In search of... King Tut’s willy

The documentary Tutankhamun - Secrets of the Boy King was screened Tuesday night on ABC1 (hardly earth-shatteringly new, having been produced in 2007).

Among the wild assertions aired in the programme...

• King Tutankhamun was embalmed/mummified with an erect penis.
• Said penis was stolen by tomb robbers probably during World War II.

King Tut’s ‘hotness’ apparently continues to be hotly debated, with the substance of the debate ... er ... hanging on a photograph taken in 1922 of the mummified remains.

This blog declines to enter into that particular debate.

But the assertion that Tut’s member was literally ‘ripped off’ his mummified corpse in the 1940s by tomb raiders had already been contradicted by an authority who was extensively interviewed and consulted in the very making of the programme.

Dr Zahi Hawass, a foremost authority in Egyptology and Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, told Discovery News in the year before the programme was released:

“...It has always been there. I found it during the CT scan last year, when the mummy was lifted. It lay loose in the sand around the king’s body.”

First rule of popular documentary making: Never let a hard fact get in the way of a good story about dangly bits.

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Non Sequitir Friday

From a potted biography of the late entertainer Danny Kaye, the year 1938 is summed up thus...

Unfortunately, his debut in London was upstaged by Chamberlain’s sellout performance in Munich.

I guess it’s entirely reasonable that Nev’s Munich gig put a lot of showbiz careers on hold.

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Nora Head Revisited

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