Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.

“ TUTANKHAMUN – Pharaoh, Icon, Enigma” by Prof. Joyce Tyldesley (published in 2022)

 

Sometimes one has to bow down to a whim. A couple of years ago I just happened to see in a bookshop a new book about Tutankhamun, titled Tutankhamun – Pharaoh, Icon, Enigma written by the formidable English Egyptologist Professor Joyce Tyldesley. She has so far written 17 books about ancient Egypt and she is regarded as an expert in her field. I am no Egyptologist, but I knew at once that this book would not be one of those pot-boiler books that give readers a sensationalist version of an ancient civilisation. So I bought the book… and then I left it on my shelf for two years without reading it. I had so many other books to read and review. Finally, this month, I got around to reading Tutankhamun – Pharaoh, Icon, Enigma. And how enlightening and informative it was! After all the fantasies we’ve been given about ancient Egypt; after all the nonsense about deadly curses for those who disturb ancient tombs; after Hollywood movies where mummies come back to life and cause havoc [entertaining though they may be] – I found a courteous, matter-of-fact book about Tutankhamun and his times, as best as we can uncover those times. Joyce Tyldesley is a scholar, but she does not condescend to her readership, explaining things when needed, but keeping a clear narrative.

Tyldesley divides her book into two halves. The first deals with Tutankhamun and the world in which he lived. The second deals with how archaeologists found and dealt with Tutankhamun’s tomb and how it was treated 3,000 years later. Her preface and prologue tell us that Tutankhamun reigned from 1336 BC to 1327 BC – that is, he reigned for just under nine years. He died when he was about twenty. But she does not accept the idea that Tutankhamun was a “boy king”. Though his reign might have been short, and though his rule began when he was only about eleven, he grew to maturity and acted as a ruler should. It was quite common then for people to die in their twenties and it was very rare indeed for people to reach the age of fifty or older. In the era when Tutankhamun lived, the 18^th. Dynasty, pyramids were no longer raised to honour pharaohs. Instead, pharaohs were buried in the remote Valley of Kings on the west bank of the Nile, their tombs cut out of hard rock.

So to Tyldesley’s account of Tutankhamun’s life and time.

The pharaoh Akhetaten was a sort of heretic. He moved his capital from the traditional court in Thebes / Luxor to the smaller city Amarna and he set about abolishing many of the gods. Some historians have mistaken him for a monotheist – a believer in one god – but this was not true. Akhetaten was a henotheist – one who believed that there were many lesser gods, but only one really important god. Akhetaten shut down many temples and built his worship around the sun god alone. His consort was Nefertiti. Among Egyptologists there is still much speculation about who were Tutankhamun’s parents. Was his mother Nefertiti? Or [a possibility] one of his older sisters? Or what some Egyptologists call “harem queens”? We do not know because a pharaoh would keep his sons very much in the background and not publicise the birth of a son.

 

What we do know is that after Akhetaten died, young Tutankhamun became a semi-divine pharaoh.  He had grown up with Akhetaten’s henotheist beliefs … but he set about reversing Akhetaten’s “religious experiment”. Tutankhamun brought the court back to Luxor / Thebes, restored the status of the gods, and repaired neglected temples. Why did he do this? It appears that at this time, Egypt was threatened by former vassal states to the East. Egypt was beginning to lose territory, especially to the growing Hittite empire. Temples and places of worship had been allowed to decay when their favoured gods were not revered. Morale had plummeted. Restoring the traditional gods was one way of raising morale in the face of foreign threats. This is not to say that Tutankhamun was not himself a genuine worshipper of the many gods. Indeed he appears to have been devout.

Once again, Joyce Tyldesley emphasises the mental maturity of Tutankhamun and insists “This is not a ‘boy-king’ : it is a thoughtful mature ruler.” She also, using existent forensic evidence, criticises recent attempts to reconstruct what Tutankhamun’s face looked like. She refutes the idea that Tutankhamun had tuberculosis or had been murdered. There is no real evidence for either of these scenarios.

At which point she turns to the matter of how Tutankhamun was preserved and buried in death. She discusses the methods and importance of mummification – the draining of the brain which was the first thing drawn out of the corpse by a hook. Then the removal of the heart and other essential organs… and only then were acres of linen wound tightly around the mummy. Precious masks (often made of gold) covered the young pharaoh’s face. Riches and jars were sealed behind the various chambers that comprised the tomb. Elaborate blessings to the gods were carved into the tomb to help take Tutankhamun to the other world. Archaeology has proven that Tutankhamun was originally going to be entombed at a different site from the one where he was eventually entombed. This meant that the purified mummy had to be dragged on a sled over the bumpy sands to finally be put to rest.

What of Tutankhamun’s consort? His wife was obviously of regal pedigree. But Tyldesley is clear that the pharaoh had the right to marry many women for his harem. It is also clear that royal women could sometimes be used as bargaining chips with foreign countries. There survives a document which some Egyptian bureaucrat wrote, suggesting that an Egyptian princess could marry an important Hittite leader to make an alliance… though it apparently came to nothing.

And after these chapters, Tyldesley turns to burial customs for the commoners and peasants, and then the activities of thieves, who stole precious things from the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Commoners who could afford it had tombs with images of happy lives and partying. This was really a fantasy of a hope-for after-life. At very most, only 10% of the population was literate and had some wealth. Grave robbers would know that that they were violating hopes of an after-life, but were often involved in stealing whatever riches there were in the graves of the impoverished. There were very severe penalties for those who robbed graves, but theft was still an attractive way of life for the poor. There is also the fact that often one tomb would be ransacked to furnish another tomb, even by those were in charge of royal tombs. In this way, undertakers would take shortcuts to furbish an appointed tomb. It is possible that some of the artefacts found in 1922 in Tutankhamun’s tomb had in fact been taken from other tombs. Tutankhamun’s tomb was attacked by grave robbers very shortly after his interment. But then higher security was used, and there is evidence that the robbers had to work quickly and were therefore responsible for the messy way some of the tomb’s artefacts were found 3,000 years later.

Rounding off her account of Tutankhamun’s times, Tyldesley tells us that only after the young pharaoh died, Egypt fell apart in various ways and the Valley of the Kings was no longer used as the burial place of kings. All but the overlooked tomb of Tutankhamun, royal tombs were removed from the valley. At which point Joyce Tyldesley concludes her account of Tutankhamun’s times.

Professor Joyce Tyldesley with ancient Egyptian head of a queen.
 

The second part of Tutankhamun – Pharaoh, Icon, Enigma brings us to archaeology leading up to the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb and its aftermath.

Europeans began to be interested in Egyptian antiquity in the 18^th century, with European travellers writing books about what they had seen -  but barely understanding the ancient civilisation. Only when the Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion de-coded the “Rosetta Stone” could early Egyptologists understand and read Egyptian hieroglyphics. By the late-19^th century, most of the [ransacked] tombs in the Valley of the Kings had been discovered, but the search went on. Egypt’s Antiquities Service (mostly controlled by the French and the British) said that too many diggers were spoiling the valley. They decreed that only one team at a time could work there, under a legal warrant. In 1902, a wealthy American lawyer Theodore Monroe Davis – who was not an archaeologist – was given the warrant. He was wealthy enough to hire a very large team, American, European and Egyptian (Howard Carter was part of his team), and they made some real finds, including the [empty] tomb of Yula and Thuya. His expedition did not make use of cameras, meaning Theodore Monroe Davis could later not verify where exactly some artefacts had been found. Like many others, Davis wanted to find the tomb of Tutankhamun, not because Tutankhamun was a major figure but because his tomb had not yet been located. In 1914, he gave up his warrant, declaring the valley was exhausted and there were no more tombs to find. The irony was that his team had come very close to the site of Tutankhamun’s tomb, but they had overlooked it.

The extremely rich dilletante English aristocrat Lord Carnarvon was in no way an archaeologist, but it 1915 he gained the franchise to resume excavations in the Valley of the Kings. However, work was suspended for much of the [First] World War, and it began again only in 1917. Officially, Howard Carter was Carnarvon’s employee; but in fact it was Carter who led and supervised the whole expedition. Carter adopted the strategy of digging deeply to the bedrock of the valley and, in 1922, he finally found the steps that led down to the entrance of Tutankhamun’s tomb. He did not open the tomb until, one month later, Carnarvon joined him so that Carnarvon could take the credit for  being one of the first to step into the tomb. At this stage, British newspapers gave Carnarvon all the credit for finding the tomb. There followed the long and careful categorising of every artefact in the tomb. This time, photography was used to verify everything – from 1922 to 1930, over 3,000 photographs were taken inside the tomb by members of the expedition. It was soon understood by Carter that in ancient times, some things had been robbed from the tomb and much of what was found was left in disorderly disarray.

The tomb was protected from tourists. Carnarvon withdrew very soon after the discovery of the tomb – but he still had exclusive rights to the tomb and the only journalists he allowed to enter the tomb and report on progress were from the Times of London. This greatly annoyed other newspapers who hungered for information about the great find. So they turned to writers of fiction to pad out what little that they knew about the tomb and its discovery. Enter sensationalist tales about ancient curses that damned anyone entering the tomb. There were no such curses in the tomb, but when Lord Carnarvon died from an accident beginning with a mosquito bite, the sensationalists had a field day. Add to this a report claiming that at the very moment Carnarvon died, all the lights in Cairo went out. This too was fiction. So began the whole tradition of tales about mummy’s curses, occult events etc. etc., leading to entertaining horror movies. Archaeologists could either sigh or shrug their shoulders in the face of such nonsense. Throughout the 1920s there were still fierce quarrels about who had the right to see the tombs of the Valley of the Kings.

There was another attitude brought on by the excavation of ancient tombs. At this time, Egypt was basically ruled by Britain, though it officially had a king of its own. Egyptians were becoming increasingly nationalist in their views, as they often saw archaeologists as intruding on their treasures. They took badly the idea that it was a foreigner who had been the first to discover Tutankhamun’s tomb. So there was concocted the fictitious tale that the steps leading down to Tutankhamun’s tomb had really been discovered by a humble little Egyptian water-boy who had just happened to be doodling around ahead of Carter’s excavators.

There was another, and perhaps more reasonable, controversy. An English bishop raised the question of whether it was ethical to dig up corpses from the tomb. There was also the belief that it was unethical to dismember ancient bodies with autopsies. Inevitably, even the best doctors and pathologists destroyed or maimed part of Tutankhamun’s body, breaking bones in order to discover whether the young pharaoh had suffered from various diseases. Their conclusions were very contradictory. In her epilogue, Professor Tyldesley says that scientists are now using DNA to determine ancient Egyptian aristocratic bloodlines… but given the decay of blood over eons, she believes their efforts are not likely to yield an accurate result.

I think that, as in so many controversies, Tyldesley is right.