King Tut Tomb

Our view: Bringing King Tut to the world

In 1974, I reported to the American Embassy in Cairo as cultural attaché.

A seven-year hiatus in Egyptian-American diplomatic relations, prompted by our support for Israel during the 1967 June War, had drawn to a close. President Nixon and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat opted for rapprochement after the 1973 October War.

Whipsawed by the Watergate scandal at home, Nixon turned to international travel to free himself from the hammering he was enduring in the U.S. He came to Egypt in June 1974 and was accorded a hero’s welcome.

Sadat was impressed by Nixon the statesman. He also was taken by the presidential helicopter on which they traveled. Nixon noted Sadat’s admiration in both areas and in a magnanimous gesture tossed him the keys to the chopper.

Sadat responded by honoring Nixon’s request that treasures from the tomb of King Tutankhamun tour America. As cultural attaché, the King Tut exhibit follow-up fell to me.

Dr. Gamal Mokhtar, Egypt’s director general of antiquities, was having none of it. I learned this at our first unsettling encounter.

The flinty Mokhtar informed me that he, not Sadat, managed antiquities. He said that the King Tut treasures would never leave Cairo on his watch. Our meeting was perfunctory. I said little and reported the impasse to the ambassador.

A week went by and Mokhtar invited me to stop by again, probably prompted by a phone call from the president’s office. A flood of mail was pouring in from American museums anxious to host King Tut. The surly attitude of the week before had vanished.

We scanned a grab-bag of museum letters. Mokhtar insisted the exhibit, if it were to travel, should visit no more than five cities. He worried about who would manage and pay for the complex preparations. He said he had no budget for such extravagance. I suggested we meet again in two weeks, noting that in the interim I would seek guidance from the State Department.

I soon had a phone call from Carter Brown, president of the Smithsonian Institution, suggesting we bring New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art into the conversation. Brown said we needed a world-class player. He nominated Tom Hoving, age 35, the flamboyant, entrepreneurial, urbane and controversial director of the museum. Hoving was a marketing expert and a connoisseur. He phoned me the next day to schedule a visit to Cairo.

Microbial growth in King Tut's tomb suggests burial was a rush job ...

Cambridge, Mass, June 8, 2011 - In the tomb of King Tutankhamen, the elaborately painted walls are covered with dark brown spots that mar the face of the goddess Hathor, the silvery-coated baboons—in fact, almost every surface.

Despite almost a century of scientific investigation, the precise identity of these spots remains a mystery, but Harvard microbiologist Ralph Mitchell thinks they have a tale to tell.

Nobody knows why Tutankhamen, the famed "boy king" of the 18th Egyptian dynasty, died in his late teens. Various investigations have attributed his early demise to a head injury, an infected broken leg, malaria, sickle-cell anemia, or perhaps a combination of several misfortunes.

Whatever the cause of King Tut's death, Mitchell thinks those brown spots reveal something: that the young pharaoh was buried in an unusual hurry, before the walls of the tomb were even dry.

Like many ancient sites, Tutankhamen's tomb suffers from peeling paint and cracking walls. In the oppressive heat and humidity, throngs of tourists stream in and out of the cave, admiring it but also potentially threatening it.

Concerned about the tomb's preservation, the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities approached the Getty Conservation Institute for help. The Getty, in turn, had questions for Mitchell.

What are the brown spots? Are visiting tourists making them worse? Most importantly, do they present a health hazard?

In his investigation, Mitchell, the Gordon McKay Research Professor of Applied Biology at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), combines classical microbiology with cutting-edge genomic techniques. His research team has been culturing living specimens swabbed from the walls of the tomb as well as conducting DNA sequence analyses.

Meanwhile, chemists at the Getty have been analyzing the brown marks, which have seeped into the paint and the plaster, at the molecular level.

So far, the chemists have identified melanins, which are characteristic byproducts of fungal (and sometimes bacterial) metabolism, but no living organisms have yet been matched to the spots.

"Our results indicate that the microbes that caused the spots are dead," says Archana Vasnathakumar, a postdoctoral fellow in Mitchell's lab. "Or, to put it in a more conservative way, 'not active.'"

Further, analysis of photographs taken when the tomb was first opened in 1922 shows that the brown spots have not changed in the past 89 years.

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