Word: hawass
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Carsten Pusch, a medical geneticist with a special interest in ancient diseases, never imagined he'd be called in to help autopsy one of history's oldest and most internationally celebrated corpses. But that's just what happened when Zahi Hawass, the legendary director of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, rang him up at his offices in the University of Tübingen in Germany...
Would Pusch be interested, asked Hawass, in doing a DNA analysis on several mummies from the 18th Dynasty - including a king who died before he reached the age of 20 and who went by the name of Tutankhamen? (See pictures of disputed antiquities...
...immune system that was badly compromised by a particularly virulent strain of malaria combined with a degenerative bone disease that had already left him weak. "This is confirmed by images that show him sitting while shooting an arrow, which normally would have been done standing up," says Hawass. "He cannot stand." Indeed, more than 100 canes were found in the tomb when Tut's mummy was found in 1922, some of them showing signs of wear...
Another mummy, known as KV35YL, was identified as both the sister of Akhenaten and the mother of Tutankhamen, meaning that Tut was the product of a brother-sister coupling. "She cannot be Nefertiti," says Hawass, citing another popular speculation that Nefertiti, Akhenaten's chief consort, was Tut's mother, "but she can be any of the five daughters of Amenhotep [Akhenaten's father...
...seeing a legend turn real. It's hard to divine what could be buried by Cleopatra's side, let alone how the storied queen's body itself may be preserved. Could there be treasures? The coiled skin of a snake? "A diary," offers Tyldesley, "would be fantastic." But Hawass and his team must hurry. The dig abuts the summer residence of President Hosni Mubarak, which may force the dozens-strong team of archaeologists to abandon work from May to November. The security concerns of Egypt's current ruler, after all, still outweigh the mystique of its past...