Free Tutankhamen by Joyce Tyldesley

unwrapping, so once again we are reliant on eye-witness accounts; accounts which vary wildly. Davis, for example, tells us that the hands were clasped, while Ayrton reports that the left arm was bent with the hand resting on the breast and the right arm was fully extended along the thigh. Tyndale, who had been told that the mummy was female, remembered:
    Her dried up face, sunken cheeks, and thin, leathery-looking lips,
exposing a few teeth, were in ghastly contrast to the golden diadem which encircled her head and the gold necklace that partially hid her sunken throat. Her body was wrapped in thin gold plate, but this being broken and torn made it yet more horrible to look at. An uncomfortable feeling that it was unchivalrous to stare at the poor creature when she was looking so far from her best brought me back to her effigy on the mummy-case with a mental apology that I regretted having taken her unawares, and would in future only think of her as she appeared in all her glory. 29
    This atmospheric description may owe something to Tyndale’s artistic imagination: others tell us that the exposed head was bare of flesh, and that the face had been crushed by a rockfall. If Tyndale is correct, his account suggests that there was originally more flesh on the mummy than Davis would have us believe. However, the fact that Davis could not immediately determine the mummy’s gender suggests that some parts, at least, had rotted away.
    The golden shrine had unambiguously been a part of Tiy’s burial equipment, and the canopic jars were obviously female. The positioning of the mummy’s arms, according to Ayrton, also suggested a female burial. It is therefore not too surprising that Davis immediately assumed that he had discovered Queen Tiy. This would have been a great find for him. In the days before the discovery and public display of the Berlin bust of Nefertiti, it was Tiy who was regarded as the most intriguing, most glamorous, and most important of the 18th Dynasty queens. Davis sought to prove his own identification by calling on the services of a local doctor, Dr Pollock, and an American obstetrician who was spending the winter in Luxor. He tells us that the two pronounced the remains female on the basis of the wide pelvis. The accuracy of Davis’s report is, however, open to some doubt, as Weigall (who did not believe the body to be female) confirms: ‘I saw Dr Pollock in Luxor the other day, who denies that he ever thought that
it was a woman, and says he and the other doctor could not be sure.’ 30 Davis never wavered in his conviction that he had discovered Tiy, and it was as The Tomb of Queen Tiyi that he published the tomb.
    Davis did not feel that the bones had more to offer, and it was left to Weigall to pursue the matter. Several months after their unwrapping, having soaked the bones in paraffin wax to strengthen them, he sent them to Cairo Museum to be examined by Smith. Smith had been expecting the bones of an elderly woman. Opening the bone box, he found instead the bones of a man of about twenty-five years of age.

    Although he had a string of spectacular discoveries to his name, Davis was becoming disillusioned with his inability to find an intact royal burial. Had he but realised it, his team had actually discovered three crucial clues to Tutankhamen’s whereabouts:
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    Clue 1: During his 1905 – 6 excavation season Ayrton found a simple faience cup ‘under a rock’. The cup bore Tutankhamen’s name and was, perhaps, part of swag dropped by the robbers who raided his tomb soon after the funeral.
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    Clue 2: On 21 December 1907 the team discovered a stone-lined pit (KV 54) housing a collection of large storage vessels. The jars were opened, and then quickly forgotten. Herbert Winlock, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, was present to record the sorry story:
    Sometime early in January 1908 I spent two or three days with Edward Ayrton, to see his work