to the new city of Akhetaten, known now as Amarna. He further shocked the country by attacking Amun, a major god, smashing his images and closing his temples. “It must have been a horrific time,” said Ray Johnson, director of the University of Chicago’s research centre in Luxor, the site of ancient Thebes. “The family that had ruled for centuries was coming to an end, and then Akhenaten went a little wacky.” After Akhenaten’s death, a mysterious ruler named Smenkhkare appeared briefly and exited with hardly a trace.
And then a very young Tutankhaten took the throne — King Tut as he’s widely known today. The boy king soon changed his name to Tutankhamun, ‘living image of Amun,’ and oversaw a restoration of the old ways. He reigned for about nine years — and then died unexpectedly. Regardless of his fame and the speculations about his fate, Tut is one mummy among many in Egypt.
How many? No one knows. The Egyptian Mummy Project, which began an inventory in late , has recorded almost so far and is still counting. The next phase: scanning the mummies with a portable CT machine donated by the National Geographic Society and Siemens, its manufacturer.
King Tut is one of the first mummies to be scanned — in death, as in life, moving regally ahead of his countrymen. A CT machine scanned the mummy head to toe, creating , digital X-ray images in cross section. Tut’s head, scanned in . millimetre slices to register its intricate structures, takes on eerie detail in the resulting image.
With Tut’s entire body similarly recorded, a team of specialists in radiology, forensics, and anatomy began to probe the secrets that the winged goddesses of a gilded burial shrine protected for so long. The night of the scan, workmen carried Tut from the tomb in his box. Like pallbearers they climbed a ramp and a flight of stairs into the swirling sand outside, then rose on a hydraulic lift into the trailer that held the scanner. Twenty minutes later two men emerged, sprinted for an office nearby, and