MYSTERY OF THE MUMMIFIED MEMBER DID TUTANKHAMUN HAVE AN ERECTION?

EXACTLY 100 years ago, Howard Carter discovered the lost tomb of Tutankhamun. And for decades the mummified penis of Tutankhamun has been shrouded in mystery ... especially when it mysteriously "vanished" for a number of decades ... only to be found amongst the dust and detritus between his legs at the bottom of the sarcophagus a few years ago.

But a prominent Egyptologist says the embalmers engorged the royal penis so that it was erect ... and it originally stood at a 90 degree angle upwards from his body ... to enhance his identification with Osiris. 

This would contradict Howard Carter's famous first photo of the mummy, which shows the penis pointing towards his toes. However, it is well known that the mummy had been badly damaged by Carter in the process of unwrapping the ancient bandages.

The head had to be severed from the body because the back of the skull was "glued" by perfumed resins to the bottom of the mummy case. The wrists were broken in order to remove bracelets.

But somehow the royal penis and testes miraculously survived this rather rude unwrapping process and were clearly visible in those initial photos ... the first royal photographic portrait of the king.

The portrait was one of nearly 2,000 images taken by Carter's photographer, Harry Burton, as part of a photographic record of each step of Carter's meticulous procedural methods ... setting new standards for archaeological research.

As you can see in the photo, the penis is clearly visible. In fact, by mummy standards, King Tut is really quite well endowed. The mummification process results in dramatic shriveling of soft tissues, of course, reducing even the most prodigious penis to about the size of a sun-dried sultana raisin.

Somehow, in Tut's case, the embalmers managed to retain at least a semblance of respectable manhood.

Did the embalmers pump it full of padding material that would resist shrinking, like some after-world sausage-makers? No one knows how they achieved that. It is one of the puzzles of archeology, the subject of dissertations.

Now, Egyptologist Salima Ikram, a professor at the American University in Cairo, says it is in fact supposed to represent an erect penis ... and it was originally positioned at right angles to the body ... pointing towards the heavens.

The mummified erect penis and other burial anomalies were not accidents during embalming, Ikram suggests, but rather deliberate attempts to make the king appear as Osiris, the god of the underworld, in as literal a way as possible. 

The erect penis evokes Osiris' regenerative powers. Egyptians believed Osiris was killed and dismembered by his brother Seth. Isis found all the scattered pieces ... except for his phallus, which had been swallowed by the phallic-shaped Oxyrhynchus fish.

Isis fashioned a magical phallus by which she, in the guise of a bird, was impregnated by Osiris. Their child was Horus the falcon sun god.

Another anomaly is the absence of a heart. No heart was found in the canopic jars, and no heart scarab was found in Tutankhamun's ribcage. Ikram says the lost heart recalls the story of the god being cut to pieces by his brother Seth and his heart buried.

Making the king appear as Osiris may have helped to undo a religious revolution brought about by Akhenaten, a pharaoh widely believed to be Tutankhamun's father, Ikram says.

Akhenaten had tried to focus Egyptian religion around the worship of the Aten, the sun disc, going so far as to destroy images of other gods. Tutankhamun was trying to undo these changes and return Egypt back to its traditional religion with its mix of gods.

Ikram cautions that her idea is speculative, but, if correct, it would help explain some of the mysteries surrounding Tutankhamun's mummification and burial.

Mystery after mystery surrounds the mummy. 

There was a great outcry in dusty Egyptological circles when the mummy was unwrapped in 1968 in order to be X-rayed, and British researchers discovered not only that the arms and legs had been broken off but also that one ear was missing ... and that the royal penis was gone.

It was obvious that something had happened to the mummy after the portrait photo was taken. Had it been dropped?

For the past four decades, speculation has been rife as to the fate of the mummified member. 

It was generally assumed that Carter or else his benefactor, Lord Carnarvon, had swiped the penis immediately after Burton snapped the photograph.

It was whispered that Carter or Carnarvon may have kept the penis as a kind of gruesome souvenir. Those rumors were spurred by reports that Carnarvon had, in fact, spirited away a few objects from the tomb which were found in his manor house many years after his death ... the same manor house which is the setting for the TV series "Downton Abbey."

But it seemed very out of character for Carter to have done such a thing, or for him to have condoned such a theft by Carnarvon. Carter was incredibly meticulous, spending years cataloging and safe-guarding every last item in the tomb, every shred of fabric, every last bead from long-disentegrated necklaces.

It seemed unthinkable that Carter, a consummate scientist, would have copped the king's cock.

So it was very gratifying when, in 2006, it was announced that the penis had been found ... it had only dropped off and become lost amidst the other debris of the royal groin so that nobody had noticed it.

And what has all of this to do with Antinous? Well, his tomb and his body have yet to be found. Carter's methodology and ethics will doubtless serve as a model.

And Ikram's latest findings could spur speculation about the sacred-sexual state of the remains of Antinous ... who was also identified with Osiris.

TUTANKHAMUN'S METEOR SPACE DAGGER WAS A FAMILY HEIRLOOM, EXPERTS SAY

FOR years, experts have known that one of Tutankhamun's famous daggers was made of a meteoric iron that literally came from space. But further study now suggests the dagger had been a gift to his father Akhenaten or his grandfather Thutmosis IV.

Metallurgical analysis in 2017 shoed the iron metal had come from a meteor that had hit the Earth in prehistoric in pre-historic times.

Analysis of the blade composition could not reveal where the meteorite had landed, of course.

But study of the Amarna Letters tablets provided some hints. The tablets were inscribed approximately 3,400 years ago ... about a century before King Tut was interred. 

In looking at the transcription, the researchers noted a section where an iron dagger was mentioned. It was given to King Tut's grandfather by the King of Mitanni, suggesting the meteorite may have landed in what is now Syria.

Tutankhamun was buried with several weapons, including two daggers. One was a golden ceremonial dagger and the other had an iron blade. Both had golden sheaths.

While archaeologists knew that one of the blades was iron, there was no way of knowing where that cutting-edge alloy had come from at such an early date in history.

But using non-invasive, portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, a team of Italian and Egyptian researchers confirmed that the iron of the dagger placed on the right thigh of King Tut's mummified body a has meteoric origin.

The team, which included researchers from Milan Polytechnic, Pisa University and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, detailed their results in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science.

The weapon, now on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, was described in 1925 by Howard Carter, who three years before had discovered the treasure-packed tomb, as "a highly ornamented gold dagger with crystal knob."

Made of non-rusted, homogeneous metal, the finely manufactured blade features a decorated gold handle. It is completed by a gold sheath garnished with a floral lily motif on one side and with a feathers pattern on the other side, terminating with a jackal's head.

The dramatic technological improvements have allowed the researchers to determine the composition of the blade.

"Meteoric iron is clearly indicated by the presence of a high percentages of nickel," main author Daniela Comelli, at the department of Physics of Milan Polytechnic, told Discovery News.

Indeed, iron meteorites are mostly made of iron and nickel, with minor quantities of cobalt, phosphorus , sulfur and carbon.

While artifacts produced with iron ore quarrying display 4 percent of nickel at most, the iron blade of King Tut's dagger was found to contain nearly 11 percent of nickel. Further confirmation of the blade's meteoric origin came from cobalt traces.

"The nickel and cobalt ratio in the dagger blade is consistent with that of iron meteorites that have preserved the primitive chondritic ratio during planetary differentiation in the early solar system," Comelli said.

Comelli and colleagues also investigated the possible source of the iron blade.

"We took into consideration all meteorites found within an area of 2,000 km in radius centered in the Red Sea, and we ended up with 20 iron meteorites," Comelli said.

"Only one, named Kharga, turned out to have nickel and cobalt contents which are possibly consistent with the composition of the blade," she added.

The meteorite fragment was found in 2000 on a limestone plateau at Mersa Matruh, a seaport some 150 miles west of Alexandria.

Earlier, experts determined that the Ancient Egyptians used meteoric iron for beads as early as 5,000 years ago ... long before the Iron Age began. The EGYPTIAN SPACE BEADS have been the subject of intense study.

It has also been long known that the Ancient Egyptians used METEOR GLASS in their jewellery.