A CENTURY ago this month, Howard Carter opened the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun. Within, he found ornate jewellery, beautiful furniture, fine clothing – and that famous gold face mask. Everything was in keeping with a royal burial from the most prosperous period in ancient Egyptian history. Or almost everything, because hidden within the mummy’s bindings, Carter discovered a dagger that seemed out of place.
The problem wasn’t with its golden sheath. It was with its blade of gleaming iron – a metal the Egyptians didn’t learn to smelt until centuries after Tutankhamun’s death. Carter had a simple explanation. He assumed the dagger was imported, perhaps from the ancient Hittite Empire in Anatolia, where . Not until 2016 was it confirmed that the iron originated from much further afield, with the discovery it contains the . For the Egyptians who wrapped the dagger close to their king’s body, it was a gift from the gods.
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What makes this finding significant is the way it was made – through an X-ray analysis performed without damaging the dagger. It is indicative of a new approach to Egyptology that emphasises preservation over destruction. Whether it is studying mummies without unwrapping them or generating virtual landscapes as they existed millennia ago, we can now make discoveries Carter could have barely dreamed about while leaving artefacts intact for future generations.
Scanning a mummy is nothing new: X-rays were discovered in 1895, and a few years later, in 1903, Carter carried the 3300-year-old body of Pharaoh Thutmose IV out of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and that had access to the new technology. But recent decades have seen significant changes in the way archaeologists use X-rays, partly because it is now much easier for them to obtain access to high-resolution CT scanners, which fire X-rays from multiple angles to construct a three-dimensional image of an object’s internal structure.
In 2021, , a former minister of antiquities in Egypt, and at Cairo University published the “digital unwrapping” of the mummy of Amenhotep I, a pharaoh who ruled two centuries earlier than Tutankhamun, around 1500 BC. The king’s tomb was looted in ancient times, but a few generations later, priests salvaged the body and reburied it for safekeeping. It was discovered in the late 19th century, beautifully preserved inside a coffin that also included flower garlands.
Hawass and Saleem’s CT scans showed that the mummy had been carefully repaired. They also revealed 30 pieces of gold, quartz and clay jewellery, with forms including a scarab beetle, snail shell and serpent head, as well as a belt formed of 34 gold beads.
When Carter and his team analysed Tutankhamun’s mummy in 1925, they pulled it to pieces in order to discover the objects – including the iron dagger – that had been placed inside. Now, says Hawass, “we can show you the face, we can show you the golden amulets that we found inside, without touching the mummy”.
Of course, a virtual scan might fail to generate the same sense of awe that can come from directly viewing an ancient object. But many researchers are now going one step further than imaging, using digital scanning data to reconstruct physical objects in exquisite detail with 3D printers. This is sometimes done to engage the public: when Tutankhamun’s mummy was deemed too fragile to travel for an , for example, the curators .
Generating replicas of inaccessible body parts can aid scientific study. In 2018, researchers . And last year, Egyptologists in Manchester, UK, generated 3D printouts of scanned bones to .
Campbell Price, curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum, has used the technique to recreate more items otherwise hidden from view, such as . He has even reproduced an embalming plate – used to cover the incision made during the embalming process – revealing a surface decorated with the Eye of Horus, an ancient Egyptian symbol of protection. “You would never have seen or been able to handle these things,” says Price, “but you can with 3D printing.”
New technology can also transform our perspectives of life in ancient Egypt, says Enrico Ferraris, an Egyptologist and curator at the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy. Experts have traditionally focused on texts, he says. “Normally, they put more emphasis on what is written on an object and not what it is made of.” This approach has highlighted Egyptian religious beliefs: “eternity, mummies, death and so on”, says Ferraris. He argues that science can now offer a more down-to-earth, human insight into this ancient civilisation, such as its manufacturing techniques or how its different artisans worked.
Ferraris has been enlisting scientists around the world to use techniques including mass spectrometry and X-ray fluorescence to re-investigate hundreds of items recovered in 1906 from a 3400-year-old tomb of a high-ranking foreman, Kha, and his wife Merit, located near Luxor in southern Egypt. The team’s analysis of a painted box from the tomb revealed that the artist used two different black inks, one to fill in larger areas and one for final touches, such as dots and strokes. Such investigations are “the key to a new chapter in Egyptology”, says Ferraris.
Virtual landscapes
What’s more, digital approaches are enabling Egyptologists to virtually reconstruct not just tombs and artefacts, but entire landscapes. In a project called , Elaine Sullivan at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has combined data from sources including excavations, satellite imagery and topographic maps to produce a 3D model through time of Saqqara, a sprawling, ancient cemetery just south of Cairo. It is the perfect approach to capture the changing nature of the site over Egypt’s entire history, says Sullivan.
The cemetery developed from a scattering of mud-brick tombs at the edge of the desert in the 1st dynasty, around 3000 BC, to a huge ritual landscape full of pyramids, temples and tombs that persisted until Roman times, roughly 2000 years ago. “I don’t think anyone really has a brain that is sophisticated enough to put those hundreds of different buildings back together in your mind,” she says. The 3D reconstruction enables “virtual time travel”, she adds, so viewers can experience what the site would have looked like at different moments in history.
The model also enables Sullivan to test new ideas, such as sightlines. She argues that a previously under-appreciated factor in where people placed their tombs was having an uninterrupted view of monuments that were important to them, such as their pharaoh’s pyramid or the Temple of Ptah – an Egyptian deity – at nearby Memphis. She predicts such virtual landscapes will become more realistic as the technology improves. Researchers are already working to reconstruct sounds, smells and lighting effects, while Sullivan and others are delivering their 3D reconstructions via virtual or augmented reality headsets.
A century ago, many of the treasures Carter and his peers uncovered were put inside museum cases. Today’s Egyptologists dream of creating virtual worlds where we can walk ancient streets, smell the incense inside grand temples and shiver inside cold tombs.
However, some specialists worry that the science can be pushed too far. Particularly problematic is the imaging and sampling of ancient human remains to look for clues to illnesses or a cause of death. Techniques including X-ray imaging, CT scans and DNA tests have driven TV documentaries and best-selling books, but many scientists have expressed scepticism over the results (see “How did Tutankhamun die?”).
Egyptologists including Price are sceptical too. “People think it’s this magic wand,” he says. “You wave science and suddenly, bam, you know everything about the mummies.” In practice, however, fragile remains that are thousands of years old and have been through the violent process of mummification are much harder to interpret than living people. Price recalls arguments between doctors and archaeologists when the mummies held by the Manchester Museum were CT scanned at a local children’s hospital. “People couldn’t decide what they were seeing,” he says.
There is also the ethical question of how or even if to present the results of scans to the public, when it seems unlikely that the ancient individuals would have been comfortable sharing such information; the hieroglyphics and imagery suggest they wanted to be remembered as godlike, not as imperfect, ill humans. For these reasons, the museum’s upcoming exhibition, which explores ancient Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife, “will not show any CT scans”, he says. “We are actively editing out information.”
Another researcher who emphasises both the potential and limits of new technology is independent Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves, author of The Complete Tutankhamun. He studied virtual reconstructions of the painted walls of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber, created using laser scans and digital photographs by art conservation company Factum Arte. “It’s fantastic,” says Reeves. “It doesn’t matter how high on the wall it is, you can see every brushstroke. You get a better view from sitting down at the desk than you do looking at it face to face.”
Reeves identified previously unseen cracks in the tomb walls, which suggested to him the presence of hidden doorways. He also concluded that several painted scenes of Tutankhamun’s funeral have been altered; he believes they originally showed Tutankhamun in the act of burying an earlier Egyptian royal, Queen Nefertiti. In 2015, Reeves proposed a dramatic hypothesis: that beyond Tutankhamun’s relatively small four-room tomb lies at least one more chamber, the resting place of Nefertiti herself. In other words, Carter’s astonishing discovery a century ago might not be the final word: there may be another, even richer, royal burial to be found.
But that doesn’t mean Reeves thinks this heavy emphasis on scientific tools is problem-free. Since 2015, several teams have probed the walls of Tutankhamun’s tomb with ground-penetrating radar, which uses radar pulses to image buried objects. Detecting chambers cut deep into rock is extremely difficult, however. Researchers were unable to agree on how the data should be interpreted, and without clear confirmation, most scholars have dismissed the Nefertiti idea.
Reeves, however, argues that science shouldn’t simply trump Egyptology. “We automatically assume it’s the last word, but you cannot just ignore the archaeological evidence.” In September, he reported a : some hieroglyphics had been altered in antiquity. Although they now depict Tutankhamun’s burial by his successor, Ay, they originally identified the boy king himself burying someone else in this very tomb.
Reeves thinks his hypothesis could be tested by drilling a small hole in one of the tomb’s walls and using a tiny camera to investigate the opening, although whether this would gain approval from the authorities remains an open question.
Depite the controversies, and with the technology improving all the time, some researchers view the data gathered using non-invasive scientific tools as a valuable provision in the event of archaeological finds being damaged. Ultimately, “materiality is fragile”, argues Ferraris. This means physical remains are always at risk from disasters such as flooding, fire or looting.
“We have to do everything to preserve these objects physically, but probably this is not the final goal,” says Ferraris. Digital information, once captured, is unbreakable, a “sort of insurance” that can be studied and appreciated in the future no matter what happens to the objects themselves, he says. “The final goal is the knowledge.” Carter, who spent 10 years meticulously recording the items he found in Tutankhamun’s tomb, would perhaps agree.
HOW DID TUTANKHAMUN DIE?
Few historical figures have been investigated as exhaustively – and brutally – as Tutankhamun. The mummy was unwrapped in November 1925 by anatomist Douglas Derry. He removed the charred, crumbling bandages, cut up the body to remove its jewellery and scraped the pieces from their golden coffin with hot knives. Derry determined that the pharaoh died young, aged around 18. He had a large head, a scab on his left cheek and no obvious cause of death.
That is still about all we can say for sure. In 1968, anatomist Ronald Harrison at the University of Liverpool, UK, X-rayed the mummy for a BBC documentary. He saw a thinning at the base of the skull that “might” have resulted from a blow to the back of the head, a finding that spawned multiple murder hypotheses, but eventually turned out to be an artefact of the imaging process.
In 2005, National Geographic sponsored a team, led by archaeologist and then Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt Zahi Hawass, to CT scan Egypt’s royal mummies, including Tutankhamun. From the resulting 3D images, the team concluded that the king’s left femur was broken and suggested that he fell in a chariot accident. Next, Hawass and his team (now sponsored by rival media company Discovery) attempted to isolate ancient DNA from the bones. In 2010, they reported that Tutankhamun had malaria and that his parents were siblings. They reanalysed the CT scans, identifying that he had a club foot, and presented a new version of the boy king as sickly, inbred and infirm.
These studies inspired more TV documentaries, but were criticised by other scientists, who argued that the DNA results could easily have been due to contamination and that the CT scans couldn’t distinguish between injuries or illnesses from before death and damage inflicted since. Not that this has deterred the speculation: more recent ideas include that Tutankhamun had epilepsy or was felled by a hippo.
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