Who slew the pharaoh's first born son?

If the theory is right, then the owner of Cairo's royal beak was the progenitor of Dundee's head case. Between them they recall in bone and mummified tissue one of the most important episodes of the Old Testament, the Koran and the Torah. They knew Moses personally. They suffered the 10 plagues of Egypt (or nine in the case of the younger man, who perished in the 10th). The older one not only witnessed the Exodus but was the cause of it. His was the army that drowned when it pursued the children of Israel through the Red Sea. In the unravelling of these men's stories may lie clues to ancient mysteries and synchronicities that will hook myth to fact. Are biblical texts compatible with archeological evidence, or are they locked in eternal opposition — thrust and counter-thrust of faith against science?

The elder man — tall, long-headed, with thinning red hair faded to yellow — was, if nothing else, a giant of Egyptian history, the pharaoh's pharaoh, Rameses II, known as the Great. His reign in the 13th century BC lasted for 67 years until his death at the age of 90 — more than double the average life expectancy for the 19th dynasty. Anyone who believes in the mythological connection between great noses and great potency will find here a prime example. Rameses serviced a rotating fleet of wives and concubines (the wives including at least two of his own daughters), who are believed to have given him some 170 babies. His reign was said by contemporary chroniclers to have been a period of military conquest, monumental buildings (the two large temples at Abu Simbel alone would ensure his immortality) and unfailing prosperity.

Or that is what they hoped we would believe. Ancient Egypt spun its politics as ruthlessly as the Blairite court would do 3,000 years later, but with the difference that there was no BBC to expose the dodgy dossier. The official account, in hieroglyphs, paintings and carvings, is a testament of infallibility. Only victories are noted. There are no famines to weaken the land of plenty; no defeats in battle; no dissenting voices; no revolting Hebrew slaves. The Nile never turns to blood. There is no mention of frogs or flies or boils. And yet, if scholars are right, the desiccated body in the Cairo museum — ironically missing its genitals — is the pharaoh of the Exodus, challenged by Moses for his exploitation of the Hebrews, spectacularly punished by God and improbably morphed into Yul Brynner for Cecil B DeMille's epic of 1956, The Ten Commandments.

The Old Testament writers do not name him, but Rameses's identification as the Exodus pharaoh is now widely accepted by historians, who cite evidence both chronological and circumstantial. There were people from Canaan in Egypt during his reign, when a great royal city was built by slave labourers in the Eastern Delta. That comfortably fits the biblical picture (Exodus I, v 11: "And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses.") There is persuasive evidence of a cult of monotheism, heretical in Egypt, being spread by migration at about the same time, and the first recorded mention of Israel as a nation occurs during the reign of his immediate successor, Mernaptah. That fits too. For these and other reasons, Rameses II is not so much the strongest candidate as the only one. But if there was an Exodus, were there also 10 plagues and a parting of the Red Sea? Oddly, the easiest phenomenon to explain is the one that seems the most implausible. We all know the Sunday school/Cecil B DeMille version. The Red Sea opens to allow safe passage for the refugees, then closes again over the pursuing Egyptian army. The Bible is quite explicit (Exodus XIV, v 21: "And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided." When the children of Israel moved forward, "the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left").

Scholars now argue that this is all the result of a simple misreading of Hebrew text. For Red Sea, read "reed sea". Moses was relying on his wits, not on a miraculous suspension of physics. The Sea of Reeds was an area of marshland in Sinai. Whereas the fugitives on foot could have passed with ease, the Egyptian chariots would have sunk to their axles.

The deeper question is whether the Exodus happened at all and, if so, whether it was led by the man we know as Moses. Unsurprisingly, given the selectivity of the Egyptian record and the scant survival of papyri, Moses is historically untraceable. The story was not written down until hundreds of years after it was supposed to have happened, and there are many examples in mythology of foundlings rising to become national leaders. It is not possible to know if the story of Moses grew out of these myths or has a nucleus of historical truth (for even myths need sources). The only safe bet is that he would not have looked like Charlton Heston.

But the question remains. If Moses did exist and was raised in the Egyptian court, then the postmortem now taking place in Dundee could reveal a man in whose death he conspired with God. The search for the man's identity, involving world leaders in archeology, theology, anthropology, anatomy and disease, is the subject of a new film by the London-based programme maker Atlantic Productions. In more ways than one, the story is a long one.

In 1825 an Englishman, James Burton, burrowed through what looked like the entrance of a buried tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. Finding nothing inside but rubble, he swiftly moved on. Howard Carter, discoverer of Tutankhamun, did much the same a century later, penetrating no more than a metre inside before declaring the tomb to be devoid of interest. Worse — when he disinterred the treasures of Tutankhamun, he dumped all the spoil on top of the abandoned tomb and ensured its disappearance for another 60 years.

It was not until 1989 that Kent Weeks, professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, arrived at the same spot with a trowel in his hand. Since 1978, Weeks had been director of the Theban Mapping Project, an ambitious scheme to plot the exact positions of tombs and temples on the west bank of the Nile. In 1989, he and his team reached the area where the neglected Burton-Carter tomb was thought to lie buried, and where the Egyptian Department of Antiquities now wanted to widen the roadway for tour buses.

In the event, it took only two days to find the entrance, and that might have been that. The intention was only to mark its position on the map. A preliminary inspection revealed what had deterred Burton and Carter — crawling through a narrow passage on top of the debris, all around and below them they could see nothing but rubble. It was only as they turned to leave that one of Weeks's students spotted what Burton and Carter had missed — a wall fragment bearing hieroglyphic texts, from which, when they cleared a space, a name stood out as starkly as if it had been flashed in neon: Amun-her-khepeshef, eldest son of Rameses the Great. He was depicted walking into the tomb behind his father to be introduced to the gods in the afterlife. The implication was obvious: in all probability, somewhere nearby lay the body of the pharaoh's first-born son, supposedly killed by God in the 10th plague of Egypt. What a find that would be!

The plagues are a big problem for rationalists. If you cannot accept the literalness of the biblical account — that God punished Egypt with a catalogue of worsening disasters after Rameses refused Moses's demand for the release of the slaves — then what are you left with? How can such events be accounted for? First the water turns to blood; then Egypt is overrun in turn by frogs, lice and flies; its sheep and cattle all die; the people suffer a plague of boils, followed by the worst hailstorm in the country's history, a plague of locusts and three days of unbroken darkness. Finally, God kills all of Egypt's first-born children, and the first-born of every domestic animal. To sceptics, it is pure fable.

And yet scientists can give a pretty good, cogent account of each of the first nine. Kenneth Kitchen, professor of Egyptology at the University of Liverpool, explains that the whole sequence could have emerged quite literally from the Nile, and revolved around the seasons. From July to August, he suggests, the river could have flooded its banks and washed down huge quantities of dust and red earth from the mountains of Ethiopia. An alternative theory says that abnormally hot weather could have triggered a toxic algal bloom. Either way, the river turns red, the ecological balance is upset; fish die, leaving uneaten the frogspawn on which they normally would have fed. There follows a plague of frogs (in some accounts they are toads) fleeing the poisoned water to die. Rotting frogs and stagnant water make ideal breeding grounds for insects and disease — hence the lice, flies and insect-borne epidemics that kill the livestock and cause people to break out in boils and sores.

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After that came the hail: "As it does in February," observes Kitchen. "Then locusts came up, as they could in January, February, March." That brings the number of plagues to eight. The ninth — three days of darkness — could have been caused by a desert wind, the hamsin, which blows in April and May, bringing sandstorms and blizzards. Which leaves unexplained just one final plague: the 10th, the death of the first-born. There is a "rationalist" theory — that harvested grain was stored when wet and contaminated with locust droppings to create a perfect culture for the growth of toxic bacteria. This would have killed only the first-born because the bacteria affected just the upper level of the granary and the eldest were fed firstÉ Well, yes, on balance it does seem a theory too far — no nation's eating habits are as precise as all that.

So the unanswered question takes us back to the Valley of the Kings, where Kent Weeks and his team have laboured for year after year
in what he now says has been "one of the most nightmarish excavation jobs that I've ever undertaken". The rubble, washed into the tomb and then repeatedly dried and soaked by floods for 3,000 years, has set like concrete and will not yield to anything less than a pickaxe. And yet it needs toothbrush delicacy to avoid damaging the archeological remains. In the second season, 1990, they cleared a further section of wall and met another surprise: more hieroglyphs commemorating another son of Rameses II. This alone was enough to set the tomb apart — family mausoleums in Egypt are vanishingly rare.

Chip by chip, the first small chamber took all of four digging seasons, during which, from out of the grit, came hundreds of pieces of pottery. Beyond it they came to a second chamber, in the same clogged state as the first, bearing memorial hieroglyphs and paintings of yet another prince. And then came a third chamber. But it soon became clear that this one was very, very different. Two-and-a-half years of digging, and two more years of making the structure safe, revealed a 16-pillared hall, one of the largest rooms to have been found anywhere in the valley. Even so, there was a letdown.

"The reason we were anxious to spend so much time in here," says Weeks, "is we wanted to see where it went. Imagine our disappointment when we went along the main axis, digging the way through all this hideous material, then ran into a wall." It was evidently the end of the tomb.

Just to make sure they didn't miss anything, they dug along the base of the wall to see if there were any more pieces of decorated plaster. Instead, low down, they found another doorway. It was Groundhog Day, February 2, 1995. As in the previous three rooms, the space beyond the doorway was packed with debris — Weeks and a student could just crawl into the 2ft gap between the rubble and the ceiling. "It was a very strange feeling," he says. "We thought this was going to be a small chamber. I look to my left, I can see a wall. The flashlight reflects off it. I look to my right, I can see a wall. But when I push my light down, it doesn't bounce off anything. It just goes on and on into total darkness." There was no back wall. They crawled on.

"As we duck-walked down the corridor we could see the tops of doorways on either side. Two, and then four, then six, then eight. And the corridor kept going and going. I was saying to the student, ÔI just simply cannot believe this. What on earth are we in?'" The answer turned out to be the biggest tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings, a gigantic mausoleum stuffed with princes. There were 18 doorways in all, and at the end of the corridor stood a great statue of Rameses himself, gazing back down the 100ft hallway towards his sons.

The tomb, listed as KV 5, was a front-page sensation (it made the cover of Time magazine). More corridors appeared; more side chambers; more doors. The previously biggest known Egyptian tomb was 180 metres long with floor space of a few hundred square metres. Floor space in KV 5 is measured in thousands of square metres, on at least three different levels. The room count so far has topped 130 and may reach 200. Decades of patient, snail-paced excavation lie ahead, with archeologists moving behind teams of mining engineers. Of the rooms so far identified, only 10 have been cleared of rubble.

"Our problem now," says Weeks, "is to figure out why this plan is so complex and so unlike any other tomb." The answer, he believes, lies in the pharaoh's extreme old age and his great fecundity. There would have to have been a change of plan, with the family mausoleum growing room by room from the original chamber designed for the pharaoh himself. "Rameses had the good fortune to live probably to the age of 90. But in a country where the average life expectancy was about 40, he had the bad fortune of outliving many of his sons. These all had to be buried in a fairly special and elaborate structure. And so he chose to bury the first of them adjacent to his own burial near the entrance to KV 5. When another one died, he simply enlarged that tomb in order to accommodate him. A third son died, and he added another suite of rooms. And so, rather than being able to dig a railroad-flat tomb, he had to go off in several different directions to create new burial suites, while avoiding disturbing those who had died before."

For almost six years, as one room yielded to another, the team pressed on. Then, one day, by chance, a pit was found beneath an unpromising bit of bare floor over which they had long ago passed in chamber 2. The first thing to emerge was a mummified haunch of beef. Then came a human skull, then two more, and then what Weeks describes as "the completely articulated body of an adult male lying on the ground". They unearthed the partial skeletal remains of four male mummies, all of which had been flood-damaged and lost their flesh and linen. Given the location, it would be difficult to reach any conclusion other than that they were sons of Rameses. Weeks deduced that, soon after it was sealed, KV 5 was attacked by tomb robbers looking for gold and jewels inside the mummies' wrappings. Most likely, they would have brought them out from the burial chambers so that they could work in better light near the entrance.

"They left them lying on the floor," says Weeks, "and the next time a flash flood came along, it washed parts of the bodies into this pit. We're finding other parts of the skeletons further down corridors to the left, right and deep inside."

There is no existing technology, not even DNA, that can prove beyond doubt the bones' identity. The best we can hope for is a balance of probability. Given their position high in the tomb, the fact that they are likely to have been washed inwards, and on the evidence of the inscriptions on the walls, the most reasonable assumption is that they are the first-, second-, sixth- and ninth-born sons of Rameses the Great. Examination of the bones for evidence of age identifies one in particular as the probable skull of Amun-her-khepeshef — the first-born who would have been killed by God.

It is, by any standards, a big moment. The 15 surviving skull fragments are first patched together in the tomb by Dr Caroline Wilkinson of Manchester University, an expert in facial reconstruction. By careful measurement, she can create digital images and a computerised three-dimensional reconstruction of the living head. Comparing these with reconstructions of the other three skulls from the pit, and with that of their putative father — whose face will be the first ever to be reconstructed using soft tissue from mummified remains — will show whether or not there is a family likeness.

There are differences, certainly. The lower face of Amun-her-khepeshef does not match the extreme elongation of Rameses, whose nose, lips and chin are distant strangers to each other. But when the reconstructions are finished, the impact on Kent Weeks is like a biblical miracle, academic restraint blown away by something altogether more visceral. "Oh wow! Oh yeah! Oh Jeez!" There are unmistakable family likenesses in the chin, jaw, goofy teeth, nose, eyebrows and overall shape of the head.

Weeks finds it hard to express his emotions. "I'm not used to looking at members of the Rameside court like this. I'm used to seeing them carved or painted on temple walls. But certainly we're looking at two individuals who have a strong resemblance to each other." Another shock is the men's extreme ugliness — a noble mien, perhaps, by the standards of their day, but hatchet-faced and disagreeable, quite unlike the idealised, formal images on the walls.

If this really is the first-born son of the Exodus pharaoh, victim of the wrath of God, then there is a much more important question than what he looked like. How did he die? What was God's instrument? In Dundee, Professor Black continues her patient examination of the skull, concentrating now upon the place where the bone looks to have been smashed inwards by a blow. She confirms that the injury occurred at around the time of death and, by implication, could have been the cause of it. Such a fracture might well have ripped open one of the large, thin-walled blood vessels that lay beneath. "If it does that," says Professor Black, "then the blood will start to ooze out. It won't do it at great force but it will continually leak away and there's no repairing it." Death would come within minutes or hours, depending on the size of the tear. "It would be like falling asleep, or gradually passing out." So what might have done such damage?

Significantly, the indentation closely matches the shape of a stone mace — a lethal bone-crusher widely deployed on ancient battlefields. "The way it is located," says Weeks, "it looks almost as if either a left-handed opponent came up from behind or a right-handed opponent came up from the side." Such a death would be only too likely in a man known to have led his father's army. "If it is Amun-her-khepeshef, the battle wound is certainly consistent with the way in which an officer might have perished." Could it even be that, as commander-in-chief of the Egyptian forces, he died in a skirmish during the Exodus itself?

If this is so, then the question at the heart of the investigation — was he killed by God or man? — seems to have found an answer, and the 10th plague continues to elude scientific explanation. According to the Bible, the pharaoh in his suffering agreed to let the Israelites go, but then reneged and sent a pursuing army. It leaves the most important conundrum of them all. Was the Exodus an historical event? The desert yields no evidence of the encampments you might expect in such a mass migration, but absence of proof proves nothing. "How much evidence is there for the Battle of Hastings?" says Kenneth Kitchen. "How much evidence is there for the last Glastonbury festival?"

Nevertheless, to the rational mind there are problems. The numbers reported to have marched out of Egypt were improbably vast — according to the book of Exodus, they included 600,000 children of Israel "that were men", plus children and a "mixed multitude". By some calculations, this brings the gross total to something in the region of 2m. "I think it would be a very strange miracle," says Kitchen, "because the population of Egypt overall may only have been 4m without the Hebrews. It would be very strange if there were as many Hebrews as that in Egypt in the late Bronze Age." He points again to the likelihood of mistranslation: the Hebrew word for "thousand", eleph, can also mean "leader" or "family group". If you go for this interpretation and assume, as Kitchen does, that each family group would have numbered around nine, then — with the addition of children and mixed multitudes — you get a total nearer to 20,000 than 2m.

Others dispute even this. The Israeli biblical archeologist Israel Finkelstein insists that nothing resembling the popular image of the Exodus could ever have happened. The answer to the question, he says, is "a kind of yes and no. No, it did not happen the way the Bible describes it. However, there could have been some sort of an historical nucleus in a tale of people emerging from Egypt, crossing the desert, coming to Canaan. But not in the way that you have it in the text, and not necessarily on the background of the 13th century BC".

Mark Winer, the senior rabbi of the West London Synagogue, puts it succinctly: "The whole history of humanity," he says, "is the history of immigration, and the Exodus is a great story of immigration. That's all it is."

Rameses: Death of the Firstborn, by Atlantic Productions, is broadcast on Five on February 1 at 8pm