When I eventually finished my thesis, to emerge as a ‘self-employed Egyptologist’, cynics gave me six months. Admittedly there aren’t many of us about, but I was determined to stay as far beyond the traditional career route as possible. Surely I could do the subject I loved and still be myself?
As luck would have it, three days later I received a phone call inviting me to join a small team examining the collection of ancient Egyptian mummies at Cairo University’s Faculty of Medicine. It was not the sort of offer that comes along every day, let alone with such impeccable timing, and at first I thought someone must be playing a joke. But it was genuine enough, and on 16 January 1997 I arrived in Cairo, knowing only that I would be working on some extraordinary ancient Egyptians.
The Medical School was at Qasr el-Einy, the great Mameluke palace built in ad 1467 by Ahmed Ibn el-Einy, whose tomb, topped by a mosque, was part of the site. The palace was used as the official residence of the Turkish viceroys of Egypt until the French invasion of 1798; Napoleon held his Council of War there the night before the Battle of the Pyramids, and it was later turned into a military hospital. In 1890 it became the Medical School, occupying new premises built on the site by the British administration.
The first Professor of Anatomy had been Grafton Elliot Smith, who, given his well-known interest in ancient Egyptian bodies, was soon sent human remains from sites all over Egypt. Usually the very last things archaeologists were concerned with during their search for ‘artefacts’, mummies and body parts arrived at the school in ever-increasing numbers to form the core of the Qasr el-Einy collection. Having taken delivery of ‘64 huge cases of prehistoric remains from Upper Egypt to be unpacked and arranged Museum shape’, Smith was delighted with the contents, which he described as ‘really most extraordinary, not to say marvellous. In some bodies the whole of the soft parts are retained in a desiccated state, and I have a large number of excellent brains (about 7,000 years old!), hair, beards, even eyes, nerves, muscles, genital organs and various viscera.’
By 1903 a wealthy American businessman named Theodore Davis had begun to fund large-scale excavations in the Valley of the Kings and, during a series of major tomb discoveries, Smith studied the mummies found inside. They included those of Queen Tiy’s parents, Yuya and Tuya, and remains which he would identify as Akhenaten. Over the next two years Smith studied a growing collection of mummies in minute detail, providing a real understanding of ancient mummification techniques, their variations and their evolution through time – all excellent preparation for his matchless work on the royal mummies in the Cairo Museum (described in Chapter 4.)
After Smith’s acceptance of a chair at Manchester his work in Egypt was continued by Douglas Derry, who had begun working there as his assistant back in 1905. After a stint at UCL’s Anatomy Department, Derry returned to Cairo’s Medical School in 1919 and was soon caught up in the Tutankhamen saga.
Having invited Derry and his assistant, Saleh Bey Hamdi, down to the Valley of the Kings in 1925 to examine the pharaoh’s mummy, Carter noted in his diary that ‘this scientific examination should be carried out as quietly and reverently as possible’. The diary also reveals that the work had to be put back several weeks when it was discovered that the mummy was going to be extremely difficult to remove from its protective nest of three coffins. After ‘some two bucketfuls’ of perfumed unguents had been poured over the innermost gold coffin during the king’s burial rites the pitch-like substance had set rock-hard, and the mummy and its famous gold death mask were now stuck firmly to the base of the innermost coffin. Even leaving it in the hot sun for a few hours failed to melt the unguents and free the mummy. So, still in its heavy coffin, it was taken to the tomb of Seti II, which was being used as a laboratory by Carter’s colleague Alfred Lucas, the Manchester chemist who was conserving the treasures. Carter had already removed the mummy’s shrouds, jewellery and regalia, the flowers in the funerary wreaths suggesting that the king had been buried between mid-March and late April. Then, with Egyptian officials, Maspero’s successor Pierre Lacau, Carter and Lucas all standing round the coffin, and a camera rigged up on a frame to take shots from above, Derry and Saleh Bey Hamdi finally began their examination of Tutankhamen’s mummy on 11 November 1925.
As Carter stood by with his magnifying glass, Derry rolled up his shirt-sleeves and began to remove the wrappings. They crumbled at a touch, and became increasingly powdery and ‘soot-like’ the closer they were to the body. Yet the team was still able to determine the way in which the body had been wrapped in sixteen layers of linen; care had obviously been taken, since each finger and toe had been wrapped separately and fitted with an individual gold cover.
The internal organs had been removed through an embalming incision which ran in a horizontal direction from the navel across to the left hip rather than conforming to the standard position in which the incision is made vertically down the left side of the abdomen. Tutankhamen’s body cavity had then been filled with resin-soaked linen which had set rock-hard, and his skin was brittle as a result of the lavish use of unguents. These also carried traces of the natron salts which had been used to dry out the body.
The king had been buried wearing golden sandals and an anklet above his right foot, and as the men worked their way up his body they began to find more and more jewellery and regalia. By the time they reached his folded arms, loaded with bracelets from elbow to wrist, they had recovered fifty-two items, including belts, amulets and large gold signet rings. By the fifth day they were up to his neck, which was swathed in more than thirty necklaces, amulets, pectorals and collars. In total, there were ninety-seven different groups of objects!
Once they had finally freed the head from the mask using heated knives, the protective linen padding was removed and Tutankhamen’s eyes were revealed to the light of day for the first time in 3252 years. They were partly open and fringed by ‘very long’ lashes. As Carter and the king finally came face to face, the archaeologist wrote in his diary that ‘sufficient of the head of the King was exposed today to show us that Tut-Ankh-Amen was of a type exceedingly refined and cultured. The face has beautiful and well formed features. The head shows strong structural resemblance by Akh-en-aten . . . a resemblance in character which makes one inclined to seek a blood relationship.’
They discovered that Tutankhamen’s brain had been removed via the nose as part of the mummification process. His nostrils had been plugged with resin-soaked linen, and his lips likewise sealed with resin. His ears had clearly been pierced, and his shaven head was encircled by a gold brow-band. His skull was covered with a fine linen cap covered in a beadwork design, with cartouches naming the Aten and four protective cobras, their sinuous bodies unconsciously mirroring the suture lines on the skull.
After the body had been studied, measured and photographed, Derry and Saleh Bey were ‘able to definitely declare the age of the young king to be about eighteen years of age’. Since he was known to have reigned for just under ten years, that meant he must have come to the throne around the age of eight. Requesting Derry to contribute his findings to the second volume of The Tomb of Tutankhamen, which would be published in 1927, Carter told him ‘the only thing I ask is that the text be of a kind comprehensible to the layman and the man in the street’. In his diary, Carter stated that the king’s remains ‘will be reverently re-wrapped and returned to the sarcophagus’, as indeed they were in 1926, laid on a tray of sand inside the outermost gold coffin whilst everything else was sent to the Cairo Museum.
This, however, was not the only mummy found in the tomb. Later that year Carter had reached the piles of chests and boxes crammed into the small room adjoining the burial chamber, which had originally been guarded by a great reclining black jackal figure swathed in one of Akhenaten’s old tunics. After finding a lock of Queen Tiy’s hair inside a miniature coffin bearing her name, he came across a plain wooden box containing two more miniature coffins, which, like Russian dolls, contained two even smaller coffins within. Amazingly, each contained a tiny mummy.
Unwrapping the smaller of the two, Carter believed they were ‘without doubt’ the children of Tutankhamen and his wife Ankhesenamen, granddaughters of Nefertiti and Akhenaten, and ‘had one of those babies lived there might never have been a Ramses’. Wanting to know if they had been born prematurely either as a result of foul play or because of ‘an abnormality on the part of the little Queen Ankhesenamen’, he sent them both to Cairo. Here they were eventually examined in 1932 by Derry, who discovered that the smaller of the two was a five-month-old foetus still retaining part of its umbilical cord. This prematurely born girl had clearly been mummified and was in an excellent state of preservation, but there was no sign of any of the internal organs having been removed. When the second body was unwrapped by Derry it proved to be, similar to the first, the seven months’ foetus of a prematurely born girl. This time the internal organs had been removed through a tiny incision in her side.
Then, to discover how the brain had been treated during the mummification process, Derry states that he ‘opened the head’, one of the more extreme techniques employed over the next twenty years on material sent to him from excavations throughout Egypt. This included the remains of the 21st dynasty pharaohs buried at Tanis, the bodies of high officials found in their Giza tombs, mummified remains from the burial chamber of King Djoser beneath Sakkara’s Step Pyramid, and some of the mummies of royal women and nobility discovered at Deir el-Bahari on Luxor’s West Bank.
Each was examined by Derry and his assistant Ahmed Batrawi, who eventually took over from Derry as anatomy professor in 1949 and continued to add a great deal to the understanding of mummification. And still the collection continued to grow, with the arrival of the remains of two pharaohs of the Pyramid Age, Djedkare and Sneferu, and, indeed, most of the ancient human remains discovered in Egypt since the First World War. Now known as the Derry-Batrawi Collection, this unique assemblage of ancient remains became the focus of research and conservation carried out by the Bioanthropology Foundation. It was this collection, with its great quantities of hair and wigs, that I was asked to examine in 1997.
Two days after my arrival in Cairo the Muslim month of Ramadan began, and with the students on holiday the faculty was fairly quiet. However, our work was punctuated each day by the loud call to prayer from the mosque next door – the same sound which had caused Smith to refer somewhat dis-respectfully to Qasr el-Einy as ‘The Palace of the Howling Dervish’.
The daily journey home often included a visit to the Cairo Museum, where I had finally managed to see some of the royal mummies for myself when eleven of those considered to be amongst the better-looking ones had been put back on display in 1994. Tuthmosis IV had made a particularly good impression with his relatively long, shoulder-length hair dressed with dark-colored resinous material, and I’d also spotted a couple of lice egg cases in the hair behind his clearly pierced ears – he was the first pharaoh to adopt this foreign fashion. He also had lovely long eyelashes and Smith, dismissing the pharaoh as ‘effeminate’, had also commented on his long fingernails. The majority of the other royal mummies were off-limits to the general public, but we were allowed to see them whilst we were working so nearby. As well as the warrior pharaohs Amenhotep II and Tuthmosis III and the great queen Ahmose-Nefertari, I finally got to meet Amenhotep III himself.
I have to admit that Amenhotep III has always been something of a hero of mine and I was then preparing to write a biography of him. Although he’d been dead for more than three thousand years I was overwhelmed to meet him face to face. His body had, however, suffered serious damage at the hands of the ancient plunderers. Presumably having been adorned with even more lavish quantities of gold than he had worn in life, the body may well then have been wrapped in gold foil ‘winding sheets’ of the type inscribed with Tiy’s name and said to have been found at Amarna. These would certainly have been pillaged when his tomb was ransacked. After being salvaged and rewrapped in 1057 BC, according to the ink inscription on his restored linen wrappings, the king was reburied in one of the side chambers of KV.35. He was unwrapped again in 1905 by Smith, who found that the use of large quantities of resin had produced an almost statue-like mummy. Since the king’s embalmers had clearly had the ability to create some of Egypt’s most life-like mummies, especially those of his in-laws Yuya and Tuya, Amenhotep III’s very different appearance was surely no accident. Because in life he’d declared himself a living god after ritually merging with the Aten sun disc, I wondered if his statue-like mummy was the result of being covered in huge amounts of shiny golden resins intended to symbolise his solar powers.
Whatever the motivation, Smith had long ago realised that this new form of mummification had begun at the start of the Amarna Period when things were being done differently. But whether or not the bodies of Amenhotep III’s successors underwent a similar process ‘is now impossible to say, because nothing but skeletons of some of them have come down to us’. And in the very next glass case lay the skeleton from tomb KV.55 which many Egyptologists believed to be that of his successor, Akhenaten himself. Tucked up beneath a linen covering dotted with dark splashes of resins, only his skull was visible, although missing nasal bones did suggest that the brain had been removed, and the discovery of canopic jars together with the body meant that the entrails had been taken out. In the original excavation report the remains are described as far more complete – the mummy of a ‘smallish’ person whose perfect teeth apparently crumbled to dust when touched. So too had most of the fine-textured linen wrappings, and when the cloth nearest the skin was removed ‘it came off in a black mass, exposing the ribs’. The body had also been covered with sheets of gold, so perhaps, bearing in mind the use of golden resins for Amenhotep III and the gold sheets inscribed with Tiy’s name, this body too had been imbued with the golden qualities of the Aten sun disc. If only we knew for sure who it was.
Looking at all those fascinating mummies in one room was an incredible privilege, as was being allowed to examine others on a daily basis at the Medical School, where it was my job to study their hair. All found in the 1920s and 1930s in the Deir el-Bahari region during excavations by Egyptologists from New York’s Metropolitan Museum, the artefacts had been divided between the Cairo and New York museums, whilst the remains of the people themselves – including their hair – were generally sent north to Derry at Qasr el-Einy. After he’d examined them they became part of the Derry-Batrawi Collection, stored away for more than seventy years and effectively ‘lost’ until the Bioanthropology Foundation began their research and conservation programme.
My first subject was QA.39, a simple accession number which referred to Ashayet, one-time queen of Egypt and Great Royal Wife of King Montuhotep II. Having reunited Egypt around 2000 BC, he had been venerated down the centuries as a great warrior, and although his own body was destroyed in ancient times the remains of his chief queen had survived largely intact. Following the discovery of her tomb in 1921, her mummy was found inside a great limestone sarcophagus carved with scenes of daily life. Although the wrappings had already been ripped open by ancient robbers, photographs taken at the time reveal that the mummy itself was in an excellent state of preservation, with Ashayet endearingly described as ‘a plump little person with bobbed hair done up in innumerable little plaits’. Derry himself reported that the body was in almost perfect condition when he examined it shortly after discovery, but this was certainly no longer the case – time had not been kind. Like the body from KV.55, Ashayet was now skeletal except for her left hand, her feet and part of her scalp and hair. After our conservator had cleaned her remains and the palaeopathologists had examined her bones, confirming that she had died in her early twenties, I began my work.
Her dark brown, quite fine mid-length hair had been carefully styled, and from the remaining plaits it was possible to obtain a good idea of how it would have looked when compared to the image on her sarcophagus. Each plait ended in a small open-centre curl secured with a drop of resinous fixing lotion, and although she hadn’t used any false extensions her natural colour seemed to have been brightened with a henna-type preparation. A few lice eggs also remained in her hair.
Having branched out into the world of the ancient manicurist, I also examined her one remaining hand. It was delicate, and both the nails and the palm were stained orange-red, perhaps from the application of henna which is still used for decorative purposes of this kind in modern Egypt and the Middle East. The lack of wear and tear on the nails’ surface bore evidence of a woman who clearly didn’t do her own housework, and the likelihood of a privileged lifestyle was reinforced by their well-manicured appearance. Then I noticed that the thumbnail appeared to show traces of human teeth marks, and all of a sudden the Great Royal Wife became a human being, nervously nibbling her thumbnail during the grand state occasions in which she played a central role. Her feet were equally small and delicate, and, even allowing for some shrinkage during the mummification process, would only have been around a UK size 3.
After examining the queen I turned my attention to an entire family of bodies which the Metropolitan team had found at Deir el-Bahari, this time high in the hills overlooking the great female pharaoh Hatshepsut’s splendid funerary temple. Inside an intact rock-cut tomb they had found a woman called Hatnefer and her husband Ramose, with some further women and children. But this was no ordinary family. Hatnefer and Ramose were the parents of the great state official Senmut, right-hand man, and some said lover, of Hatshepsut, and the man responsible for building both her funerary temple and tombs for himself and his family close by.
Intriguingly, the grandest coffin in Senmut’s parents’ tomb was made for his mother. Inside her gilded wooden coffin, beneath the golden mask, her mummy with its hundreds of hair extensions had been unwrapped and looked at in situ by those who had discovered it before being sent to Derry, who conducted his usual rigorous examination. Sixty years later, we decided to reconstruct Hatnefer’s original hairstyle using the excavator’s descriptions and original black and white photographs as our guide.
Presented with several bags full of hair, I began to sort through the curls and braids, discovering pieces of her original linen mummy wrappings and even one of her teeth. Her own short curls were heavily streaked with grey, and literally hundreds of thin, tapering plaits of dark brown human hair had been attached to create the top-heavy style found in art of the time. The plaits had originally been gathered into two sections at either side of the head, falling on to her chest in two rounded masses which the excavators believed had been wound around ‘flat spiralled disks on the upper breast’. Yet when we X-rayed this part of the hair we found that no such discs had been used; instead, the ends had been kept in place by large quantities of resin fixative.
This distinctive style was associated with Hathor, the ancient Egyptian goddess of beauty also known as Lady of the Locks and Mistress of the Braid, and frequently shown wearing this exact coiffure. Given her additional status as Goddess of the West, believed to take the souls of the dead into her care within the Deir el-Bahari cliffs, the hairstyle also had funerary connotations. Hatnefer’s extraordinary hairdo certainly seemed to be a post-mortem version of the style, since so many plaits attached to such fine sections of natural hair just couldn’t have been worn in everyday life.
She would undoubtedly have presented an imposing figure, and, carefully prepared for burial in her finest jewellery, her fingernails stained a vibrant reddish shade, she appeared to have died between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-five. Although Derry thought her husband Ramose was of a similar age, our palaeopathologists felt he had been a much younger man, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five – the average life expectancy in ancient Egypt. But, much as I’d like to have imagined Hatnefer taking up with a toy boy, it seemed that she had simply lived longer than he had. Benefiting from her son Senmut’s rise to power, as shown by her wealthy burial, she had been mummified in a superior way to that of her husband and other members of the family. This suggested that they had been exhumed and then laid to rest with the aged Hatnefer when she finally died.
Close to Hatnefer’s tomb, the American archaeologists also found burials of people the family may well have known in life – contemporaries who had served at the court of Hatshepsut herself, including my own particular favourite, a man named Harmose. His coffin inscription revealed that he had worked as a singer, and alongside his body was his red lute, a chest containing his mummified entrails, a linen tunic and a pot of some sort of unguent. Although only his scalp seemed to have survived, Harmose’s thick curly hair was neatly trimmed and fixed in place with a mixture which under the microscope appeared as a cracked coating – perhaps the contents of the jar buried with him. His unusually light brown to blond hair colour may also have been enhanced with some sort of yellow dye, perhaps a way to stress his connections with Hathor, the multi-faceted goddess who, as patron of musicians and daughter of the sun god, was herself known as the Golden One.
In addition to all these individuals I was even allowed to look at the remains of the two tiny foetuses from the tomb of Tutankhamen, which Carter had considered were the king’s children by his wife Ankhesenamen. Although he’d wanted to know why they had been born prematurely (perhaps as a result of the family’s in-breeding?), Derry had been unable to discover the reason. Then they had been ‘lost’ until 1978, when a team from Liverpool University located the older foetus. This they found to be ‘damaged, particularly the skull which appears as though it has been squashed, in addition to Derry’s post-mortem examination’. Nevertheless, their X-rays revealed that the baby girl had suffered from spina bifida, scoliosis and a shoulder deformity, and had she survived would have been quite severely disabled. With the second foetus rediscovered in 1992, I was able to look at what were believed to be the last in a long line of ancient royals, the flesh-and-blood relatives of Amenhotep III and Tiy, Akhenaten and Nefertiti, Tutankhamen and Ankhesenamen. I found the remains of the two tiny bodies lying in their separate boxes incredibly moving. Not having a scientific background, I’ve never been able to treat human remains with the correct amount of detachment, simply as artefacts or objects of study. Each one is an individual, prepared for burial by people who cared for them, and when you know their name or something about them it becomes doubly difficult.
My time at Qasr el-Einy gave me a real insight into what might be discovered, just by looking at their hair and nails, about people who had lived thousands of years ago. It had been possible to establish details of the lifestyles, habits, health and occupation of queens, priestesses, musicians and workers, most of them known by the names they had been given millennia ago.
I also did my first bit of television there for a Discovery series, appearing on the appropriately named Post-Mortem episode holding forth about Hatnefer’s wonderful hairstyle. I hardly set the world alight with my screen presence, but I almost enjoyed it and found that, once I got the hang of it, it wasn’t as difficult as I’d first thought.
Back home, I continued to write articles about mummification, ancient hair, cosmetics and tattoos, acting as a consultant and contributing chapters to one or two worthy tomes. I also wrote my first book, a small volume for the British Museum Press looking at the ways the ancient Egyptians had used perfume, not only as fragrance but also in medicine, magic and of course in mummification, where the ritual use of perfumes conveniently hid any hint of decay.
As a spin-off from my work at Qasr el-Einy I went out to Hierakonpolis in southern Egypt, the most important city in the country prior to the unification of north and south around 3100 BC. Excavations there had revealed a sizeable settlement, with large-scale pottery production and Egypt’s earliest brewery. It was also the site of the country’s first painted tomb and earliest-known temple, a large timber-framed structure dedicated to the falcon god Horus. Here, back in 1894, archaeologists had discovered a whole range of ritual artefacts including the famous Narmer Palette and a superb gold falcon head with eyes of black obsidian, both now in the Cairo Museum. Close by stood Egypt’s oldest standing brick building, the enigmatic mudbrick enclosure thought to have been built by King Khasekhemwy around 2686 BC.
The site’s continuing importance in later times was reflected by a series of rock-cut tombs built for New Kingdom dignitaries (c.1500–1100 BC). Yet in time-honoured fashion, the majority of the ancient population had been buried in holes in the sand where the hot, dry conditions had preserved much of their skin, hair and nails. So I was asked to examine material found in previous seasons and help recover that still being found during excavations at a workers’ cemetery dating back to 3400 BC.
Here, amongst some of ancient Egypt’s oldest mummified remains, was all kinds of hair. Most of it, like the vast majority of other ancient hair, was dark brown, although there were also a few red and even blond examples. The styles ranged from very short crops to mid-length waves and long ringlets for both sexes. The most amazing hairdo had belonged to a middle-aged woman, and we were able to reconstruct it from scattered fragments of her skull and hair recovered from her heavily plundered grave.
Clearly the result of many hours’ work undertaken by someone other than the lady in question, her natural hair of slightly more than shoulder length had been transformed into an imposing crest-like coiffure using numerous hair extensions. Supplying the earliest evidence for the use of false hair anywhere in Egypt, the find became even more significant when we discovered that the woman’s greying brown hair had been dyed, either just before her death or as a post-mortem treatment. The dye had coloured the brown parts auburn while turning the white hairs a bright orange, a characteristic of henna which I knew from personal experience.
The Egyptians in the nearby village told us that henna shrubs still grew at the site, and, kindly pointing out where the best leaves were to be found, allowed me to help myself. They also demonstrated the heavy circular stones they used to grind the leaves to a fine powder which they mixed with water to colour their own hair, skin and nails. Inspired, I carried out my own comparative tests using a range of modern hair samples of varying amounts of greyness supplied by members of our team. The results replicated the effects seen in the ancient samples.
The incredible kindness of the local people made my month at the site a tremendous experience, and when I swapped stories with the women using a combination of very basic Arabic and some rather inventive hand gestures, they usually asked about my pierced nose and reddish orange hair. One day while telling me about the types of jewellery and cosmetics they used, they insisted on making up my eyes by applying kohl in the traditional way – spitting on a short metal rod, dipping it in a small bottle of black powder and then pulling it horizontally between my closed eyelids. Then, with their characteristic generosity, they gave me the rod and bottle as a gift; I have kept them ever since.
Like many visitors, I have experienced much of this kind of hospitality in Egypt, and even have an adopted family in Qurna. I had first met them back in 1991 during one of my research visits when, as often happens, our taxi driver invited me to take tea with his family. The car left the road and headed up a hill honeycombed with ancient tombs, where we pulled up in front of a mudbrick house built right into the side of the Theban hills close to the tomb of Nakht, temple astronomer in the reign of Amenhotep III. What an incredible place to live!
Close by was the house where an excavator and collector named Yanni d’Athanasi had lived in the 1820s and 1830s, his furniture made from ancient coffins like that of his friend and neighbour, the Egyptologist John Gardner Wilkinson. Wilkinson’s unusual tomb home contained all manner of fixtures and fittings, including a working library, and even had a garden at the front. As something of a commune of Egyptologists and artists developed in the nineteenth century, their numerous guests included the future British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli who turned up in 1831 on his Grand Tour. Apparently there were social evenings every Thursday, and one guest commented that ‘never was the habitation of death witness to gayer scenes . . . and the odour of the mummies had long ago been dispelled’.
Many of the Qurnawi people had themselves lived in or beside the ancient tombs for a century or more, and the family I was visiting were no exception. Sitting with the children on the wooden bench by their front door we could look out at one of the best views in Egypt, the hill falling away before me and then flattening out before the ruins of the Ramesseum, the funerary temple of Ramses II, Shelley’s Ozymandias. A little way beyond to the right, amidst the vivid green of the fields, stood the Colossi of Memnon, and even further round were the sands which covered the palace of Malkata. Sipping my sweet tea, I stared out into the distance where a pale haze hung over the river, hiding the temples of Karnak and Luxor on its banks.
This turned out to be the first of many visits. The family had six sons and five daughters, and although the boys spoke pretty good English, not to mention having a working knowledge of French, German, Italian and even some words of Japanese, picked up through working amongst Luxor’s endless stream of tourists, the mother and daughters spoke only Arabic. This gave me the incentive to try to learn the language, through a combination of evening classes, tapes and the family’s extremely patient, good-humoured coaching. As my visits to Egypt increased I spent more and more time with them, sitting talking, watching old black-and-white Arabic films, helping to make dinner, visiting the extended family in surrounding houses and, when the men were out, turning on the radio to practise our dancing. It’s difficult to do justice to all that they’ve done for me over the years, but for some reason they have always treated me as one of their own, and I am proud to be able to call myself their daughter.
Their house was actually little different from the ancient houses of mudbrick: the walls were painted similarly bright colours, there were wooden benches and mats on the floor for sitting or sleeping, meals were eaten around a low table, and the chickens and donkey were never far away. There was no running water, so that having a shower involved locking yourself in with the chickens and dousing yourself in water which had been heated on the primus stove. Through a gap in one corner of the roof I could see the feet of the tourists walking past, although fortunately for them they never saw me.
Accompanying my parents and sister on their first visit to Egypt, I gave a lecture about my work for the Egypt Exploration Society at the British Council in Cairo, which was reviewed in the Cairo Times under the headline ‘Itchy the head that wears the crown’ and accompanied by a wonderful cartoon of Akhenaten and Nefertiti checking their daughters for head lice. After my first book, Oils and Perfumes of Ancient Egypt, had been published I was approached to write a more general book on ancient Egyptian art and religion and then a third book, this time for children. Having established myself as a freelancer, I was also able to move back from Manchester to my beloved Yorkshire where, with the understanding of an ever-supportive bank manager, I bought the house of my gothic dreams beside a medieval graveyard overlooking the sea. I’d only been in the house a couple of weeks when I noticed what looked like a large, smooth stone protruding from the side of the hill by the gate. When I moved the surrounding soil a little I was certain I could see suture lines, the tell-tale marks of a skull. And after clearing away a little more soil, I discovered that it was human!
Human remains aren’t something you find every day, and, although I appreciated this rather unorthodox house-warming gift, I decided to phone the police and report it. They turned up with bright yellow incident tape, but I assured them that there had been no foul play and that, from what I could see, the body was several hundred years old. Although my job description as an ‘Egyptologist specialising in human remains’ initially raised a few eyebrows, it was a great way to meet the local archaeologists who were told about the discovery and came along to decide what should be done. Given the body’s precarious position they applied for Home Office permission to excavate, and the skeleton of a young woman estimated to be around five hundred years old now resides in storage in the local museum.
Briefly mentioning the unexpected discovery at a lecture I gave in London, I was contacted by the science editor of one of the daily broadsheets and asked if I’d like to contribute on anything of an archaeological natural that I found appealing. So I did, with updates on work in the Valley of the Kings, Tutankhamen’s clothing, new research work into mummification and the body of what was supposed to be an ancient Egyptian princess but turned out to be someone quite different.
I also discovered that there was life beyond ancient Egypt when I was invited to look at some of the extraordinary mummies that had been produced in South America. Here was the world’s longest continuous mummy-making culture, only brought to an end by the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century. The Conquistadors had been amazed by mummies so life-like that they were regarded as living beings; indeed, the royal mummies were fed, clothed, consulted and carried aloft at state occasions.
In late 1998 I spent a month in the far south of Peru, studying mummies of the Chiribaya who eventually became part of the mighty Inca Empire. Situated between the windswept desert and the Pacific Ocean, the region is stunningly beautiful, and one of the most archaeologically rich sites in the world. It is home to literally thousands of mummies swathed in superb textiles, and, given the prevalence of grave robbing, the Bioanthropology Foundation had stepped in to help conserve and study these ancient human remains.
I carried out my examinations at their combined storage and study centre, surrounded by hundreds of neatly shelved crates and boxes of heads, torsos and entire bodies. Like most ancient South American cultures, the Chiribaya buried their dead with their knees drawn up, wrapped in many layers of decorated textiles to form a bundle. A few were even provided with gold death masks, although the great majority wore a variety of hats, caps, headbands and hairstyles. The extensive practice of skull deformation to mark out elite members of society also meant that, when their pointed hats were removed, the head beneath was often the same shape.
Such elongated heads were often enhanced with a fabulous range of hairstyles, although, as was also the case in Egypt, it was generally the men who sported the most elaborate styles. In many cases their hair was long – the Spanish conquerors had dragged away the last Inca king by his long hair – and braided into a multitude of thin plaits all over the head, a feature found in the textile designs of the Chiribaya and many other South American cultures and apparently connected to the serpent-like hair of the priestly shamans. Separate sections of hair left unplaited around the nape of the neck were then woven in the same way as textiles, forming a V-shaped braid down the back and neatly finished off with various coloured wools, which quite possibly contained information about the wearer. So intricate were some of these styles that they had to be the work of specialists. Women too sometimes grew their hair quite long, and enhanced their appearance with a form of red colourant on the cheeks. Both sexes also used more permanent forms of skin adornment, with beautiful tattoos of birds, frogs and spirals repeating the images featured in the textiles they wore.
Lacking any form of written script, the ancient South Americans used complex motifs on their textiles and forms of personal adornment in order to record information. The Spanish observed that the men wore distinguishing insignia on their heads, and the coded messages conveyed by people’s dress were so important that it was a capital offence to wear attire inappropriate to one’s social position. Studying their hair, headgear, cosmetics and tattoos was as close as one could get to being able to read about these people in their own words.
The dry climate had preserved just about everything, as had the frozen conditions in the high Andes, where the Inca regularly left their most beautiful young people, often drugged and accompanied by superb textiles and gifts of silver and gold, to freeze to death as gifts for the gods. Up to a hundred of their naturally mummified bodies had been discovered and DNA analysis had uncovered a family link between the mummies and the villagers who still lived at the foot of the mountains. I found it amazing that, whilst I had no idea what members of my own family looked like a mere century ago, these people could actually look into the faces of relatives from some thirty generations back.
My fascination with the mummified dead soon completely took over from my original narrower interest in hair and nails. The more I looked, the more there was to find out. My horizons expanded by my first trip to South America, I embarked on a series of extraordinary jobs working on mummies right across the world.
It all began when I was approached by a television company which was making a programme about the spread of mummification. The producer, who had a PhD in anthropology from Cambridge, was writing a book on mummification and wanted the Egyptian angle. As the programme came together we ended up filming in Egypt and tracing funerary practices across North Africa as far west as Morocco. We then went out into the Atlantic, to the Canary Islands. This wasn’t the first place I’d have looked myself until I found out that the islands’ ancient Guanche population, with their links to nearby North Africa, had not only built pyramids but mummified their dead.
We were able to confirm this when we were allowed to reexamine an anonymous Guanche mummy in Cambridge, first examined in 1968 by palaeopathologist Don Brothwell, now a professor at York University. He had discovered that the torso had been packed with filling inserted Egyptian-style through an incision in the abdomen. So we asked Don, one of the world’s leading experts in ancient bodies, to return and help us re-investigate the mummy using state-of-the art computerised tomography (CT) equipment at Cambridge’s Addenbrooke’s Hospital. This process revealed massive facial injuries, which were presumably the cause of death. And to our surprise, carbon dating revealed that the mummy was only 650 years old, making it one of the very last links to an immemorial tradition only lost when the Spanish imposed their own beliefs on the native population, just as they had done in South America.
Don and I continued to keep in touch, and when the programme aired I also got an email from archaeological chemist Stephen Buckley. Completing a PhD on the materials used in Egyptian mummification, he wanted to know about the kinds of materials the Guanche had used to preserve their dead. And as we too began to correspond, the three of us eventually began to look at mummification practices throughout the ancient world.
My trips to Egypt continued, and as I began my book about Amenhotep III I also did some filming for a Channel 4 three-part series looking at the lives of the pharaohs and their people. At Giza’s Human Remains Centre Dr Azza Sarry el-Din, one of Egypt’s leading authorities on human remains, showed us what was left of those who had actually built the pyramids. The discovery of their town and cemetery in the early 1980s revealed that they had been not slaves, whatever Hollywood liked to think, but a core workforce whose numbers were regularly swelled by farmers, temporarily redeployed in massive job creation schemes during the three months every year when their fields were submerged by the Nile flood.
Lifting out bone after bone from the boxes on the shelves around her, the softly spoken Dr Azza began to bring the ancient workforce to life. The compressed vertebrae of those who had actually done the heavy labour, side-by-side with the more normal vertebrae of those of who had simply stood about as overseers, offered graphic evidence of the incredible effort which had gone into building these huge monuments. As more bones appeared on the table, a properly set, well-healed fracture on an ancient forearm showed that medical facilities had been on hand for the workforce. Although theirs was by no means a life of beer and skittles, they were at least provided with a degree of care. The most moving remains were those of a female dwarf who had died in childbirth, the matchstick-like bones of her baby showing that it had been of normal dimensions – with tragic results.
One of the programmes in the series looked at the Amarna royal family. Since much of the filming was done at Amarna I was able to spend time around the city, in its palaces and temples and up at one of the great boundary stelae, with its incredible views back across the plain and its criss-crossed roads where the city had once stood. Visiting the tombs of the officials, on this occasion I saw for the first time the Southern Tombs, including the largest of all, the extraordinary tomb of Ay and Ty with its forest of columns. Although Ay held several titles – Fan Bearer on the King’s Right Hand, Master of the Royal Horses, Royal Scribe, and God’s Father – none of these was really amongst the top jobs, and it has been suggested that the massive size of his tomb must have been due to some other connection to the royal family.
Although Ay is thought by many to have been Queen Tiy’s brother, the only definite link with the royals can be found in the titles of his wife Ty, named as ‘Great Nurse Who Nourished the Goddess’, meaning Nefertiti. So this woman on the wall in front of me, with her superbly carved, long, rippling wig and finely pleated robes, had been instrumental in Nefertiti’s childhood. This was my closest link so far with the elusive queen.
Ay’s tomb inscriptions made fascinating reading, and after a bit more self-glorification (‘My name has penetrated the palace because of my usefulness to the king’) he said, ‘I see the king’s beauty when he appears in his palace.’ This reference to the king’s beauty, not the queen’s, offers a clear contradiction of the modern world’s long-standing belief in some sort of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ scenario in which Akhenaten’s supposedly grotesque physical appearance is simplistically contrasted with the beauty of Nefertiti. Demonstrating his support for the Aten cult with a very long version of the Hymn to the Aten, Ay then paid extravagant honours to the royal couple, asking to be allowed to ‘kiss the pure ground’ before their feet. Then he prayed that the Aten bless the king and ‘the Great Royal Wife, his beloved, abounding in her perfection, she who sends the Aten to rest with a sweet voice, and her perfect hands bearing two sistrums, the Mistress of the Two Lands, Neferneferuaten Nefertiti, living for ever and ever. May she be by the side of Akhenaten for ever and ever’, inscriptions which revealed more about Nefertiti than any I’d seen before.
As in one of the Northern Tombs, Nefertiti wore the elaborate ‘atef’ crown of a king, appearing at the Window of Appearances side by side with Akhenaten whilst their youngest daughter touched Nefertiti’s face in the way young children do when they want their mother’s undivided attention. To the great cheers of the crowd, Nefertiti and Akhenaten rewarded Ay and Ty, making them ‘people of gold’ as they threw down the ‘gold of honour’ in the form of eighteen chunky gold necklaces. The two faithful courtiers were also showered with a hail of cups, goblets, jewelled collars, bead necklaces, signet rings, ornamental head-bands and items of clothing. Some of the garments looked like tie-on sleeves or maybe even leggings of the sort the Leiden research team in the Netherlands had found amongst Tutankhamen’s wardrobe – and perfect for those chilly nights in the desert. And among the lavish gifts piling up at their feet a pair of riding gloves, the preserve of royalty, were so unusual that Ay immediately put them on, and was seen holding out his hands for his colleagues to gather round and admire.
The tomb even featured scenes of palace life, with menservants sweeping the floors and preparing food whilst women were depicted eating, singing, and playing harps and lutes next door to what appeared to be a music room. Best of all, they were shown doing each other’s hair; the unusual long curly style, coupled with some of their layered robes, suggested that some of these women were Syrians, presumably some of the foreign women who lived at the royal court. Packed with detail, this really was a fabulous tomb.
Then, for a complete change of mood, we spent a day out at the remote and lonely burial place of Akhenaten and members of his family. As we made our way slowly up the boulder-strewn valley the wind suddenly picked up from nowhere, pelting the sides of the jeep with sand, and I had a distinct feeling of unease. Waiting for the generator to spark into life and bring some light to the tomb, my first impressions were of a very eerie place indeed.
Beyond a huge doorway, a superbly cut entrance corridor led right down into the depths, where my pocket flashlight made little impression as I stepped cautiously forward and headed slowly down towards the burial chamber. But even when the electric lights did finally come on, the atmosphere hardly seemed to change. Standing beside the plinth where the king’s mummy had once lain, surrounded by what was left of the crumbling wall surface, it was difficult not to feel incredibly sad. Moving on into the suite of rooms containing funeral scenes of the dead princess Meketaten, mourned by a distraught Akhenaten and Nefertiti and three of her sisters, I felt deeply moved.
A few months later I was given the opportunity for more research into the ancient dead, this time nothing to do with Egypt. Following a tour around Peru, I hopped on to a small plane and flew south to Tacna where a car took me across the border into Chile, home to the world’s oldest mummies. During the next few weeks I saw for myself some of the bodies that had been mummified an astonishing eight millennia ago – some three thousand years before the Egyptians had begun to mummify their dead.
Discovered on the coastal edge of the Atacama Desert, they had been created by small fishing communities of the Chinchorro culture. After the dead were defleshed, the bodies were dried and then reassembled; their hair was reattached as a wig, and their faces covered in a painted clay mask. Some showed signs of repainting, and since there were also signs of damage to the feet area the mummies may have stood upright and been treated as objects of veneration before their final burial in family groups.
Because the earliest mummies were those of children and foetuses, it was possible that Chinchorro women had been the first practitioners of mummification as a means of keeping their dead offspring with them. Certainly a condition known as auditory exostosis visible in male skulls indicated that the men had spent most of their time diving for food at sea, so the women who processed and prepared the daily catch of seals as well as fish may well have used the anatomical knowledge they gained from preparing sea mammals to prepare their own dead – an intriguing and highly persuasive theory.
In 2001 I was invited on what turned out to be the funniest trip to Egypt I’ve ever had. Ex-Python Terry Jones was going to front a history programme, and I was asked to take him on a tour through ancient and modern Egypt. The finished show also featured my Egyptian family, who soon became local celebrities themselves. Not surprisingly, the whole thing became quite surreal at times.
Within a few months I was back in Egypt with very different companions – two ex-FBI detectives. They had been sent out by the Discovery Channel to investigate whether there was any evidence to support the theory that Tutankhamen could have been murdered, and they needed an Egyptologist to provide some background information as they tried to build up criminal profiles of people who might have done the deed. Once again, television allowed me to visit places, see things and have experiences that would not otherwise have come my way. We spent a whole day filming in Tutankhamen’s tomb, this time down in the actual burial chamber which is usually off-limits. Studying at point-blank range the king’s gold coffin containing his body, and looking inside the small side room where the foetuses had been found, enabled me to study in detail parts of the tomb I’d never seen.
On another trip, this time filming at Karnak Temple, we were allowed to go right to the top of the first pylon from which there were extensive views across the temple and beyond. It had been off-limits for years since a tourist had fallen to his death, and the way up consisted of a very narrow, very long, pitch-black passage festooned with hundreds of drowsy bats sheltering from the daylight. But it proved to be well worth the hike when I looked right over the river to the West Bank, and then back the other way to where Akhenaten and Nefertiti had built their extraordinary Aten temples in Karnak’s eastern quarter. I was even allowed into the long, low store rooms where the remains of these temples had ended up – the thousands and thousands of individual blocks carved with the Aten, the king and Nefertiti, whose figure cropped up time and time again.
Back home I had also begun to work with Stephen Buckley, now at York University, who was continuing his analytical research into mummification. Although it had long been assumed that everything about this complicated process was now fully understood, his work had started to show this was simply not so, and he had the scientific evidence to prove it.
At the end of 2001 we were both invited to Rome to look at two bodies which had just been discovered near the heart of the city. After uncovering a vaulted stone tomb close to the Appian Way, Italian archaeologists had found two stone sarcophagi containing the bodies of a woman and her son. Although this in itself was not particularly out of the ordinary, the fact that the son appeared to have been mummified certainly was. The burials dated from the first century ad and had obviously been influenced by Egyptian funerary traditions, for the woman had been buried in a carefully styled wig covered with a fine gold hair net. The hair had survived in amazing condition, and both bodies were swathed in floral garlands so huge that they were virtually covered. While I examined the wig and hair net, Stephen studied the bodies and gave advice on storage and conservation.
A couple of months later we received a call from the TV producer who had been writing a book on mummification: it had led him to a fascinating new discovery when a reader from Australia had written to say how much she’d enjoyed the book, although she could find no mention of the mummies in Yemen. He’d never heard of them, and when he phoned me I wasn’t much help, as I hadn’t either. In fact no one seemed to know anything about Yemeni mummies, and since this appeared to be an entire mummy-making culture unknown to the outside world we felt we needed to find out more. With the support of the Yemeni Government, Sanaa University and National Geographic I was asked to put a team together, and so, as the Anglo-Yemeni Mummy Research Project, Don, Stephen and I flew out to quite an adventure.
Previously the only Yemenis I had known about were Sheffield boxer Prince Nasim and the legendary Queen of Sheba. As Yemen’s most famous figure she appears in the Bible, the Quran, the Ethiopian Orthodox Kebra Nagast and the Jewish scriptures. She also looms large in the country’s colourful history as Queen Bilqis, who lived some time in the tenth century BC. I was now amazed to learn that a third famous Yemeni was also a woman – one who had ruled the country for an astonishing seventy-one years until her death aged ninety-two in ad 1138. This was Queen Arwa, patron of the arts and a great builder of aqueducts, schools and mosques, who had been buried in the mosque she had built in her capital, Jibla. Although her tomb had been vandalised in 1995 by fundamentalists unhappy with the historical reality of a woman in power, even so long ago, the vast majority of Yemenis still hold Arwa in great affection and the name remains a popular one.
Shortly after our arrival we met several hundred Yemenis all at once when we were invited to give a set of impromptu lectures to the university’s archaeology students. Breaking the ice by apologising for not speaking better Arabic, I described what we’d be doing and what we wanted to find out from the mummies housed in their department’s museum. Placed on their sides in the foetal position, the mummies’ heads popped out of the top of the carefully stitched animal hides they were wrapped in. Some had also been dressed in leather clothing, and one of the mummies still bore a small label telling us he had been a priest. He had been buried with his ceremonial implements, and X-rays revealed that he was also wearing a rather fetching silver toe ring. Don took one of the mummies to the local hospital for CT-scanning, and we were also allowed to take samples for analysis back in the lab at York.
Then, with government permission, we travelled around this stunningly beautiful country to visit many of the major mummy sites and excavate some of the burial caves and ledges where the mummies had originally been placed. These were invariably hundreds of feet up in the most inaccessible cliffs, so we were fortunate to have with us two professional climbers trained in archaeological rescue. Their expertise proved invaluable, as did that of our minder, the grandson of Yemen’s last Imam, whose influence kept us much safer than we would otherwise have been. Relations between the government and some of the more traditional communities have long been volatile, and there were a few sticky moments involving tribal feuding, a jail-break and a couple of murders in one remote site. Unsurprisingly, I suppose, when all the males over the age of about twelve carry the traditional curved knife and often a Kalashnikov as well, whilst in public the vast majority of women are veiled from head to toe and are seen but not heard.
As a Western woman with bright red hair I stood out even more than I usually do, but the Yemenis are tremendous people and made us all feel very welcome. When I was invited into their homes I experienced the same warmth and genuine friendliness I found amongst Egyptians, and during our stay we found evidence for trade links with ancient Egypt. The Yemenis mummified their dead as early as 1200 BC using preservative materials which seem also to have been in great demand by the Egyptians across the Red Sea, where they were additionally used for funerary and temple rituals and to make perfumes.
Although a return visit to Sanaa has been temporarily postponed by the world political situation, the murder of several foreign scientists and a belief that extremists still hide out in some of Yemen’s remoter regions, our research on their mummies has continued in the rather more secure environment of York University. And as Don, Stephen and I began to compare their mummification practices with those of Egypt and beyond, we were also given the chance to examine an Egyptian mummy stored closer to home in Hull Museum.
An anonymous, undated individual of unknown sex and origin whom no one seemed to know very much about, it had obviously suffered when much of Hull was flattened by bombs during the Second World War. The museum itself had been destroyed, along with any details about the mummy’s origins, but the mummy itself had survived, although its relocation in a riverside warehouse had done little for its long-term well-being. When new museum premises finally became available, the mummy was in such poor condition that its place was taken by one on loan from the British Museum whilst it remained in storage. Something had to be done, and a specialist conservator was brought in.
As regards its provenance and possible identity, the museum staff gave me some very useful leads. Old newspaper cuttings revealed that the mummy had originally come to Hull from Whitby, and in 1903 the small museum there had written to the British Museum for advice on a new acquisition which they described as ‘the mummy of an Egyptian princess’. But when the museum was forced to sell off parts of its collection in 1935 the mummy was sent down the coast to Hull, where it took centre stage amongst Egyptian antiquities obtained from Petrie’s excavations, which had been partly funded by Hull Museum. In the wake of the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb, Hull’s curator capitalised on the phenomenal interest in all things Egyptian by asking the Hull branch of the British Medical Association to X-ray his newly acquired mummy. Photographs of this unusual event were published in the local press.
Although the X-rays themselves had been lost in the wartime bombing, I was able to obtain a copy of the photograph that had appeared in the newspapers. When the image was blown up, the shape of the pelvis suggested that the body could indeed be female, something which could be verified using the 3-d images provided by CT scanning. Although the mummy’s fragile condition meant that we couldn’t transport it to a hospital in the usual manner, Lister Healthcare very generously provided us with a portable CT scanner and three of their highly skilled staff, which meant we could examine the mummy with the minimum disturbance.
After slowly manoeuvring our mummy into position inside the scanner, we gathered round the screen to view the images as they appeared. There were the wide pelvis, gracile bone structure and delicate brow ridge that were all regarded as feminine traits. But what was that? Our supposed ‘princess’ had a penis! So much for his ‘female characteristics’, and a real lesson in treating ‘typical’ features with caution!
But who was he? Although all inscriptions from the coffin had been lost during the mummy’s years of storage in damp conditions, the coffin’s shape and style suggested a date between about 500 and 300 BC. The old press photograph showed traces of its original inscription around the leg area, and this was enlarged and enhanced and sent to coffin expert Dr John Taylor at the British Museum. Although the text was damaged in the area that stated the mummy’s name, it turned out that he was the son of a priest and priestess of the fertility god Min who worked in the god’s cult temple at Akhmim, just north of Luxor. And their unnamed son – our mummy – had followed in his parents’ footsteps, working as a priest of Min and responsible for dressing and adorning the god’s cult statue. And all of a sudden this anonymous, linen-wrapped mummy became a living, breathing individual, a graceful man who had once wafted round Akhmim Temple carrying his coloured scarves and perfume bottles, now at last able to reclaim his remains from the clutches of the fictitious Egyptian princess.
As more of ancient Egypt began to appear in my home county, I was also invited to Harrogate to look at the local museum’s collection of Egyptian antiquities. The curators, with the help of enthusiastic volunteers, had begun to catalogue the hundreds of objects they had in storage. My role was to confirm the collection’s authenticity and, as their consultant Egyptologist, give advice on their forthcoming exhibition, Land of the Pharaohs. Very little was known about the objects’ background, most having originally been bought at auction by the Kent family for display in their home, a sturdy old farmhouse with stone-flagged floors, tallow candles and a large stone fireplace – typical of a traditional farm interior in every way except for the Egyptian mummy case and the thousands of ancient artefacts displayed in the upstairs rooms.
When the last direct member of the Kent family left these antiquities to Harrogate corporation, almost everything except the mummy case was placed into storage, along with artefacts donated by a local goldsmith, James Ogden. In the early 1920s Ogden had begun to correspond with two leading archaeologists – Leonard Woolley, just back from his excavations at Amarna, and Howard Carter, who had recently discovered Tutankhamen’s tomb. Looking for specialists, Carter invited Ogden to work on samples of gold from the tomb, and while he examined part of Tutankhamen’s treasures in his Yorkshire workshop Carter kept him informed of what was happening in the Valley of the Kings, including plans to examine the pharaoh’s mummy. Ogden, a keen collector of ancient jewellery, gave much of his collection to Harrogate in 1930.
Despite such an illustrious pedigree, the combined Kent and Ogden collections had remained in storage due to lack of space. As they had started to come to light during the staff’s cataloguing process, crate after crate had begun to reveal the most wonderful artefacts which hadn’t seen the light of day for years. There was even a mask of the jackal god Anubis, most likely last worn by a priest during the highly secretive mummification rituals and unique. The collection also contained objects naming some of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs – Tuthmosis III, Hatshepsut and the great Amenhotep III. One of Amenhotep’s large scarab seals named his Great Royal Wife Tiy and revealed that the king had shot 102 wild lions ‘with his own arrows’, and there was a superb limestone relief fragment of the king celebrating one of his jubilees. Yet nothing prepared me for the biggest discoveries of all, a whole range of carved reliefs and statue fragments inscribed with the names of Amarna royalty.
Lifting up a piece of mottled red and black granite, I tilted it around under the light until the name ‘Neferneferuaten Nefertiti’ almost jumped out and grabbed me! Never in my wildest dreams had I ever imagined I’d find Nefertiti in the depths of a store room in North Yorkshire, but there she was. A second fragment in glowing white alabaster again carried her name, whilst a larger piece of limestone preserved her name alongside Akhenaten’s, whose sandal-clad foot appeared in the corner. Another small chunk of alabaster depicted two gracefully rendered hands offering small pots of incense to the Aten’s rays, whilst a section of red quartzite revealed the well-manicured fingernails of a royal right hand supporting the base of a wide offering tray, perhaps from one of the many statues of the royal couple which had once filled the central open-air court of the Great Aten Temple. There was even an image of one of their young daughters vigorously shaking her sistrum rattle for the Aten, who was named on piece after piece of limestone, alabaster, sandstone, quartzite and granite – all fragments of the vast temples and palaces which had once dominated the royal city of Amarna.
Needing to find out more we consulted the Kents’ handwritten catalogue, and there on page 54, in neat, careful handwriting, we found them: complete entries for no fewer than twelve items ‘from Tell-el-Amarna, Egypt, XVIII dynasty, Flinders Petrie Excavations’. This was clear proof that these completely unknown pieces relating to ancient Egypt’s most popular yet controversial period had indeed come from the first excavations at the site, carried out by Petrie and Carter themselves. There was even an old black-and-white photograph of all the Kent Amarna pieces proudly displayed together.
I immediately emailed the news to my friend and colleague Earl Ertman in Ohio. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on Amarna art, and I’d first met him in 1995 at the International Congress of Egyptologists, where I was presenting a paper on the wig fragment found in Tutankhamen’s tomb and he a paper entitled ‘Tut-Tut: Newly Identified Images of the Boy-king’. Since he was a fellow Egyptologist unafraid to admit to having a sense of humour we got on like a house on fire and kept in touch, working on joint projects including the use of jewellery during the Amarna Period.
As a seasoned archaeologist who had excavated in the Valley of the Kings for many years, Earl had even worked in the controversial tomb KV.55, burial site of Queen Tiy and, some believed, Akhenaten. Here he had discovered something missed by earlier archaeologists: a small piece of limestone on which had been drawn a plan of the tomb. As we discussed the Amarna material, I told Earl more and more about my attempts to gain access to the side chamber in the Valley of the Kings and see the three mummies for myself. He gave me great encouragement, pointing out that I was properly qualified, had excavation experience in Egypt and Yemen, was part of York University’s Mummy Team, and was consultant Egyptologist to several museums. I was therefore ‘respectable’ – at least in terms of ticking all the right official boxes.
Soon afterwards, in 2002, I was invited to work in the Valley of the Kings itself, in the highest and apparently oldest royal tomb in the valley, the mysterious KV.39. Its spectacular location close to the Peak of Meretseger, the great serpent goddess known as She Who Loves Silence, had first been discovered in 1899 by Victor Loret, the year after he discovered the tomb of Amenhotep II with the three mummies in the side chamber. Although it had been cleared by two local men looking for loot, Arthur Weigall was intrigued by KV.39 and, despite finding it ‘entirely ruinous’ on his visit in 1908, believed its position corresponded perfectly with that given for the tomb of Amenhotep I in the reports of the ancient tomb inspectors. But Carter, who had fallen out with Weigall, believed he had found Amenhotep I’s tomb at the other end of the region. Matters were not helped by the fact that these early royal tombs were never decorated, and so, with no name conveniently provided on the walls, the question could only be resolved by sifting through the immense piles of debris.
This was something I was very much looking forward to contributing to. I had first been approached to join the team working at the tomb some ten years earlier, to examine increasing numbers of hair fragments which were being found during the clearance of the tomb’s passages and chambers. But I was then still trying to complete my PhD thesis, and there was no way I could find the money for a season’s self-funded work in Egypt. So this was my second chance to look at the material, as one of a specialist team that included a surveyor, a geologist, a botanist and my old friend Stephen Buckley, who had been out there on several previous seasons in his capacity as an archaeological chemist.
Just as Stephen had told me, I found there was far more than hair to examine. Among the artefacts were mummified remains, linen wrappings and coffin fragments, not to mention fragments of gold and a pharaoh’s large gold ring he’d analysed and conserved. It was also his opinion that there was more still inside the tomb, whose main burial chamber had a natural geological fault in the form of a perfect cross – so X really did mark the spot, whatever it said in Indiana Jones films. And, perhaps unsurprisingly since the tomb was so close to the home of the great serpent goddess high on the mountain peak above us, there were snakes living there. One of the workmen had been bitten during a previous season and needed immediate hospital treatment, and although I like snakes I took care nevertheless.
Climbing up to the tomb high in the Theban hills, I looked back the way I’d come to enjoy the splendid views down into the Valley of the Kings. Then, peering over the edge of the cliff not far from the tomb entrance, I could see right down to Deir el-Bahari thousands of feet below, and beyond to just about everything on the West Bank and the Nile itself. Midway between the land of the living and the Land of the Dead – what a fabulous place to be buried!
Donning a hard hat in case of rock falls, I made my way cautiously down the steep bank of loose chippings leading to the tomb entrance where the team’s expert geologist was waiting to take me on a guided tour of the huge, labyrinthine structure. Soon we were slithering down the long, long passageways cut deep into the rock to reach the tomb’s multiple burial chambers. Much of the tomb was still choked with tons of stone chippings and all kinds of intriguing debris, repeatedly churned up by a combination of tomb robbery, early excavations and catastrophic flash floods, when the tomb fills with water and everything is thrown around as in a giant cement mixer.
After looking at the new finds being made by the team, including yet more mummy wrappings, a piece of gold coffin and a coin of Ptolemy III, minted 1200 years after the tomb was built and evidence, perhaps, of early tourists visiting the area, I turned my attention to the things which had been found during previous seasons. All were stored in the official store rooms next door to Carter’s house on the road which leads to the Valley of the Kings, in an area known as Elwat el-Diban or ‘Mound of Flies’. Despite its lively insect population, the store room had a fairly level table and benches and we did have the use of a microscope. Alongside our chemist and botanist I began to go through the finds, beginning with the hair. There were seven separate fragments of different hair types recovered from the various parts of the tomb, and despite the chaotic state of the tomb’s interior it was my job to try to work out exactly what each fragment had originally been.
The first clump of dark brown hair had been found with numerous coffin fragments and linen wrappings at the tomb entrance, presumably where the tomb’s original occupants had been dragged outside into the light to be stripped of any valuables. The rest of the samples came from inside the tomb. Both auburn and dark blond hair were recovered from the south passage leading down to the lower burial chamber, and since the auburn piece was still attached to a fragment of skull this was obviously the individual’s own hair. Yet the difference in colour and texture between the two samples suggested that they were not from the same person. All these remaining samples seemed to have been styled in some way, mainly plaited in a fashion which had been especially popular between about 1700 and 1500 BC.
Part of one wig had been found at the entrance to the Lower Burial Chamber, whilst intricately worked portions of at least two further wigs came from the main Burial Chamber itself. Although people had often been buried with a single wig or, very occasionally, with two, the only burials I knew to have contained more were the caches of royal mummies found over the hill at Deir el-Bahari in 1881, and the mass burial of clergy close by that had been discovered in 1891. So from a few scruffy-looking bits of hair we could certainly say we were looking at a high-status, possibly royal tomb, which may also have been employed as the final resting place for one or more royal women from the beginning of the New Kingdom, about 1600–1500 BC.
Previous long-term work at the tomb had shown that here were the remains of at least nine bodies, and although the majority were skeletal as a result of the regular water damage from flash floods, the few which had remained out of the water had miraculously retained their skin, hair and the substances used to embalm them. And because these materials changed over time, they gave some idea of when the bodies had been placed in the tomb.
The mummified remains had all been found in the main burial chamber, and included a well-preserved child’s hand as well as a female skull which still retained the skin on the lower half of the face and neck area together with parts of the original linen wrappings. The eye sockets were filled with thick resinous packing material similar to that which Smith had described on royal mummies including that of Amenhotep I’s father. The upper teeth also appeared to project well beyond the lower incisors on both this skull and a second found nearby, a feature known as maxillary prognathism or, more familiarly, as buck teeth. Smith had said that ‘the prominence of the upper teeth . . . may possibly be a family trait’ which he had found in some of the leading members of the early 18th dynasty royal house, including Ahmose-Nefertari, Amenhotep I’s formidable mother and co-regent, as well as his father, King Ahmose.
The same high status was reflected in the quality of the embalming materials studied by Stephen. In cases where the bodies themselves had long ago been ripped to pieces the thick resin coating used to mummify them had kept the original shape of parts of the arms, legs, vertebrae and entrails. The resins also gave the remains the appearance of having been burnt, even when this wasn’t the case.
Stephen and I also wanted to look at the textiles and mummy wrappings – just as Carter had noted in his clearance of Tutankhamen’s tomb, textiles made up the largest category of finds from KV.39. It was no exaggeration to say that the tomb had been almost knee-deep in mummy wrappings. There were also more than a hundred fragments of wooden coffins, and it was obvious that the tomb had been reused for many more than the original mummies buried there. Talking it through with my colleague at Leiden’s Textile Research Centre, who had plenty of experience with this material, it was clear that there were pieces of wrapping here similar to those used to wrap 21st dynasty priests of the eleventh century BC – the men who had also been responsible for rewrapping many of the royal mummies down in the Valley. So what was going on?
Everything we’d seen so far supported the idea that KV.39 had originally been built as a royal tomb for Amenhotep I and some of his female relatives, but had then been used again several centuries later as one of the temporary storage places for some of the royal mummies brought up from the Valley after their original tombs had been robbed. After restoration, the re-wrapped royals were reburied elsewhere, either in the Valley in the tomb of Amenhotep II, KV.35, or over the hill at Deir el-Bahari in the caches of both royal and priestly mummies. With our tomb located midway between these two places, it would have been the perfect place for the priests and officials to bring the salvaged bodies and fit them out for reburial – when, presumably, more precise clues may have been left behind. It was time to open up more boxes.
On the basis of similar examples found at various sites including Tutankhamen’s tomb and in houses at Amarna, we suggested that the curious lengths of twisted linen found in the main burial chamber were ancient lamp wicks – vital in the tomb’s construction, during the arrangement of the burial equipment and, indeed, during its robbery. Evidence for some of the high-status burial equipment originally placed in the main burial chamber included well-carved wooden fittings familiar from the storage chests discovered in Tutankhamen’s tomb. There was also a large wooden lion’s foot, once part of a chair, a bed or even a lion-headed funerary bier of the kind known from other burials in the valley such as those of Yuya and Tuya, their daughter Tiy in KV.55, or Tut again. Although the gold had long ago been scraped off just about everything, large pieces of gold leaf had been discovered, along with a piece of gilded coffin decorated with coloured stripes, and other fragments still with one or two superbly carved hieroglyphs painted yellow on a black background. There were also inlaid eyes of ivory and obsidian, and a whole range of coloured beads and semi-precious stones including blue-and green-glazed faience, a large agate drop, carnelian and lapis lazuli, one or two carved with a series of parallel ridges exactly like those used on royal coffins and jewellery.
All these precious items had been discovered around the tomb entrance where the bodies would have been dragged up into the daylight to be stripped of their wealth, something which may also have been the case with the most spectacular find of all, a large gold ring inscribed with the name ‘Menkheperre’. Whilst this is the throne name of Tuthmosis III, and may well have come from his mummy during its rewrapping in KV.39 prior to reburial just over the hill in the nearby royal cache at Deir el-Bahari, Menkheperre was also the name of a 21st dynasty high priest whose family were also buried in the Deir el-Bahari tomb together with the spectacular collection of priestly wigs in the Cairo Museum.
The only inscriptions were found on limestone fragments listing priestly titles, and a series of small sandstone dockets with faint traces of royal cartouches. Three appeared to name Amenhotep I, another was inscribed ‘Tuthmosis I’ and two more ‘Amenhotep II’. Were these labels made by the priests to keep track of whose tomb the mummies had come from or were going to? Who knows.
Yet the most exciting piece of inscribed material turned up when I re-examined a rather unattractive-looking lump of mud found in 1993 at the tomb entrance. Turning it slowly around in the light, I slowly began to make out the original seal impression and wondered if this had once been part of the sealed-up entrance to the tomb. I began to see the head of an ibex or gazelle-like creature standing on its hind legs, its front legs resting in branches of foliage. The image of the gazelle, closely associated with the goddess Hathor, was used on the crowns and diadems of royal women who didn’t enjoy the exalted status of Great Royal Wife. Indeed, Amenhotep I’s own mother, Queen Ahmose-Nefertari, had worn a gazelle crown when still a young woman.
Yet when I came to check out this very specific rearing gazelle and tree motif, I could only find a few examples, all of them dating to the reign of Amenhotep III and the Amarna Period. Two were seal impressions discovered amongst the ruins of Malkata Palace whilst two more had been found during the excavations of Petrie and Pendlebury at Amarna. Having found both seal impressions and the actual mould used to mass produce the image as a cylinder seal, Petrie believed the gazelle motif did not appear to be Egyptian and was ‘probably due to foreign influence’, with later Egyptologists suggesting a Syrian origin.
The more I looked at it, the more I wondered. Was it even remotely possible that KV.39 had perhaps been the place where some of the royal mummies of the Amarna Period had been rewrapped and restored prior to their reburial down in the Valley of the Kings?