’ The dental evidence suggested the boy must have died at around twelve years old, give or take six months.
But then as Andrea moved down the body we saw that some of the long bones were close to fusion, suggesting he might actually have been closer to fourteen or fifteen. Stephen also pointed out the snowflake effect which could be seen throughout the Boy’s body, so he’d been prepared with the same type of embalming fluid as the Elder Woman. And, just as in her case, the ethmoid bone inside the top of his nose was intact.
As Neil and Andy brought up the stored image of the Elder Woman’s profile side by side as a comparison, Don was suddenly struck by the remarkable similarity of their profiles.
‘Look at that. It certainly suggests a close family relationship.’
‘Close enough to be mother and son?’
‘Yes, indeed.’
That was amazing. If the Elder Woman was Tiy, this was most likely her son Tuthmosis, whose death had allowed his younger brother Akhenaten to take the throne. And if this was indeed Prince Tuthmosis, how had he died?
There was severe damage to the chest area, which we all assumed to have been caused by tomb robbers as in the case of the Elder Woman, but Don seemed more interested in the area around the top of the boy’s right leg. We’d already noticed that this leg appeared to be slightly shorter than his left, and the X-rays soon revealed why. Zooming in on his right hip, we saw a massive injury. The head of the femur was wrenched out of position and driven right back, and there was no doubt that it had been severely dislocated. Given the small amount of new bone growth around the femur head it seemed that the boy had survived, for a short time at least, although he must have been in agony. Don agreed that this could have been linked to the cause of death.
I wondered if the family obsession with fast horses and chariot racing had had anything to do with the prince’s horrific injury. And could the gilded whip handle belonging to ‘king’s son, troop commander, Tuthmosis’ once have belonged to him?
Moving down the narrow legs, we saw that the Boy’s feet, like the Elder Woman’s, had again been detached at some stage, and both were missing the big toes and several smaller ones. And as we completed our examination of the Boy and Elder Woman I really did want to start calling them by the names Tiy and Tuthmosis...
It was closing time in the Valley before we realised. Just as the previous occasion, our one-track conversation continued from the moment we all left the tomb and sailed back over the Nile to the moment we turned in several hours later.
Next day we were up bright and early, ready to get back into the tomb to begin work on the Younger Woman. This was it, the culmination of so much preparation. But what would we discover?
We resumed our places in front of the screens, and Andrea once again began to guide the machine into position. As the image of the Younger Woman’s skull appeared before us we noticed some similarities with her two burial companions, although the likeness was not as marked as it was between the Elder Woman and the Boy. Quite possibly we were looking at a member of the family – but not of the immediate family.
The roughly triangular hole in the front of her skull was almost certainly a post-mortem injury likely to have been inflicted by the same tomb robbers who had damaged the Boy in the same way. The images also revealed that the ethmoid bone inside the top of her nose was again intact, and a mass of desiccated brain tissue was clearly visible within the skull. And with the snowflake effect clearly seen throughout the body, the same kinds of embalming fluid had been used too. So now we had clear evidence of unusual but consistent mummification techniques.
Commenting that the face was ‘fairly gracile’, Don started looking at the teeth – or at least what was left of them following the severe damage to the mouth. As he peered closely at the image, he pointed out that some of the wisdom teeth weren’t fully erupted.
‘So the individual’s young, or youngish – late teens, early adult.’
I looked at him. ‘Early adult, you say?’, trying to keep my voice as level as possible.
‘Maybe fifteen to nineteen.’
Well, that’s it, I thought. I’ve been chasing an illusion. This can’t be who I thought it was. Suddenly everything started to slow down for me. Even taking into account the knowledge that ancient Egyptian women married as young as ten and started to produce children soon afterwards, it was a well-known fact that Nefertiti had had six children over an eight-or nine-year period. It wasn’t possible for someone aged between fifteen and nineteen to have done so. With so many other clues pointing unmistakably to a royal female of the late 18th dynasty with links to Amarna, this must surely be a younger woman, maybe one of Nefertiti’s children, either Meritaten or Ankhesen-amen, the two known to have survived at least until early adulthood.
Oblivious to my mental somersaults as I tried to work out who on earth this could be, Don continued to peruse the teeth. Pointing out that some showed signs of dental caries, he commented that this may have been someone with a sweet tooth, perhaps someone who regularly consumed luxuriously prepared foods and sweetened drinks – an indication of a pampered lifestyle. And again the bones revealed no sign of prolonged illness, suggesting a high-status, well cared for individual.
And then we saw them: small shapes which certainly didn’t look like carpenter’s nails. Beginning around the jaw area, and then moving down into the ribcage, were a number of little metal amulets, possibly made of gold, and at least twelve small beads.
‘Aha! That’s not normal packing.’
‘Can we zoom in on those?’ I asked Andy and Neil. ‘That looks like one of the tiny amulets that they used as jewellery – a nefer shape, often worn in profusion around the neck!’
Measuring the nefer-shaped amulets on screen, we found they were about 1cm long and almost certainly would have been part of a broad collar consisting of amulets and small beads. In fact such a collar had been found around the neck of the mysterious Amarna royal in nearby KV.55, made up of exactly the same shaped ‘gold pendants and inlaid plaques connected by rows of minute beads’. Presumably the amulets and beads we were now seeing on screen must have broken free when tomb robbers ripped the jewellery from her neck, scattering loose beads which had then fallen down inside the damaged body cavities – yet another secret the Younger Woman had kept very much to herself. We had literally found hidden treasure in the Valley of the Kings – a tremendous cliché, but quite a thrill nevertheless.
As Andrea continued to send through image after image, working her way down the torso, Don announced that ‘the proximal radius epiphysis appears to have united with the radius shaft’. Now this, when translated, sounded a little more promising. Apparently the general condition of the spine and major joints, and the fact that all the parts of the long bones were fused, suggested an age of about twenty-five, although, as both Don and Andrea later agreed, she ‘could have been as old as thirty’. Then Don pointed out that there was also the possibility of very early arthritis in the vertebrae, again suggesting a fully mature individual.
By this point, my brain felt as though it had been put through a mangle, and as we took a short break I sat on the steps of the burial chamber to think. People came and went, carrying in equipment, moving cables and keeping a constant check on all the electrics in the tomb, as I tried to take stock of everything so far. The teeth suggested youth and the body suggested someone older, which all seemed pretty odd to me. How could there be such a wide range of possible ages with a single body? But, as Andrea told me later, ‘there’s really no such thing as an average body’.
And, of course, there was the mysterious mummy from tomb KV.55 just across the way, which, as all Egyptologists know, had first been assessed as old, then as young, then as old and most recently as young again. Not only that, but it was first thought to be a woman, then declared male after all. Reminding Don of our recent experience in Hull, when our Egyptian princess had turned out to be a man for all his ‘gracile bone structure, delicate brow ridge and wide pelvis’, I asked him what he thought about the Younger Woman. Could she too be a man after all, as Loret and others had suggested?
None of us had found any evidence of male genitals, and as the pelvis appeared on the screen Don peered at it closely. Taking in all the tell-tale details, he announced that ‘the width, shape and depth of the sciatic notch is consistent with a female’, just as Elliot Smith had stated. And Andrea also agreed that this was ‘most definitely’ a female pelvis. What a relief!
As we now had such a clear image, could we also tell from the pelvis just how many children the woman had produced? Having worked in the past with human remains specialists who had studied the pelvic bones to find out whether the muscles had undergone the strain of childbirth, and if so how many times, I wondered if these were visible in this case. But Don explained that the method had been discredited as unreliable several years ago. A pity, as this information would have added considerably to what we already knew of the woman who lay before us.
As we continued to study the images Andrea was taking in stages down the body we came to the lowest part of the spine, where the last lumbar vertebra appeared ‘abnormally angular’. From the otherwise straight position of the rest of the spine and body, Don deduced that this couldn’t be the result of the embalmers failing to lay out the body properly during mummification. Instead, he believed it to be evidence of scoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine.
‘It could well have caused a certain amount of abnormal back posture in life,’ he said; and, as I tried to imagine the woman standing or sitting, I remembered that the famous Berlin bust had originally been carved with one shoulder slightly higher than the other until the sculptor had perfected its symmetry with a layer of plaster. Quite possibly a simple coincidence, but curious all the same. Apparently Tiy’s mother, Tuya, had suffered from mild scoliosis, and when the elder foetus from Tutankhamen’s tomb was X-rayed in the late 1970s she too was found to have suffered from this condition. But with a shoulder deformity and spina bifida too, this tiny granddaughter of Nefertiti would have been quite severely disabled had she lived.
Beneath the piles of fine linen which still concealed most of the Younger Woman’s legs, the feet had once again been detached at some stage, as with the Elder Woman and the Boy.
And in the Younger Woman’s case, someone had inflicted damage on the arms too. There were a couple of fractures on the upper part of the intact left arm, and Don believed the sharpness of the edges of one of them suggested that the injury had occurred soon before death or perhaps post-mortem, maybe, like that on the Elder Woman, when the body was being moved, or even perhaps when jewellery was being ripped from her arms.
As we already knew, her right arm had been torn off altogether just below the shoulder joint – with considerable force, to judge by the twisted remains of exposed muscle tissue and the jagged ends of the remaining bone, which came up very clearly on the computer screen. But which arm had once been attached to this stump of bone? Was it the extended arm we’d first seen lying there, which certainly looked the part, even if it was a little too long? Or was it our newly discovered bent forearm, the one originally seen by Smith in 1907 and then rediscovered, hidden beneath piles of wrappings? Or perhaps neither?
As Andrea set up the extended arm for X-raying we were keen to compare both loose limbs with the fracture, taking careful measurements as well as checking bone density to compare with the remaining left arm. On the extended arm, the jagged bone at the top certainly looked a promising match to the equally jagged stump remaining. Whichever arm it was had clearly been quite brutally detached, and yet the extended arm had survived relatively intact. This seemed strange – particularly at the elbow, where such force could well have caused it to come apart. Then of course there was the almost-2cm difference in length when compared to the remaining left arm, and the mismatch in the linens and resins used to preserve them. Then we looked at the recently rediscovered bent arm. Don again remarked that the proportions suggested it had belonged to a female adult. But with only the forearm present, and not the upper fractured section, it was impossible to make an accurate comparison without further study and analysis. So we decided to look for other clues, beginning with the way both arms had been mummified.
Using the snowflake effect for comparison, Stephen looked back at the arms of all three mummies and found that this distinctive embalming treatment had been applied to both the upper arms and forearms of the Elder Woman and the Boy. But in the case of the Younger Woman, only her remaining left upper arm had been treated in this way; for some reason, her left forearm had not. Assuming the same should be true of whichever right arm was hers, he was able to demonstrate that the extended arm didn’t match but the right forearm did, and of the two it was the one which conformed more closely to her remaining left arm.
But, playing devil’s advocate, what if neither of the arms belonged to the body? Could we try to find out, just from the position of the remaining stump, exactly how the right arm had originally been laid out?
Once again the digital images allowed us to compare the arm positions of all three, measuring on screen across the head of the humerus in each case. As we knew in the case of the Elder Woman, the fact that her left arm was bent up had caused the diameter of the head of the left humerus to differ markedly from the measurement across the head of the right humerus, since her right arm was straight down at her side. As for the Boy, with both hands down at the front of his body the measurements across the head of both the right and left humerus should have been identical, as indeed they were. So far, so good.
So then we took the same measurements on the Younger Woman, and got much the same difference as we saw in the Elder Woman – clear evidence that her original right arm had been placed in a completely different position from her left and could not have been laid out straight at the side. The measurements suggested that the Younger Woman’s right arm had in fact been bent up at quite a sharp angle, confirming the original belief that she had been laid out in the posture and position of a pharaoh.
Having taken a complete set of X-rays of each of the three mummies in turn, Andrea and Alastair’s work was over and the X-ray rig was dismantled. With the side chamber clear again, it was time for Don to inspect the bodies at close range and look for any clues which might suggest a cause of death. I was also keen for him to examine the damage done to the three in ancient times – damage which was generally regarded as the result of tomb robbery but some of which looked malicious.
I followed him round with a small dictaphone so that I could catch his observations and go through them again later. We began, as before, with the Elder Woman. Peering at the pitting to her face, he suggested that this might be some kind of postmortem skin change caused by the mummification process. I asked him if it might be evidence of some disease she may have suffered in life, in the same way that the marks on the face of Ramses V’s mummy were thought to have been caused by smallpox. But without the possibility of taking samples, we could only speculate. An interesting possibility, none the less.
Moving to the extensive damage to her torso, we could find nothing to suggest that it wasn’t the handiwork of brutal tomb robbers stripping away the gold. Yet Don doubted Smith’s original belief that she had suffered from an ulcer on the left heel, as he had found no evidence for this in the X-rays. With no evidence for anything particularly sinister having happened to her body, we moved on to the Boy, where a very different picture began to emerge.
Except for a puncture hole in the right frontal area of the skull his face was intact, but there was severe damage to the upper left side of his chest. After carefully examining and measuring the area, Don stood back and thought for a while.
‘Now this poses some very interesting forensic questions,’ he said finally.
Clearly not the single ‘large gash’ referred to in passing by Smith, it was a real mess. Don believed it to be the result of ‘an axe-size weapon being driven into the chest at least five times’. Pointing out where the blows had repeatedly cut clean through the bone, he said part of the chest wall had been dragged away each time the weapon had been pulled back. Yet he could find no sign that the chest had then collapsed or splintered as it would have done if the mummy was completely dried out and rigid at the time of the attack, when the segment of chest pulled back also appeared to have been soft and malleable. As he peered further into the Boy’s gaping chest cavity with his torch and magnifying glass, neither of us could see any trace of linen in the cuts, suggesting that the axe damage had been inflicted either before it had been wrapped, or, more likely, after it had first been unwrapped.
Don then asked if it was possible that the body was still being prepared when the attack took place. But, knowing just how good the ancient embalmers were at patching up damage, they would almost certainly have done all they could to restore the prince’s torso. Still, why would anyone want to start hacking away at a young lad like this? All I could suggest was that they wanted to get at the wealth of jewellery which would have festooned the boy’s neck and chest, the area we were now looking at.
As we had seen from the X-ray profiles, the boy was almost certainly a son of the Elder Woman, who, as Don knew, was possibly Queen Tiy. And if the boy was the royal prince Tuthmosis, his funerary figurine clearly shows a large amulet spread across his chest, described in the Book of the Dead as ‘a human-headed bird of gold inlaid with precious stones laid on the breast of the mummy’. Certainly a treasure worth stealing, but why with an axe?
This was nothing, however, compared to what we were about to see with the Younger Woman, whose body had been damaged far more extensively than either of her companions. Don looked down at the place where the entire left part of her mouth gaped wide open. Scrutinising the wound closely, he used a metal ruler to demonstrate the way in which someone had stood over her body, just over her left shoulder in fact, to bring down a terrible blow.
‘Right here, in fact, an axe or machete-type weapon hacked into the face, cutting clean through the jawbone, carrying away some of the upper teeth and breaking off some lower teeth.’ It was impossible not to wince at the ferocity of such an attack.
And, just as we had seen with the Boy, the Younger Woman’s face showed no sign of collapse or splintering around the wound. This would have been expected if her body had been completely rigid and dry, as it would certainly have been by the time the mummies had been reburied around 1000 BC, over three hundred years after their deaths. So the damage hadn’t been inflicted by those who had reburied them, as I’d first thought, but had happened earlier, and not too long after death. And, with no trace of a single linen thread in any of the cuts, her face could not have been wrapped when the damage was inflicted.
The conclusion was inescapable. Whoever had attacked her body by hacking into her face had been able to see exactly who they were attacking. This had been no accident.
Then, moving down to the side of the body, Don examined a fairly straight cut about 12cm long just below the woman’s left breast first pointed out by Samia. He pointed out that there were traces of white body fat (adipocere) visible around the break in the skin, indicating that this was something done either in life or immediately after death. Looking at the position of the wound, he decided it couldn’t have been produced by a blow directly to the front of the body, but was the result of an angled stab injury which had glanced off the ribs. Although this seemed to be a flesh wound which had inflicted only superficial damage to the ribs and so hadn’t been apparent on the X-rays, they had shown up a fracture on the upper part of her left arm, an injury which Don had already suggested might have occurred close to death. So had this woman tried to defend herself by raising her arms as someone tried to slide a sharp blade into her side? And if so, I asked Don, could it have killed her?
‘Well, yes, maybe through blood loss. Having looked at all the wounds, murder can’t be ruled out. But it’s something that needs further investigation.’
In fact he’d already started to plan experiments that we could carry out back in the lab at York, to simulate the damage we’d seen on the mummies. And that is exactly what happened.
At the end of our fourth day, with all three mummies X-rayed, examined, measured and photographed, the computers were unplugged, the wires and cables taken up and the world’s most unusual X-ray machine put securely back in its safe-like box. And as the wall was finally put back, I had the distinct feeling that this really would be the last time I’d ever see the mummies. Although we now had hundreds of photographs, X-rays and hours of detailed footage courtesy of the ever-present film crew, I realised that this was probably the end of the line as far as face-to-face encounters were concerned. A poignant moment.
As the porters returned to take everything back out of the tomb, I hung around for as long as possible before leaving myself. Slowly the procession of equipment made its way back down the Valley, followed by Samia and me. Whilst I looked my usual bedraggled self, she was as glamorous as ever, lipstick intact and earrings dangling beneath her neat hair. I said I admired her taste in earrings, and before I could say anything else she had taken them off and placed them in my hand. Looking down at the two amber and silver treasures in my palm, I remembered the two holes in the Younger Woman’s ear and, deciding the impromptu gift was somehow fitting, I accepted her generous gesture.
With addresses exchanged and goodbyes said, we returned to the UK that evening and, back in York, prepared the official report required by the Egyptian authorities on the work we had done, also expressing the hope that further forensic studies could continue on the three bodies. We also continued to work through the great stack of digital images, as did Andrea and her consultant colleagues at KCARE in London.
With all their different specialities, the team were able to shed light on all manner of intriguing details. One of the consultant radiologists, an expert at interpreting X-ray images, studied the X-rays and told us that the Younger Woman’s scoliosis was ‘fairly minor and would probably not be obvious in life except when seen from behind, becoming more obvious when bending forward. But when fully clothed, it would probably be un-noticeable.’
They also provided plenty of supporting information about her original arm position after we’d made further comparisons between the X-ray images and the departmental skeleton. These revealed that her right arm could indeed have been bent up at an angle, something which would confirm the Younger Woman’s possible pharaonic posture.
And then, of course, Don’s recreation of the ancient damage through experimental trauma also added greatly to the picture. We gathered in the lab on a very wet Monday morning to begin preparing two dead pigs – the nearest thing to a human body, and regularly used in such experiments. I have to say I was having second thoughts about my role as I began to wind great lengths of linen strips round and round the posterior regions of these dead creatures in the manner of an ancient mummy. One was a fresh carcass and the other had been thoroughly dried out to give the effect of a mummified body. And with half the body wrapped and the other half left unwrapped, it would also be possible to see what effect the wrappings had.
Then the real work began, using blades which closely resembled the ancient weapons. I’d also consulted the colleague who had drawn the profiles of the Younger Woman and the Berlin bust for me way back in 1990, and who now had a PhD on Egyptian soldiers and their weapons. After examining photographs of the mummies’ wounds in detail, she agreed that an axe seemed to fit the bill as the weapon which had destroyed much of the boy’s chest. ‘But as for our ‘‘friend’’,’ she added, ‘I’d suggest that someone had a go at her with a short-sword, a kind of elaborate dagger with quite a fine blade. The difference also suggests that there was a difference in intent, and rather than her face just being bashed in at random, the use of the short-sword seems to suggest someone more in control.’
So a picture was building up of someone very deliberately inflicting terrible damage using a sharp metal blade. Metal was a very precious commodity in ancient Egypt, so such blades would not have been available to just anyone, and the use of some sort of dagger-like weapon suggested someone of quite high status.
With a modern version of the ancient short-sword or dagger and a well-sharpened axe, we were ready. And as the blades crashed down repeatedly into the face and body of each carcass in turn, each cut was numbered and a careful note made of the depth and angle. As the blows were then repeated on the wrapped sections of the bodies, we were all astonished to see the way the blades bounced off the linen. In only one case did the dagger-type blade manage to make any headway at all, and when it did the linen threads were pushed deep into the wounds – something we had not seen on the mummies.
After a fascinating day of truly ‘hands-on archaeology’, it was clear that the bodies of the Boy and Younger Woman had been attacked relatively soon after death, certainly within no more than a generation. More to the point, they had been unwrapped before the damage had been inflicted, and by someone of sufficiently high status to own a dagger-type weapon.
While Don was leading the experimental trauma sessions in York, the digital X-rays of the Younger Woman’s skull had been sent to a team of facial reconstruction experts at Nottingham University. Working closely with their colleagues at Sheffield University, they were building up the face using the latest techniques in forensic graphics in the same way that they reconstruct faces of unknown murder victims for the police. And this case would be no different, for they had no idea who this person was – male, female, young, old, European, African, modern or ancient. They were given no clues. As they explained, ‘Whenever we do any sort of forensic work we always work as blind as we can. We work with the data we are given and nothing more, otherwise it may affect our judgement on that particular case.’
Having first turned the X-rays into a three-dimensional computer model, the team had to map out thousands of individual points on the face and head, with markers put in place to indicate the depth of the skin, before the muscles and flesh could gradually be added. Several months later, when they had finally completed their complicated task, I was invited along to Nottingham to see the end result. I was very excited, rather apprehensive and even a little bit scared.
What would she look like? Who would she look like? Would she even look like a she? And of course, the big question – would she be ‘beautiful’?
As I sat in the darkened room, with a growing feeling of expectancy combined with the same long-felt apprehension, the computer image was suddenly projected up in front of me and the entire process began to unfold. First the skull appeared, and as it rotated on the screen the muscles began to wrap themselves around, followed by the skin. And as the skin began to cover the contours of the head, an amazing, striking face began to take shape. There, floating in space and staring back at me, was a truly amazing individual. I couldn’t believe it. She was perfect, absolutely perfect. Her fine nose and evenly spaced features gave the impression of strength and dignity – no chocolate-box prettiness here, simply the perfect features of an exquisite face. An Egyptian face.
And as the last thirteen years seemed to stretch out for ever behind me, I felt that this was it – I’d finally reached the end of the search. I believed that this was most likely Nefertiti herself.
But the identification would certainly not be accepted by everyone. As soon as the television company broke the story in The Sunday Times, we were bombarded by the media for months on end. As I said at the time, ‘I’ve established in my own mind that this is a royal woman of the 18th dynasty – potentially a female pharaoh – and I believe she could well be the great queen Nefertiti.’ Yet the comment was regularly edited down to the simple headline ‘Nefertiti found’, and, believing that we had declared this was indeed the great woman for absolute certain, some people started leaping up and down and haven’t really stopped. And in the grand tradition of Egyptology, with its ‘oh-no-it-isn’t-oh-yes-it-is’ approach, our evidence has been accepted by some, reinterpreted by others and dismissed out of hand by many. Some Egyptologists still maintain that the Younger Woman is a man, whilst others claim it’s a girl and have brought my own abilities into question. All part of life’s rich tapestry, I suppose. At least I’ve learned to be philosophical.
Yet controversy has always been par for the course, and having surrounded the Amarna Period for more than a century it will no doubt continue to do so for many years to come. There will always be those who see Akhenaten as a gentle poet-king, a harmless dreamer caught up in his own little world, and certainly not the useless politician and dictator-like figure which many now believe him to have been. They are often the same people who think he was succeeded by an enigmatic and somewhat effeminate-looking prince, whilst Nefertiti had simply looked on, doing what she did best, producing babies and ‘being beautiful’.
Nevertheless, the evidence shows that a woman ruled as pharaoh in the late 18th dynasty at the end of the Amarna Period, and the Younger Woman appears to have been buried with her right arm arranged in the pose of a pharaoh. She was also buried with a short wig most likely set in the Nubian style, with Amarna-era double ear piercings and gold beads of the type found in the Amarna Period tomb KV.55. Having suffered malicious damage at the time when all traces of Amarna underwent similar treatment, her mummy was then reburied with two individuals who seem to have been members of the Amarna royal family, all three of them prepared using mummification techniques unique to the later 18th dynasty. And then of course there is the facial reconstruction, which speaks for itself. Yet, as Earl Ertman wisely pointed out to me, ‘Unless this mummy can sit up and speak to us and tell us who she is, then there will always be those who won’t believe it.’
So is the search for Nefertiti over? I believe it is. And whilst others will always continue to look for her themselves, I feel my search at least is done.