Tutankhamen (6 page)

When, in 1707, Father Claude Sicard, a determined Jesuit missionary, travelled to the small and insignificant town of Luxor, he became the first European to recognise and record the true nature of the Valley and its tombs:

Others soon followed. In 1743 the Reverend Richard Pococke's
Description of the East and Some Other Countries
fascinated his readers while providing a highly inaccurate plan of the tombs that would baffle archaeologists for many years to come:

In 1798 Napoleon's Commission – a band of scientists, historians and artists charged with recording Egypt ancient and modern – arrived to count a mere eleven tombs in the main Valley plus one in the Western Valley. Publication of their survey, as part of the
Description de l'Égypte
(1809 – 29), coincided with the culmination of Jean-François Champollion's work on the decoding of the hieroglyphic script. Suddenly, it was possible for scholars to read the texts that decorated the tomb and temple walls while the texts themselves were, for the first time, available to stay-at-home scholars via the plates of the
Description
. As her king-lists were deciphered, Egypt's lost history was restored and Egyptology became a proper, respectable subject for academic study. Museums that had once regarded Egyptian artefacts as beautiful but meaningless ‘dead ends' – unlike Greek and Roman artefacts, which had always been recognised as both beautiful and relevant to the development of Western civilisation – were now increasingly interested in acquiring them.

Explorers and treasure-hunters were drawn to the Valley. These first Egyptologists had no idea that the royal mummies had already been removed from their tombs, and their hope was always that an intact royal burial would be found. Theirs was not a pure, academic curiosity: enough non-royal burials had been recovered to suggest that a royal tomb would be packed with grave-goods which could be sold at great profit to the growing number of private and institutional collectors in the west. Finding the royal tombs was not, in fact, too difficult: from 1816 – 17 the ex-circus strongman Giovanni Battista Belzoni used his practical engineering skills to locate eight, including the
tomb of Ay. But, although they yielded occasional random artefacts, none of the tombs was intact.

The missing kings would not be discovered until the 1870s, when Ahmed el-Rassul, a member of a notorious family of tomb robbers, discovered the hidden entrance to the tomb of the High Priest Pinodjem II. As we have already seen, this tomb housed not only the Third Intermediate Period Pinodjem family burials, but an entirely separate cache of New Kingdom royal mummies. Because the royal mummies had already been stripped of all valuables, the el-Rassul brothers concentrated on the Pinodjem family grave goods. They were able to sell a series of illustrated papyri, bronze vessels, figurines and at least one mummy before their dealings attracted the attention of the Antiquities Service. On 6 July 1881 the el-Rassuls revealed the whereabouts of the tomb and Émile Brugsch, the representative of the Cairo Museum, was lowered down the shaft. To his amazement, he discovered a chamber packed with coffined and labelled mummies including the 18th Dynasty kings Ahmose, Amenhotep I, Tuthmosis I (a disputed mummy), Tuthmosis II and Tuthmosis III. A second chamber held the recently desecrated burials of the Pinodjem family.

Meanwhile, French Egyptologist Victor Loret had started to explore the Valley of the Kings. He was to discover sixteen tombs, but his most important discovery, in 1898, was the tomb of Amenhotep II (KV 35). Lying in the tomb passageway he found an anonymous male mummy stuck to a model boat. Within the Burial Chamber he found the king himself, stripped of all valuables and re-wrapped, but lying in his original quartzite sarcophagus. A sealed side chamber yielded three unwrapped, unconfined and unlabelled New Kingdom mummies lying side by side, each with a hole in the head and a damaged abdomen, while a second side chamber held nine plain coffins bearing royal names including those of the 18th Dynasty Tuthmosis IV and Amenhotep III.

Within just seventeen years, almost all the 18th Dynasty kings had
been rediscovered. Still missing were Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamen, Ay and Horemheb. Ay, however, had an open tomb in the Western Valley, while Akhenaten had an open tomb at Amarna. Hatshepsut's pillaged tomb would be identified in 1903 (KV 20); Horemheb's equally pillaged tomb in 1908 (KV 57). By 1910 only Smenkhkare and Tutankhamen lacked both a mummy and a tomb. Excavators searching for an intact 18th Dynasty royal tomb were effectively looking for these two relatively unknown characters.

The 19th Dynasty Ramesside kings were arrivistes, a military family from the north who, in order to justify their right to rule, consistently emphasised their links with Egypt's earlier kings. The temples that the commoner-born kings Seti I and Ramesses II built at Abydos therefore included King Lists: lines of ‘ancestor' pharaohs inscribed in chronological order. These lists omitted Akhenaten, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamen and Ay, passing directly from the well-respected Amenhotep III to the equally well-respected Horemheb. Excluded from Egypt's official history, Akhenaten and his immediate successors became non-kings: their reigns, totalling maybe thirty years, had never officially happened. Modern observers find this blatant falsification of history difficult to accept. To a people who accepted that the written word might have magical properties, however, it made perfect sense. History could and indeed must be corrected to reflect events as they should have been.

Fortunately, the missing kings had left enough textual and archaeological evidence to confirm the existence of the ‘Amarna Period' – the period when Egypt was ruled from the city of Amarna – and Egyptologists were in general agreement that the omitted reigns slotted into the late 18th Dynasty as follows:

The exact sequence of events surrounding the death of Akhenaten was, however, hazy, and the relationship between Akhenaten, Smenkhkare and Tutankhamen was uncertain, although the succession following the death of Tutankhamen was clear. As his immediate successor, Smenkhkare was generally assumed to have been Akhenaten's son. Egyptologist Percy Newberry, influenced by the florid Amarna art-style, felt able to draw a very different conclusion. Here he describes a round-topped limestone stela, a votive dedicated by the soldier Pasi, carved with an image of two kings, seated side by side on a couch. One king wears the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, the other wears the blue crown:

In fact Newberry was letting his imagination run away with him. It is not possible to determine who the two ‘kings' are, as the
cartouches which would have recorded their names are empty. While one is almost universally recognised as Akhenaten, the other has been variously identified as Smenkhkare, Nefertiti or Amenhotep III. Whatever their relationship, Smenkhkare was closely associated with Akhenaten as his co-regent. Like Akhenaten, he had ruled and died at Amarna and, while he was occasionally mentioned outside that city, he had almost certainly been buried in the Amarna royal tomb. It was therefore highly unlikely that his tomb would be discovered at Thebes.

Writing in 1917, for a non-specialist readership, the Reverend James Baikie, author of many popular books on Egypt and the Near East, told all that was known of Smenkhkare and Tutankhamen:

Five years later, E. Wallis Budge, Keeper of Egyptology at the British Museum, was able to summarise Tutankhamen's life and reign in just six sentences:

Tutankhamen was understood to have been Akhenaten's son-in-law. However, while he, too, had lived at Amarna, many of his monuments and texts had been discovered at Thebes. There had been a handful of finds at Memphis, Abydos and Gurob, and his name had even been mentioned outside Egypt, in Nubia and Palestine. Tutankhamen, unlike Smenkhkare, was not purely an Amarna king. The ‘Restoration Stela' – a large carved stone slab originally erected to stand before the third Pylon, or gateway, of the Karnak temple – confirmed this. Its thirty lines of text told how Tutankhamen worked to restore Egypt and her traditional gods after the tribulations of the Amarna Period: