Marie-Therese Schadlich’s morning had tested her patience. Breakfast was interrupted by her husband, an oil and gas trader, telephoning from Moscow to let her know he had to stay there for another two days as negotiations with Gasprom were going badly. ‘Rubbish,’ she fumed. ‘He just wants more time with his whore.’ She knew Udo was having an affair with his Market Analyst, Grethe Poppe. They had been travelling as a negotiating team for the past few years and their business trips always took longer than planned. Now, Udo’s flowers, chocolates and presents were gifts of guilty contrition rather than tokens of love. No matter, she liked gifts, whatever the motivation.
Next, her eldest son, Max rang from Hamburg to discuss his latest gig. Max was a member of a heavy metal band who played a form of music his mother could never like, no matter how much she loved him. He needed some money, the usual reason for his infrequent calls, so she told him to ring his father. The penalty for his adultery should be just a little more expensive this time, she thought with some satisfaction. When she finally arrived at her office, she was tense and building up a head of steam. The report on her table with the latest results from the Egyptian project, did nothing to make her day any easier. She would have to ring Dr. Hussein in Cairo and give him some rather startling news.
Professor Schadlich was the Director of the Instituit de Medicin Scientifique, a ground-breaking government research facility in Versailles. Though she had married a German, Marie-Therese was French to the marrow. Petite, smartly dressed under her white lab coat and, with her auburn hair well groomed, she was far from the stereotype of a female researcher. Even the gold rimmed glasses she was now compelled to wear added to the glamour, which successfully hid a brilliant mind, driving ambition and the qualities that separate managers from company directors.
The IMS was a world leader in DNA research and, under her dynamic directorship, the Institute was assured of its technical prominence in this exciting and rapidly expanding field. She had led the team representing Europe in the Human Genome Project and the Institute’s collaboration with its Americans counterparts, engineered the first complete human DNA profile. The results broadened the whole field of genetic engineering, biomedical sciences and opened a new chapter, if not an entire book, in the fight against disease.
When the Research Director at the Council of Egyptian Antiquities, Dr. Omar Hussein, first broached the subject of a DNA analysis on the New Kingdom royal mummies over dinner in London some three years ago, Marie-Therese’s interest was pricked. She had done some research before meeting the Egyptian and was impressed with his credentials. The discussion was stimulating and Marie-Therese was surprised to find Omar a very attractive man, one she physically reacted to over the dinner table. Memories of his flashing eyes, dark wavy hair and dusky skin momentarily brought a flush to her face.
Dr. Hussein was the best qualified medical examiner in Egypt. After qualifying top of his class at the University of Cairo’s School of Medicine, he took a post graduate course in forensic medicine at Caltech in America. Before joining the Council, he had directed the Cairo Police Forensic Unit. However, as police science in Egypt was in its infancy and cutting up corpses not well regarded by the county’s Muslim population, he kept an eye open for a career changing opportunity, which he expected would only arise overseas.
Omar revered his country’s history and took what opportunities he found to visit ancient sites and the national museums. Although he viewed the embalmed bodies on display with a more clinical eye than most tourists, he did not find himself intrigued or in any way drawn to the rather pathetic remains. He told his friends ‘Give me a fresh corpse and I am at home. These withered husks of the past are just where they belong, in glass cases’. His disinterest was to be overturned.
Egypt’s new President, Mohammed Kamal, acknowledging that tourism was the country’s financial lifeblood, determined that insufficient emphasis was being placed on promoting and preserving the country’s heritage. Fully aware that the greatest portion of the tourist dollar came from the wallets of foreigners who wanted to see Ancient Egypt artefacts and not it’s Coptic or Muslim past, he directed that a larger percentage of the increased funding he approved flowed towards the Land of the Pharaohs rather than to the patriarchs and pashas of more recent times.
The pre-eminent body administering Egypt’s patrimony, the Council of Egyptian Antiquities, was quick to seize upon the largesse about to flow from the Ministry of Finance. The majority of the Council’s Governors were men of learning and they looked hard at what Council functions could be enhanced. The more scholarly cynically disregarded the opinions of the political appointees to the board, who thought their principal role was to be photographed near monuments with crowds of grinning tourists.
The Director of Operations, Dr. Abdullah Dief, was asked to prepare a comprehensive report on what should be done to bring the science relevant to antiquities into the modern age. He and his colleagues merely pulled out old files containing their dreams, brushed the dust off them, updated their content and made an impassioned presentation to the board. Dief, who was an old and gifted hand at political machinations, was able to get almost every project he had dreamed of funded and when the final budgets received the approval of the President’s office, he wept tears of joy and spent an hour in the Blue Mosque thanking Allah for his kindness.
Dief long harboured dreams of establishing a high tech laboratory dedicated to the investigation of ancient human remains. Shortly after accepting his directorship, he met his department heads and reviewed their facilities. His visit to the existing laboratory was a journey back in time. Much of the equipment was dated, there wasn’t a computer in sight and no vestige of modern technology was to be found in its threadbare cupboards. The Research Director, a gentle and elderly scholar, was profuse in his apologies about the lack of facilities but an hour’s discussion with him quickly identified the problem. Dief’s predecessor had no interest in forensic science and almost completely neglected the subject. Ironically, his attitude was almost identical to those held by the man who would soon become the new Research Director - mummies were dried husks best housed in glass cases or sent back to the tombs from whence they came.
Abdullah was a man in a hurry. Quickly determining how much funding was required to create a fully equipped laboratory, he early realised he needed an energetic Egyptian to be its new director. He knew of Dr. Hussein through his social connections and, after a few phone calls, Abdullah decided Hussein was the man he wanted. In short order, he rang the Dean of the School of Medicine at the University, Cairo’s Police Commissioner and had lunch with them and the Board of Governors Chairman, where he told them of his desire to extract Dr. Hussein from the Police Forensic Unit and assign him the laboratory’s directorship. Having pulled the political strings tight, he then arranged another lunch with the Police Commissioner, the Dean, himself and their unwitting victim, Omar Hussein.
Dr. Hussein’s fate was sealed. The Commissioner freed him from his position, whilst praising him for his past achievements and the Dean extolled the new position’s significance to the nation. Dief put the cream on the cake when he mentioned the President approved of his appointment. Dr. Hussein, buried under an avalanche of political pressure, had the good grace to accept his new responsibilities with aplomb. That night, his girlfriend, who was overjoyed with the news of her partner’s newly acquired fame and salary increase, was nonplussed when he said to her ‘Now I know what done like a turkey dinner means’.
Even though the Commissioner had assured him he would be called upon to conduct autopsies in difficult cases, Hussein unhappily believed his future activities would revolve around unlimited paperwork and a slew of desiccated bodies. When he reported to the Council offices three months later, he was more than surprised by the degree of complexity involved in building up a forensic and research facility from almost nothing. Apart from identifying what equipment was required, he had to interview potential technicians, create a resources library and attend Council meetings to determine the priorities of the revitalised facility.
In addition to the clerical jungle inherent in any Egyptian bureaucracy, Dr. Hussein had to immerse himself in Egypt’s immense history and in particular its preserved human and animal remains. He had not realised there were thousands of mummies in storage, in museums and tombs, not only in Egypt but all over the world. Mummification was not unique to the Ancient Egyptians as he came to learn when he read through the large body of literature pertinent to preserved bodies.
At the end of of his first year, Dr. Hussein had developed a new respect for his responsibilities as the laboratory was involved in more than just working with dehydrated corpses. It employed specialists in the study and analysis of foodstuffs, materials as diverse as resins, paints, cosmetics, timber, textiles, leather, papyrus and other organic matter, biology and bacteriology. His department also providing field liaison officers and technicians, who worked in collaboration with archaeological missions. However, none of these activities ignited Dr. Hussein’s interest as much as the study of preserved remains because this field drew heavily on his training as a doctor and opened new pathways into his speciality, forensic medicine.
His research disclosed that Egyptians, during the Archaic Period, some 4,500 years ago, observed that bodies buried in the desert desiccated naturally because heat retained in sand inhibited the decomposition of flesh. With the maturing of religious concepts, the nature of the relationship between life on earth and the immortality of the soul developed to the point that it became a fundamental tenet that the human body must be preserved. In the early dynastic period, informal experiments were undertaken to determine how best to limit decomposition. The initial efforts saw corpses tightly wrapped in linen bandages, which did little to impede decay.
Fishermen and butchers knew, that if organs were extracted, a body could better resist decay. This knowledge led to the removal of internal organs before the body was bound up and this practice led to greater success but perfect preservation remained illusive as body fluids still led to corruption. To maintain the human image, early linen wrapped bodies had representations of human details such as fingers, facial features, genitals and breasts painted onto the fabric to provide a vestige of normal appearance.
By virtue of fortuitous, but unrecorded, trials, those involved in preparing bodies for burial used various types of salts in their efforts to preserve human flesh, drawing on the techniques used to conserve meat and fish. The first attempts were not always successful and it was not unusual to find ancient bodies with the skeleton intact but skin, muscles and other soft tissue so excessively treated, they disintegrated when touched.
Further investigation revealed that a naturally occurring salt mixture found in abundance at the Wadi Natrun, an area north-west of modern Cairo, was an excellent desiccant. If a body was packed in natron, an amalgam of sodium chloride, hydrated sodium carbonate, sodium sulphate and sodium bicarbonate, the compound extracted the fluids from the corpse, leaving it dry, yet supple, with all the extremities reasonably flexible. The Ancient Egyptians called this compound netjry or ‘divine salt’.
Once the use of natron became widespread, the process of chemical preservation became a common practice, although techniques differed slightly throughout the historic period. The methods involved were transmitted from father to son for generations as the black art wasn’t a subject worthy of recording in any permanent fashion. The Egyptians required their bodies be preserved but didn’t want to know any of the grisly details. Dr. Hussein could sympathise with that. Modern manuals on body preservation would never feature on any Book of the Month Club ‘must read’ list and, in common with most societies, those who handle the dead are viewed with some wariness.
The mummification process was complex. Immediately after death, the body was delivered to the embalmers as decomposition begins rapidly in hot climates. The work was undertaken near or in the religious temples as embalmers practiced their dismal trade at the behest of the priesthood. The corpse was placed on a stone table, stripped of garments and washed. An incision was made, usually in the left side of the abdomen from the top of the pelvic arch to the base of the lowest rib and the viscera extracted. The liver, kidneys, lungs and stomach were put aside for purging and natron preservation. Later, each organ was wrapped in fine linen and placed in stone vessels, now called canopic vases. The other organs were discarded with the exception of the heart, as the Egyptians believed it to be the seat of intellect, reason and emotion. As it embodied an individual’s personality, it was deemed essential to retain the heart within the body.
By the Eighteenth Dynasty, the brain was usually removed by breaking through the ethmoid bones behind the nose and the cranial vault penetrated. The brain and the meninges were withdrawn with gruesome metal tools designed to facilitate the extraction. A solution of heated resins was then poured into the empty skull case. The abdominal cavity was flushed with palm wine, the eviscerated body placed on an angled stone table, the corpse posed, its thorax and abdomen packed with natron and the body covered with divine salt. The arms could be crossed over the chest, laid alongside the trunk or the hands placed over the genital area. The Ramesside Pharaohs had their arms crossed over their chests with the hands placed flat on their shoulders, replicating the way they held the crook and flail in life. After a period of between fifty to seventy days, the body had given up its moisture and the soft tissues were fully desiccated.
Next, steps were taken to restore the body to a semblance of its original form. The abdomen was padded out to re-establish its shape and the incision hidden under wax or fine gold foil. Openings such as the anus, vagina, ears and nose were plugged with beeswax or resin soaked linen. Throughout the New Kingdom era and early into the next dynasties, it was not uncommon for the corpse to have its face painted in either yellow for women or red for men. False eyes of stone, small onions or glass might be added. Hair extensions, made of human hair or string, were commonly employed to add volume. Occasionally, the cheeks were packed out with linen pads though several mummies of the period have their cheeks split open due to the over generous use of stuffing.
Fingers, toes and the male genitals might be individually wrapped before the body was bound in linen strips carefully wound around it to perpetuate the human form. Amulets were placed within the bandaging and religious texts sometimes written on the linen. The mummy was then encoffined. Depending on custom or wealth, the number of coffins varied and, if more than one, these were fitted tightly together to form a nest of caskets. It was not unusual for a non-royal mummy to have placed on it, a painted face mask of stiffened linen. Royal face masks were of inlaid gold or silver with the finest example, the acclaimed golden mask of Pharaoh Tutankhamen, demonstrating exceptional craftsmanship.
Fragrant oils and viscous resins were poured over the mummy or painted onto the wrappings before the coffin was sealed. The resins, extracted from cypress or juniper trees, had antiseptic properties and imparted a fragrance to the body. It was also used to mask the smell resulting from an inadequate embalming that had not fully arrested the process of decomposition. Tutankhamen’s remains evidence an overly generous use of resin; so freely had it been used, it carbonised linen wrappings, glued the body into its coffin and the fabled mask and caused the disintegration of the corpse. Howard Carter worked for days in a grisly and largely unsuccessful attempt to separate the body from its housing.
Within the tomb the body, ensconced in its coffins, was placed in a stone sarcophagus if the occupant was of high rank or wealthy enough to afford this last funerary embellishment. If the deceased could not afford a stone casket, then one of wood was used though the style and shape of sarcophagi varied widely throughout the entire Pharaonic period.
So successful was the process, Hussein had at his disposal hundreds of mummies, a not surprising number as body preservation was practiced for almost three thousand years. There was not a major museum in the world that did not possess at least one mummy on exhibition, with others held in storage. The best known royal remains are those of the New Kingdom rulers between the years 1550 to 1070 BC, as this was the high water mark of the embalmer’s skills.
It is only with luck, some ancient good management and, perhaps, an attack of conscience that any of the royal mummies of the New Kingdom survive. The last pharaohs of the Ramesside line ruled from the then fabulous Delta city of Pi-Ramess, as Thebes was long forsaken as a city under strict obedience to royal edict. Infrequent royal visits were restricted to religious festivals as the power and extent of pharaonic rule lessened and even though all but the last Ramesside king were buried in the Valley, the Twentieth Dynasty was on its last legs. The temple priests gradually usurped effective power in Upper Egypt and, during the reign of Ramesses XI, they became involved in a territorial dispute with the viceroy of Nubia in the south. In an attempt to resolve the dispute, the pharaoh despatched a general, who found himself in need of funds to mount his campaign. He joined, as an apparent co-conspirator with Amenhotep, High Priest of Amun, in an act of sacrilege unprecedented in Egyptian history.
Amenhotep ordered the looting of the tombs of the kings, queens and nobles in all the Theban necropolises. Every tomb was opened, stripped of anything of value and pillaged, regardless of the occupant’s rank. Whilst there had been casual grave robbery in the past, the wholesale desecration, documented in fragments of papyrus and determined from archaeological evidence, was systematic with the high priest’s minions assiduously exploring the cemeteries for tombs.
The subsequent history of the plunder and the disposition of mummies is unclear. Under the next high priests, Herihor and Pinudjem I, looting continued, although the pillage was then described as a ‘restoration’ of the burial sites. Pinudjem, who nominated himself co-regent with the king, may have commanded the establishment of the first cache of royal remains in the tomb of Horemheb, and there are indications that other royal mummies were collected and transferred to other caches.
In the reign of Pharaoh Siamun, the new Twenty-First dynasty ruler, bodies in a fourth cache established in the tomb of Seti I were moved to Queen Inhapi’s tomb. Some forty years further on, for reasons not as yet known but possibly driven by conscience stricken piety, the mummies were collected from there and other minor caches and moved to the tomb of Pinudjem II (DB320), where they lay undisturbed until discovered in 1881. The second cache was established in KV35. There may be a third collection as the mummies of several New Kingdom kings have not been positively identified or recovered. The fate of the remains of queens, royal children and nobles is unknown.
What confronted Gaston Maspero, Director of the Antiquities Service, after the discovery of the cache in DB320, was an assemblage of 44 mummies, many pharaonic, conjoined with members of Pinudjem II’s family and lesser nobility. Victor Loret uncovered the second cache of seventeen mummies in Amenhotep II’s tomb in 1898.
The bodies were pieces in an enormously complex jigsaw puzzle. The science of archaeology in the late 1880’s was in its infancy and Egyptologists like Maspero and Loret were principally interested in finding artefacts rather than in information gathering. Both men were dazzled by the discoveries as the bodies of almost every notable New Kingdom Pharaoh lay beneath their hands in an awesome roll call of the dead. Most of the mummies had been damaged by robbers tearing apart the linen bindings and bodies in search of amulets and heart scarabs. Heads, arms, feet and appendages had been broken off corpses, funerary masks were torn away and coffins stripped of their gold foil decorations. Some mummies were hastily re-wrapped after their initial desecration and several bodies were placed in coffins originally belonging to others, before being secreted in the caches.
Loret wrote, described his find in these words. ‘The coffins and the mummies were a uniform grey colour. I leaned over the nearest coffin and blew on it so as to read the name. The grey tint was a layer of dust which flew away and allowed me to read the nomen and praenomen of Ramesses 1V. I blew away the dust of a second coffin and a cartouche revealed itself, illegible in an instant, painted in matte black on a shiny black ground. I went over to the others coffins – everywhere cartouches!’ Emile Brugsch, who cleared DB320 for Maspero, wrote in terms of equal amazement. ‘Collecting my senses I made the best examination I could of them by my torch and saw at once that they contained mummies of royal personages of both sexes and yet that was not all. Plunging ahead I came to the end chamber and there standing against the walls or lying on the floor I found even a greater number of mummy cases of stupendous size and weight. Their gold coverings and polished surfaces so plainly reflected my own excited visage that it seemed as though I was looking into the faces of my own ancestors.’
To modern archaeologists, the identification and interpretation of the remains in these caches, would demand years of specialised work. Under Maspero’s fervid hand, the fate of the mummies degenerated into theatre of the most dramatic and macabre kind. Scissors and knives hacked through the wrappings, identifying inscriptions drawn in ink on the linen wrappings were disregarded, cut through and lost forever. There exists a photograph of Tuthmosis III’s mummy after it had been unwrapped by Maspero. John Romer, in his famous book on the Valley of the Kings, used the words ‘The bandaging … lay around the king like the results of a gruesome explosion’.
Maspero made mummy unwrappings a public spectacle, with many stripped of their windings in the presence of the ruler of Egypt, Khedive Tewfik, foreign visitors and local officials. He deprived Ramesses II of his funerary cloth in less than a quarter of an hour and then remarked, looking down on the body, ‘His conduct at Qadesh suggests a good trooper, but a dull general, and his mummy does nothing to cause a revision of the judgement’.
Ramesses corpse was hastily re-wrapped, moved to Cairo and stripped a second time. There, the king’s desiccated, withered arm moved as a result of the exposure to the more humid climate in a manner that frightened the daylights out of his examiners. Later, his remains were found to have become a haven for lice and given a mercury bath to rid it of the pests. In 1976, the mummy was air freighted to Paris for conservation and, on examination, it was again found infested with parasites and the body had to be irradiated before restoration could take place. His soul must have writhed in anguish.
The mummies found at KV35 and DB320 were ultimately housed in the Cairo Museum where they remain today. Just after a cache arrived at the Museum, its new French Director, Eugene Lefebure wrote a moving epitaph. ‘A mummy, that of Amenophis 1, whose yellow mask with enamelled eyes moulded to this adolescent face seemed, weary of his sleep to be awakened with a smile, in his bed of flowers. This graceful tableau sums up the basic impression of the work at Deir el Bahari. (the site of DB320) Apart from some precious historical documents of the 21st Dynasty and some prayers on linen that were chanced to be found with the 18th Dynasty mummies, there is perhaps no material to sustain long research, nor will there be great conclusions. The interest in the discovery lies elsewhere. It is in this piece of theatre the dramatic and sudden bringing to light of the assembly of kings which brings close to us that which we thought remote. It is the Egyptian visions of death that we see in this poetic entourage. Framed again for our eyes are the most fleeting relics of life, from the fly swish of Tuthmosis found in his coffin, to the smile of Amenophis’
Hussein thought long on Lefebure’s remarks. No, Lefebure, you were wrong. There are great conclusions to be made and we have enough material to initiate many years of research. My task is to remove the confusion created through the slipshod unwrapping of mummies by Maspero and those who followed. I have a new laboratory, the world of science at my finger tips and I accept the responsibility for the final, definitive identification of the kings and queens whose bodies were dumped so ignominiously in jumbled caches and later so ill-treated.
Selected mummies in the Cairo Museum and elsewhere had been further examined since their original discoveries. In 1996, an extensive radiographic study of the royal mummies found in KV35 and DB320 was initiated and, at various times, mummies had been sent out for CAT scans. The advent of MRI tomography made a more intimate examination of remains possible. Laboratory staff investigating the causes of the death of the kings and queens used MRI scans, combined with organic tissues analysis, to identify a range of ailments. Skin diseases, circulatory problems, baldness, arthritis, scoliosis, obesity, arteriosclerosis, smallpox, hernias and poor dentition were but a few of the afflictions suffered by the pharaohs and nobility of the New Kingdom. Hussein reflected that in some areas, nothing much changes in human history.
However, the greatest mystery remained unresolved - the correct identification of the mummies and their genealogical relationships. Solving this puzzle would be a long and exacting process using a new weapon in his scientific arsenal, DNA analysis, and whilst Egypt did not have the necessary equipment or expertise, he knew who did and this took him to the dinner table of Professor Schadlich in London and the genesis of his quest.