King Tutankhamun’s head severed to remove precious death mask: Unraveling the intricate process of ancient embalming

Mary Beard is the best boss I’ve ever had. She was head of the Classics Faculty at Cambridge when I worked there for a year. She welcomed me when I arrived, told people to read my new book (my first, The Beautiful Burial in Rome, Egypt), and let me get on with my work at the Museum of Classical Archaeology. Heaven.

So, like any right-wing person, I have been dismayed by the vitriolic attacks she has received via Twitter over the past two weeks, after she expressed support for the way a BBC educational cartoon (yes, for children) depicted a highly rated British Roma family that included a dark-skinned father and a literate mother. (Read about it in her own words here, plus plenty of press coverage and some top-notch science journalism that exists in response.) Both a Roma officer from Africa and a Roma woman who could read and write are common, but not helpful. υпattested. Also, the point was to show today’s children that there is diversity in the open world. To pay back some of the people who have long paid for it. Similar things have been drugged into educational material in the UK and US (maybe elsewhere too) to ensure Egypt is not whitewashed.

If we go back to the 18th century, we can see how race was augmented to characterize physical differences between humans, and how it developed in a way that supported overwhelming inequalities based on those perceived differences. One of the least enjoyable pieces of research I ever did was reading a book called Types of Makeup, written by self-proclaimed Egyptologist George Gliddo and a slave-owning doctor named Josiah Nott. Its widely erased justification of racism is vile, but that didn’t stop it from winning eight prizes in 1850s America. Nor can we dismiss people like Gliddo and Nott as cranks. Race science was a pseudoscience, a word that might seem to create a safe distance between the “us” of the 21st century and the earlier scholars who accepted, fostered, and used its basic tenets. It was a real thing, and every archaeologist and anthropologist caught up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had been caught up in understanding the acceptable past through some version of racial categorization.

So, inevitably, to Tυtaпkhamυп. When the mummy was wrapped – or rather, cut, scraped and torn to pieces – the principles of racial classification always, always applied to acceptable Egyptian human remains. That meant asking a doctor to take a series of measurements of the skull, and also of the major bones, if the body was dissected or poorly preserved within the wrappings, as Tυtaпkhamυп’s was. When Tυtaпkhamυп’s mummy was wrapped in November 1925, two doctors had to study it: Douglas Derry, professor of anatomy at the Cairo Medical School, and Saleh Bey Hamdi, its former director. Oply Derry was credited with the published atomic report, which duly reported all the skeletal measurements.

At the time only two photographs of the head of the mummy of Tυtaпkhamυп were published, both with the head cradled in a white cloth, which concealed the fact that it had been detached from the body at the bottom of the beak to remove the gilded mummy mask. The cloth also conceals all the tools and remains of the work surface, which is made clear by the photographic negatives. They were printed and published cropped to the head with the cloth around it, as seen here:

Left profile of the mummified head of Tυtaпkhamυп, photograph by Harry Bυrtoп (eg. TAA 553), published in The Illustrated London News, 1926.

(Personal disclaimer here: I really hate posting pictures of mummies, especially wrapped mummies, mummified body parts, and child mummies. I’ve done this here to make a broader point about the display of race, and I know these images are already circulating out there. Still, don’t worry.)

Anyway, of the two photographs Howard Carter released to the press and used in his own book on Tυtaпkhamυп (volume 2), there were two views, one open to the front and one open to show the left profile, as seen above. But photographer Harry Burtop took several more photographs of the head after some more work on it, and after it had been mounted vertically on a wooden board, with what appears to be the handle of a paintbrush used to hold the spout. Neither of these photographs were published during Carter’s (or Burtop’s) lifetime, and I don’t think they were intended to be. But clearly, from his perspective, having photographs of the head was crucial. It is also telling that while some of the photographs show the head in pear profile or at three-quarter angles, most stick to the established forms of racial “type” photography: front, back, left profile, right profile.

Print, possibly 1925, from a photograph by Harry Borto, eg. TAA 553, (c) The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Above, an example of opening pear-shaped or three-quarter angle profile views. As far as I can tell, this was first published, in an even smaller size than the image here, in Christiae Desroches-Noblecort’s English handwriting book Tυtaпkhamυп (George Raibird 1963), with the paint handle carefully erased. (Here you have only the reflection from my iPhone.)

Print from a photograph by Harry Borto, eg. TAA 1244, (c) Metropolitan Museum of Art. The brush handle has been masked with masking tape.

It was not until 1972 that most or all of the photographs of the mummy, including its head, were published in a scholarly study by F. Filce Leek, part of the Griffith Institute’s Tomb of Tυtaпkhamυп photograph series. That included the left profile above, where masking tape was applied to the negative before printing, again, to remove the brush handle.

These different stagings of the head of Tυtaпkhamυп’s mummy matter, as does the way in which the photographs were or were not circulated, or what adaptations were deemed necessary to make them ready for publication. Clearly, that brush was deemed inappropriate in some way in the 1960s, just as in the 1920s and 1930s, when Carter was still writing about the tomb, he must have deemed it inappropriate to show that second set of photographs.

And what do these photographs show us? Tυtaпkhamυп’s face? Tυtaпkhamυп’s race? Or something else? Carter did not speak explicitly of race when describing the mummy’s appearance: there was no need, because there was already a language code for distinguishing more ‘Caυcasian’ bodies from more ‘negroid’ bodies (to use the most common terms used in late 19th and early 20th century archaeology). “The face is refined and cultivated,” was how the Illustrated Lopédo News reported in its July 3, 1926, issue, almost certainly paraphrasing or directly quoting Carter. Placed beneath the cloth-wrapped left profile (the first photo I showed above), the text and image together made it clear to the paper’s middle-class readers that Tυtaпkhamυп was a receptive Egyptian of more Arab, Turkish, or even European appearance than sυb. -Saharan Africa. The mummy’s prominent cheekbones appear high and sharp, and the flattened posture of the profile appears arched and narrow.

What really interests me here, though, is what we don’t see, because we still take those kinds of photographs, drawings, CT scans, and 3D reconstructions, of course – images like these have racial science at their heart, right back in the 18th century. ^^ So when I see a photograph like this – and there are thousands of them in the apos of archaeology – I don’t see Tυtaпkhamυп, and I certainly don’t see anything refined or cultured about mummified heads. I see the extent to which the practice of race had worked its way into almost every realm of archaeology, especially the archaeology of colonized and co-owned countries like Egypt. Why take these photographs? I suppose that in 1925, it was impossible, just as it was impossible to wrap the mummy, take atomic measurements, separate the head from the body, and remove it from the mask.

Images matter, photographs matter, and the way we use photographs and talk about them matters too. In the book I will be publishing next year on the photographic archive of the tomb of Tυtaпkhamυп, I go into more detail about this particular set of photographs of the mummified head. But leaving aside the controversy over race, colour omission and DNA in Roman Britain that recently erupted, I thought I would blog again with this example.

In our image-saturated age, we need to be even more careful about how we use historical images like these photographs. Don’t look at what they show in the image. Instead, look for what they show about the moments in between and the motivations behind the taking of the photograph. The legacies of racial science are still with us, and if we, as archaeologists, historians, or Egyptologists, hope to bring those legacies to a wider audience, we need much more vocal and more critical work on the history of Egyptology and the visualization of the seemingly dead.