Pod Insights Empire: World History 366. Ancient Egypt: Tutankhamun The Boy King (Ep 5) About this episode **Unlock the entire Ancient Egypt series early and ad-free by joining the Empire Club at empirepoduk.com**
His death mask is one of the most famous faces in Ancient Egyptian history, but who was the real Tutunkhamun? What do the items found in his tomb tell us about his life? And what myths have been spread about him?
Anita and William are joined by Dr Campbell Price, author of Golden Mummies of Egypt, and Curator of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum, to discuss the life of King Tut.
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2:39 Speaker 03 He is the most famous pharaoh who ever lived. His face, that serene golden mask with its striped headdress, is one of the supreme images of the ancient world, recognized on every continent. Millions of people have cooed for hours to stand before the original in Cairo.
2:59 Speaker 04 And yet, in the Egypt of his own time, this man was a nobody. Not even a man, a child when he came to the throne and dying in his teens. He won no great battles, built no great monuments, left no great inscriptions. So who exactly was Tutankhamun? Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon.
3:21 Speaker 03 And me, William Dalrymple. And our guest today is the curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum, author of Brief Histories: Ancient Egypt, of Ancient Egypt: Fifty Discoveries, and of the magnificent Golden Mummies of Egypt, Dr. Campbell Price. Take a bow.
3:37 Speaker 05 Hello again.
3:38 Speaker 04 Hello again. Hello again. Listen, so, so great to have you back.
3:43 Speaker 05 Oh, thank you.
3:43 Speaker 04 A lot of people listening or watching, they're going to know the story of the discovery of King Tut's tomb. We're going to have a glorious episode with you about Howard Carter and the Valley of the Kings in 1922. So if you want to hear that, you know what you need to do? Become a member of the club. But today, we're going to talk about the boy king himself. So can we start right at the very beginning? Let's, I mean, it seems like a really basic question, but it isn't straightforward. It becomes quite contested. Who were his parents?
4:11 Speaker 05 Oh, well, Tutankhamun, in a way, as we'll discuss, is kind of the end of the line. He's the end of a dynasty, quite literally. And there is a lot of debate, as there often is in Egyptology.
4:23 Speaker 03 We're just getting a flavour of that between you and Aiden.
4:26 Speaker 05 Yeah, there's, yeah, hotly contested in the pages of journals, the identity of Tutankhamun's parents. So as you said in your introduction, he is extremely famous. He's probably the most famous of Egyptian kings. But we assume, based on relatively few bits of evidence, that his father is a chap called Akhenaten.
4:49 Speaker 03 Who we've been dwelling on at some length in this, in this series.
4:53 Speaker 05 Yes, but while that's, I would say that's fairly assured. The identity of his mother is not. And as we'll say, even doing DNA tests, because there are lots of bodies around, actual bodies, not just historical inscriptions, even with the bodies, we're not quite sure. So probably the son of Akhenaten, a big religious reformer and an unknown woman.
5:17 Speaker 03 And he had, Akhenaten had, like all pharaohs, a number of wives. So it's not entirely surprising that this should be contested.
5:24 Speaker 05 Yes, exactly. His chief wife, Nefertiti, who listeners will have heard of, no doubt. Her bust is in Berlin. She seems to be his favoured wife. I mean, she appears in almost all the monuments. But as you say, the king of Egypt had multiple sexual partners.
5:41 Speaker 04 Okay, but there is a question though, because, I mean, we're quite progressed since the days when we wrapped bodies in bandages. Could we, what you mentioned DNA, have there not been DNA studies? Could they not just definitively tell us who's the mummy? Who the mummy, you know, to put it that way?
5:58 Speaker 05 Irresistible, irresistible to say that. Short answer, no, because DNA degrades with time. It is very easy to contaminate. And you've got to remember when these bodies were unwrapped, they were handled. I mean, the ones that were unwrapped and put in museums were, in a way, the lucky ones. They were ground down for medicine, for paint, to make paper. Imagine having your fish and chips from paper made of mummified ancient Egyptians. There's lots of contamination, so it's actually very difficult to be sure. And even if you do extract DNA positively, actually confirming the nature of the relationship.
6:36 Speaker 05 A genetic relationship is very difficult indeed.
6:39 Speaker 03 But most scholars today seem to opt on balance, not definitively, but on balance for Nefertiti as the mum.
6:48 Speaker 05 Ah, yes.
6:49 Speaker 03 You're looking very, you're looking not at all convinced by that statement.
6:52 Speaker 04 He's doing the face of a sceptical face. That's what he's doing, isn't he?
6:55 Speaker 05 As often in Egyptology, it depends who you talk to. I mean, I'm a great believer in the work of Professor Aidan Dodson, and on balance, he opts for Nefertiti as the mother of Tutankhamun. But another name is a minor wife called Kia, and there are iconographic reasons where she does seem to play a role in the court of Akhenaten, but then disappears. So possibly she is the mother, but we cannot know. And surprisingly, people think, we've got the tomb, we've got all the stuff. Surely there are loads of writings about his parents. There are not. There's a shirt, a quite touching shirt that enshrouds his jackal statue of the god Anubis, which has the name of Akhenaten, his father, on it. Otherwise.
7:38 Speaker 04 Otherwise, we just don't know. Okay, so we'll take all the caveats. Let's take all the caveats. One thing we do know, and, you know, it's one of those really dwelled on, and a really glitzy, schmitzy documentary about sort of doing the CT scan of Tut himself. We do know a little bit about the state he was in, don't we?
7:56 Speaker 03 Again, that's also contested, isn't it? Because he's got a knock on his head, but no one knows whether it was the unwapper or an assassination.
8:03 Speaker 04 So there's a knock on the head, but there's also the shape of the body, which I thought sort of might have told us if he had come from disease or, you know, sort of too close genetic material. I mean, because after all, Nefertiti and Akhenaten were cousins, right? So, I mean.
8:19 Speaker 03 Maybe, yeah.
8:20 Speaker 05 Maybe.
8:20 Speaker 04 Oh, my goodness. What we do, we know here, Campbell. Okay, sort it all out for us.
8:25 Speaker 05 Right. Okay. So first off, we must acknowledge the dreadful state that Tutankhamun's body was in after Howard Carter and his team finished with it.
8:33 Speaker 03 And saw it up, didn't they?
8:34 Speaker 05 Tutankhamun was found glued into his inner solid gold coffin, covered with wonderful artefacts, which had to be extracted. And so Howard Carter and the team totally atomised him, decapitated him, tore him limb from limb to get him out of this black.
8:52 Speaker 03 And that's literally what we're talking about. He's stuck in the thing and they have to just pull.
8:56 Speaker 05 Yeah, so all of that contaminates and compromises the the the nature of what we would now want to analyse.
9:04 Speaker 03 And they weren't wearing rubber gloves and stuff.
9:06 Speaker 05 They were not, William, no, they were not. They're breathing, smoking, touching, things, things that we might not do today. So the evidence is, I think, to my mind, fatally compromised in that way. But you're right that Tutankhamun, he comes at the end of the line, even if his parents were not directly related, his father definitely came from what we would call an inbred royal family to keep the royal blood pure.
9:34 Speaker 03 In contrast to other royal families.
9:36 Speaker 05 Well, yeah, it's a common, it's a common thing to not, to not, and for, for reasons of inheritance, generally not just royalty, that you, you want to know who the, the next generation are and what they're going to inherit. So Tutankhamun may be one of the reasons he doesn't have children of his own is because of a genetic issue. But as far as disease goes, and I've been in hospitals where we've done the CT scans of mummified bodies, often in that scanning room, you're with an archaeologist, an Egyptologist, a radiologist, a bioarchaeologist, and no one can agree when the scan comes up what they're seeing on the screen.
10:19 Speaker 05 So things which to us, or which to a specialist might look like paleopathology, so diseases endured or not endured in life, or the cause of death, these in fact are artefacts of mummification, the fact that the body has been changed by being completely dehydrated, covered in resins, oils, and been left for 3,000 years. So actually, CT scans are very difficult to interpret.
10:47 Speaker 04 So I, I completely love this. It's, you know, basically give the, give the guy a break, he might have been fine.
10:53 Speaker 05 Yeah.
10:54 Speaker 03 It sounds like he had several breaks by the time Haun Kadr got him out.
10:57 Speaker 04 Well, quite. Well, Cam, well, let's talk about maybe things that we know a bit more about. So he's born into the most revolutionary moment in, in ancient Egyptian history, this time when his father rips up the pantheon of gods and says there is only one, and that is the, the sun disc, the Aten. Just from, remind us or paint us a picture of, first of all, what his name tells us, because, you know, we know him as, as Tutankhamun, but that's not how he started off, is it?
11:25 Speaker 05 No, he's born Tutankaten or Tutankutaten. So as you said, that is the sun disc, the god, the deity who his father favors. So his father is born Amenhotep, so a very traditional name, Amenhotep, son of Amenhotep. And then at some point early on in his reign, as you said, he simply rips up the rulebook, moves the court to a really desolate part of Middle Egypt, which he says is not sacred to any god or any goddess, and sets up shop completely afresh. So Tutankhamun is born into this moment. He's given the name Tutankutaten, which means something like the living image of the sun disc, which is very appropriate for the time, which will change in a kind of
12:09 Speaker 05 counter revolutionary moment, but he must grow up at the site of what we today refer to as Tell El Amarna. This is the site in ancient times called Akhetaten, not to be confused with Akhenaten. That's the name of the king, that's Tut's dad. Akhetaten means horizon of the Atten. This is the capital city where Akhenaten basically says that he's never going to leave. So Tutankhamun as a boy, as a prince, will have had a very comfortable existence as it went, and presumably some hopes were pinned on him because he was the male child of the reigning king.
12:45 Speaker 03 Now, Cam, but when we go to Berlin to see Nefertiti's bust, in the room beside it, there's all these gorgeous pictures of his daughters.
12:54 Speaker 05 Yes.
12:54 Speaker 03 And there's a whole beautiful set of cases with these very hard stone images of these unbelievably beautiful girls with slightly odd shaped, slightly alien, alien shape. I love those girls. And what's it, what's the stone called, quartzite? Is it quartzite?
13:12 Speaker 05 Quartzite is favored because it's this reddish orangish color, as you've seen, solar, it's got solar associations. But something to say about the booming sculpture of the royal family, it is unusual that the children of a monarch are so memorialized, so commemorated, so materialized in stone. Because remember, Akhenaten's closed all the temples. He said, right, there's only one god essentially at the Atten. And we are only going to worship him. So all the other gods are totally obsolete. So all the temples are going to get closed. I'm moving to a new capital. So the sculptors who trained under his father, the traditional Amenhotep the third, who were producing statues.
13:54 Speaker 03 I've got nothing else to do but do lots of images of their own family.
13:57 Speaker 05 Well, previously there were lots of images of gods and people in ancient Egypt liked statuary. So there the sculptors are just told, right, in the absence of any gods, you can't sculpt a statue of the Atten, the sun disk, really. He's the god in the sky, just loads and loads and loads of of images in relief and in sculpture in the round of Akhenaten, his chief wife, Nefertiti, she seems to see off any other wives.
14:23 Speaker 03 And the whole tribe of girls, but no Tut.
14:25 Speaker 05 Six daughters who can only all have been alive together briefly. Because there's at least one death pretty, pretty soon.
14:39 Speaker 05 As as was probably not uncommon to an ancient Egyptian family, having six children was often accompanied by a high infant mortality.
14:48 Speaker 04 What we haven't done, Campbell, is actually put a date on on this happy family tableau minus Tut. So I mean, what what can just tell people what we are talking about here?
14:58 Speaker 05 So we're talking about the 14th century BCE. So leading up to about 1350 is around the reign of Tutankhamun. So this is, you know, a high point in Egyptian history, what Egyptologists call the New Kingdom, the 18th Dynasty. Lots of battles have been waged, lots of foreign territory has been, if not included in an empire. I'm sceptical about the concept of empire, I should say, on a podcast called Empire in ancient Egypt. But there's definitely raiding and acquisition of materials. So Akhenaten, his father, is really pretty magnificent ruler who builds lots and has lots of statuary and rules
15:40 Speaker 05 well over 30 years. And Akhenaten and Tutankhamun inherit this, and some would say Akhenaten kind of squanders it.
15:47 Speaker 03 So that world. Collapses when Akhenaten dies, doesn't it? And we've had the description of his death in the episode that we talked about the fall of Omana. And at that point, we assume that, what, Tut is a child of eight or nine?
16:02 Speaker 05 Yeah.
16:03 Speaker 03 And his world presumably goes into spin at this point.
16:06 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, because Akhenaten, whichever way you you you cut it, I mean, Akhenaten is a very singular individual. He was once described as the first individual in history. He must be quite a commanding guy because he's instituted all these reforms. So then when he disappears, maybe before he disappears, he takes, as is not uncommon, a co-ruler. So we have the name Smeneh Kari, who seems to be a co-ruler of Akhenaten's and who may die, disappear before Akhenaten's death. And then, for some people, my colleague, Professor Aidan Dodson, included, Nefertiti, the wife
16:49 Speaker 05 of Akhenaten, takes on the role of king. So there's a period, there's a kind of interregnum, you could say, between the death of Akhenaten and Tutankhamun becoming king, before he changes his name, where there's various, yeah, kind of horse trading for power.
17:05 Speaker 04 So he doesn't have his father anymore. He's just, you know, been living in an age of enormous tumult. Nobody's seen anything like this, where the gods themselves have been, you know, destroyed, if you like. He's just a boy. Two very powerful adults come into his life, the muscle and the brain, the political fixer and the military commander. So tell us about Ai and Horemheb. Who are they and what parts do they play in his life?
17:35 Speaker 05 So we probably know rather less about Ai. He seems to be an elder statesman already in the reign of Akhenaten from a powerful family in some way connected to the royal family. We're not quite sure how. For some people, for some Egyptologists, he's the father of Nefertiti. I'm a little sceptical about that myself. He takes on the slightly mysterious title of God's Father. And if you're the god's father, you could say, maybe, I don't know, you're the father-in-law of the king, you're kind of acting as a regent, but he appears in Tutankhamun's shadow pretty much at the same scale as the king, which is a great presumption. If you show yourself as the same scale visually as the pharaoh of Egypt, you must be someone quite
18:20 Speaker 05 important. So he's hanging around. And then there's Horemheb, who we know from his extensive and very beautifully decorated tomb at the site of Saqqara, which he was preparing before he eventually became king after Akhenaten's death. He is the general. He is in charge of the military, the army.
18:37 Speaker 03 He's the CC of the day.
18:39 Speaker 05 Yes, and CC has been compared to him for sure, the current president of Egypt. And he's interesting. I find Horemheb interesting because he makes great play, which might seem surprising for, you know, a military guy, with being able to write. He's got the skills of writing and of organising.
19:01 Speaker 03 Is that unusual for a general?
19:03 Speaker 05 I think so, yeah. They don't put graves on their penmanship, but he has statues showing him as a writer. There's a, there's, yeah.
19:11 Speaker 04 Okay, so his literary, which is unusual, but also the fact that he still maintains, you know, his position as a commander of the army. Because, let's face it, Tutankhamun's dad wasn't really that fussed about the army, was he? I mean, we know he neglected starvation around him with all those begging letters that we have from the Amarna tablets, which, by the way, we've done some really lovely episodes on, if you want to go back and hear in-depth stuff about both Amarna and indeed Akhenaten. But, tell us, I mean, how is it that he still remains this huge sort of muscular figure when the father wasn't really that bothered about armies?
19:49 Speaker 05 Well, I think the key to Horemheb's success is that he's probably in charge of the army.
19:54 Speaker 04 Cyclical there, okay.
19:57 Speaker 05 They would, they would, they would bump, bump back, and that's been echoed in the more recent history of, of Egypt itself. But these two courtiers clearly are the ones that are advising, as you said, this, the small boy of seven, eight. And when he comes to the throne, they must have their own interests. But it's worth emphasizing that Tutankhamun, even as a boy, is the son of a previous king. So he has the legitimacy of that position.
20:25 Speaker 03 So are we assuming that this little kid, in the aftermath of this catastrophic revolution that's gone wrong and everyone is peddling back frantically, that he is a puppet, which Horemheb is controlling, he's pulling the strings, or not necessarily?
20:40 Speaker 05 Not necessarily. There is really the belief that this child, especially once he is the pharaoh, he's the king of Egypt, that he is divine. The advisers, I and Horemheb, can claim whatever they want and may have this kind of command of the real politic, but they are not anointed living gods. So I think you've got to imagine there could be a petulant little nine-year-old saying, I want it this way. And you've got to follow what the kid wants. But Tutankhamun is in a moment where he must know there is pressure for counter-revolution. So it's about managing that transition back to tradition in some ways.
21:22 Speaker 04 Okay, so I'm interested on whose idea the counter-reformation is, you know, the putting back of the gods on their pedestal. Because, I mean, at nine, can you really imagine that a little boy would say, you know, what we need, what we need in Egypt is our gods back? I mean, could that possibly have come from a child?
21:40 Speaker 05 I mean, it depends, you know, who has an influence on him personally. We know of a royal tutor who doesn't seem to come to much, a guy called Senefor. So if you have that role of being a teacher, a tutor, in some way rearing the young future or current king, then you are incredibly powerful because you could influence this child's thinking. But there must be an atmosphere in the aftermath of Akhenaten's death that the experiment has gone wrong. And so it's about managing, as I say, that transition back to orthodoxy.
22:19 Speaker 04 Now, Willie, do you remember we talked about the fact that even though Akhenaten was busy smashing up any mention of any of the other gods, people still hid their little statues of little hippos in their homes. And I suppose in desperation, when times are hard, and that man's gone, you can pretty much clamour for what you like. So maybe following the tide rather than having the idea himself.
22:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think leaning into what must have been a, I mean, a fairly common thought that the traditional gods of Egypt had existed for thousands of years. And Akhenaten's experiment seems to have pertained mainly to the elite, to the court surrounding the king. So when the king disappears, you know, the court think, what is in our best interests? So yes, you're right, people in their homes, we know of amulets that show all the old traditional gods. And there are economic reasons that closing all the temples, which are huge hubs for agricultural administration, if you do that, you kind of complicate the
23:22 Speaker 05 whole system of taxation, of, you know, governance of the country. So there are good reasons probably to revert those things. But maybe a nine-year-old wouldn't understand.
23:34 Speaker 03 Campbell, when we were talking about the fall of Amarna, we dwelt briefly on the restoration stellar.
23:41 Speaker 05 Yes.
23:42 Speaker 03 Does this date from this important document? Does this date from Tutankhamun's reign? And do we think that he might have put it out?
23:49 Speaker 05 Yes, although it's later claimed it's edited to suggest that it was later kings that did it. I mean, yeah, Tutankhamun in a way was relatively insignificant. But one of the, if not the most significant thing he did was the Counter-Reformation, the Counter-Revolution, the restoration of the old gods. This is a very significant historical document, but it should be seen in the context of the fact that any new power, any new king, says that everything that went before wasn't quite right, and I've restored things back to the way they should be. So that is a literary trope. It is used hundreds of years before. So Tutankhamun in a way is following that. But the language that's used in that inscription,
24:34 Speaker 05 we know of at least two copies of it from Karnak, the home of the traditional god Amun, Amun Ra. The language in it is quite emotive, and you could imagine people felt pretty disenfranchised. And so the king is... Is doing probably what most people want.
24:52 Speaker 04 So I mean, what we should say is that the Restoration Stella that we're talking about this, it's a deeply interesting political document, as Campbell says. And the kind of thing, Campbell, that you're talking about, the things that it says, it describes temples falling into ruin, the gods' shrines overgrown with weeds, a land in confusion, the divine world inaccessible. So, you know, as you say, I mean, could it be, I mean, because it is so hyperbolic, more propaganda than anything else? I mean, how do you race?
25:22 Speaker 05 Right. Well, okay. So I don't like to use the term propaganda for ancient Egypt because it has a set of assumptions in the more modern world that probably aren't appropriate. Most people, you know, 95% of people can't read. So any statement that's written is directed first and foremost to the gods themselves, a metaphysical audience we totally underestimate, and then the few elite people invested with any power to convince them that what the state, such as it is, is doing is the right thing. So I don't think it's propaganda necessarily for the populace.
26:04 Speaker 03 Fascinating thought, just to dwell on it. So all the stuff that we are reading, that we assume people can read and is going out there is actually, a lot of it's directed at the gods. It's not directed at human beings at all.
26:15 Speaker 05 Yes, exactly. So I think that's important to bear in mind in a pre-modern setting. But you're right, the writing is emotional in a way, and it does break kind of formulaic customs, although the tropes are echoed from centuries before.
26:32 Speaker 03 And it's very like that Shakespeare sonnet, "Bare-ruined choirs", talking about the fallen monasteries of the Reformation. And this is the same sort of...
26:40 Speaker 05 Yes.
26:40 Speaker 04 To sing the tune, Willie, because you've got, you know, another extract from it. I'm sure people will want to know what it says.
26:45 Speaker 03 My John Gilgood voice coming up.
26:48 Speaker 04 Here we go.
26:49 Speaker 03 His Majesty drove out disorder throughout the two lands, and justice was established in its place. Now, when His Majesty appeared as King, the temples of the gods and goddesses from Elephantine down to the marshes of the Delta had fallen into ruin. Their shrines had become desolate.
27:12 Speaker 03 The gods turned their backs upon this land. If an army was sent to Djajahi, which is Palestine, to extend the frontiers of Egypt, no success came to them. If one beseeched any god, he would not come. Hearts were weak in bodies, for what had been made was destroyed.
27:34 Speaker 04 Yeah. I mean, it's poetry, really, isn't it? It's got that lilting quality to it. So, I mean, again, I'm also obsessed with this idea that this is a message up rather than a message out. But in his life, you know, what he's actually surrounded by, I mean, does he marry? I mean, there's always a sort of pressure at a young age to marry, particularly if you have... So, I mean, that, to me, fascinating. It's a message up rather than out.
27:59 Speaker 03 Yeah.
28:00 Speaker 04 But in the out and about and around him, tell me, you know, is he with somebody? Is he in love? I mean, has that all worked out? Is he happy? What's going on, Campbell?
28:10 Speaker 05 We'd love to know.
28:13 Speaker 05 Well, we surely, this kind of historical detail is inaccessible. We do know he marries his sister, or half-sister, a lady called Ankhesen Pa Atin, or a girl, really. She might be a bit older than him, but she changes her name to Ankhesen Pa Amun, as he changes his name to Tutankhamun. So they drop the Atin and they move back to the capital, to Memphis, and they start building at Thebes. So this is expected, that a young king will marry a relatively close female relative. Maybe it was for love or affection, more likely just for dynastic reasons.
28:55 Speaker 05 And she features in a number of items from his tomb. She's named, she's depicted in various ways. So from the get-go, I think, you don't just get a king on his own, you get a great royal wife, you get a queen as well.
29:12 Speaker 04 Let's take a break. Join us after the break, where, I mean, it all sounds marvelous, a new way of doing things that is the old way of doing things. Everybody happy, they've got their gods back, a man married, young boy married to somebody who can build an empire with. Doesn't quite go to plan, though. Join us after the break.
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31:49 Speaker 04 Welcome back. Campbell, so you're somebody who thinks particularly carefully about objects and the physical things that survived from the ancient world. Tell us a little bit about the people who made these beautiful things that we now flock to museums to see. Who were they? Who used these objects?
32:05 Speaker 05 Well, I think it's important to say that those craftsmen, those artisans, were specialists, not just in the sense of knowing how to work materials and specialists in certain techniques, but also religious specialists. So if you were crafting the statue of the king or a statue of a god, you had to be someone who was initiated into not just a kind of trade guild, but into the initiations and the mysteries of the gods. And we know around the time of the Restoration, Tutankhamun and a couple of reigns later, there are craftsmen who boast about being initiated
32:45 Speaker 05 and going around and restoring, putting back in order, all the temples and all the statues that had been smashed up by Akhenaten and his agents. So you've got to imagine there would be a lot of work going about for a specialist stonemason craftsman to set right again what Akhenaten had cast asunder.
33:05 Speaker 03 And one of the things that appears in surprising number in that tomb, when you look behind all these lovely mummies and all the gold and everything, there's a lot of walking sticks. Now, what's going on there?
33:19 Speaker 05 Now, much has been made of this. So Tutankhamun's tomb, remember, is the only royal tomb of the New Kingdom period found intact. So everything seems exceptional because we've got it. It survives. And Howard Carter, as I said in another episode, was uniquely placed to know what might be in a tomb because he'd found lots of fragments of these kinds of objects. And- It's really only been in the last fifty or so years with more medicalised, some might say clinicised, treatments of Tutankhamun that focus has been on his perceived disability.
33:59 Speaker 05 And so from this narrative springs the assumption, oh, he had lots of sticks and staves because he needed them.
34:07 Speaker 04 Let's spell it out, because, I mean, you know, I've read things about his club foot, his curved spine, his weak bones, his sort of rickety legs, you know, all of that kind of thing, that actually these were walking sticks because this kid needed help to walk.
34:20 Speaker 05 I'm sceptical of this.
34:21 Speaker 03 You're sceptical of quite a lot, Campbell.
34:23 Speaker 04 Yes, you are.
34:24 Speaker 05 Well, that's the fun part of being an Egyptologist.
34:27 Speaker 04 Yeah.
34:27 Speaker 05 To.
34:28 Speaker 03 Pick apart your colleagues' papers.
34:32 Speaker 05 So, clearly in ancient Egyptian iconography, holding a big stick means you can beat other less important people up. Having a staff is a sign of authority. So Tutankhamun is a king. One of my favourite objects from the tomb is a stick with a, with an inscription that's been added saying, "Cut by the king's own hand."
34:54 Speaker 03 Really?
34:54 Speaker 05 So a flunky has added this, you know, the king's gone out hunting or whatever in the marshes and cut, cut this down himself. So these are signs of authority. The iconography shows Tutankhamun as a king of the time. There is no implication really that he needs to use a stick any more than any other king.
35:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, quite the contrary, we see him in his chariot, using a bow, he's this sort of heroic sort of young god in some of the pictures.
35:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, there's, there's no reason, suppose, he didn't actually go off to active warfare in some kind of fury. The presence of the sticks has been mapped on to perceived evidence of, of decrepitude of the body. But this is highly subjective. Not everyone agrees on it. You know, it was suggested at some point, oh, he may have had a club foot. Again, the, the jury is out on that.
35:46 Speaker 03 I thought that was settled. That's not settled at all.
35:48 Speaker 05 No, no, I don't think it's settled.
35:50 Speaker 04 I also thought it went even further than that, Campbell, that, you know, Marfan syndrome. Which is this scully. Oh, look at your face.
35:57 Speaker 03 That comes not by this at all. No, very skeptical.
35:59 Speaker 04 Let me just say what Marfan's syndrome is. There's a very specific shape of their head that is produced by Marfan, which I thought his father might have had as well, which influenced the whole art aesthetic of the alien chic, as I like to call it. When he finds it very beautiful.
36:15 Speaker 03 I find it very beautiful. You keep looking, you're thinking it's E T.
36:17 Speaker 04 I don't like it at all. Yes, I think it's weird, but you're saying no.
36:21 Speaker 05 I'm saying no, I'm saying the aesthetics, I agree, William, they are beautiful and they're all the time, they're highly stylistic and they emphasize the godliness and the the separateness of royalty. You cannot diagnose someone based on their appearance on an Egyptian relief or a statue. That is just a fantasy. So, actually, the evidence is pretty equivocal.
36:49 Speaker 03 This is all complete revelation. I thought this was settled and absolutely.
36:53 Speaker 05 No, no, no, no.
36:54 Speaker 03 They were all inbred, that they'd gone weird because they were, they were too many cousins marrying each other for generations after generation. And he had curvature of the spine and fell off his chariot and all the rest of it. Nothing, none of this, you don't buy it.
37:05 Speaker 04 This podcast is going to lead to a herd of Egyptologists armed with walking sticks coming for Campbell. I'm just, I'm predicting. It is written in the sand. This may well happen. Can we talk about some of the other things that may be less controversial in the, in the tune? Because he had toys. He had, you know, sort of, you know, charming childhood things.
37:26 Speaker 03 But now he's shaking his head and I'm afraid to do it.
37:29 Speaker 05 No, no, there are no, there are no toys.
37:32 Speaker 04 No boomerangs. Oh, my goodness.
37:35 Speaker 05 This is a really, really important point. And it's, it's quite a sinister and quite pernicious and persistent idea of ancient Egypt, that things that we don't understand. And if they're small, they get labelled as toys. Ancient Egyptian experiences of childhood were different in in construction, I think. More interesting is the things that were into it in Cummins Tomb, like heirlooms. There's a lock of his, probably grandmother's, maybe great grandmother's hair, Queen T. That's fascinating that he has that.
38:08 Speaker 03 The Victorians liked carrying locks of their grandfathers and grandmothers hairs around with them in little bracelets. It's only a fashion that's got out of, out in the last hundred years.
38:18 Speaker 05 Yeah, there are ritual religious reasons you might want to to have that material in your tomb. But more interesting than an interpretation of of toys is the fact that there are objects which were used by a child, so child sized sandals or child sized furniture, which must be because, if you believe the king is a living god, anything which comes into contact with his body is by association sacred, so it has to be kept.
38:48 Speaker 04 Okay, okay.
38:50 Speaker 05 So if you imagine Ramses the second lived till his nineties, his tomb is massive, partly because he needed to have all of his wardrobe kept. And there's also another sense in which if a magician, we know this this happened, if an ill intentioned magician got a hold of one of the king's personal possessions, they could essentially do black magic on him.
39:13 Speaker 03 That's still very much a thing in Africa today, isn't it? You've got to hide your toenails and stuff when you go to Kenya hotels, because people do all sorts of stuff on it, yeah.
39:23 Speaker 05 So keeping all of that material together in the tomb was a way of keeping the king safe for eternity. So I don't think there's any definitive evidence of there being toys. There are games that he used as a young man. There are musical instruments, there are weapons, there's a writing kit with one of his sister's names on, which is quite charming. Back to the idea of female literacy, clearly that was. Something that was present in the royal family at least. There are little insights into life, but most of the material in the tomb is about the transformation of Tutankhamun into a god, rather than sentimental stuff about his life.
40:00 Speaker 04 I just wanted to make the observation, not since Peter Frankopan have we been beaten up quite so much on a podcast. Not, not so much since the immortal words of the great Peter Frankopan. You lot don't know what you're talking about.
40:14 Speaker 05 We've got that far.
40:15 Speaker 03 We've got to show this to Anita's mum, because she always likes it when Anita's put down.
40:19 Speaker 04 She loves it when we get beaten up on a podcast. She absolutely loves it completely.
40:23 Speaker 03 So you don't like Anita's toys, but you presumably do go with the fact that there are, rather sadly, even tragically, two fetuses.
40:34 Speaker 05 Yes, this is a sad, but probably not uncommon fact of life in the ancient world. Although those two stillborn children are not named, which is interesting in itself, they are given very careful treatment. Their bodies have been mummified and, like their father, buried in coffins.
40:56 Speaker 03 How many months old are they?
40:57 Speaker 05 They are both, yeah, pre, pre-birth, less than nine months in age, and they are presumably the children of Tutankhamun and Ankhesan Enamun, because we don't know of another wife Tutankhamun had. I guess he didn't live very long. He only reigned for nine years, a fact we know principally from his wine cellar, because the highest attested date on the wine is year nine. So that's how we know Tutankhamun was on the throne for nine years.
41:27 Speaker 03 Amazing how much the wine comes into the story of ancient Egypt. Whether we've had it when we were doing Gaza, about all the wine being sent south from Gaza under seal. We've come into it again on all these episodes of the Mariner. It's a major form of evidence.
41:40 Speaker 05 Yes, yeah, yeah. Because labelling the wine is pretty important. Labelling containers generally is a very useful thing the ancient Egyptians did for future historians. So yes, the two fetuses seem to be the only known children of Tutankhamun and his wife. And then when he dies. His wife is left alone and there is good evidence of her appealing to foreign powers to to help her out.
42:08 Speaker 03 Would that be regarded as traitorous? Because we've come across these letters before. She writes to the Hittites.
42:13 Speaker 05 Yeah, the ancient Egyptians don't seem to have liked the idea of Egyptian royal women marrying non Egyptian royals.
42:20 Speaker 03 Yeah, we get we get lots of women sent to marry male pharaohs.
42:24 Speaker 05 Yes.
42:25 Speaker 03 But we don't summon foreign princes to come and sleep with with sacred Egyptian women.
42:31 Speaker 05 Yeah, to supplant the sacred male line of Horus kings, Egyptian Horus kings would yeah, not have been viewed positively.
42:39 Speaker 04 Now, fully accepting the fact that you're going to beat me up. Can we talk, dare I bring up the fact that, you know, we've talked about the death of the children. Can we talk about the death of Tutankhamun? Because there is a thesis around Campbell, didn't just make it up, Campbell, that he was murdered. Now.
43:00 Speaker 05 There's been a murder.
43:03 Speaker 04 Yes. Now, now you're going to tell me, no, he died very happy old man.
43:10 Speaker 04 How did he die?
43:11 Speaker 05 He died a young man. I mean, that's all we can say. Really? Lots of theories about this. Again, difficult to say because the evidence is compromised. Not only did Carter extract him so violently from the coffin, but subsequently between the 1930s and 1960s, some rummaging had gone on and basically the front of Tutankhamun's rib cage had been removed. So a theory that that is based on, you know, major trauma to the chest is difficult to prove because the evidence isn't there. So lots of theories. Was he munched by a
43:52 Speaker 05 hippo? Or did he die in a chariot accident? Which people tend to make much of as if he was, you know, a boy racer. In fact, we know from descriptions, from formal religious descriptions of previous tombs, that the royal burial in.
44:10 Speaker 05 Included a chariot haul. So a new kingdom king would be buried with chariots. That's just a standard thing. It's not that Tutankhamun was particularly.
44:19 Speaker 03 You come with your garage into the new world.
44:21 Speaker 05 No, exactly. It's not the royal muse transferred into the afterlife. So you've got to imagine also specialists in chariotry have pointed out that you couldn't make an Egyptian chariot go very fast. So it would be a stately thing as we see with Akhenaten and Nefertiti, they're snogging in the chariots at Tamarna. Because there are no processions of God, so you have to watch the king and queen necking instead. So I don't think he died in a chariot accident because it couldn't have gone fast enough. He doesn't seem to have had a club foot, so it's not that he just wobbled off.
44:56 Speaker 03 That was the theory, that he had a club foot, he fell backwards there, yeah.
44:59 Speaker 05 We'll never know for sure. It's fun to speculate. I remember being at a book festival and talking about Tutankhamun and I said as a joke, maybe he'd been drinking before. And then the next day, there was a tabloid newspaper said Tutankhamun died from drink driving. It's just nonsense.
45:18 Speaker 04 And Willie, you were sort of, you know, scratching your head about the hippo. I've heard the hippo thing, but we should say, and those of you who have grown up in lands of hippos, they're bloody violent.
45:28 Speaker 05 Yes, the most dangerous animal in Africa still.
45:30 Speaker 04 Can we then talk about the woman who, or the girl who is left a widow now because she's still very young and she hasn't got a living child. That I'm assuming is going to make you pretty damn vulnerable.
45:41 Speaker 03 We have her image, don't we? There are pictures of him on the throne with her standing beside her. That is the right, same girl.
45:48 Speaker 05 Ankesenamun. So she's on various objects in the tomb, but no, there are no surviving children. So if she had had a son, of course, she could be the queen regent and that could work out well. We've got precedent for that. But there's this extraordinary text from the deeds of Supliliuma.
46:05 Speaker 03 We love that name. We'll even ask you to say it again, Campbell.
46:10 Speaker 05 Supliliuma, very un-Egyptian sounding. So the queen of Egypt, which is, I mean, based on evidence is likely to be because of the reference to the king's name, to be Ankesenamun, his wife, his widow, writes saying to a foreign king, please send a son. I don't want to marry a servant of mine.
46:32 Speaker 05 And so whether this was traitorous behaviour or not, she's desperate. And it seems that a son is sent, but he's murdered on the way.
46:39 Speaker 03 Murdered en route.
46:40 Speaker 05 Yeah.
46:41 Speaker 03 By who? This is death on the Nile all over again.
46:44 Speaker 05 Well, a dash of Agatha Christie for sure. I mean, you can, given what we've said in this episode, there are people hanging around. There is I and Horemheb.
46:55 Speaker 04 There are suspects, the brain and the brawn, who, you know, it's not in their interest to have another king when they've been, you know, accessed all the power.
47:04 Speaker 05 No, no, exactly. To supplant people who may not be of royal blood, but who in some ways maybe think that they've earned the position. And it's interesting that I can only rule for a couple of years, two or three years, doesn't last long. He may be the servant that Ankitson Amun's afraid of, because there is a ring, bezel of a ring which names Ankitson Amun and I together. So maybe there is a brief marriage of convenience between the two of them. For ancient Egypt in general, in this period in particular, we've got so much interesting detail and fragmentary evidence. So there are little bits that, you know, nudge your interpretation in a certain way.
47:49 Speaker 05 I mean, undoubtedly, Horemheb comes along and rules for well over, you know, well, probably over 20 years. So he's a success. He kind of stabilises the country.
47:58 Speaker 03 We haven't said that clearly. He becomes the next pharaoh.
48:00 Speaker 05 Yes, Horemheb does in time become the next pharaoh.
48:06 Speaker 03 So I gets into the bedchamber and Horemheb gets into the throne. That's even more complicated.
48:11 Speaker 05 Yes. I mean, I is an old man for sure by the time he gets to the to the throne. So he's only around briefly. And then Horemheb secures and consolidates the Reformation position. And he actually writes out Tutankhamun from the story. So he lumps everyone previous.
48:33 Speaker 05 In the Amarna period with, you know, negative thoughts, writes them out of history, Horemheb connects himself with Tutankhamun's grandfather, Amenhotep III. So there's a, an elision between the two of them and that's what history remembers. The great kings lists of Ramses II, a few generations later, go from Amenhotep III to Horemheb and everyone else is forgotten.
48:58 Speaker 03 Campbell, I've got an urgent question here though, because we know from previous episodes that a lot of the old Amarna crew are queaked out of their tombs and shoved into a sort of holding chamber and their nice tombs are taken over and, and they're not given the honour that we'd expect from a pharaoh. How come Tutankhamun is left when Atnaten and Nefertiti bundled into, into a great sort of chamber together with everyone else from that era?
49:28 Speaker 05 Well, you're right, they're queaked. I think that's exactly the right word, great word.
49:32 Speaker 03 It's a Billy Connolly word.
49:34 Speaker 05 Yeah.
49:35 Speaker 03 You know, sketch.
49:36 Speaker 05 So again, there's lots of uncertainty about this, about the identity of the people involved. There's kind of musical chairs, musical mummies, both from tombs at Atamarna, where people are maybe initially buried and then brought back to Thebes and then movement at Thebes. So the reason Tutankhamun is left alone is basically because of the situation, the actually very lucky situation of his tomb being at the base, really the bottom of the Valley of the Kings. So the Valley of the Kings, although it may not see met, if you've visited, can occasionally have flash floods that bring in dust and mud and sand. And when that dries, it's like cement. So if your tomb is in the bottom
50:19 Speaker 05 of the valley, as Tutankhamun's was, it was covered over. Other kings build higher up on the hills and the chippings from the tomb cover Tutankhamun's sepulchre. And then Tutankhamun, perhaps a benefit of his having been officially forgotten was that he was struck off lists. So if people were going around trying to find tombs, they wouldn't find him.
50:40 Speaker 04 In the spirit of my learned friend here, I have an urgent question. Okay. So now that he's been erased.
50:48 Speaker 04 It's an imperative question here, Campbell.
50:50 Speaker 03 Go for it, Anita.
50:51 Speaker 04 Yeah, so now that all of, you know, that Amarna revolution never happened, now that he's erased every member of the family, even those who tried to reverse it in the shape of Tutankhamun, do the people of Egypt prosper under this this new non-royal blooded regime that follows?
51:07 Speaker 03 Military regime, as an Egyptian military general yet again.
51:12 Speaker 05 Difficult to know exactly, you know, how prosperity trickled down the social pyramid, but as far as stability of government goes, if you judge the prosperity of a country by the stability of the royal house, things do markedly improve because Horemheb makes plans, although he doesn't have children of his own that we know of to inherit, he makes plans for a military colleague, Pa Ramesu, who changes his name a bit to become Ramses the First, and Ramses the First is a living son, Seti, and probably a living grandson, who becomes Ramses the Second. So Horemheb has the foresight, after a fairly successful reign of his own, to set up the next dynasty, Dynasty 19.
51:54 Speaker 03 And they again are military colleagues, aren't they? They're generals.
51:58 Speaker 05 Yeah, they're in the military together, and the military and the administration at that period are pretty close, and the religious hierarchy are pretty close, so things are stable, strong and stable, you could say.
52:10 Speaker 03 So at the end of this period of confusion, Campbell, the Ramses, who we all know, when you go to Cairo, it's Ramses Square, you know, the big, often regarded as the golden age of ancient Egypt, so we are leaving this story with a very happy ending, in a sense.
52:28 Speaker 05 Anyway.
52:31 Speaker 03 Well, that's good.
52:31 Speaker 05 Great.
52:33 Speaker 03 After all these disasters.
52:36 Speaker 03 Very nice. And Ramses the Second famously is the only Egyptian pharaoh with a passport, isn't he? He needed a passport to go to America.
52:44 Speaker 04 Oh, don't start him off again. He just went supposedly.
52:47 Speaker 03 He doesn't like that.
52:47 Speaker 04 In that way, they.
52:50 Speaker 04 With that, and they all lived happily ever after, we're going to end this episode. Campbell, we're going to have you back then.
52:55 Speaker 03 To destroy more of our theories.
52:57 Speaker 05 Pops and balloons.
52:59 Speaker 04 But I think this is wonderful. I think this is so, so useful and interesting. So Campbell, do come back because we're going to talk about Tutmania, where the whole world was gripped with Egypt fever. So do come back for that. Dr. Campbell Price, Brief Histories: Ancient Egypt. It's published by Seven Dials and Ancient Egypt and Fifty Discoveries, co-authored with Stephanie Boonstra, and is published by the Egypt Exploration Society. It's also available now. If you have loved Campbell as much as we have, join our club because you'll hear much more of him. Anyway, till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Aron.
53:37 Speaker 03 And goodbye from me, William Derimpel.
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