Summary of the Lesson

The 2005 scan. On the evening of 5 January 2005, as an angry wind stirred up dust and dark clouds veiled the stars, King Tut's mummy was lifted from its rock-cut tomb, some 26 feet underground in the Valley of the Kings, and carried into a CT scanner parked outside in a trailer. The world's most famous mummy was to undergo the first such examination, aimed at probing the medical mysteries of the young ruler who died more than 3,300 years ago.

Why the mummy is in bad condition. Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, remarked that the mummy was in poor shape 'because of what Carter did in the 1920s.' Howard Carter had discovered the tomb in 1922 after years of fruitless searching. Its contents — the richest royal collection ever found — had been only hastily ransacked in antiquity and were surprisingly complete: golden artefacts, but also everyday things Tut would want in the afterlife, such as board games, a bronze razor, linen undergarments, and cases of food and wine.

Carter's rough handling. After carefully recording the treasures, Carter opened the three nested coffins. He found a shroud garlanded with willow and olive leaves, wild celery, lotus petals and cornflowers — evidence of a burial in March or April. But the ritual resins had hardened and cemented the mummy to the solid-gold coffin. The sun could not loosen them (Carter heated the mummy to 149 degrees Fahrenheit with no effect), so his men chiselled the body free, removing the head and severing nearly every major joint to strip away the gold, then reassembled the remains on sand in a padded box.

Changing archaeology and new technology. Archaeology has since shifted from a hunt for treasure to a study of the details of life and the mysteries of death, using tools like medical imaging. In 1968 an anatomy professor X-rayed the mummy and found that Tut's breast-bone and front ribs were missing. In 2005 a CT scan — hundreds of cross-sectional X-rays layered 'like slices of bread' into a virtual 3-D body — promised far more, and might answer how Tut died and how old he was.

Tut's lineage. Tut belonged to the eighteenth dynasty's golden age. Amenhotep III (Tut's father or grandfather) ruled for nearly forty years. His son Amenhotep IV promoted worship of the sun disk, the Aten, renamed himself Akhenaten ('servant of the Aten'), moved the religious capital from Thebes to Akhetaten (now Amarna), and attacked the god Amun. After his death and the brief, shadowy reign of Smenkhkare, a very young Tutankhaten took the throne, changed his name to Tutankhamun ('living image of Amun'), restored the old ways, reigned about nine years, and then died unexpectedly. …