The Shadow King takes a look at the history of King Tut’s mummy from a modern perspective. What really happened to King Tutankhamun and why do we care so much? She examines the history of discovery, how the mummy has been analyzed over the years, and recent scientific evidence. She explores the many theories that have arisen over time with a keen eye for separating fact from speculation.

Marchant’s writing style is clever and clear. She explains the science in ways that make complex subjects easy to assimilate. She sounds like a good friend telling the reader all these exciting historic and scientific facts she has uncovered in her research.

She stars with the history, including the discovery of the tomb, Tutankhamun’s extended family, and the mummification process. Next, the author takes a look at how technology has changed and produced new ideas about the way King Tut died. She reports the methods that have been utilized to examine the remains include x-ray, CAT scans, and DNA analysis. Early archeologists thought nothing of man-handling the bones and cutting the corpse into pieces. These days, scientists would be appalled by the contaminations that were introduced by this crude approach.

Some of my personal favorite sections involved the evolution of archeology, from early treasure hunting to modern meticulous care and scientific analysis, the infighting among scientists regarding the applicability of DNA evidence into two camps. One camp believes DNA can be extracted and provides a clear path to tracing the family history of these mummies. The other doubts that thousands of years old DNA can provide evidence of sufficient quality to perform this analysis (and questions the “official” conclusions). It is fascinating the number of causes of death that have been considered, including such diverse ideas as chariot accident, infection, war, malaria, poisoning, tuberculosis, and hippo attack.

The book covers the museum exhibits of the contents of the tomb, the Discovery channel’s involvement in funding and filming further research, and the potential influence exerted to “find something definitive.” She incorporates recent history such as the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 and its impact on Egyptology. She interviews prominent Egyptologists and concludes with her feelings about visiting the tomb.

I appreciated Marchant’s style. She remains neutral and open-minded about what she may find. I enjoyed her fact-based approach, even realizing that we may never know what actually happened. It reads as a real-life mystery, with plenty of intrigue. This is an excellent read for anyone interested in the history of Egypt. I found it fascinating.

“It’s the story of the people who have studied Tutankhamun and the other royal mummies—who these scientists were, where they came from, and most importantly, what they were trying to find. But more than that, it’s about all of us—why we are so fascinated with Tut, why we love these stories so much, and why we care so intimately about the fate of a boy who lived millennia ago. In other words, what studying this mummy really illuminates is not Tutankhamun himself but us today: what makes us human and the different things we’re searching for. The more we probe this sorry pile of bones, the more we shine a light deep into our own souls.”

4.5 ( )

There are doubtless more books about the otherwise obscure 18th dynasty pharaoh Nebkheperure Tutankhamun than all other Egyptian rulers combined; it’s therefore surprising when somebody breaks new ground. But it’s so with Jo Marchant’s The Shadow King. Marchant’s take is not yet another history of the Amarna period, but a chronicle of what happened to Tut’s remains after Howard Carter looked through the little opening in the door of KV62 in 1922 and saw wonderful things.

It took until 1925 before Tut’s mummy was finally exposed to archaeological view. The process of exposure was pretty brutal. After the mummy was wrapped, embalmers poured various liquids over it – usually called “resins” in the Egyptological literature, although AFAIK there’s never been detailed analysis. Certainly the ancient Egyptians were fond of oil, perfumes, ointments and such; the language has lots of words and phrases where only the ending “-ointment” or “-oil” can be translated. At any rate, whatever Tut had been drenched in three millennia had changed it into a black, hard substance that effectively glued him into his mask and inner coffins. Carter’s chemist, Alfred Lucas, tried a variety of solvents but couldn’t get anywhere with the stuff, only noting that it softened slightly under heat. Tutankhamun was therefore carried (with the lower halves of the third and second coffins and the gold mask) out of the tomb and into the full Egyptian sun. The whole assemblage was then suspended face down for several hours, in the hopes that Tut would heat up enough to drop out.

Modern Egyptologists cringe – if they don’t do something worse, like retreat to museum corner and curl into the fetal position while sobbing softly – over this treatment, but it was the best Carter and his advisers could think of, and certainly better than many earlier investigators had treated mummies, royal or otherwise. In a perfect archaeological world, Carter would have just given up and allowed the mummy to remain intact until future methods could extract it. Unfortunately he was under time pressure for a variety of reasons. So when Tut didn’t ooze out of his cocoon, Carter cut him out.

At least he didn’t use a chain saw. His anatomist, Douglas Derry, took five days on the job. Tut’s bandages had “carbonized” and crumbled at a touch; therefore Derry first covered him with yet another layer, this time of wax, so the bandages could be peeled back reasonably intact. There were numerous amulets and trinkets wrapped with him, including the famous iron and gold daggers. However, the body itself could only come out in pieces; Derry used a hammer and chisel to remove the arms, legs, and torso, and cut the head out of the mask with hot knives. After the human remains were removed the mask and coffins were eventually separated with blowtorches.

Marchant makes an interesting observation here; lots of New Kingdom royal mummies are known, from “caches” around the Valley of the Kings. The story is that as Egypt weakened during the 3rd Intermediate Period, faithful priests fearful of tomb robberies gathered all the royal mummies they could find and reburied them in secret locations. (They also faithfully extracted all the gold from coffins and tomb furniture). The two royal caches, one in DB320 (originally the tomb of High Priest of Amun Pinudjem II) and one in KV35 (originally Amenhotep II), were discovered in the late 19th century and the mummies were removed to the Cairo Museum for safekeeping. The interesting thing is none of these mummies had the same degree of “resin” coating as Tutankhamun; all are in much better condition. Was the extensive resin use an embalmer’s fad only during the late Amarna period? Or did the relatively shorter time between the original and subsequent reburials (“only” a few hundred years) keep the coatings from hardening into the almost impenetrable confronting Carter and Derry, so that the 3rd Intermediate Period priests had a much easier job extracting and rewrapping them?

At any rate, Tutankhamun was reassembled (Carter and Derry seem to have used some sort of contemporary resin to stick some of the bones back together but didn’t document this, to the confusion of future Egyptologists), placed on a shallow, sand-filled tray (the sand again helping to keep disarticulated bones in position), and returned him to his outer coffin and sarcophagus, where he remained without further Egyptological disturbance until 1968.

In that year, radiographer Ronald Harrison from the University of Liverpool received permission to X-ray Tutankhamun, with the stipulations that the mummy could not be removed from its tomb and that there could be no interruption with the normal flow of tourists. Harrison assumed that portable X-ray equipment was available in Egypt so didn’t bring his own; that turned out to be true, but just barely – the only equipment he could locate dated from the 1930s and had to have extensive repairs before it was operable. Finally, the X-ray team showed up in the Valley of the Kings, removed the glass plate over the sarcophagus, lifted off the outer coffin lid, and discovered that Tut wasn’t in the condition they expected. Carter had reported a beaded skullcap and a beaded “bib” on the mummy which he hadn’t removed since they were too delicate; instead they were photographed, covered with wax to keep the beads in place, and left on the body. When Harrison lifted the tray out of the coffin, both the skullcap and bib were missing; what’s more, various bits of anatomy were scattered around the tray – the right hand, left thumb, a clavicle and a femur were all out of position stacked alongside the body. Both ears were missing, the eyes had been punched in, and the penis and scrotum were found underneath the tray in the outer coffin. (This last fact wasn’t publicized by Harrison, but was recorded in his field notes). Harrison buried the recovered “jewels” in the sand tray. Thus, for years it was thought they were missing.

The press had a field day with this information; in particular the Egyptian media suggested that Howard Carter or some member of his expedition had stolen the missing jewelry. In fact, Carter should be faulted for not documenting the state the mummy was in when he returned it to the coffin, but the consensus among Egyptologists was that the damage was done by looters sometime between 1925 and 1968, most likely during WWII. The theory proposed is that somebody bribed KV guards to let them into the tomb – not a terribly difficult thing to do in Egypt even today – stole the remaining jewelry, and “blinded” and “deafened” the mummy to keep it from coming after them. When Egyptian inspectors discovered the violation, they didn’t report it – at the minimum they would have lost their jobs - but collected the scattered remains as best they could and returned them to the coffin, if not to their original locations. Unless the thieves realized that the items were unsalable and just discarded them, this would mean somebody somewhere has Tutankhamun’s ears.

Harrison’s X-rays showed a lot of interesting things, but interpretation was difficult. It seemed that after Tutankhamun’s brains were removed the embalmers pour resin into the skull twice – once with the body on its back, and once with it head downward. Further, there was what looked like a tiny bit of bone inside the skull, interpreted as the remnant of a depressed fracture. Then there was a part of the skull that looked unusually thin, possibly the result of a congenital aneurysm. Finally, Tutankhamun heart and chest are missing – the ribs have been sawed off. This lead to widespread theories about Tutankhamun’s death – he had been hit in the head with a blunt instrument; he had fallen from a chariot; he had been stepped on by a hippo. (An alternative suggestion was that the rib cage damage was done by the supposed WWII looters; however each rib had been sawed separately while it was assumed that looters would cut straight across).

The next time Tut was removed from his tomb came in 2005, this time under the auspices of National Geographic. An all-Egyptian crew under the direction of Zahi Hawass used a donated CAT machine and scanned Tut, tray and all. The results still haven’t be fully published; Egyptologists are allowed to examine the data but cannot make copies (and the examination can only take place on the original CAT scan computer, which is still in a trailer parked behind the Egyptian museum – apparently no copies have been made anywhere). The CAT scan eliminated some of the murder theories; the mysterious bit of bone inside the skull was not from a blow to the head but from embalmers entering the skull by cutting a hole above the atlas vertebrae; apparently they weren’t taking any chances on brain removal and used both the traditional scoop through the nose and the less common but still well-attested route through the foramen magnum. Similarly, the supposed thin area of the skull turned out to be artifact of positioning in the 1968 X-rays. The chest really was missing, though; Hawass blamed Carter, suggesting that he had stolen the “bib”. The CAT scan also disclosed that Tut had a fractured left femur; it wasn’t clear if this was pre- or post-mortem and it’s been proposed as yet another cause of death.

There was yet another move for Tut in 2007. It was decided that lying in his original coffin (where he was last time I saw him in 2006), while correct enough for his ka, wasn’t really all that good for his physical remains. A climate controlled nitrogen filled case was installed in a corner of the tomb and that’s where he is now, covered with a sheet that just exposed his head and feet. He got bothered one more time, though; in 2010 another “all Egyptian” project involved drilling into his bones to collect samples for DNA analysis. This was reported in the JAMA and the results were surprising, to say the least. The DNA results identified a number of previously mysterious mummies – KV35EL is Queen Tiye; KV35YL is Tutankamun’s mother by KV55 and thus just possibly Nefertiti, KV55 is Akhenaten; KV21A is Ankhesenamun. Except maybe not. Marchant is a science journalist specializing in genetics and found a number of experts who thought the DNA results were spurious; particular criticisms were that usable DNA just couldn’t survive that long under Egyptian tomb conditions; that under the sampling and analysis conditions it would be impossible to avoid contamination by modern human DNA; and all the identifications happened to agree with Zahi Hawass’ hunches on who the mummies were. OTOH a number of other experts found the results more convincing. With the mess Egypt is in now it will probably be a while, if ever, before things get sorted out.

Marchant provides a couple of less serious chapters; one’s on the supposed “curse” of the tomb and associated woo-woo. She notes that “curse” claimants, like most woo-woo practitioners, have been fairly casual about facts. As one example, she cites a book by Phillip Vandenberg, “internationally known archaeology writer” who made the disquieting observation that shortly after performing Tut’s autopsy in Cairo, Alfred Lucas died of heart failure and Douglas Derry died of circulatory collapse. Except the autopsy was performed in the Valley of the Kings, not in Cairo; Lucas died in 1945, and Derry in 1961. With respect to Marchant, she doesn’t draw the obvious woo-woo conclusion; the curse takes effect in “archaeological time”. Since Tut’s been lying in his tomb for 3000 years and change, he’s in no hurry to eliminate the desecrators; what’s 20 to 40 years if you’ve been waiting for millennia? This give me a disquieting thought; I’ve been KV62 myself, twice, and without a doubt in 20-40 years the curse will catch up with me too.

Another chapter discusses woo-woo about Tut’s “actual” identity; I thought I was fairly well up on all things Tut but these theories surprised me. One, promulgated by Ahmed Osman, who concluded (after identifying Akhenaten as Moses) that Tutankhamen was none other than Jesus Christ. The evidence Osman supplies seems rather unconvincing. You would think that would be as woo-woo as you can get, but not so; Marchant tracked down some YouTube videos claiming that Barack and Michelle Obama are actually space alien-created clones of Akhenaten and Queen Tiye.

At any rate, this is a well written and well documented book, showing off good science journalism. Marchant’s style is informative yet entertaining, with enough personal anecdotes to provide immediacy but not so many that it detracts from the explication. The photographs are well chosen, the footnotes are apropos to the text, and the book is well indexed. Marchant does assume her reader will know a little bit about Egyptian history, but considering the probably audience that’s OK. Recommended. ( )

An engaging read for the first half of the book up until she gets bogged down in long technical details about DNA sequencing and the modern politics of Egypt in the second half. This book about Tut's mummy was fascinating when the focus remained on Tut and what to learn from him; when it became more about "how to get info from a mummy" is when it lost me as a reader. Thus, this dropped from 4 stars to 2.75 for me. ( )

Probably the best book I've read on Tutankhamun (and I've read some godawful crap in the last decade or so), and one of the best on Egyptology, if for no other reason that Marchant is not pushing some theory about who killed Tutanhkumun or who he's related to, but provides an honest, dispassionate survey of the history of Tutankamun's remains from the moment Howard Carter cracked his sarcophagus up until the present day. looking at all the theories, from the eminently scientific to the just plain loony, that his mummy has provoked. Along the way, she gives an appraisal of the history of Egyptology itself, from its roots in the 19th century as European adventurers looted every tomb they can find through the Tutanhkamun-fuelled boom of the 20s, through the rise of Egyptian nationalism under Nasser, which saw Egyptology and the protection of Egyptian antiquities become a rallying point for Egyptians to take control of their own history. The central figure in this and the man who dominates the last third of Marchant's narrative is the polarizing figure of Zahi Hawass, by turns either an Indian Jones-hatted bully desperate to jump in front of any camera pointed in the direction of an Egyptian artefact, or a man dedicated to restoring to Egyptians their own past and raising millions of dollars to forward the progress of Egyptology run by Egyptians, until he tied himself too closely to the despised Mubarak regime and crashed and burned during the revolution in 2011. The background to all this is the mummy of Tutanhkamun himself, small of stature, dessicated, crumbling and so meagre of remains that Marchant wonders in the last pages of the book how something so insignificant has come to mean so many things to so many different people. This is an Egyptological tour de force for the layman, written with an easy balance between the scientific and the readable. I can't recommend it highly enough, not only for those with an Egyptian fetish, but anyone who fancies a cracking good read. ( )

Technically this a book of historiography, looking not so much at the life of Tut in his lifetime but the 90 year history of Tut since his discovery in 1925. The opening chapters retelling his discovery are riveting and great fun. Then a somewhat interesting series of chapters on the theories how how Tut died, the changing technologies used to examine mummies (X-Ray, CT, DNA sequencing) and through it all a wild cast of characters and, well, stories. Without reliable historical records Tut has become a blank slate to build stories around, with many profiting including National Geographic, Discovery, Egyptian government, Egyptologists and so on. Whatever you know about Tut is probably either wrong or not well accepted, he remains a great enigma. This is a lighthearted and often humorous book but one of serious scholarship, recommended for anyone interested in ancient history, modern popular culture, and a good story. ( )