Accidental Blogger

A couple of nights ago, Discovery Channel aired a two-hour special on the search to find the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut, complete with photogenic archaeologists hyperventilating in front of the camera. Phrases like ‘stunning discovery’, ‘amazing find’ , ‘shocking news’ peppered the script so generously as to induce sneezing fits.

Elaborate DNA evidence examination with a state-of-the-art DNA lab contribution of $5 million from the Discovery channel notwithstanding, the real shocker was that the whole case was declared as hinging on the discovery that one of 4 candidate mummies might have been the owner of a missing tooth identified in a CT scan of Hatshepsut’s canopic jar. This was enough for Dr.Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the department of Egyptian antiquities, to declare that ‘it is 100 percent definitive’ that this mummy was that of Hatshepsut, although DNA evidence had not been conclusive at the time of completing the documentary. Having failed to generate a nuclear DNA match between the mummies and what was believed to be the mummy of Hatshepsut’s father Tutmosis I, they were still awaiting the results of mitochondrial DNA match searches between the candidate mummy and that of Hatshepsut’s grandmother Ahmos Nefertari.

Why couldn’t they wait a few more weeks for conclusive mtDNA evidence? Because, it might kill the airing of the Discovery channel documentary and bring into question the $5 million dollar deal.

The whole reporting of the issue is rife with inconsistencies.

"The identification of the tooth with the jaw can show this is Hatshepsut," Hawass said. "A tooth is like a fingerprint."

"It is 100 percent definitive. It is 1.80 cm (wide) and the dentist took the measurement and studied that part. He found it fit exactly 100 percent with this part," he told Reuters.

A 1.8 cm wide tooth would be very wide indeed (Try measuring one of your own. One of my incisors was 0.7 cm wide, for example). Even if the report misquoted Dr.Hawass, since ‘wide’ was in brackets, there was an issue with the documentary mentioning the measurement of the tooth as 1.6 cm, while the gap was 1.7cm. Most of the press release based articles quoted this as "’tooth matches within a fraction of a millimetre ". Since when did  1 mm (or 0.1 cm) become a fraction of a millimetre? It’s a fraction of a centimetre (or -ter, if you prefer).

Scanning through several reports, the game of Chinese Whispers comes to mind :

" The players sit in a circle on the floor. The first player begins by whispering a phrase into the ear of the person next to him/her.  One by one, each person repeats the whispered sentence as they  hear it when it is whispered to them. When the last person receives the message, he/she repeats it out loud. It is usually completely  different than the original statement."

The net result is a garbled account of what actually transpired, which is fairly clear from Dr.Hawass’s own account on his website.  In another example, he states:

"When I saw the tooth in the box I asked Dr. Ashraf Selim to bring in a dentist right away. The dentist was a professor from Cairo University, Dr. Galal El-Beheri. He began to study the tooth, and we went back to the CT scans of all six of the unidentified female mummies, to see if any one of them was missing a tooth. Not only was the fat lady from KV60 missing a tooth, but the hole left behind and the type of tooth that was missing was an exact match for the loose one in the box from DB320! We therefore have scientific proof that this is the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut."

The Chinese Whispers effect afflicts the press reports, for instance from Scientific American
"Orthodontics professor Yehya Zakariya checked all the mummies which might be Hatshepsut’s and found that the tooth was a perfect fit in a gap in the upper jaw of the fat woman."

More Chinese Whispers at this Egyptian  weekly:
‘her right arm crossed over her chest…left arm laid beside her’-

The photo from this link shows the left arm crossed over chest.

Mummy identification has been a tricky field for a long time. It can be very hard to positively ID a mummy solely from the sarcophagi or the nearby funerary objects, especially with the intervention of over 3 millenia, and shifting of royal mummies during later periods to guard them from tomb robbers.

For example, while Egyptologist Joann Fletcher wrote of her search for the mummy of Nefertiti, she shied short  in the book of actually declaring the mummy she favored to be that of Nefertiti, the fabled beauty and queen of Pharaoh Akhenaten. In her book, she examined the case for a certain mummy being that of Nefertiti based on the style of hair used in the royal wig associated with it, Even though the hair styling was compelling, the age of the mummy near which it was found didn’t match the known age of Nefertiti at death and the royal wig evidence was more circumstantial than could allow for certitude. Hawass dismissed her suggestions about the possible Nefertiti mummy in so many words:

" Dr. Hawass reiterates that other points made in support of the identification of the Younger Lady as Nefertiti can be refuted without  referring to the CT-scans. These include a wig of a type worn by Nefertiti   found in the tomb and the fact that the mummy has a double-pierced ear;  both of these attributes are seen in non-royal women of the New Kingdom,  so do not at all prove that this is Nefertiti. The age range suggested by  the CT-scan is between 25 and 35; again, this would fit any number of  important New Kingdom Dynasty females. In summary, Dr. Hawass concludes that there is no convincing reason to identify the Younger Lady as  Nefertiti."

While dramatizations of historical events or presumed historical events always make for great eye-candy, they often distort the actual occurrence and end up reinforcing certain stereotypical views in the mind of the viewer (similar to the subliminal mushroom cloud images used to sell the Iraq war). The image may have only faint bearings on reality as this example shows, with the print version saying: 

"Finally, a wooden box inscribed with Hatshepsut’s throne name and found in DB320 was also scanned, and it included the key to the riddle. … From other embalming caches it is known that anything associated with the body or its mummification became ritually charged and had to be buried properly. Therefore, it seems that during the mummification of queen Hatshepsut, embalmers put into the box anything that came loose from the body during the mummification process."

The screen version had some bigwig suggesting that the infected tooth was removed and it may in fact have been the infection from this that passed into the  bloodstream and killed her, rather than the cancer/diabetes for which the CT scan of the mummy had provided evidence.

The dramatization showed a beautiful young woman on a sickbed being fanned by a servant, as opposed to what might have been the reality of a tired, obese woman with bad teeth prone on her deathbed. There was a clear disconnect between what the science asserts (even without certitude) and the on screen portrayal.

While Dr.Hawass had been earlier dismissive of the suggestion that DNA tests be used to ID mummies in the past, he did change his tune and accepted a deal with the Discovery Channel for $5 million dollars to set up a DNA lab in the Cairo Egyptian museum. So there was definitely a quid pro quo involved, which probably had everyone satisfied by the deal.

Dr.Hawass got a DNA lab to check his mummies, Discovery Channel got their documentary. Everyone is happy, including the viewers who are lulled into accepting this as ‘real science’.

Real life is not always so clear cut and pretty. Real science can trump the filming schedules and rush to  broadcast into mockeries of those who fell for earlier ‘100 per cent’ assertions, as is quite evident from this whole episode.

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Update(for a yet unpublished post!):

May I suggest we should embalm,mummify and raise pyramids in honor of Larry and Sergei (after their natural demises, of course)and preserve them for posterity because of their creation of Google?

Looking for a link to corroborate Dr.Hawass’ initial scepticism about the veracity of mummy DNA tests led me to this :

"Hidden treasures of Ancient Egypt: Unearthing the Masterpieces of Egyptian History," by Zahi Hawass…
Anyway, here’s what Hawass has to say on page 227:
"Many people woul love to see this debate (on the mummy of the Younger Lady) resolved through the use of DNA analysis. However, a certain uninterrupted length of the DNA chain must be recovered for accurate analysis to be carried out. Much of the DNA within mummies has decayed, and sufficiently long sequences have not yet been able to be recovered. The few positive results gained using current techniques are in each case likely to be the result of modern contamination. … The available technology for DNA analysis is not yet reliable, and there are no labs in Egypt capable of doing "ancient DNA" research. Once labs have developed effective methods for analyzing shorter sequences of DNA, we will allow them to be used on Egyptian mummies. Perhaps many mysteries will finally be solved!"

On further reading of the same thread, I came upon this exhaustive Canadian Broadcasting Corporation website ‘debunking‘  the science behind, you guessed it, the Discovery Channel special on ‘Nefertiti Resurrected’ (2004) made in conjunction with Joann Fletcher.

"Discovery bankrolled Dr. Joann Fletcher’s quest to Egypt to  examine a group of three mysterious mummies lying in an  underground chamber in the Valley of the Kings.
Fletcher and a team of experts were on a mission to prove a sensational theory.
According to Fletcher, one of those mummies may be none other than Egypt’s lost Queen Nefertiti.

Have Dr. Joann Fletcher and the Discovery Channel made the biggest discovery since King Tut? Well, it depends who you ask…"

 

Hooray, It’s a small world after all! We have pots of all sorts (Hawass vs. Fletcher, CBC vs. Discovery…) calling kettles black.

Which leads me to announcing my discovery of the Law of Conspiracy Theory :

Google the simplest situation hard enough, and you will discover the grand conspiracy behind it.

(I will be approaching the Discovery Channel to bankroll a $2 million dollar expedition to prove the truth of my discovery and make a dramatized reenactment of the ‘Eureka’ moment.)