Pod Insights Empire: World History 367. Ancient Egypt: “Tut-mania” And Tutankhamun’s Tomb (Ep 6) About this episode **Unlock the entire Ancient Egypt series early and ad-free by joining the Empire Club at empirepoduk.com**
Why did the world go crazy for all things Ancient Egypt after the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922? How were his treasures used in Cold War Diplomacy? And why did they invent Ancient Egypt-themed contraceptives?
Anita and William are joined once again by Dr Campbell Price, author of Golden Mummies of Egypt, and Curator of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum, to discuss Tutmania.
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2:37 Speaker 03 Wow, hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arndt.
2:41 Speaker 04 And me, William Derumpel. Now, in the last episode, we saw the end of Akhenaten's dynasty with the death of the boy king Tutankhamun, who had no heirs. Today, we bring you a special episode to wrap up the series. We are discussing when everyone went crazy for Tut in the aftermath of the incredible 1922 discovery. We are joined once again by the brilliant and wonderful, my compatriot, Dr Campbell Price.
3:12 Speaker 05 Hi, hi, hi. Nice to be back.
3:14 Speaker 03 We're so delighted to have you back. We did a bonus episode for anybody who wants to go and listen, where we talked in depth about the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. For those of you who want to listen to it, join our club, empirepod.uk.com. But, you know, we talked about this man, Howard Carter. Unlikely, because he wasn't from one of, you know, the top notches of British education establishment, an Egyptologist who discovers the intact tomb of Tutankhamun. It's the best preserved pharaonic tomb in existence. And Howard Carter, after this 1922 discovery, Campbell, the world goes nuts for King Tut.
3:57 Speaker 05 They do, Anita, they absolutely do. And it's worth saying, 1922 also represented the centenary of the decipherment of hieroglyphs by Frenchman Jean-François Champollion. So it was a double whammy of Egyptomania. And it's difficult to, I think, yeah, over emphasise just what.
4:19 Speaker 05 Tutankhamun meant how much he caught the zeitgeist of the moment in the 1920s.
4:24 Speaker 03 And I suppose that's not a coincidence when so many people are thinking about, you know, the senseless loss of young lives, Tutankhamun, the boy king, and, you know, the world has just come out of World War One where so many young men died.
4:37 Speaker 05 Well, going into the excavation, Carter and the team didn't know that Tutankhamun was a boy. That was information that came out from the discovery and aging of his body. But when it became known that he died about the age of 18, of course, yeah, that resonated with that lost generation of of young men in Europe. And the aesthetics of the tomb, the idea of discovery, the idea of finding something that was hidden and was secret. But then you've got to remember, yeah, roaring twenties, art deco, all that angularity and geometric design that the tomb was filled with, really spoke to the moment.
5:15 Speaker 04 And there's also the timing in terms of mass media. After the First World War, you're getting things like photography, illustrated newspapers, radio, all that is beaming this stuff out, isn't it? And it has a kind of global presence in a way that it just wouldn't have done in the in the early years of the century.
5:34 Speaker 05 Yeah, in a way, it's the first big global news story that's not about war. In the aftermath of the First World War, you're right, there's, there's, you know, there's improvement in communications, there's a greater use of colour. So not just in in newspapers, but a lot of the Tutankhamun material was visualised in the Illustrated London News. That's where you could see a lot of the photographs, often colourised photographs of the finds. So it spread not only because it was a great story, but because there was a means to communicate, to literally to telegraph this this news around the world.
6:12 Speaker 03 And advertisers who are never backwards about coming forwards, they jump all over it very, very quickly, don't they? Because you have pretty much Egyptian motifs on on everything.
6:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, there's a there's a great rage for for Tutankhamun. I mean, everything from, from soap to clothing to contraceptives are Egypt themed. So yes, yes, it's, it's a big moment.
6:36 Speaker 04 Tell me about the Egyptian themed contraceptives.
6:39 Speaker 03 I'm so glad you asked, because I, there was the question I wanted to know the answer to. Yes, do tell us about the contraceptives. What are we talking about?
6:45 Speaker 04 Hieroglyphs covered? I mean, what's the?
6:47 Speaker 05 Don't think there were hieroglyphs on them.
6:49 Speaker 03 Was it sort of obelisk? I mean, oh no, genuinely, Campbell, we want to know.
6:52 Speaker 04 First time, prices crashing.
6:54 Speaker 03 Yes.
6:55 Speaker 05 Well, I mean, the Rameses name is, is, is kind of ironic because he had a hundred children. So don't know how effective.
7:01 Speaker 03 Oh, that's funny.
7:02 Speaker 05 A contraception device with the name Rameses would have been. But I think it's both high culture, you know, it's really expensive, nice stuff. And pretty low culture stuff takes inspiration from pharaonic Egypt generally, but Tutankhamun in particular.
7:17 Speaker 03 So, I mean, Carter gets bombarded with silly requests, you know, things like, um, you know, can you, can you send us the designs of the shoes? Cause we want to make footwear. Um, you've got grocers wanting to sell packets of mummified food, as you say, from everything, you know, soap, gloves, everything else is sort of just getting stamped with, with hieroglyphs and, and these faces that have been exposed. Um, why? Now you tell me, why do you think, Campbell, that this tut mania suddenly takes hold? What was it about this tomb and its contents?
7:51 Speaker 05 There's an element of the, the timing, sure, you know, that is pretty kind of slow news days, perhaps after the First World War. There is the gleam of gold, which always assures interest, fashion, celebrity, glamour, royalty. At a time when European monarchies were maybe not entirely all of them feeling confident about their possessions. But then there's the act of discovery, something which, you know, it's, it's the kind of, um, the, the challenge of discovery of planning and then searching and then eventually finding
8:33 Speaker 05 this absolutely untold splendor just waiting in the sands of Egypt. There'd always been interest, you know, interest in Egyptology was, was way back before Napoleon showed up. But then it just reaches this kind of fever pitch. And along with the, um, the telecommunications and the visuals.
8:53 Speaker 05 Yeah, it just goes wild for several years and then drops off to nothing.
8:57 Speaker 04 Why is it that it has so much more of an effect in popular culture than, I mean, around the same time you've got, you know, Woolley digging the royal tombs of Ur. And that's got some pretty good gold and lapis too, but it doesn't have the same effect on popular culture that that tut does.
9:14 Speaker 05 No, exactly. And I think it's not just about the bullion, you know, it's not that there's just more gold in the tomb of Tutankhamun. It's about the way it's fashioned, the way it's shaped, especially in the way the face of Tutankhamun literally speaks to us. And it's something we talked about in that previous episode about the discovery, Howard Carter's sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, whose name is inextricably linked with Tutankhamun, the curse of Tutankhamun. The greatest curse on Carnarvon was that he never saw the golden mask.
9:44 Speaker 04 It's extraordinary.
9:46 Speaker 05 Yeah.
9:47 Speaker 04 Fact that, because we always associate him, you have the picture of Howard Carter beside the mask, and it's always assumed that he saw it, but he didn't.
9:55 Speaker 05 He didn't. And the the aesthetics of that, well, the craftsmanship of the mask. Of course, the king is represented in a number of other objects in a very, almost kind of androgynous way, because this is typical, as we said, of the Amarna revolution, the time Tutankhamun lived in. His father is a religious revolutionary, Akhenaten, and he favors the worship of one god. And in doing so, he kind of slices male and female. And so regardless of what the people looked like, we'll never really know for sure, they are depicted with very long skulls and very androgynous faces.
10:34 Speaker 04 That's what Anita calls ET chic.
10:36 Speaker 03 ET chic, it's exactly what I call it. Yes, the rounded bellies and narrow shoulders.
10:41 Speaker 05 And Tutankhamun's mask, which may have actually been reused from from a mask made for Nefertiti, some people believe, some Egyptologists believe, has pierced ears. They were covered when Tutankhamun was found by Carter, but the fact that they have pierced ears and what survives and what's presented adds to this androgynous kind of appeal. Tutankhamun is something for everyone. He speaks to every generation, taste, background.
11:08 Speaker 04 This also coincides, not just with the southern efflorescence of mass media, but there's also the very important political moment, isn't there? Because in 1922, Egypt gets its independence. The Brits, who've been sitting there since the time of Lord Cromer dominating Egypt, have become very unpopular and they withdraw.
11:29 Speaker 05 Absolutely, this is so important to recognise. Yeah, after the invasion of Egypt in 1882, Cromer's been there for quite a while. Egypt gets partial independence, you could say. The Brits are quite keen to control access to the Suez Canal because of its linkage with South Asia and the broader world. But yes, it's a moment of Egyptian national identity asserting political independence. And so Tutankhamun arrives on the world scene at a very interesting and very sensitive time for Egyptian politics.
12:05 Speaker 03 I mean, that must have a moulding effect on Egypt's population as well. Because, you know, there is a religion, it's Islam. And yet you've got now people becoming completely obsessed with something that entirely predates Islam or any Abrahamic religion.
12:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think there was always interest. I mean, people often forget that a lot of scholarship before Europeans showed up was written in Arabic.
12:29 Speaker 03 Good point.
12:30 Speaker 05 Egyptian and other Arab-speaking, Arab-writing scholars were describing ancient Egypt. But you're right, in 1922, there's the rise of what's called pharaonism. So this is the deliberate, explicit pushing back against colonialism, British colonialism, and trying to connect to the pharaonic past. So it influences architecture, it influences discourse at the time of the 1920s into the 1930s. Ultimately, it kind of goes out of fashion after then, but it's quite hot around the time of Tutankhamun's discovery.
13:09 Speaker 04 How does it manifest? You don't have the speaker in the Egyptian parliament dressing up in ancient Egyptian garb or anything, no?
13:16 Speaker 05 No, no, no, you don't. But so you have the Prime Minister, Saad Zaghloul, who is, you know, proud of pharaonic history and of Egypt's independence. And I think there's something about Egypt being a self-contained...
13:32 Speaker 05 United country at the time, a kingdom, remember, there is a king of Egypt, still in the 1920s.
13:38 Speaker 04 Farouk at this point?
13:40 Speaker 05 Not yet Farouk, he's the 1930s, but King Fuad, the first his father. I mean, Egypt is always the kind of in-between place, as Egyptian friends might say. They're partly foot foot in different camps. But there is a real need to assert ownership of the Tutankhamun find, because remember, Howard Carter, his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, does a deal with the Times of London. So the news exclusively of the find, when it's discovered, is channeled through a British newspaper. So if you're an Egyptian journalist, or if you're an Egyptian consumer of news, that's quite an insult.
14:20 Speaker 03 Do the Egyptian newspapers, do we know that they respond in kind? Are there sort of ceremonies to say, you know what, it's ours, not theirs? We did know about this, this is our birthright, not a European one, not Howard Carter's?
14:32 Speaker 05 Yeah, there's anger, of course, there's anger because there's anti-British sentiment anyway in Egypt at the time. And, I mean, everything can be nuanced, of course. I mean, Carter had lived and worked in Egypt for a long time, could speak Arabic, was good friends with lots of Egyptian people. But his stated interest was in the scientific objectivity of the excavation, and he wanted to control access. I mean, that's Carter's claim. So he had his specialists, who were mainly, but not exclusively, Europeans or Americans. And so in doing the deal with the Times, he claims, he wanted to just simplify the news communication.
15:16 Speaker 05 But that, of course, put a lot of, understandably, a lot of Egyptian noses out of joint.
15:21 Speaker 04 Campbell, just tell me a little bit more about the politics of this, because 1920s is the, almost the high point of Pan-Arabism. You've got a lot of talk about Syria, Palestine is under the British mandate, and there's a lot of frustration over the Balfour Declaration and so on, and Al-Aram is publishing articles from Cairo attacking all this. Do you have the Egyptians very much?
15:47 Speaker 04 Taking on their Arab identity and opposing it from an Arab point of view? Or are they saying we're descendants of the Egyptians? And our moolids still contain many of the same, uh, these religious festivals contain many of the echoes of pharaonic festivals? Or how, how is this, how does it play out?
16:05 Speaker 05 I, I think this ebbs and flows, uh, really. Um, although in the 1920s and 30s, you have pharaonism and this, this desire to connect with pharaonic past to, to stand against European colonialism is, uh, strong.
16:22 Speaker 04 Right.
16:23 Speaker 05 That kind of pan Arabism, that takes over into independence. So full independence, of course, with, with the seizing of the Suez Canal, liberation of the Suez Canal in the 1950s. So there are reasons when that becomes more significant later on, but around the time of Tutankhamun, that's like a touch paper to connect more closely with, uh, pharaonic heritage, not to dismiss and ignore Islamic heritage, but to be proud of a pharaonic history.
16:54 Speaker 03 Very interesting. I mean, we, we sort of talked about this during our Persia series as well, the way sort of young Iranians were, were harkening back to.
17:02 Speaker 04 Looking to Persepolis, exactly.
17:04 Speaker 03 Exactly that. And I, I mean, putting matters temporal to one side for a moment, can, can we talk about matters supernatural as well? Because the curse of.
17:14 Speaker 04 Oh, we like a good curse on this. I can see, I can see Campbell coming over all skeptical again though.
17:19 Speaker 03 No, no, no, I'm, I'm not, I'm not suggesting there was a curse, but I'm, what I'm asking is in, in 1922, were people obsessed with the idea that, you know, this is cursed? We shouldn't, we shouldn't talk about it or, you know, it's, it's killing people. I mean, what was that sort of portrayed as at the time, both in Egypt and in Britain?
17:37 Speaker 05 Well, so, I mean, this is probably.
17:40 Speaker 04 We know that, we know that tone in Campbell's voice when he says, well.
17:45 Speaker 05 This is something which is, yeah, probably the most well-known aspect. You know, the, the, the, the, the fine points of 18th dynasty chronology are not so scintillating as, you know, Lord Carnarvon was, was bumped off by a pharaoh's curse.
18:02 Speaker 04 And the dog howled.
18:04 Speaker 05 I think there's something underlying throughout the excavation. And it's something, you know, in Carter's description. So behind me, I've got a cardboard cutout of one of the so-called guardian statues.
18:18 Speaker 03 Handsome he is too.
18:20 Speaker 05 So one thing which bubbles along under the, the more kind of headline-worthy news about the curse is a certain anxiety about the status of the tomb. And so Howard Carter describes these two black painted gilded statues of the king as guardian statues. I've got a cardboard cutout of one of them in my office behind me. And these are actually ritual representations of the king that may have been used during the king's lifetime, but which ended up in the tomb ante-chamber. So among the first things that Carter saw. And he describes them as sentinels because they hold weapons and they seem quite menacing.
19:05 Speaker 05 It almost kind of implies that Carter feels guilty for probing further into the tomb. So there is this, in a way, a kind of colonial guilt about the, the entering and the emptying of a, a pharaoh's tomb. And that finds real expression in a narrative which is cooked up by people who feel kind of left out in the cold by the Times deal. So the Times of London, uh, reporting deal means that in order to generate, you know, copy for newspapers, journalists have to write about something. And so this idea of, especially after Carnarvon's death.
19:49 Speaker 05 The supposition that it's a curse really kind of balloons.
19:53 Speaker 03 And what's interesting is that, you know, Carter's having none of it. He sees it for what it is and describes it as Tommy Rot. Any, any mention of the curse is Tommy Rot, he says. But, but what is also interesting is the human condition. Because you have talk of the supernatural and talk of a curse, people are even more interested in seeing it with their own eyes. And, you know, getting their hands on merch if they can.
20:14 Speaker 05 I mean, I think there's always, there had always been an association between pharaonic Egypt and magic. So appears in scripture, Egyptian magicians, and that persists because, you know, we're talking about pharaonic religion. Appears to an outsider quite mysterious, quite arcane, quite in some ways quite threatening. There's lots of things to do with the dead, focused on tombs and graves. So all of this makes a really heady cocktail that speaks to the, to the moment.
20:45 Speaker 04 But it's also significant for the moment that all this stuff stays in Egypt. We, you know, for the previous two centuries, most of the good stuff is being shipped out. You go to Italy and there's this enormous Egyptian museum in Turin, associated with the, the early Italian royal family. The British Museum is obviously notoriously chock a block with Egyptian goodies. Now, Tutankhamun's, which is the best stuff of all, stays in Egypt. And that would not have happened presumably 20 or 30 years earlier.
21:16 Speaker 05 No, and there's an interesting play on the rulebook. Because it said that if a tomb was found intact, certainly a royal tomb, that it should stay property of the state in its entirety. But if a tomb is robbed, in some way not intact or not a coherent group of objects. Then it's subject to this system of finds division, this colonial system cooked up by an Englishman and a Frenchman. Flinders Petrie and Gaston Maspero. So when Carter finds Tutankhamun, they find evidence and play up, deliberately play up the evidence that the tomb had been robbed. So this seems to be done as a way of-
22:00 Speaker 04 They're trying to get it all out. Yeah.
22:02 Speaker 05 Yeah. Well, getting at least some-
22:05 Speaker 04 Some of it out. Yeah.
22:06 Speaker 05 Carter describes as recompense for Lord Carnarvon, because Lord Carnarvon has spent a lot of money on the excavation. And this is also the justification for the times deal. Because Carter, sorry, Canarvan himself has spent a lot of cash in doing the business of archaeology. It's not cheap.
22:26 Speaker 04 Now, Canarvan does get bits out because when you go to Downton Abbey today, in the basement, there is, there is some stuff. There's quite a lot of Egyptian bits and bobs, but it's not obviously the gold mask or any of the really big knockout objects.
22:41 Speaker 05 No, and to be clear, it's just so we're not done for libel, Highclere Castle doesn't have any actual Tutankhamun stuff. I don't believe any of that.
22:48 Speaker 04 There's some Egyptian stuff.
22:50 Speaker 05 It has Egyptian stuff because Carter was a buyer for Canarvan before the find of Tutankhamun.
22:57 Speaker 04 That's not Tutankhamun stuff that you see there in the basement.
22:59 Speaker 05 So this is not necessarily directly connected to the tomb, but for sure Carter does pocket a couple of things which may end up outside of Egypt, but then subsequently are returned.
23:10 Speaker 04 You wouldn't possibly be able to say.
23:12 Speaker 03 We can comment on the fact that there were massive rows about this, that Carter was accused of, you know, pocketing an amulet, which then gets given to somebody in 1934. And the allegation is very clear that, you know, while he was taking stuff out and putting things in crates and counting things up, there's stuff that went uncounted and slipped into pockets.
23:33 Speaker 05 Yes, that's a nice way to put it.
23:35 Speaker 03 I think we'll leave it at that. Okay.
23:38 Speaker 05 We'll leave it at that, but, but it's important to say that that was at the time the expectation of any find. That was just how things were done. But back to the political context, with the Egyptian government keen to assert its own authority, it was no question to, to Egyptian officials at the time that everything should stay as one find. You know, the power of the Tutankhamun galleries in the Grand Egyptian Museum now is that they are everything together and you can see everything together from the tomb.
24:09 Speaker 03 So Campbell, I mean, look, this is the first wave, we should say, of Tart mania. There is a second wave to come. And just as the first wave comes on the heels of a hot war, the second one has a lot more to do with the Cold War. Join us after the break and we'll talk about this some more.
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25:38 Speaker 03 Welcome back. So just before the break, we were sort of giving you a little tease about the second wave of Tuck Mania, but we ought to talk about events in Egypt, which we've, you know, done a whole series on here at Empire. And that is, you know, NASA's rise to power, the whole Suez crisis. And this complete assertion of, you know, Egyptian pride, if you like, Campbell. And, and with that assertion, where you've got sort of a living figure like NASA, I guess the Egyptology kind of fades into the background because here's a living, breathing colossus that people can fixate on.
26:13 Speaker 05 Yes, absolutely. I think most important to, to mention, of course, is Egypt's complete independence in the 1950s. And so NASA is the president of Egypt and that ushers in a period of great ambition. So the plan is pretty soon realised to raise the Aswan High Dam to generate energy. And so going hand in hand with that, I think there is a notable. Slump in interest in Tutankhamun, there's a slump in interest in Egyptian archaeology in general, and certainly non Egyptian archaeologists working in Egypt don't dry up entirely, but aren't so significant. But in order to raise awareness and raise
26:58 Speaker 05 funds for the Aswan High Dam project and the removal, the movement if you like, of the temples that are threatened with flooding, so temples of Abu Simbel, most famously, temple of Philai in the south of Egypt near Aswan, Tutankhamun has to go on tour. So although, as we will discuss, there are major, you know, tours of geopolitical importance in the 1970s, actually in the early 60s, some material of Tutankhamun goes around several venues in the United States, seen by Jackie Kennedy, this is a, this is a big thing, it's already a diplomatic move. So it's ancient objects, ancient material, being leveraged for modern fundraising.
27:43 Speaker 04 So certainly from a British point of view, the big moment of wave two Tutankhamun if you like, is 1972, when President Sadat, who's the guy who takes over after Nasser, the guy who we met most recently with the 1973 war, attacking over the Suez Canal, and then Camp David, those are all episodes which you can, you can listen to on, on our backlist. He sends Tutankhamun to the British Museum in London. And I remember as a seven year old, some of my earliest memories, the excitement. I was already mad keen on Tutankhamun
28:24 Speaker 04 and I knew already the galleries in Edinburgh backwards. And I begged, and I begged, and I begged to go to London to see this thing. And it was my first ever trip to London. And I went down and I remember being amazed by everything, by the, by the double decker buses and the Hare Krishna people who were outside the British Museum playing on their, on their drums, and then going in and this darkened museum space. With this amazing lighting of this, you know, completely iconic death mask at the centre. And I remember, you know, as a literally a seven year old peering up at it because I was physically down below it. You have certain memories from your childhood which are completely clear.
29:06 Speaker 04 This for me is one of those, it's my first big moment, my first big trip, it was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me. And it was, everything of that entire trip is, is absolutely sharp in my memory.
29:17 Speaker 03 So I mean, you know, that, that tour had a profound effect on a, on a man who's then going to devote his life to, to history. Where else did the tour go? And do we know what kind of impact it had on the people who, who saw?
29:30 Speaker 05 Yeah, well, that's a great story, William. Thank you for, for sharing it. I would love to have been one of those, those people.
29:36 Speaker 04 You're too young, Campbell, you're too young, you're barely out of short trousers.
29:41 Speaker 05 A little bit later. But I know several noted Egyptologists who, like you, were children in the queue and that inspired them to become Egyptologists. It's worth saying about that show, that really iconic 1972 show, there were 50 objects, including the famous gold mask, selected to mark 50 years since the find. So 1972, of course, was 50 years since 1922. And then that really ushered in the literal blockbuster because that and other venues clocked up, well, at the BM, almost a million people in the United States, eight million people, where people were queuing around the block. So it busts the block. So there,
30:26 Speaker 05 there's the origin of the, the phrase. And one thing as a curator, I'm often struck by in looking at the photos and the press around that time, is the dramatic lighting. So it were, the rooms were dark, the galleries were dark, objects were not given much in the way of contextual information, but they were spotlit. And so they really loomed out of the darkness.
30:48 Speaker 03 They popped, as we say.
30:50 Speaker 05 They popped and it's, they absolutely popped.
30:53 Speaker 03 Yeah. So in, in what Britain has, has taught the Egyptians and said at the helm is that there is a Hunger for this and he's a savvy man as we've discussed in our Egypt series before. And he realises that there is a certain currency and kudos that, you know, soft power, if you like, with jumping on the back of this tuck mania. And what's really interesting, Campbell, is that there is a tour of the Soviet Union between 1973 and 1975. So, straight after the British Museum enormous success. And it's interesting because Sadat himself has kicked out previously, all his Soviet advisers previously. When he comes to power, he's sick of them, you know, littering the place and boots them all out.
31:36 Speaker 03 And yet he realises, if I want to build a bridge, let's make it a pharaonic bridge.
31:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, and emphasis on the soft power. Because although, as I said, Tutankhamun or items from Tutankhamun's tomb had been on tour in the United States in the 60s, you know, big stuff like the gold mask really do speak to diplomacy. The numbers also, I suspect, really shocked people because there are hundreds of thousands of people queuing up. And it gets, yeah, it gets the cultural products of one country in the newspapers of another. So it does help with diplomacy. But then the relationship, I think, with the USSR tools on the international scene generally.
32:20 Speaker 05 But that with the United States warms up and that introduces the possibility of a return visit for Tutankhamun with bigger flasher things, including the mask in the second half of the 1970s.
32:36 Speaker 04 This, as we know from our Camp David episode, is in the aftermath of 1973 war. Sadat is making peace with Israel. Carter is pulling Sadat close to him.
32:49 Speaker 05 Jimmy Carter, not Howard Carter.
32:51 Speaker 04 Jimmy Carter, not Howard Carter, not to be confused. And Tutankhamun goes off in the wake of all this, round the States. He goes to Washington, Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Seattle. For three years between 1976 and 1979, Toot is on the move. And we even get a law case, don't we, when there's a policeman who has a stroke while guarding the treasure? And his legal claim on the city is that the injuries resulted from the curse of the fairies.
33:23 Speaker 05 I've not heard that one, but I would fully believe it.
33:27 Speaker 03 Very happy to tell you, it says it's Police Lieutenant George E. Labrush, who had the stroke and tried that on.
33:34 Speaker 04 History doesn't relate whether he got his injury claim with the Curse of the Pharaoh.
33:38 Speaker 03 But what does happen is that, you know, as a tool of diplomacy during the Cold War, suddenly, you know, the pharaohs are front and centre.
33:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, and I think that's probably also more generally in museums, the idea of the, you know, temporary touring exhibition as a diplomatic tool comes to the fore. It's not just for ancient Egyptian material. So, yeah, I mean, Tutankhamun can go places that maybe politicians can't, or you can smooth the way. And that has, yeah, reverberations in pop culture, particularly in America. Yeah, for Egyptology.
34:18 Speaker 03 And what's really interesting is that that American exhibition happened because the canniest operator of them all, Henry Kissinger, personally gets involved. So Metropolitan Museum, Campbell, I'm right in saying, you know, hmm, not sure, dunno. And he picks up a phone and says, are you mad? Just say yes.
34:35 Speaker 05 You're gonna take it.
34:36 Speaker 03 Because we're gonna take this. So as Campbell said, nearly eight million visitors will go and have a look at the Tut exhibition. You'll have things like, oh, Steve Martin, comedian Steve Martin, performing that King Tut on SNL Saturday Night Live. And that, you know, which is just a jokey song, go look it up, it's still on YouTube, very funny, breaks into the Billboard Top 100, sells a million copies. And then it's merch, so much merch. And I think this is a, I mean, I suppose it's, the 1920s was merch-tastic. I don't know whether you've ever even done a survey of this, who produced the most?
35:16 Speaker 03 Toot, tut, tut, toot, tut, tat, however you want to put it, tut, tat. Yes, which was the era with the most tut, tat?
35:24 Speaker 05 I suspect it probably was the seventies. And subsequent exhibitions haven't been able to replicate that, that sense of real excitement. Because we're quite used to it now, we're used to the blockbuster, we're used to the idea of a big show rolling into town. And photography and documentaries and films and books make this stuff quite accessible. But in the 1970s, you know, the first big glossy colour books about Tutankhamun were coming out. So even if you didn't go to the exhibition, you might see a documentary film on television or you might buy a book.
35:58 Speaker 04 And back in Egypt, of course, this is also being registered. And this whole business of Pharaoh being associated with Sadat. Because in 1981, Sadat is assassinated by Khalid al-Istambulli. And he says, I have killed Pharaoh.
36:14 Speaker 05 Yes.
36:15 Speaker 04 So all this is playing out at multiple levels.
36:18 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly. It's worth saying, you know, in the Quran, in the Muslim holy book. You know, the Pharaoh is not depicted well, he's not depicted well in the Bible, I guess, or the Torah. But to call someone a Pharaoh is an insult. It's, you know, the mark of a tyrant.
36:39 Speaker 04 And then you get, Solomon is the symbol in the Quran of justice. And Pharaoh is the symbol of injustice, ironically, very interesting. Anyway, then it goes off around Germany, it's not the end of the tour.
36:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, it goes to other venues. And again, I know plenty of people who are practising Egyptologist now, who were inspired by those shows of the later seventies into the 1980s.
37:02 Speaker 04 Where did you first see it?
37:04 Speaker 05 I first saw the Mask of Tutankhamun in Cairo in 2001, my first visit to Egypt with my parents. But subsequently, as a student, working in the Cairo Museum on a databasing project for a few weeks. I remember when the cleaners were in, going in before the public entered and having a few minutes alone with the mask. And that is easily one of the best moments of my entire life.
37:32 Speaker 03 Can I just say, I completely concur. So I was absolutely blessed to have this. So I'm friends with an Egyptian novelist.
37:41 Speaker 04 The great Ada Sufi, who we love, yeah.
37:44 Speaker 03 Yes, who took, you know, me and a bunch of really excellent women who got in before. You know, so they did this enormous reconstruction in recent years of the Cairo Museum. So what had been sort of fairly dark and dingy, maybe when you were doing your research, was suddenly illuminated, huge cavernous rooms created to show this stuff off. I mean, it was, I mean, beautifully, beautifully done. And they were working on the Tutankhamun housing, you know, the special place that opened last year. And we got to have a look and wander around like we were the only people in the world, Campbell.
38:17 Speaker 04 I'm very envious of both of you.
38:18 Speaker 03 It was emotional, I mean, genuinely, genuinely to see something like that in that space and being all alone. And it's the stuff of my childhood too, you know, completely fascinated and obsessed with it. Cairo's done a good job, hasn't it? I mean, the museum, can we?
38:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, no, it's absolutely beautiful.
38:34 Speaker 03 I think it's, I think they've done a really, I mean, as a man who does this, tell us what they've done that people should go and see if they can.
38:41 Speaker 04 And we should all go and see it, exactly.
38:43 Speaker 05 So the old museum in which I had that encounter is still very close to my heart and is still packed full of jaw dropping treasures from pharaonic and later Egypt. But the new museum, the Grand Egyptian Museum, is out at Giza by the pyramid. And so it was initially conceptualised to house the Tutankhamun treasures. But there are plenty more galleries, including a huge museum dedicated to boats of King Kufu. But you can now go and if you go early and you run up to the gallery, you can pretty much get, get the mask to yourself. Everything is there and it's beautifully lit, beautifully explained, beautifully displayed with lots of space.
39:25 Speaker 05 Because in the old museum, you had to jostle, you still have to jostle on a busy day.
39:29 Speaker 04 Yeah.
39:29 Speaker 05 But that's why having those experiences where you're relatively alone and unaccompanied is really special.
39:36 Speaker 04 The thing I love most are the Alfheim portraits. Are they still in the old museum? But where have they gone?
39:41 Speaker 05 Yes, we've got several of them. Them here, William, actually, you should come and see.
39:44 Speaker 04 In Manchester, I'll come and do a trip. Don't do it. These are these perfect late Egyptian.
39:51 Speaker 05 Roman period, yeah, paintings.
39:53 Speaker 04 Portraits probably done during life.
39:55 Speaker 05 I'm sceptical about that as well. I think they're stock images. We're seduced by them because these look so lifelike. But I'm writing a book on that subject.
40:04 Speaker 04 Are you?
40:05 Speaker 05 The way we have faced the ancient Egyptians.
40:07 Speaker 03 Well, and it will get you on again for that. Campbell, can I ask about, you know, when you handle artefacts from ancient Egypt? And people are still very much keen to know or to associate that period and the artefacts from it with magic, with the supernatural. You've got one at your elbow, in fact. Tell us the story of a little spinny statue because I love it. And you should share it.
40:33 Speaker 05 Thanks for asking, Anita. So next to me here on my desk is a replica of a very striking piece, arguably the most famous out of the four and a half million specimens we have here at Manchester University Museum. And this is a chap called Neb Ew, who lived about 4,000 years ago and who could never have imagined his fame. In 2013, I was going into the gallery, which was new in Manchester, newly opened, and I noticed he was in a different position every morning. He was rotating in his case. But the case was locked and alarmed and I had the only key. So I thought someone's playing a trick on me.
41:15 Speaker 05 So we set up a stop motion camera, which took a photo every minute for a week. And it showed that he was spinning at night. And so we put the 53 second clip online and this went viral. It was seen by 100 million people.
41:30 Speaker 04 Did you, did you begin for the first time in your life to assume that there was a supernatural thing going on? Or were you a Sherlock Holmesian rationalist?
41:38 Speaker 05 No, it was, it was sadly because of vibration from traffic outside and footfall in the gallery. During the day, the movement was greater.
41:47 Speaker 03 When you did first tell the story before, when we were setting up, I did say, oh, that'd be the, that'd be the trains. All the traffic, I'm dead inside. I do believe I'm dead. This is, you know, my co-host weeps with emotion and I'm like, yeah, sorry. Yeah. But the, but the news, Campbell, at the time, when you released that footage, must have gone berserk. Did you, did you see a real spike in visitors after, after you put that out?
42:10 Speaker 05 Yes, yeah, we did. For about a week, because news gets old fast. People brought in lottery tickets, thinking the statue was going to magically give them the numbers.
42:20 Speaker 03 Stop it.
42:21 Speaker 05 People came from Japan. Yeah. Yeah.
42:23 Speaker 03 What? Oh, that's funny.
42:24 Speaker 05 So it's, the, the clip is on YouTube. You can see it still. And it did influence the depiction of a museum in an episode of The Simpsons. So there's a marker of pop notoriety in the 21st century. We were on The Simpsons. But it connects to the same thing that people find fascinating about Tutankhamun. There's something mysterious, there's something vaguely threatening. If it had been a, I don't know, a Mesoamerican artefact, or a classical Greek artefact, it wouldn't have had the same effect.
42:57 Speaker 04 So you don't need to take your lottery tickets to Campbell. Campbell can come to you if you join the club. Because we have, for our club members, a very, very wonderful episode, which Anita and I think is one of the most wonderful we've ever done, with Campbell talking about the discovery of the tomb. And he discusses at length the question of the curse of the mummy. So that is all available for club members. Anita, do you want to finish this episode off?
43:27 Speaker 03 Sure. Well, it's empirepoduk.com.
43:30 Speaker 04 In your characteristic fashion.
43:31 Speaker 03 Empirepoduk.com. It's only because you can't remember the email. Let's face it.
43:37 Speaker 04 I can't.
43:38 Speaker 03 If you want, if you want to join our club. And it really, it is, it is a very good episode. But all that's left for us is to say, Dr. Campbell Price, so great having you on again.
43:48 Speaker 04 Thank you. Thank you.
43:49 Speaker 05 Thank you. Thank you both.
43:50 Speaker 03 Brief Histories: Ancient Egypt, published by Welbeck. It's available wherever you find your finest books. And thank you very much, Anita. Until the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnhem.
44:01 Speaker 04 And goodbye from me, William Durhample.
44:19 Speaker 02 On that flight with three hundred and fifty passengers on board.
44:25 Speaker 01 The Great Game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.
44:32 Speaker 02 We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.
44:38 Speaker 05 Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.
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44:57 Speaker 01 We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO. A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia? Yes.
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