News from the Valley of the Kings

My thanks to Vincent Brown for spotting this story in Spiegel.  If anybody has missed the background to the allegations of theft against Howard Carter, then it's worth reading.

There is no proof, but the circumstantial evidence that Howard Carter removed items from Tutankhamun's Valley of the Kings tomb is substantial.  Articles from King Tut's tomb are in a number of museums around the world, not just in the Egyptian Museum.  The largest and best known collection of other objects is in the Met and their existence has been in the public domain since the 70s when advertised by Thomas Hoving.  The Spiegel article also identifies an object in the Louvre which is one I hadn't heard about.

It is true that Carter had permisson to remove some items, but the number in circulation seems inconsistent with this. However the complex legal status of the tomb in the 1920s muddies the water enough that an amateur like me is unable to understand whether the allegations against Carter are well-founded; however, nor do I feel able to exonnerate him.   What is perhaps most surprising is that Egypt is not pressing for the return of these articles.  That suggests that Carter did obtain them legally.  (The conspiracy theorists have an alternative explanation which suggests that Carter removed papyrii relating to the Exodus and that there is therefore a reluctance to re-open the question of the clearance of KV62.  The story was covered by Andrew Collins in his book, Tutankhamun - The Exodus Conspiracy.)

If Carter did illegally obtain items from KV62, and enter the tomb in advance of the offical opening, then we no longer know the state of the tomb at discovery.  Archaeologically that may be more important than the removal of a small number of items.  Read the article and make your own mind up.

I may have been unduly pessimsitic about the chances of recovering mitochondrial DNA.  I understand that mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) was successfully extracted from the elder of the two foetuses in the Vallley of the King's KV62 and reported a TV documentary Secrets of the Pharaohs: Tut's Family Curse which aired in February 2001.  There was a companion book to the series of three documentaries ("Secrets of the Pharoahs") that I have just ordered from Amazon for £0.01.  If anybody wants a copy, there was still one "Very Good" condition used copy on the UK site at that price (although many more rated "Good") and I'd guess it could be picked up in the USA for $0.01. I'll try to post up a book review once I've got it.

While hunting for that, I have found this article at Egyptology Online which I'd recommend.  There are several interesting sections but I want to quote one:

Back in 1993-94 Professor Scott Woodward, a microbiologist from Brigham Young University (USA) was asked to demonstrate the usefulness of DNA, testing on six mummies from the Old Kingdom period, with the aim of providing clues to their sexing and possible genealogies.  Woodward was able to determine that two of the mummies had been [accidentally?] placed inside the wrong coffins.

Following his success, Woodward was invited to the Cairo Museum sometime during the mid 90’s to examine and harvest tissue samples from 27 royal mummies from the New Kingdom Period, during their removal to a new display room.From the 27 mummies, only 7 yielded successful DNA sequences.  However, from his results he was able to determine that Ahmose I had married his full sister Seknet-re and that Amenhotep I's mtDNA was different from Ahmose I, making it highly likely that Ahmose – Nefertari was in actual fact Amenhotep I's mother.

As two what the foetuses may reveal, it's interesting that in the August 2008 Zahi Hawass was reported in National Geographic as saying ""I personally feel they are not the sons of Tutankhamun".  (There'll be a link to that article in the next post.)   mtDNA was extracted from the older ofthe two foetuses which is female and therefore wouldn't have a Y chromosome to allow straightforward comparison to tutankhamun's own DNA.  Even by the 90's, the condition of the foetuses had deteriorated badly - they were even hard to locate and were eventually tracked down to Cairo Medical School.  Although techniques have improved in the near 2 decades since, whether they have deteriorated further since, rendered DNA extract impossible, has to be a concern.  (Apparently a partial mtDNA sample was extracted from the second foetus.  I have seen no report indicating whether this was consistent with a sibling match.)

There are reports that Scott Woodward also succesfully extracted DNA from Yuya, whom some identify as the Biblical Josepth.  There are suspicions that it was these links which caused the project to be abandoned fairly abruptly.   It will be interesting to see what is published in the next few months by Dr Hawass but having investigated some of this may be corroboration of earlier findings rather then groundbreaking news. It will be interesting to see whether the work of Professor Woodward is credited.