Tutankhamen: The Life and Death of the Boy-King

PART ONE

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL TUTANKHAMEN

Introduction

The land of ancient Egypt is a distant one – not just geographically, but in time. But the time that has elapsed since the demise of the dynasties does not seem to have touched what remains. The monuments left behind by its people, the brilliantly coloured tombs and honey-gold temples, lure visitors into this ancient world daily as if into a world that is still alive. The archaeological remains in other countries are often fragmentary, and most of it may be available only to the specialist, but in Egypt, the warm dry climate has preserved everything more or less intact. The linen still lies in folds where someone placed it 3000 years ago; dried-out dishes of pigeon casserole still fill bowls that some chef served 4500 years ago; and the paint on the ancient tomb walls seems so fresh that, if you touched it, you feel sure that it would smudge. Leaving Cairo behind, that bustling, overpopulated, noisy and polluted capital city, you step back in time to a land where centuries disappear in the blinking of an eye. You may even see the faces of the great pharaohs in today’s Egyptians. A replica of Ramesses II may shine your shoes; Seti I may serve you coffee. It has happened to me! Egypt is a world where ancient and modern meet, and jostle equally for attention. Somehow, the magic that this country exerts makes you forget how very long ago it all happened.

In this book, I want to lead you not just to the land of ancient Egypt, but to a specific time and place. The time is the fourteenth century BC; the place is Luxor. In these sun-scorched streets, along the stone-lined processional routes of the temples, there once walked a young boy. Born Tutankhaten, he inherited the throne of Egypt and received the crown in the temple of Karnak. Nine years later, having changed his birth-name to Tutankhamen, he died suddenly, under mysterious circumstances. In late March, around 1325 BC, a burial was held within the silent walls of the Valley of the Kings on the west bank of the Nile in Luxor. Songs were sung, dances completed; then the tomb was sealed and forgotten. Not until AD 1922 was that lost world rediscovered.

The forces that shaped both that lost world and that long-ago boy were complex. Let us take a look at them.

Life in ancient Egypt: philosophy and belief

Egypt, as a politically united country, had come into existence some 1500 years before the time of Tutankhamen. During this period Egypt was in a state of cultural stasis: it seemed unchangeable. In many areas of Egyptian culture – art, medicine, architecture – once a satisfactory method was found, it was never altered. Egyptians regarded the physical world in its entirety as perfect order, which emerged from primeval chaos, with Egypt standing at the very heart of creation, the first mound of land to emerge from the oceans. They called this moment of creation the ‘First Occasion’.

In the Egyptian creation myth, on the First Occasion, when man had been brought into existence, everything was perfect, in harmony and complete balance. This state they personified as a goddess called Maat. Later, things began to get out of balance. The Egyptians believed that to maintain any order at all in the world, the harmony of the First Occasion needed to be recalled, using ceremonies and special words carried out by people with knowledge. There was thus a constant, ongoing struggle to return to the time of perfection. They considered that there could be only one solution to any given problem: if that solution was applied, order would be restored. So why consider another solution?

This philosophy of life was applied to all areas of knowledge and science along the banks of the Nile. A person was sick; set remedies were applied. The person lived, the remedy was recorded and in all future cases, the same remedy was then applied. There was no experimentation: research and development were frowned upon. If you developed a new method and it failed, you were directly culpable, because you had broken the link with Maat.

Life was tranquil; everyone knew their place. Egyptian society was rigidly hierarchical, and can be seen schematically as forming a pyramid. At the peak was the king; below him, a small group of close, trusted advisers; below them, the courtiers, the governors of provinces; below them, the mayors and skilled craftsmen; below them, the foremen and overseers; and at the bottom, the largest group – the workers who raised the crops and cut and moved stone for building works, to provide the wealth on which those at the top of the pyramid could grow rich and fat. Yet this bottom stratum seemed to have felt little resentment. After all, fate provided your status in life and there was nothing to stop you rising up through the pyramid – even to the very pinnacle itself.

There were rules that showed people how to act towards the other groups in society. From time to time, people such as Ptahhotep, Hordjedef, Ani and Amenemope recorded their thoughts for posterity in what we today call ‘wisdom literature’. Through all these texts, which are instructions from elders to the younger generation on appropriate behaviour in every aspect of life, shines the awareness of others’ needs. This was a philosophy based not on revenge but on understanding the needs of other people. Those philosophers said, you are rich; tomorrow those riches may be removed from you. It is your duty to look after those less fortunate than yourself and without gloating about it; tomorrow you may need that help, and you would not want anyone gloating over you.

Everyone, according to this ideal, should be benevolent and caring. Every high official in the court, according to the inscription of the appointing of a vizier (the king’s right-hand man) in the tomb of the courtier Rekhmire, on the west bank of Luxor, would have his words and actions judged by others. They were accountable not only to those above, to the king, but also those below – every poor man in the land. Every person was born to fulfil a preordained destiny, and this brought not only rights but also responsibilities. It was not for a man to be jealous of his neighbour. Every man, no matter how poor, may have food on the table or a child under his roof that would make him rich in another man’s eyes. Thus he should not brag about his position, but rather needed to work to maintain the responsibility that had been given to him. This applied to every individual, no matter what his status. Chief among all men on the social pyramid was the king; and his was the greatest responsibility of all.

The duties of a king

To understand a king’s role in ancient Egypt, we need to look more closely at how life itself was seen by Egyptian society. Order was prized above all. Every day the sun shone; every night the stars appeared; every year the Nile rose in its bed and flooded its banks, bringing life-giving water to the land; every year crops would grow. The ideal Universe was one of perfect balance, when everything came at its due time and gave according to requirements. This was the essential nature of Maat. The goddess Maat was a young girl with an ostrich feather in her headdress, or sometimes simply the feather itself. Some writers have characterised Maat as representing truth, but she was far more than that. Maat represented the events of the First Occasion, that ideal time when everything was naturally in balance. For equilibrium to exist, good as well as bad was needed; if everything was entirely good, then balance would not be achieved and Isfet, the twin of Maat, representing imbalance or chaos, would return.

The king of Egypt was not the most blessed and lucky individual according to these beliefs, but instead was the ultimate servant. The highest social rights brought with it the highest responsibility. His was the essential preservation of Maat, first within Egypt, and then the rest of the world and the cosmos. Exactly how he was expected to do this is open to debate, and seems to have changed subtly over the years, according to the concept of kingship evidenced at any one time. About 2500 BC, during the time of the Old Kingdom, when the great pyramids were built, texts make it clear that the king was considered to be a living god. Coming into his presence was felt as terrifying. At the end of the Old Kingdom, however, as officials left their home towns to gain promotion at the feet of Pharaoh, work in the local regions became unorganised, and often stopped altogether. When the floodwaters of the Nile subsided, for example, the first priority of local officials was to order and organise the cutting of drainage ditches to enable the land to be drained speedily so that crops would grow. This was not done, and in the flooded fields the crops rotted. People starved. In the provinces, officials left autobiographical texts in their tombs that spoke of cannibalism in some areas as people tried to survive.

The king who emerged from this chaos and ruled during the time of the Middle Kingdom was not so much deemed a living god as seen as the propitiator of the god Amun. His duty was to ask the gods for their cooperation in the maintenance of Maat. How precisely this was done is uncertain. It is clear that the king ‘requested’ aid daily from the chief national god of his time. To do this he entered the temple alone, and went into the sanctuary, a hidden, dark and secret place where ‘lived’ the statue of the god. Here the king undertook secret ceremonies that ensured the continuation of Maat, the growth of crops, the regularity of the inundation, the circulation of the sun – in short, by carrying out these ceremonies correctly, the people of Egypt could give their entire consideration to their own responsibilities, whatever these might be, to ensure that their contribution to Maat was successful. If these ceremonies were abandoned or carried out incorrectly, it was feared that the uncontrolled chaos of Isfet would return, and Maat would be driven out. If this ever happened, succeeding kings would have their work cut out to satisfy the forces of the cosmos in order that Maat might be restored.

It was in the middle of the Eighteenth Dynasty, about 1350 BC, that these fears suddenly and unexpectedly became justified. A king, Akhenaten, came to the throne and did not carry out the continuity of service, broke with the old ways, turned his back on the First Occasion and tried instead to introduce a new order. It was not so much his new ideas that seemed to be frightening Egypt; it was the abandonment of Maat.

We now need to take a look at the world-within-a-world that Akhenaten so shook up – the royal families of Egypt.

The Egyptian royal family

At the start of the Eighteenth Dynasty there had been no inkling of what was to come. By 1550 BC, Egypt, having been occupied for a short period by foreign rulers (see here), fought its way back to independence. The family from Luxor who formed the Eighteenth Dynasty was made up in part of fighting men proud of their strength and military prowess. While they were away in battle, their women, back home in Upper Egypt, held the reins. Queens Tetisheri, Ahhotep and Ahmose-Nefertari in succession took political control and ruled, as well as raising troops and sending supplies northwards for their husbands.

The example of these three great women at the start of the dynasty seems to have made a profound impression on the royal family. Yet there had been no dearth of powerful women in the early years of Egypt’s history, when they had played an important part in ruling the country. In those times, there seems to have been no discernable difference between the roles that could be played by male and female. For the following five centuries after the unification of Egypt, during the Old Kingdom period, women encouraged and supported their menfolk, were depicted in art as equal in size, had independent status and, often, tombs and estates of their own, and were often given ranks and titles of great status. At the end of the Old Kingdom, this attitude, seems to have changed profoundly, as did the whole nature of kingship. The women of the Middle Kingdom suddenly became relatively insignificant, powerless and historically characterless.

At the start of the New Kingdom Tetisheri, Ahhotep and Ahmose-Nefertari changed all that. But it should not be thought that they were a feminist force determined deliberately to change the status of women; rather, they reacted to circumstances. After generations in which women had been anonymous and powerless, they might have been condemned for their forwardness, but they were greatly admired. The tomb of Queen Ahhotep, discovered by Auguste Mariette in 1859, contained three huge flies, the size of an open hand, cast in gold. These were referred to in a military inscription as a royal award for military valour. Since these were awarded only by the Pharaoh and usually to men who had fought bravely on the battlefield, they must have been given to her either by her husband Seqenenre Tao II or by her son King Amosis. The question of whether she received them for actually leading men into battle, or for providing troops and supplies for them, is currently open to debate.

The honouring of these remarkable women is emphasised by an inscription of a stela or commemorative stone found in Abydos and now in the Cairo Museum. It tells how King Amosis wanted to remember his grandmother, Queen Tetisheri, by building a pyramid, a memorial chapel and a garden on the sacred land of Abydos, the place where Egypt’s first kings had been buried 2000 years earlier.

This inscription was written in pictures that we call hieroglyphs. Whatever their meaning, the pictures themselves are extremely informative. In the back of Sir Alan Gardiner’s Middle Egyptian Grammar, first published in the 1940s and still the principal grammar in English, there is a comprehensive list of symbols. Included in this are fifty-eight symbols showing men and their occupations. These are as varied as might be expected, and include some highly unlikely ones, such as ‘man hiding behind a wall’ and ‘man standing on his head’! In contrast, there are only five pictures of women, showing them either as a queen, a ‘mistress of the house’ – an honourable position that demanded they be waited on hand and foot and so showed them with their hands tucked inside an all-enveloping cloak – or as pregnant, giving birth or suckling a child. This limited list would seem to imply that women were subjected to total discrimination by men. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Women were respected, treasured and given an equal place in society, even under the law, although they were seldom expected to work outside the home. Because of this past, royal women in ancient Egypt often held posts that were merely honorific.

Apropos of this last point, the titles of ‘Queen’ and ‘Princess’ are non-existent in the ancient Egyptian language, even though you will find those words in even the most respectable translations. Where they are used, they are mistranslations of the titles ‘King’s Wife’ and ‘King’s Daughter’. There may not seem to be much difference at first sight. But ‘Queen’ is a title held by a woman in her own right, while ‘King’s Wife’ only gives her status by virtue of marriage to a royal husband. Although these titles, together with ‘King’s Sister’ and ‘King’s Mother’, were the highest any ancient Egyptian women could hope to acquire, they too were purely honorific. They did not entitle her to any income or loyalty from the court except what was given to her by the king himself.

But in those extraordinary early years of the Eighteenth Dynasty there appeared a new female title, ‘God’s Wife’ or sometimes ‘God’s Wife of Amen’. This title is much debated today. It was given to a very limited number of royal ladies, was often inherited by their daughters, and seems to have been an actual office of state rather than a simple honour. When a woman acquired this title, she would use it in preference to all the other titles that she held from the king. This would imply that it was an office of her own, rather than one gained from her proximity to the king. It brought with it status, high income and the service of high-ranking courtiers.

The start of the Eighteenth Dynasty also saw the rise of another title for royal women, ‘Great Royal Wife’. The woman who took this title seems usually to have been given it on the day of the king’s coronation, whether they had been ‘married’ before or not. At the moment there is no suggestion that she was actually crowned alongside him, although one suspects that some ceremonial would have been needed in order to elevate her to this lofty rank. Many books assume that the title merely belonged either to the first wife that the king took, or to the mother of the king’s first child – in other words, that the title was automatically given. This is not the case. This title belongs to a significant royal head of state, a lady whose royal rank equalled that of her husband. As the king was considered to be of divine nature, so was she. As he acted as god’s chief representative within the temple and on state ceremonies, so she acted similarly towards the goddess. She was publicly at his side, as goddess to his god. As the king represented the male element in creation, so she represented the female.

All this meant that she was not necessarily wife first and foremost, but was rather official state consort. To illustrate what I mean in British terms, this might be compared to the offices of mayor and mayoress. The latter has her own defined duties. The two people holding office may be man and wife; but they may not be related at all. The mayor might well be married to a wife who does not want the official position and thus hands it to another woman. By so doing, she does not also hand over her role as wife, nor does the mayoress become his wife just because she holds the office. On some occasions the mayor may even be a woman, but a mayoress will still be appointed. And of course this does not in any way mean that there is any sexual relationship between the two. Exactly the same relationship existed between a king and his ‘Great Royal Wife’ – she may have been his actual wife, but then again, she may not have.

Because of this vital role that she played in the maintenance of Maat, the choice of Great Royal Wife was one of the most important decisions a new king had to make at the start of his reign. It was vital that she ‘knew the ropes’ – was aware of the public role demanded of her. She would often be very closely related to the king, frequently his full or half sister. This emphasised her divine status. Although it is generally believed that the ancient Egyptian ruling class always married their sisters, brother–sister marriages were, in fact, the practice only within the central royal family. But in the Egyptian creation myth, brother and sister deities married in order first to create and then to maintain the stability of the cosmos. So the marriage between a king and his sister showed them as being no longer of humankind, but rather as veritable gods on earth, with similar responsibility for maintaining Egypt. These brother–sister marriages were seldom