It has been nearly a month now since Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, announced that in one month he would reveal “the exact reason why King Tut died.” 

The title of the lecture was Mysteries of Tutankhamun Revealed.  I was in attendance, and among the most exciting revelations were promises to reveal more revelations in the very near future.

To be more specific, at a lecture on August 7^th, 2009, at Butler University’s Clowes Memorial Hall in Indianapolis, IN, Dr. Hawass assured the crowd that he knew the exact cause of Tutankhamun’s death, long thought (apparently incorrectly) to be murder, and that he would be revealing the cause at a press conference within a month.  (For a full review of the lecture see my analysis on Heritage Key:  Lecture Review: Zahi Hawass’ Mysteries of King Tut Revealed). 

The Boy King, Tutankhamun (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Dr. Hawass also promised that other forensic results would be made public within the month.  For example, why did the boy king need to use a cane at such a young age?  He also announced that the results of a second paternity test confirming that Tutankhamun is the father of one of the fetuses found in his tomb by Howard Carter in 1922 would be subjected to publication for peer review this month.

It has been one month and one day since the lecture, so maybe what Dr. Hawass meant was that the cause of death would be announced sometime in September.  That effectively resets the clock to T-minus 30 24 days. 

The exhibition Tutankhamun the Golden King and the Great Pharaohs is due to open at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Canada, on November 24th, 2009 (it is currently running at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, where it will remain until October 25th, 2009).  But there has been no announcement that Dr. Hawass will be speaking in Toronto to promote the exhibition, as he did in San Francisco and Indianapolis.  Besides, that would be two months from now.

The only up-coming speaking engagement for the Good Doctor that I am aware of is the Geotechnical Engineering Conference coming up on October 6^th, 2009, at Alexandria (Hawass to Speak at Geotechnical Engineering Conference), and that doesn’t sound like a very promising venue for a discussion of mummy forensics. 

But on the subject of Egypt and engineering, we have much excitement of our own planned for September here at Em Hotep!, including a multi-part very in-depth review of Jean-Pierre Houdin’s explanation of how the Pyramid of Khufu was constructed.  It’s much more complex than just an internal ramp, as you will see.

So in the meanwhile, stay tuned to Em Hotep! for more death and construction.

Photograph ”Tête de Toutânkhamon enfant (musée du Caire Egypte).jpg” by Wiki user dalbera, is provided courtesy of Wikimedia Commons  and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of those files under the conditions that you appropriately attribute them, and that you distribute them only under a license identical to this one. Official license.  Photograph “hawass3.jpg” by Anne Houston Payne is courtesty of Heritage Key–All rights reserved.

ALL OTHER photographs and text are copyright 2009, all rights reserved.

Tags: Forensic Mummy Studies, Genetic Mapping, Howard Carter, Jean-Pierre Houdin, Khufu's Pyramid, Supreme Council of Antiquities, The Great Pyramid, Tutankhamun, Tutankhamun Exhibition, Zahi Hawass