Tutankhamen Read Free Page B

favourably with the seventeen-year (far from dull) reign of Akhenaten and the four (presumably dull: we know little about them) years of his successor Ay. Ten years, in a land where elite males had a life expectancy of approximately forty years, was a long time. While it would be going too far to regard the twenty-year-old Tutankhamen as middle-aged, he outlived many of his contemporaries, and he died a man, not a boy.
    Tutankhamen’s decade was far from dull. It was the turning point between the unique religious certainties of the Amarna Age and the traditional polytheism of later reigns. 6 It included a change of capital city and a return to traditional royal propaganda that was reflected in the development of official art and writings. Tutankhamen’s own curse is surely the early death that stopped him achieving his destiny. Had he lived for twenty more years there is a fair chance that he would have succeeded in restoring his country to its former prosperity. He may even have been hailed as the first king of the 19th Dynasty. Instead, his brief reign did not allow him sufficient time to distance himself from the ‘heresies’ of his predecessors Akhenaten and Smenkhkare. Forever linked to them and their unorthodox ideas, he was deliberately excluded from the 19th Dynasty King Lists – the official record of Egypt’s rulers – and effectively became a non-person. This, to a king who believed that he needed to be remembered if he was to have any hope of living beyond death, was a serious matter indeed.
    Although the evidence is complex, and there are gaps in our
knowledge, there is enough archaeological and textual evidence to allow us to reconstruct Tutankhamen’s reign with a fair degree of accuracy. There are many areas of scholarly disagreement – Tutankhamen’s parentage being a subject of continuing, vigorous discussion even after the recent publication of DNA tests, for example – but on the whole, the bare bones of his story are agreed and we know much about his life and times. Yet alongside this orthodox and entirely satisfactory history Tutankhamen has developed a second, very different ‘history’; an intuitive, post-discovery cultural construct that makes him the subject of a whole spectrum of interpretations including murder plots, archaeological conspiracies and the occult. Modern technologies – the internet in particular – have helped these constructs to spread so that, in just ninety years, Tutankhamen has advanced from long-dead, barely remembered king to cultural phenomenon. 7 This is an important contemporary, and still evolving, aspect of Tutankhamen’s legacy, but conspiracies and curses sit uneasily alongside biomedical Egyptology and the forensic examination of ancient texts. I have therefore divided this book into two complementary but entirely separate sections. The first deals with the evidence for Tutankhamen’s life and death. The second considers the development of the post-discovery Tutankhamen. Together they tell one complete tale.

    The king of Egypt (or pharaoh: the two words are interchangeable) had many duties. As the earthly representative of the gods he was the head of the army and the civil service, and the chief priest of every state cult. But his principle, overriding duty, the duty that linked all other duties and justified his existence, was the maintenance of maat . The constant conflict between maat, the correct order of being, and its opposite isfet, or chaos, was fundamental to Egyptian thought.
Chaos is easy for us to understand: in ancient Egypt this concept encompassed all uncontrolled behaviour, including illness, crime and the strangeness of foreigners. Maat is more difficult; with no equivalent English word it is best defined as a powerful combination of truth, rightness, status quo, control and justice.
    The Theban god Amen, ‘The Hidden One’, smiled on the 18th Dynasty kings, allowing a series