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Title: Tutankhamen and the Discovery of his Tomb
Author: G. Elliot Smith, - To be updated
Language: English
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TUTANKHAMEN
AND THE DISCOVERY OF HIS TOMB
BY THE LATE
EARL OF CARNARVON and
MR HOWARD CARTER
BY
G. ELLIOT SMITH
M.A., M.D., Litt.D., F.R.S.
Professor of Anatomy in the University of London
AUTHOR OF
“THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS,” “THE ROYAL MUMMIES,”
“THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAGON,” ETC.
_With 22 Illustrations, 2 Maps,
and a Coloured Frontispiece ‘Tribute to Tutankhamen’_
LONDON
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LTD.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
1923
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
THE EDINBURGH PRESS, 9 AND 11 YOUNG STREET, EDINBURGH.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE 9
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 11
CHAPTER
I. INTRODUCTORY 15
II. EXPLORATION OF THE THEBAN TOMBS OF THE KINGS 24
III. TUTANKHAMEN 35
IV. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DISCOVERY 44
Embalming and Immortality—Early Beliefs—The Dawn of
Civilization—Giving Life to the Dead—Success after
Twenty Centuries—The King and Osiris.
V. THE VALLEY OF THE TOMBS 65
Tomb-Robbers’ Confessions—Hiding the Mummies.
VI. THE STORY OF THE FLOOD 92
VII. GETTING TO HEAVEN 100
VIII. THE ETHICS OF DESECRATION 124
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FIG. PAGE
Map of the Ancient East 22
1. Mummy of Thothmes IV 27
2. Ancient Plan of the Tomb of Rameses IV 32
3. The Mummies of Yuaa and Tuaa 33
4. Tutankhamen receiving Ethiopian tribute from Huy 40
5. Asiatic tribute presented to Tutankhamen by Huy 42
6. Part of a mace-head, showing early Egyptian king 51
7. Portrait of Hesi, _circa_ 3000 B.C. 56
8. The “packed” mummy of a Queen of the Twenty-first Dynasty 57
9. Drawing from Book of the Dead 61
10. The end of the desolate Valley of the Tombs of the Kings
at Thebes 66
11. Ancient Egyptian drawing (_circa_ 1400 B.C.) illustrating
arrangement of tomb and temple 67
Map of Thebes 70
12. The great cliffs behind Deir el Bahari 74
13. Lid of the coffin which contained the rewrapped mummy of
Amenhotep III 79
14. An inscribed stone showing Akhenaton, his queen Nefertiti,
and their daughters 87
15. A painted wooden portrait bust of Nefertiti, wife of
Akhenaton 89
16. The skull of Akhenaton 90
17. Cow carrying a dead man to heaven 105
18. Narmer’s belt with four Hathor cows’ heads, _circa_
3400 B.C. 106
19. Three couches represented on the walls of the tomb of
Seti I 109
20. A lion-couch, a mummy with three solar emanations 117
21. Three givers of divinity, the cow, the hippopotamus,
and Horus on guard 120
22. The goddess Astarte borne on her lioness 121
PREFACE
During the period when the newspapers were publishing daily reports
of the progress of the work in Tutankhamen’s tomb and Mr Harry
Burton’s photographs, which gave us so vivid an impression of the
objects that were being found, I wrote for the _Daily Telegraph_ a
series of articles discussing the wider significance of the startling
discoveries. They did not describe the tomb itself or the wonderful
collection of funerary equipment, but were merely a general commentary
on the meaning of the information being given by the reporters from the
Theban necropolis. Nor was any attempt made to collect the few facts
concerning Tutankhamen himself, or even to discuss the events of his
time. The exploration of the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, for
which the late Lord Carnarvon and Mr Howard Carter were responsible,
had brought to light the tomb of the youthful nonentity Tutankhamen,
which sheds a dazzling searchlight on one particular phase of the
history of civilization thirty centuries ago. What I set out to
attempt was to interpret the deeper meaning of those Egyptian beliefs
which found such brilliant expression in the luxuriously extravagant
equipment of his tomb.
I have been urged to collect these articles into the more convenient
form of this little book. As they were merely comments on the
descriptions of the actual tomb and its contents the separate issue
of these topical and ephemeral notes seemed at first to lack any
justification, but I have received so many requests for information and
guidance that I thought it might serve some useful purpose to redraft
my articles and give such bibliographical references as would help the
general reader to understand the results that have so far been attained
and to appreciate the value of the more important discoveries that next
season’s work will certainly reveal.
• • • • •
I have used the pharaoh’s name “Tutankhamen” as the title of this book
merely as a label to suggest the circumstance that called it into
being. But I have written an introductory chapter to give an account of
what is known of him and his times.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The only accurate and reliable account that has ever been given of
the Egyptian funerary practices and their significance is Dr Alan
Gardiner’s introductory memoir on _The Tomb of Amenemhēt_ (illustrated
by Nina de Garis Davies) which was published in 1915 under the auspices
of the Egypt Exploration Fund (now Society).
Dr Gardiner describes the actual condition of affairs found in a
private Theban tomb of the eighteenth dynasty (in the reign of Thothmes
III, about a century earlier than Tutankhamen); and in the light of his
intimate knowledge and understanding of the literature of the period,
he interprets the meaning of the arrangement of the tomb and especially
of the scenes and inscriptions sculptured and painted upon the walls,
which Mrs de Garis Davies has reproduced with such skill and accuracy.
This unique work is indispensable to anyone who wants to read what the
ancient Egyptians themselves actually wrote to express their beliefs
or interpret their customs. Professor James H. Breasted’s _History
of Egypt_ and _Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt_
are the best guides to a knowledge of the history and religion of
ancient Egypt. The late Sir Gaston Maspero’s _Egyptian Art_ (London,
1913) contains a great deal of information directly relevant to the
interpretation of objects in Tutankhamen’s tomb. But Mr Burton’s
photographs of Tutankhamen’s funerary equipment give a new interest
and value to Birch’s edition of Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s _The Manners
and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians_ (London, 1878), for many of the
objects and funeral scenes depicted in that remarkable book enable us
to form a mental picture of the Valley of the Tombs as the funeral of
Tutankhamen wound its way to the place where Mr Howard Carter has just
brought to light so many articles closely analogous to those depicted
in Birch’s and Wilkinson’s book.
• • • • •
All the information at present available concerning the life of
Tutankhamen and Horemheb, his successor once removed, was collected
and published (in 1912) by the late Sir Gaston Maspero, _The Tombs of
Harmhabi and Touatânkhamanou_ (_Theodore M. Davis’ Excavations_).
The other volumes of reports published by Mr Theodore Davis are
valuable for reference and comparison in studying the results of the
exploration of Tutankhamen’s tomb. The two volumes, _The Tomb of Iouiya
and Touiyou_ (1907) and _The Tomb of Queen Tiyi_ (1910) are specially
important, and relevant to the discoveries in Tutankhamen’s tomb. Mr
Arthur Weigall’s book _The Life and Times of Akhnaton_ gives a popular
and romantic picture of his conception of the history of the times of
Tutankhamen and his father-in-law.
TUTANKHAMEN
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
Never before in the history of archæological inquiry has any event
excited such immediate and world-wide interest as Mr Howard Carter’s
discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in November 1922. Very little is known
as yet of the king himself, but twelve months hence no doubt his
mummy will give up its secrets and perhaps the story of his life will
be revealed. But at the moment he is supposed to have been merely a
colourless youth, who reigned for a few years only, and achieved such
notoriety as is associated with his name by virtue of weakness rather
than strength of character. For his religious and political opinions
seem to have been as plastic as those of the famous Vicar of Bray,
adapting themselves with facility to his changing environment. The
objects so far found in his tomb do not add very materially to our
knowledge of history.
Yet, in spite of the unimportance of Tutankhamen himself and the
comparative lack of new historical data, the world-wide interest the
discovery has evoked is amply warranted by the new appreciation of
historical values it affords.
It gives us a new revelation of the wealth and luxury of Egyptian
civilization during its most magnificent period. The value of the
gold and precious objects far surpasses that of any hoard previously
recovered from ancient times. Judged merely by its quantity the
collection of furniture is the most wonderful ever found; and everyone
who has examined the individual pieces agrees that in beauty of design
and perfection of craftsmanship Tutankhamen’s funerary equipment is
indeed a new revelation of the ancient Egyptians’ artistic feeling and
technical skill, far surpassing anything known before.
The fact that the tomb of so insignificant a personage as Tutankhamen
was equipped with such lavish magnificence adds to the importance of
the discovery. For if a youthful nonentity who reigned no more than
six or seven years in one of the leanest phases of Egypt’s history
had all this wealth poured into his tomb, one’s imagination tries in
vain to picture the funerary equipment of the famous and longer-lived
pharaohs, such as Thothmes III, who established the Egyptian Empire
in Asia and could command the tribute of the then civilized world, or
Amenhotep III, under whom the sovereign power in Egypt attained its
culmination, and luxury and ostentation their fullest expression. Or
again what riches must have been poured into the vast tombs of Seti
I and Rameses II, the powerful pharaohs who recovered for a time the
Egyptian dominion in Asia which Akhenaton and his sons-in-law had lost?
A thousand years before Christ the desolate Valley of the Tombs of the
Kings must have had buried in its recesses the vastest collection of
gold and precious furniture that perhaps was ever collected in one spot
in the history of the world. For these reasons alone there is ample
justification for the world-wide interest in the discovery which will
always be associated with the names of Lord Carnarvon and Mr Howard
Carter.
But apart from its interest as an artistic revelation and the intrinsic
value of the objects found the discovery is important for other
reasons. The dazzling display of skill and luxury has forced the
scholar and the man in the street to recognize in some measure the
vastness of the achievements of ancient Egyptian civilization and to
ask themselves whether this vigorous and highly developed culture could
have failed to exert a much more profound influence upon its neighbours
than is generally admitted. When it is recalled that Egypt herself
devised the ships and developed the seamanship which created the chief
bond of union with Syria and Crete, East Africa and Arabia, the Persian
Gulf and beyond, we should be in a better position to realize the plain
meaning of the evidence that points to Egypt as the dominating factor
in shaping the nascent civilization of the world. The wide interest in
the revelation of Egypt’s achievements more than thirty centuries ago
should prepare men’s minds impartially to study the vast significance
of the facts thus displayed by Mr Howard Carter’s investigations.
Besides revealing the wonderful equipment of a royal tomb the discovery
of Tutankhamen’s tomb enables us to examine many objects and articles
of funerary equipment hitherto known to us only in pictures. This
makes it possible for us not only to study and appreciate the nature
of the things themselves, but also to acquire new confidence in the
accuracy and the reality of the scenes and the objects depicted upon
the walls of the tombs and the pictures inscribed on papyri. Many of
the illustrations that have long been familiar to us in the old books
of Belzoni, Lepsius, Rosellini, and Wilkinson, have acquired a new
meaning and a new reality from the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb.
Moreover, when the examination of the tomb is completed, and we learn
something of the mummy, the king’s distinctive features, his age, and
his ailments, we shall be able to read the history of his time more
clearly, and perhaps be able to appreciate the deeper significance of
one of the most piquant phases in the history of civilization.
At the time of Tutankhamen the great peoples that had built up
civilization were losing their dominant position. Egypt’s power was
showing definite signs of weakness, which were intensified rather than
caused solely by the pacifist policy of Akhenaton and his sons-in-law.
For even the vigorous rule of the powerful pharaohs of the nineteenth
dynasty merely revived Egyptian power for a time before its final
collapse. Fifty years before Tutankhamen, the Palace of Knossos had
been destroyed in Crete, marking the downfall of the great pioneer
of Mediterranean civilization to which Greece and Europe as a whole
became heir. Babylonia also had reached the limits of her influence:
and the weakening of these three earliest great powers allowed the
Hittites and the Assyrians to struggle the one with the other for
supremacy, crushing out such states as that of the Mitanni, and by
exhausting themselves, so prepared the way for the eventual incursion
of Persia into the Mediterranean area.
Another reason why the sudden weakening of Egyptian influence in Asia
under Akhenaton and Tutankhamen is so important an event in the history
of civilization is because it occurred at a time when the literature of
the Jews was becoming crystallized in the shape that was destined to
exert so tremendous an influence upon the history of belief and social
practice. If Egyptian rule had not been weakened at this particular
time and Palestine had not been subjected to the disturbing influences
of Syrian, Hittite, and Assyrian interference, the Old Testament would
not have been composed in the atmosphere of strife that gives it its
distinctive tone and seems to us to-day unduly to exalt the importance
of warfare and the value of military courage.
But if the weakness of Akhenaton and Tutankhamen contributed in some
measure to the facilitation of strife in Palestine and its reaction
upon the sacred literature of the world, the times in which these
events occurred were pregnant with new trends in the development
of civilization for which these weak kinglets could not be held
responsible. Aryan-speaking people had recently made their appearance
on the stage of history for the first time, in Asia Minor and around
the head waters of the Euphrates in Syria, and in the approaching
disruption of the powers of Western Asia, the influence of these people
of Indo-European speech was destined to make itself obtrusive in Persia
and India and exert a growing influence upon religious beliefs and
social practices.
But simultaneously with these events of far-reaching significance in
Asia, the people of Europe also first intruded upon the attention
of Egypt, and revealed the fact that a new orientation of political
influence was in preparation.
Between Asia and Europe the disturbances in the Levant played some
part in launching upon their world-wide career of exploitation the
persistent trading people we know as Phœnicians, who were responsible
for the rapid diffusion of the elements of civilization during
several centuries from Tutankhamen’s time onward. At the moment it is
the fashion to scoff at the Phœnicians and their works: but no one who
seriously studies the evidence relating to their achievements is likely
to be deceived by this pose. For there is no doubt these people did
fulfil the rôle attributed to them in the Book of Ezekiel.
[Illustration: Map of the Ancient East.]
The period which is so brilliantly illuminated by the discovery of
Tutankhamen’s tomb is thus perhaps the most critical period in the
whole history of civilization. A new era was dawning and every scrap of
information that sheds any light upon the circumstances of this fateful
time is of tremendous interest to us in understanding the civilization
under which we ourselves are living.
CHAPTER II
EXPLORATION OF THE THEBAN TOMBS OF THE KINGS
The work of modern exploration of the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings
can be said to have begun in 1819 when the traveller Belzoni opened and
wrote a description of the tomb of Seti I. In 1881 the discovery was
made of a collection of royal mummies, many of which had been buried
about thirty centuries ago in the Valley of the Tombs, and had been
removed about 1000 B.C. and hidden in a chamber in the great cliff
(behind Deir el Bahari) that faces the Nile across the Theban plain.
This stimulated renewed interest in the famous necropolis, but it was
not until 1898 that the work of exploration there was rewarded by the
discovery of the tomb of Amenhotep II containing the mummy of that
pharaoh himself—the only king’s mummy ever found in his own tomb before
the discovery of Tutankhamen’s, in which it is confidently believed
the mummy is present and undisturbed, an unprecedented circumstance
which will make the investigations next winter peculiarly important.
For the mummy of Amenhotep II had been badly plundered like all those
discovered before or since until the opening of Tutankhamen’s burial
chamber made it practically certain that in it will be revealed for the
first time to modern men the undisturbed tomb of an ancient Egyptian
king.
When Mr Howard Carter was appointed Chief Inspector of Antiquities for
Upper Egypt his chief function was to safeguard the antiquities in the
Thebaid. The Egyptian Government through its Archæological Committee
has been in the habit (until the present year, when the wise rule that
encouraged serious archæological exploration is being revoked) of
granting to archæologists whose competence was regarded as satisfactory
permission to excavate on ancient sites, and the Antiquities Department
allowed such workers to take out of the country half the antiquities
brought to light. But the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings was
excluded from the operation of this rule, because the Antiquities
Department reserved for itself a site of such historical importance.
Hence when Mr Howard Carter took charge of the Theban inspectorate
he was in a serious dilemma. The deserted Valley of the Tombs of the
Kings, in the hidden depths of which was hoarded the remains of the
vastest collection of valuable antiquities ever assembled, was in his
charge, and alongside it the modern population of Luxor and Sheikh
abd-el-Gournah, the most skilful and persistent group of tomb-robbers
who had been habituated to the practice of this craft for many
centuries. Yet he could not solve the difficulty by the most efficient
form of control, that is, by carrying on excavations there, because the
Antiquities Department had no funds for such work and, for the reasons
already given, private excavators were not allowed to work in the
Valley of the Tombs. Mr Carter was fortunate in being able to find a
solution of the problem that evaded all these difficulties. Mr Theodore
M. Davis, of Newport, Rhode Island, who was visiting Egypt as a tourist
in the winter 1902-1903, was persuaded to place at the disposal of the
Department of Antiquities the funds for exploration in the Valley of
the Tombs without claiming any reward beyond the kudos which his action
brought. Hence in 1903 Mr Howard Carter began excavating in the Valley
at Mr Davis’s expense and discovered the tomb of Thothmes IV. The
mummy of this pharaoh, which had been found in 1898 by M. Loret in the
tomb of Amenhotep II, was unwrapped after its original tomb was found;
and at Mr Carter’s suggestion, M. Maspero asked me to investigate it.
Mr Davis published a magnificent volume giving a report of the work
in the tomb and the results of the investigation of the mummy. In the
following years the expedition financed by Mr Davis found six other
important inscribed tombs, those of Queen Hatshepsut, Yuaa and Tuaa
(the parents of Queen Tiy), King Siptah, Prince Mentuherkhepshef, King
Akhenaton and King Horemheb, and nine uninscribed tombs, one of which
contained the beautiful gold jewellery of Queen Tausret and of her
second husband Seti II, and another the pieces of inscribed gold plate
stolen during the reign of Horemheb from the tombs of Kings Tutankhamen
and Ay.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.—Mummy of Thothmes IV.]
Before the war Mr Davis had completed his share of the work. He
imagined that he had found the tomb of Tutankhamen, and in the preface
of the last of his series of magnificent reports he makes the remark:
“I fear that the Valley of the Tombs is now exhausted.” But it is a
fortunate thing that Mr Howard Carter did not share this idea. After
the war the late Lord Carnarvon, with whom Mr Howard Carter had been
working since 1907, applied to the Antiquities Department, and was
granted a concession to be allowed to continue in the Valley of the
Tombs the work which the late Mr Theodore Davis had abandoned. The work
carried out by Lord Carnarvon and Mr Howard Carter before they took
over Mr Davis’s concession led to some important discoveries, the chief
results of which were published in 1912, in a magnificent volume _Five
Years’ Exploration at Thebes_.
In the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings they carried out real and
thorough exploration, as no previous workers had done. Instead of
making mere exploratory openings into the masses of rubble they
began systematically to clear the ground, moving vast quantities of
material—they are said to have moved as much as 200,000 tons—in the
process. In spite of the discouragement of doing work of so exhaustive
and expensive a kind with no further reward than a few unimportant
pots, they pressed on, until on 5th November 1922 their indomitable
persistence was rewarded with the most wonderful discovery ever made in
the history of archæological investigation.
The day before he left London last January to return to Egypt Lord
Carnarvon gave this account of the discovery. In the famous tomb of the
Vizier Rekhmara no burial shaft could be found, and after searching
for it near the tomb-building it was decided to try in the Valley of
the Tombs. While cleaning the floor of the valley for this purpose,
Mr Carter found a step cut in the rock and after further clearance he
found a wall in the cement upon which was impressed the seal of the
Royal Necropolis. Further examination revealed the presence of a tomb
that had been entered soon after the burial. It bore the cartouche of
the King Tutankhamen.
The story of the amazing treasures that have so far been discovered in
the tomb has been told in the daily press day by day from November 1922
until April 1923, and Mr Harry Burton’s photographs have given us a
realistic idea of their appearance.
The plan of the tomb presents a marked contrast to the more familiar
Theban burial places; but it becomes more intelligible when it is
compared with those which were made at the heretic king’s capital
during the time of Akhenaton.
Of the four chambers in the tomb only one has up to now so far been
examined, and when the inventory comes to be made of the annexe,
which is now packed with furniture, and the room leading out of the
burial chamber, the largest and most wonderful collection of ancient
furniture that has ever been made will be revealed.
But the most marvellous revelations of all await the investigator
next season when the shrines in the burial chamber are opened and the
sarcophagus and the coffins within it are made to reveal to us how a
royal mummy was prepared for its eternal home.
The plan of the tomb of Rameses IV, made more than two centuries
later than the time of Tutankhamen, is the only evidence we have of
the arrangement of the coffins within the shrines; but the coffins
of Yuaa and Tuaa, the great-grandparents of Tutankhamen’s wife, and
especially the wonderful coffin made for Akhenaton, his father-in-law,
have prepared us for what we are to find next winter. But the artistic
inspiration revealed in the design of Tutankhamen’s funerary furniture
and the craftsmanship are so vastly superior to those displayed in
other tombs that we cannot predict what gems of art will be found when
the inner coffins are exposed.
Of the mummy itself we can predict the success of the embalmer’s
efforts, because the art of preserving the body was at its best in the
period from Amenhotep II until Rameses II, but some very interesting
points in the technique of embalming remain to be discovered. In the
case of Amenhotep III, the latest mummy of the eighteenth dynasty so
far examined, the new procedure for stuffing packing material under the
skin was introduced for the first time. In the nineteenth and twentieth
dynasties it was completely given up, only to be readopted in the
twenty-first dynasty. It will be interesting to discover whether or not
this procedure was still in vogue at the time of Tutankhamen.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.—Ancient Plan of the Tomb of Rameses IV with an
interpretation by Howard Carter and Alan Gardiner (_Journal of Egyptian
Archæology_).]
[Illustration: FIG. 3.—The Mummies of Yuaa and Tuaa, the latest
complete mummies known before the time of Tutankhamen, and the mummy of
Seti I, the earliest after him. These mummies will give some idea of
the state of preservation likely to be revealed in Tutankhamen’s mummy.]
The most interesting discovery of all that next season holds in store
will be the equipment of jewellery with which the mummy will be
provided. So far all that we know of such jewels has been derived from
the recovery of odd fragments and the impressions left upon the mummy’s
wrappings by the pieces long since stolen.
CHAPTER III
TUTANKHAMEN
During the course of the excavations in the Valley of the Tombs of the
Kings made on behalf of the late Mr Theodore M. Davis in the years
1906 and 1907, a series of objects were discovered bearing the name of
Tutankhamen. In all probability they were stolen from his tomb during
the reign of Horemheb, only a few years after the pharaoh was buried.
Under a large rock, found tilted on one side near the foot of a high
hill, the late Mr Edward Ayrton, who was in charge of Mr Davis’s
Exploration in 1906, found a beautiful blue glaze cup bearing the
cartouche of Tutankhamen. In the following year, when the late Mr E.
Harold Jones was superintending the work, a rock-cut chamber was found;
and as it contained so many objects bearing the name of Tutankhamen
it was assumed by Mr Davis that he had discovered that king’s tomb.
Hence the volume published in 1912 giving an account of the work of
1906, 1907, and 1908 (during the last of which the tomb of Horemheb
was found on the south side of the chamber already mentioned) was
entitled _The Tombs of Harmhabi_ [Horemheb] _and Touatânkhamanou_
[Tutankhamen] (Theodore M. Davis’ Excavations: Bibân el Molük), and
the late Sir Gaston Maspero gave accounts of all that was then known
of the lives of both Horemheb and Tutankhamen. It is only right to add
that Sir Gaston Maspero did not regard the chamber opened by Mr Harold
Jones as the tomb of Tutankhamen. For in the closing paragraph of his
report on the scanty information we have of Tutankhamen’s life and
achievements, he states: “I suppose his tomb was in the Western Valley,
somewhere between or near Amenôthes III [Amenhotep III, the last
royal mummy known to have been buried at Thebes before Tutankhamen,
because Akhenaton and Smenkhara were buried at El Amarna, and removed
to Thebes later] and Aiya [Ay, the successor of Tutankhamen]: when
the reaction against Atonu and his followers was complete, his mummy
and his furniture were taken to a hiding-place, as those of Tiyi and
Khuniatonu had been, probably under Harmhabi, and there Davis found
what remained of it after so many transfers and plunders. But this also
is a mere hypothesis, the truth of which we have no means of proving or
disproving as yet.”
Although Sir Gaston was right in assuming that the chamber discovered
in 1907 was not Tutankhamen’s tomb, his hypothesis that the latter
might have been in the neighbourhood of his predecessor (Amenhotep III)
and his successor (Ay) has been shown by Mr Howard Carter’s recent
discovery not to be true. The chamber seems to have been nothing more
than a safe (perhaps cut out by the workmen who were making a tomb for
Horemheb) in which plunderers of the tombs of Tutankhamen and Ay hid
their spoil. Why they were unable to rescue all the gold they stole
and so hid away is not apparent. The chamber was buried at a depth of
25 feet and was almost filled with mud, which had been swept into it
by the rain of many centuries. In this room was found a broken box
containing several pieces of gold stamped with the names of Tutankhamen
and his wife Ankhsenamen, and others bearing the name of his successor
called the King’s Father-in-law Ay and his wife Tiy, but without any
title or prenomen. In the mud was found the very beautiful statuette
made of fine translucent aragonite commonly called “alabaster.” Apart
from its value as a wonderful work of art this figure is interesting
as the broad scarf around the loins is tied in the Syrian fashion.
Unfortunately there is no inscription on it. M. Daressy makes the
tentative suggestion that it may represent Ay before his succession to
the throne.
When it is recalled that in the recently discovered tomb parts of the
gold plating were found to have been torn off the throne and other
pieces of furniture brought to light by Lord Carnarvon’s expedition, it
is interesting to note that the inscribed sheets of gold found in 1908
represent scenes of Tutankhamen’s triumphs and captured prisoners such
as would have adorned the tomb furniture that has been found mutilated.
Other pieces of gold represent similar scenes from furniture plundered
from the tomb of Tutankhamen’s successor Ay.
A few days after the discovery of the chamber containing these stolen
objects a pit was found, some distance away from it, in which there
were large earthenware pots containing debris from a tomb, such as
wreaths of leaves and flowers and small bags of powdered substance.
The cover of one of these jars was broken and wrapped around it was a
piece of linen bearing an inscription in ink which refers to the sixth
year of Tutankhamen’s reign.
In this volume, as I have already mentioned, the late Sir Gaston
Maspero collected together the few scraps of information available in
1912 with reference to the life and reign of Tutankhamen.
In the British Museum there are two models of lions sculptured from
red granite, one of which was made at the instigation of Amenhotep
III for a temple in the Soudan. The other one may have been carved
for Tutankhamen, who claims that he “repaired the monuments of his
father Amenhotep.” For nearly a century scholars have been discussing
the question whether the use of the word “father” was intended to
refer to his parentage, whether, in fact, Tutankhamen was a brother
or half-brother of his father-in-law the heretic king Akhenaton,
or whether the word was used simply as a term of respect for his
predecessor. The problem still remains unsolved, for Tutankhamen’s
elevation to the throne was due to his marriage with the daughter of
Akhenaton, the customary method in ancient Egypt for establishing a
right to the kingship.
[Illustration: FIG. 4.—Tutankhamen receiving Ethiopian tribute from
Huy. [_After Lepsius._]
At the time of his marriage and succession he belonged to the Aton
faith, which his father-in-law had established, and his name was
Tutankhaton. But as soon as Akhenaton died, Tutankhaton and his wife
Ankhsenpaaton abandoned the heresy and returned to the orthodox faith
of Amen. As a token of their conversion they changed their names
to Tutankhamen and Ankhsenamen and left Akhenaton’s capital for
Thebes, the headquarters of the priesthood of Amen, who no doubt were
responsible for Tutankhamen’s sudden return to the old religion.
The little information we possess of his reign is derived mainly
from the inscriptions upon the Theban temples restored by him after
his return to the orthodox faith, though many of these records are
palimpsests, for Horemheb replaced Tutankhamen’s name on most of them.
The two other chief sources of information are: (_a_) the piece of
linen found in 1907, which is the only certain evidence that he reigned
as long as six years; and (_b_) a remarkably interesting series of
wall-pictures in the tombs of Huy at Kurnet (Murrai), which afford
the only record we have of Tutankhamen’s relations with Ethiopia and
Asia. These pictures are among the most familiar records of ancient
Egyptian life, having been used by Champollion, Lepsius, Brugsch and
Piehl, and the inscriptions describing the scenes have been translated
into English by Professor Breasted.[1]
[Illustration: FIG. 5.—Part of the Asiatic tribute presented to
Tutankhamen by Huy. [_After Lepsius._]
CHAPTER IV
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DISCOVERY
When the eyes of all the world are focussed on the tomb of Tutankhamen
and the fresh revelation it affords of the superb achievements of
the ancient Egyptians in the arts and crafts, it is worth while to
consider how this new discovery is likely to affect our attitude to
the history of civilization and to promote a fuller recognition of the
human motives that found expression in its creation and development.
Apart from the demonstration it affords of the fabulous wealth that was
hidden away more than thirty centuries ago in the Valley of the Tombs
of the Kings, the new discovery appeals as an æsthetic revelation of
dazzling brilliance rather than as an addition to our knowledge. So far
its effect has been to force the scholar and the man in the street to
take an interest in the civilization that was capable of producing such
perfect works of art, and to ask themselves whether this precocious
culture was really so exotic as it is commonly supposed to have been,
or whether, on the contrary, such achievements on the very threshold of
a yet unenlightened Europe did not exert a far greater influence than
it is usual to accord them.
But at present we are concerned simply in considering what is the
significance of the discoveries so far made; the furniture, which has
never been surpassed in the perfection of its workmanship and exquisite
decoration; linen of a fineness and a beauty of texture that have never
been excelled; carved alabaster vases such as the world has never seen
before; and statues that afford some justification for the ancient
belief that they were, in truth, “living images.” What is the meaning
of all this lavish display of skill and beauty? Why was so much wealth
poured into the hidden recesses of this desolate ravine, and the most
exquisite products of the world’s achievement in the arts and crafts
buried out of sight in this strange necropolis? The true answers
to these questions reveal the motive force that brought about the
development of civilization and made Egypt the pioneer in its creation.
_Embalming and Immortality_
All these elaborate preparations, the laborious and costly process of
hewing the tomb out of the solid rock and furnishing it with such
magnificence, were made because the ancient Egyptians believed that
the king’s body to be housed in it had been made imperishable. They
imagined that when the body was embalmed the continuation of the
king’s existence had been assured. Hence they provided him with food
and raiment, the furniture and amulets, the jewels and the unguents,
and other luxuries which he had been accustomed to enjoy, before he
was taken to his “eternal house” in the desolate Valley of the Tombs.
There can be no doubt that in the early days of Egyptian history this
naïve belief was regarded in all seriousness as the simple truth. In
fact, the thoroughness with which at first the Egyptians gave concrete
expression to their faith in making material provision for every want
that the deceased might experience could only have been inspired by
the confidence that all these preparations were indeed effective.
This conviction was deeply rooted in the practice of mummifying the
dead, preserving the body so that it should become incorruptible and
everlasting; and this was supposed also to involve the feasibility of
the prolongation of the dead man’s existence.
The hope of survival was thus based upon the efficacy of the
embalmer’s art; and the extraordinary constancy with which for more
than thirty centuries—for a span of years four times the length of
time that separates us from the arrival of William the Conqueror in
Britain—they persisted in their efforts to improve their methods and
render more perfect this gruesome practice is a striking tribute to the
fundamental importance of mummification to the Egyptians. The craft
of the carpenter was first invented for the manufacture of coffins to
protect the corpse; the stonemason’s first experiments had for their
aim the preparation of rock-cut chambers still further to ensure its
safety; the first buildings worthy of being called architecture were
intended to promote the welfare of the dead, to provide places to which
relatives could bring food necessary for the dead man’s sustenance, and
a room to house his portrait statue—another art that was the outcome
of the practice of mummification—which took his place at the temple of
offerings and preserved his likeness for all time.
These elements of civilization, the arts of architecture and sculpture,
and the crafts of the carpenter and the stonemason, were thus direct
results of the custom of embalming. But its influence in moulding
ritual and belief was no less profound and far-reaching.
_Early Beliefs_
The belief in the possibility of the continuation of existence after
death may have been (and probably was) much older than the Egyptians;
but the evidence now available seems fairly decisive that the belief
in immortality was not definitely formulated by mankind until the
means had been devised of making the corpse everlasting, when “the
corruptible body put on incorruption.” Moreover, the ritual of the most
primitive religions was based upon the practices of the early Egyptians
for revivifying the mummy, or its surrogate, the mortuary statue, by
burning incense, pouring out libations, opening its mouth to give it
the breath of life, and performing a series of dramatic acts to animate
it. By means of these ritual procedures it was supposed that the
officiating priest was able to restore consciousness to the dead body
and so make it possible for it not only to take an intelligent share in
the life around it, but also to hear appeals for help and guidance and
to answer such requests.
Egypt alone of the countries of antiquity provides the explanation
of these strange beliefs and practices. They were devised by the
concrete-minded people of the Nile Valley as part of a comprehensive
philosophy of life and death which was formulated as a sort of life
insurance, in accordance with the principles of which the deceased
himself was supposed to be the beneficiary, and his reward an
indefinite prolongation of existence.
This remarkable system of beliefs originated even before the
beginning of civilization, sixty centuries ago; but the latter event
was responsible for intensifying the conviction of its reality and
increasing men’s hope in its potency.
_The Dawn of Civilization_
Civilization began when the Egyptians first devised the methods of
agriculture and invented a system of irrigation. The irrigation
engineer was the first man in the history of the world to control
and organize the co-operative work of his fellow-men, and become the
ruler of a whole community. If there is one lesson more than another
that history has demonstrated in Egypt, equally in ancient and in
modern times, it is the absolute necessity of a strong and autocratic
Government, because the conditions in the Nile Valley are such that
the prosperity of the country and the welfare of the whole community
is entirely dependent upon the just and equitable distribution of the
waters of irrigation throughout the land. It is not to be wondered
at that the engineer who successfully achieved this task, and in a
very special and real sense controlled the lives and destinies of his
people, became the king, whose beneficence was apotheosized after his
death, so that he became the god Osiris, who was identified with the
river, whose life-giving powers he controlled. For to a people who
had never experienced anything of the kind before it must have seemed
an altogether miraculous and superhuman act for one man to have in
his absolute control the prosperity of a whole community and every
individual unit of it.
The connection between this story and the tomb of Tutankhamen may not
be apparent. But when it is realized that the original invention of
the social system was so closely identified with the god Osiris, it
will be understood that the ritual of mummification and burial aimed at
identifying the deceased with Osiris, and by imitating the incidents
of his story to secure for the deceased a fate like that of the god,
whose life-giving powers were sought to grant the continuation of
existence.
[Illustration: FIG. 6.—Part of a mace-head found by Mr J. E. Quibell
at Hierakonpolis in 1897-8, showing one of the earliest kings of Egypt
engaged in the task of cutting an irrigation canal.]
The early kings of Egypt, rich in their newly acquired control of the
labour and wealth of their dominion, did not hesitate to squander both
in the preparation of their tombs, in the vain belief that thereby they
were making certain their own survival. Twenty centuries later, in the
times of Tutankhamen, they were still obsessed with the same idea, and
spent fabulous sums in preparing their tombs in the Biban el Moluk.
The peculiar importance of the study of these strange customs and
beliefs in Egypt depends upon the fact that, not only were they
invented by the Egyptians, and preserved in their entirety, so that
the whole story of its development can be read in all their childish
directness and simplicity, but also because other peoples of antiquity,
to whose civilization Europe owes her own heritage, adopted some of the
results of these Egyptian devices, and, after eliminating some of their
cruder details, transformed them into the essentials of the world’s
civilization. Hence, in recovering the history of Egyptian cultural
development, we are really probing into the sources of the customs
and beliefs of our own everyday life and experience. Thus we must
regard mummification as something more than an eccentric practice that
excites our curiosity. For it played a fundamental part in shaping the
development of civilization, both its arts and crafts, as well as its
most vital customs and beliefs.
_Giving Life to the Dead_
If we turn to consider the process of mummification, and the aims of
its practitioners, it will be found that throughout the long ages in
which it was in vogue the Egyptian embalmer kept constantly striving to
attain two aims. His first object was to preserve the actual tissues
of the body as thoroughly as he could. But he was also attempting the
much more difficult task of preserving the natural form of the body,
and especially of the features. He was prompted to make this effort,
not merely that the deceased should retain his distinctive traits in
a recognizable form, but rather that the simulacrum should be the
“living” image of himself. In other words, the aim was to make the
representation of the dead man so life-like that he should, in fact,
remain alive, and be certain of maintaining his existence. The early
Egyptians seem to have entertained in all its childlike _naïveté_ the
belief that they were actually conferring vitality upon the image
when they made it life-like. The Egyptian verb for describing the
work of the sculptor who carved the portrait statue meant literally,
according to Dr Alan Gardiner, “to give birth,” in the sense of “giving
life”; and there is no doubt they meant this idea of life-giving to be
accepted as the simple expression of a fact, and not merely as a symbol
or analogy.
It must not be forgotten that when these beliefs were first formulated,
more than fifty centuries ago, there was no knowledge or understanding
of the principles of physics and biology to hinder the adoption of such
naïve fancies as the simple and obvious truth. There is no reason to
doubt that the philosophers of those days did honestly believe in the
possibility of prolonging existence by fulfilling all the conditions
that seemed to them essential and adequate to the maintenance of
vitality.
When mummification was first devised, probably at the time of the
earliest dynasty (about 3400 B.C.) it was realized that if, in the
climate of Egypt, the preservation of the tissues of the body was
not very difficult to effect, the task of retaining the distinctive
features was practically unattainable. All kinds of devices were
tried, during the second, third, and fourth dynasties, by wrapping
the mummy so as to simulate the human form, painting it, applying
clay or resinous paste, and modelling it into a portrait statue upon
the enshrouded mummy itself. When these devices failed to achieve the
desired aim of making life-like portraits, the art of modelling statues
of the deceased in stone or wood was invented, and paint and artificial
eyes were used to make them as life-like as possible. The skill
with which the Egyptians of the Pyramid Age overcame the technical
difficulties of the sculptors’ art and made life-size portraits which,
as I have said before, could not untruthfully be called “living
images,” is one of the most amazing achievements in the history of art.
But it was more than the triumph of a craftsman: it was the realization
of a deeper desire to preserve the image, and so prolong the existence
of the sculptor’s model, the deceased, who was thus supposed to have
been saved from annihilation.
In the first chapter of my book _The Evolution of the Dragon_, I have
discussed this problem more fully.
[Illustration: FIG. 7.—Portrait of Hesi, _circa_ 3000 B.C., to show the
skill displayed even at the beginning of Egyptian history in carving
portraits in wood. As a rule they were made in the round and life-size.
This funerary portrait cut in low relief in wood is exceptional.]
_Success after Twenty Centuries_
Although these early sculptors had achieved so signal a triumph, the
embalmers never abandoned the hope of bringing their art to such a
state of perfection as to make of the mummy itself the simulacrum of
the deceased. With infinite patience and persistence they experimented
through one millennium after another to attain this object. But
it was not until the time of the twenty-first dynasty, more than
twenty centuries after they first attempted to do it, that they were
able to transform the mummy itself into a portrait statue. From the
artistic point this represents to us a debasement of æsthetic motive
and practice; but to the embalmer it was the culmination of his
achievement. But it was also the prelude to the degradation of his art.
For the technique became so complex and difficult of execution that
failure became a common incident, and to disguise the evidence of such
incompetence the practice grew up of paying chief attention to the
external appearance of the wrappings rather than to the corpse.
[Illustration: FIG. 8.—The “packed” mummy of a Queen of the
Twenty-first Dynasty.]
But to us the complicated technique of the embalmers during the
twenty-first dynasty appeals rather as ingenious trickery, a tampering
with the natural body to give it a spurious and trumpery resemblance to
a living being. Judged by our artistic standards there can be no doubt
that the ancient Egyptian practice of mummification was seen at its
best at the end of the eighteenth dynasty, that is about the time of
Tutankhamen. The most successful results are revealed in the mummies of
Yuaa and Tuaa and of Seti I (Fig. 3, p. 33), which means that at the
time when Tutankhamen was embalmed the craftsmen had the skill and the
material resources to make as perfect a mummy as Egyptian ingenuity in
the whole of its experience was capable of doing.
But the Egyptian tomb-robbers brought to the attention of the official
world many mummies of the earlier part of the eighteenth dynasty,
as well as some of those of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties
respectively before and after the culmination of the technical success
in or about Tutankhamen’s time which revealed only too clearly certain
faults that it seemed desirable to remedy.
The wholesale plundering of the Royal mummies in the twentieth
dynasty, and the knowledge acquired by the priests when remedying
the damage so inflicted, seem to have been responsible for the rapid
transformation of the methods in the twenty-first dynasty. For this
experience afforded them a unique opportunity of studying the results
and appreciating the defects of their predecessors’ work.
That they profited by this experience is evident from the changes
they effected in their technique after they had realized wherein the
methods employed during the twentieth dynasty failed to attain the
desired aim. For their innovations were directed towards remedying
the most obtrusive distortions found in the mummies of the nineteenth
and twentieth dynasties. The sunken cheeks were filled out by means
of packing them with linen or mud, artificial eyes were inserted, the
nose, lips, and ears were protected from distortion by wax plates, and
the cheeks were painted. Many other devices were introduced to convert
the mummy from a shrunken caricature into a more life-like portrait.
Mummification reached its fullest and most successful development
during the six centuries from 1500 B.C. to 940 B.C., which represents
the period of the collection of royal mummies in the Cairo Museum.
They reveal the ancient Egyptian practice of embalming in its highest
perfection, and have provided most of the information we possess of the
history of mummification.
I have called attention to the aims which the ancient Egyptians kept so
persistently in view in constructing and furnishing the tombs of their
kings. The pharaoh’s body was embalmed to make sure of the continuation
of his existence beyond the grave. The conviction that this object was
really attained when the mummy was made and housed in an imperishable
building induced them to furnish the tomb lavishly and to provide an
ample store of food to sustain him and give him all the comforts and
luxuries to which he was accustomed when he was living upon earth. But,
to make doubly sure, they inscribed upon the walls of his tomb, upon
his sarcophagus and coffins, and on papyri placed in the tombs, certain
texts to make clear his identification with Osiris, with the practical
object of ensuring that he should share the fate of the god and attain
the immortality which the god had secured. Moreover, other devices were
adopted to make the issue more certain.
[Illustration: FIG. 9.—Drawing from Book of the Dead to illustrate the
Germinating Osiris, from Rosellini.]
Of the objects found in association with the mummies of Egyptian kings
of the eighteenth dynasty to which definite cultural importance was
attached, none is more remarkable than the so-called “germinating
Osiris.” Several examples of this singular symbol were found in the
tombs of Tutankhamen’s predecessors, as far back as Amenhotep II. (1420
B.C.), and as it was observed in its fullest development in the tomb
of his successor, Horemheb (1315 B.C.), it is more probable than not
that Tutankhamen’s will also be similarly equipped. It consists of a
shallow box about 5 ft. long, shaped so as to represent the god Osiris,
wearing a crown and holding the crook and whip in his hands. By means
of wooden partitions the features of the head, the necklace, the arms
are represented. This shallow box was filled with earth in which barley
was planted; when it germinated and the sprouts had attained two or
three inches in height a closely-fitting lid was fastened on to the
box by wooden pegs. The lid is slightly sculptured en ronde bosse, and
painted yellow. The details of the body and the ornaments are indicated
in relief, the effect of which is heightened by lines of black and red.
_The King and Osiris_
The symbolism expressed in this remarkable procedure was in keeping
with the motives which were explained earlier in this chapter, the
identification of the dead king with Osiris (who was himself a dead
king), whose magical powers as the bestower of renewed life and a
continuation of existence after death was symbolized by the germinating
barley.
But the procedure was richly charged with the deepest religious
significance. I have already explained that the whole of the burial
customs of the early Egyptians and the dramatic ritual which formed
part of the tomb ceremonies were inspired by the desire to ensure the
prolongation of existence. The body was made imperishable and protected
by every means the relatives could devise: it was supplied with
abundance of food and all the necessaries of life; and, above all, the
“germinating Osiris” was there to complete the process and perpetually
to animate and prolong the existence of the corpse. If its potency
was derived from the reproduction of the form of Osiris, an equally
vital part of its supposed magical power was due to the fact that it
consisted of barley in the act of producing new life.
As the earliest cereal that was cultivated and the staple diet of
the earliest civilized people—and the chief factor in creating their
civilization—barley came to occupy a peculiarly distinctive rôle
in early belief. It was the staff of life and the material from
which beer was made, the drink which was regarded as “divine,” in
the sense that life-giving qualities were attributed to it, and to
the ancient Egyptian the essence of divinity was the attainment of
unlimited existence. But the form assumed by a grain of barley (_i.e._
its similarity to the organ of birth, the giver of life) led to the
assimilation of its life-sustaining with definitely life-giving
functions. It was identified with the Great Mother as a life-giver
(in her forms as Hathor or Isis); and the “corn mother” acquired the
reputation of being able to prolong existence in other ways than
providing food and drink. The coffin texts of the Middle Kingdom
(_circa_ 2000 B.C.) translated by M. Lacau refer to the identification
of the deceased with Osiris and barley, and in the Pyramid texts many
centuries earlier the dead king is represented, as making the following
claim: “I am Osiris. I live as the gods; I live as ‘Grain’; I grow as
‘Grain.’ I am barley.” (Professor Breasted’s translation.) Just as the
Nile (which was personified as Osiris) conveyed new life to the grains
of barley by irrigating them, so the god was supposed to be able to
grant a new lease of existence to the dead.
CHAPTER V
THE VALLEY OF THE TOMBS
It was about the year 1500 B.C. that the desolate and impressive ravine
which is now known as the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings was chosen
by King Thothmes I as the site for his tomb. His immediate predecessor
Amenhotep I had observed the practice, which had prevailed since the
temple was first invented, of building the tomb in association with
it. For the temple was a development of the rooms provided at the tomb
for the relations of the deceased to make offerings of food and drink
to the dead for the essentially practical purpose of maintaining his
existence. In these rooms also certain ceremonies were performed from
time to time with the object of animating the dead man (or his portrait
statue) so that he could enjoy the food and commune with his relations.
But such functions were also part of the process of conveying “life” to
him and so ensuring the maintenance of his existence.
[Illustration: FIG. 10.—The end of the desolate Valley of the Tombs of
the Kings at Thebes, the most impressive site in the whole of Egypt.]
In course of time as these ceremonies for conveying sustenance and
life to a dead king assumed a wider significance the chamber of
offering developed into a temple and a subtle change occurred in the
meaning attached to the ritual. For instead of being regarded merely
as a physical device for conveying food and the essence of life the
ceremonies came to be regarded more and more as acts of worship of the
dead king. When this happened the close nexus between the temple and
the tomb was no longer so essential as it was in earlier times when the
ceremonial in the former was intended to vitalize the corpse of the
king (or his substitute the portrait statue). But it was not until the
closing years of the sixteenth century B.C. (Thothmes I is believed
to have died in 1501 B.C.) that the king began to prepare a tomb for
himself miles away from his temple. This geographical separation of the
temple from the tomb had a far-reaching influence upon the functions
of the former, and prepared the way for the modern conception of a
house of worship, even though in Europe the ancient conception of the
close association of a church and a churchyard (as a burying place) was
retained. The practice inaugurated by Thothmes I of preparing royal
tombs in the famous Theban Valley lasted from about 1500 B.C. until the
end of the twentieth dynasty, about 1090 B.C.
[Illustration: FIG. 11.—An ancient Egyptian drawing (_circa_ 1400 B.C.)
illustrating the arrangement of the tomb and temple about a millennium
earlier. The temple where the relations of the deceased made offerings
or animating ceremonies before the statue (or the mummy itself) was
then an essential part of the tomb, where the actual body of the
deceased was laid to rest.]
Amenhotep III, who was buried in 1375 B.C., broke away from the
observances of his four predecessors who were buried in the Eastern
Valley and made his tomb in the Western Valley; and his famous son and
successor, Amenhotep IV, the heretic king Akhenaton, made the more
daring innovation of preparing a tomb at his new capital, the City of
the Horizon of Aton, on the site of the modern Tell el Amarna. It was
a rock-cut tomb in the mountains about seven miles to the east of his
new capital—which Akhenaton built midway (p. 22) between Thebes and
Memphis, the ancient capitals of Upper and Lower Egypt respectively.
There he seems to have been buried in the red granite sarcophagus that
is now broken into fragments; but his son-in-law Tutankhamen, when
he reverted to the orthodox religion of Thebes, thought it proper to
remove the mummy of his father-in-law from the City of the Horizon to
the Theban necropolis and made for it the resting place in the Valley
of the Tombs, which was discovered in 1907 by Mr Arthur Weigall,
who as Inspector of Antiquities for Upper Egypt was supervising the
excavations endowed by the late Mr Theodore M. Davis.
The fate of the mummy of Akhenaton’s successor Smenkhara is unknown:
but Tutankhamen came after him, and Mr Howard Carter’s discovery has
shown that he displayed his return to strict orthodoxy by making his
tomb in the Eastern Valley among the worshippers of Amen. For some
reason which has not been fully elucidated, his successor Ay made
his tomb in the Western Valley and so was laid to rest alongside
Amenhotep III, whose Minister he seems to have been during his life.
He is supposed by some historians to have been the father or the
foster-father of Nefertiti, the wife of Akhenaton.
[Illustration: Map of Thebes.]
Until the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in the Eastern Valley last
November it was believed (by Sir Gaston Maspero and others) that it
would be found in the Western Valley. Until then Ay’s was the earliest
royal tomb, after that of Amenhotep III, to be discovered, and as they
were in the Western Valley, it seemed probable that Ay’s predecessor
Tutankhamen had also been buried there. But when making the secondary
tomb for Akhenaton in the Eastern Valley he seems to have made his own
tomb there also, and so resumed the old practice, which was observed by
all his successors for two and a half centuries with the exception only
of his successor Ay.
This wonderfully impressive gorge (Fig. 10, p. 66) is known to the
modern Egyptians as the _Bab_ (or _Biban_) _el Moluk_, the Gate (or
Gates) of the Kings. It was known to travellers ever since it was made
into the royal necropolis, and Greeks and Romans marvelled at the
wonderful tunnel-like tombs there, as generations of tourists have done
ever since. Strabo mentions his having seen forty of these tombs, but
it is not clear from his account whether he did not include those of
the Western Valley and perhaps the Tombs of the Queens and others.
Modern research was inaugurated by the traveller Belzoni who opened the
tomb of Seti I in 1819 and described the pictures on its walls (Fig.
20 is copied from his notebook) before they were damaged or destroyed.
He brought to London the magnificent “alabaster” sarcophagus of this
pharaoh, which is now in Sir John Soane’s museum in Lincoln’s Inn
Fields.
The year 1881 will always be memorable for the earliest discovery
of Royal mummies. Five years later, when the wrappings were removed
from such pharaohs as Seti I and Rameses II, modern men had the novel
experience of gazing upon the actual faces of these famous rulers of
the remotely distant past, whose exploits had resounded through the
civilized world for thirty centuries and more. On several occasions in
former years the discovery of Royal mummies had been reported; but in
every case further investigation failed to justify such claims, for
they proved to be merely intrusive burials of unknown people belonging
to times much later than the rifled tombs in which they were found.
Examples of such mistakes in identification are the eighteenth dynasty
mummy, now in the Cairo Museum, which was found in a pyramid at
Sakkara, and at one time was supposed to be the son of King Pepi, of
the sixth dynasty; and the skeleton (not a mummy) in the British Museum
from the pyramid of Mykerinus, which has repeatedly been referred to as
the bones, or even as the mummy, of that pharaoh.
The discoveries made in the famous cache at Deir el Bahari in 1881, and
in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings during the decade 1898-1908,
revealed the only actual mummies of members of the royal family so far
recovered, although the skeletons of much earlier members of the ruling
house were found by M. de Morgan in the pyramids of Dashur nearly
thirty years ago.
Long before the recovery of the actual bodies of these famous rulers
the statues and bas-reliefs of some of them had familiarized us with
their appearance; and inscriptions on their monuments and the ancient
writings of the Egyptians and their neighbours had made us acquainted
with certain of their exploits. The plundered tombs of some of the
great kings of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties have been
known and visited by tourists from the times of the Greek domination
of Egypt, and contemporary documents refer to others. Moreover, twenty
years before the mummies themselves were revealed, the dealers in
antiquities began to offer for sale a series of papyri (most of which
came to this country) giving accounts of the desecration of the royal
Theban tombs.
[Illustration: FIG. 12.—An old photograph of the great cliffs behind
Deir el Bahari, showing this temple as it was in 1881 before it was
excavated. The royal mummies were hidden in a cleft in these cliffs.]
_Tomb-robbers’ Confessions_
In the late Lord Amherst’s collection, which was recently sold in
London, there was a judicial papyrus of the reign of Rameses IX (about
1125 B.C.), reporting the trial of eight “servants of the High Priest
of Amen,” who were arraigned for plundering the tomb of King Sebekemsaf
of the thirteenth dynasty. The written depositions of the prisoners
set before the pharaoh by the vizier, the lieutenant, the reporter,
and the mayor of Thebes were translated by Professor Percy Newberry
in these terms: “We opened the coffins and their wrappings, which
were on them, and we found the noble mummy of the king. There were
two swords and many amulets and necklaces of gold on his neck: his
head was covered with gold. We tore off the gold that we found on the
noble mummy of this god [_i.e._ the dead king who was identified
with Osiris]. We found the royal wife also. We tore off all that we
found from her mummy likewise, and we set fire to their wrappings. We
took their furniture of gold, silver and copper vases, which we found
with them.” The prisoners who made this confession were found guilty,
and sentenced “to be placed in the prison of the temple of Amen,” to
await “the punishment that our lord the pharaoh shall decide.” There
are several other famous papyri reporting trials of desecrators of the
royal tombs. In the Abbott papyrus (in the British Museum) inspectors
submit a report on the tombs that were said to have been plundered, but
the only one that had actually been robbed was that referred to in the
confession just quoted from the Amherst papyrus. The two Mayer papyri
in the Liverpool Free Public Museums relate to plundering in the Valley
of the Tombs of the Kings. One of these is of special interest at the
present moment because it relates to the violation of the tomb of
Rameses VI, which is immediately above that of Tutankhamen. The robbers
were discovered as the result of quarrels among themselves about the
division of the spoil. This was one of the most disgraceful incidents
in the whole history of tomb-plundering. The robbers, in their haste to
get at the gold and jewels upon the mummies, usually chopped through
the bandages, and mutilated the mummy in the process. But when, in
1905, I removed the wrappings from the mummy of Rameses VI (which in
ancient times had been removed to the tomb of Amenhotep II, where it
was discovered by M. Loret in 1898), the body was found to be hacked
to pieces. This was no mere accidental injury, but clearly intentional
destruction of a malicious nature. It makes one realize the sort of
vandalism Tutankhamen’s tomb so narrowly escaped.
_Hiding the Mummies_
The discovery of the royal mummies in 1881—and this applies with
special force to the remains of the famous pharaohs Seti I and Rameses
II—gave us the other side of the story, for it revealed the measures
taken to protect the bodies of these kings from further injury, and
the persistence with which the protectors of the tombs moved the
mummies from one place to another in their endeavour to save them.
The condition of affairs revealed in the tomb of Tutankhamen brings
proof of what has long been suspected, that the work of the plunderer
began soon after the closing of the chambers. But during the twentieth
and twenty-first dynasties, when there was a rapid weakening of the
Administration, tomb-robbing assumed proportions it had never attained
before. The record inscribed upon the coffins of Seti I and Rameses
II throws a lurid light on the extent of this loss of control. For a
century and a half their mummies were moved from one hiding-place to
another in the attempt to secure their safety. The mummy of the great
Rameses was moved to the tomb of his father, Seti I, whose body for
some time remained in its own alabaster sarcophagus, which is now in
Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. But in the reign of
Siamon (976-958 B.C.) the two mummies were hidden in the tomb of a
queen called Inhapi, and about ten years later were moved again, this
time to a tomb that had been originally prepared for Amenhotep I at
Deir el Bahari. Here they, together with more than thirty other royal
mummies, remained undisturbed for more than twenty-eight centuries,
until about fifty years ago they were rediscovered, and the successors
of the ancient tomb-robbers of Thebes once more resumed the old
process of depredation. But the late Sir Gaston Maspero had not
studied the papyri of the twentieth dynasty in vain, for he obtained
a confession that is worthy of being set beside those recorded in the
Amherst and Mayer papyri.
[Illustration: FIG. 13.—The lid of the coffin that contained the
rewrapped mummy of Amenhotep III, to show how it was labelled by the
Priests of the twentieth dynasty and the record of an inspection
written alongside it.]
The story of the ill-treatment of the royal mummies and of their
repeated removal from one hiding-place to another prepared us in some
measure for the discoveries that were made when the shrouds and linen
bandages were removed. But in spite of this the investigation was full
of surprises. Several of the mummies after being hastily rewrapped (in
the twentieth or twenty-first dynasty) were put into the wrong coffins.
So that, for example, when the mummy supposed to be Rameses I (of the
nineteenth dynasty) was unwrapped, an old white-haired lady was found
embalmed in a way distinctive of the early part of the eighteenth
dynasty. And again, when the mummy in the coffin of Setnakht (the first
king of the twentieth dynasty) was examined, it was found to be that of
a woman embalmed in the manner distinctive of the time of Setnakht’s
predecessor (Seti II, of the nineteenth dynasty); and it is probable
that she is Queen Tausret, the wife in turn of the two kings, Siptah
and Seti II. Such discoveries reveal the need for caution in claiming
that the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings has yielded up all its hidden
secrets. For there are many royal mummies that we know to have been
buried there which have yet to be recovered.
If the examination of the royal mummies reveals the thoroughness
with which the tombs have been rifled—not one of the series has
ever been found undisturbed—they also give us some idea of the value
of the jewellery and amulets which excited the greed of the robbers
thirty centuries ago. The torn and mutilated wrappings of the mummies
often bear the impressions of magnificent pectoral ornaments, and of
amulets on the forehead, neck, or limbs; and the occasional finding of
fragments of these, made of gold, lapis lazuli, or carnelian, gives
us some idea of the value and beauty of this extravagant equipment
of the dead. But I have known only one instance of an object of any
considerable intrinsic value escaping the diligent searching of these
experienced robbers. During the examination (in 1909) of the badly
plundered mummy of Queen Hontaui I found a large and beautifully
embossed plate of pure gold, unique in size and in the elaboration of
its design.
From these considerations we can safely predict that if, as seems
now to be certain, the unplundered mummy is found in the tomb of
Tutankhamen jewellery of great value and beauty of design will
probably be found on it. The superb workmanship displayed in making
these ornaments and amulets is known to us from the discoveries
made by M. de Morgan in the Pyramids at Dashur in 1893. These gold
pectoral ornaments inlaid with precious stones were wrought with an
amazing perfection of technical skill many centuries before the time
of Tutankhamen; but the jewellery of the eighteenth and nineteenth
dynasties now exhibited in many museums (especially the Cairo Museum
and the Louvre) reveals that the skill in making such works of art had
not been lost. The quality of the workmanship revealed in the objects
found in the first chamber of Tutankhamen’s tomb should prepare us
for the discovery on the mummy of ornaments even surpassing those of
Rameses II in the Louvre (see Maspero, _Egyptian Art_).
But the chief interest in the discovery should be in the mummy itself,
for the welfare of which all the elaborate arrangements were made.
It is not merely because the mummies enable us to form some idea of
the physical features of the kings and queens, and by appealing to
our common humanity give their personalities a reality they would not
otherwise possess; nor is it because they often reveal evidence of age
and infirmities; their chief interest is the light they throw on the
history of the period and upon the development of the art of embalming.
Perhaps I can best make plain what is meant by this statement if I
refer to specific illustrations of the former kind of contribution the
study of mummies makes to the fuller understanding of history.
When in 1907 the bones were found that had once formed part of the
mummy wrongly assumed to be the famous Queen Tiy, I discovered that
they were the remains of a young man’s skeleton, for which, if it had
been normal, it was difficult to admit an age of more than twenty-six
years, if indeed as much. Now the archæological evidence seems to leave
no loophole of escape from the conclusion that these bones are actually
the skeleton of King Akhenaton; but, on the other hand, the historical
evidence seems to demand an age of at least thirty years (or, according
to a recent memoir by Professor Kurt Sethe, thirty-six years) for
the famous heretic pharaoh. This apparent conflict between the two
classes of evidence has stimulated an intensive study of the historical
data and of the medical history of Akhenaton himself; and the final
outcome of the investigations is likely to provide a most illuminating
revelation of the inner meaning of perhaps the most human and dramatic
incident that has come to us from ancient times. The peculiar
features of Akhenaton’s head and face, the grotesque form assumed by
his legs and body, no less than the eccentricities of his behaviour,
and his pathetic failure as a statesman, will probably be shown to
be due to his being the subject of a rare disorder, only recently
recognized by physicians, who have given it the cumbrous name Dystocia
adiposo-genitalis. One of the effects of this condition is to delay
the process of the consolidation of the bones. Studying the history
of modern instances of this affection the possibility suggests itself
that Akhenaton might well have attained the age of thirty or even
thirty-six years, although his bones are in a condition which in the
normal individual is appropriate to the years twenty-two to twenty-six.
It is tempting to speculate on the vast influence on the history of
the world, not merely the political fate of Egypt and Syria in the
fourteenth century B.C., but the religious conceptions of Palestine and
the whole world for all time, for which the illness of this pacifist
poet may have been largely responsible.
There is still a vast amount of information to be got from the study of
the royal mummies in the light of modern knowledge, and by the use of
technical methods that are now for the first time available: and one
of the hopes raised by the new discoveries is that it may be possible
to set an example of how such work ought to be carried out, so as to
extract from the remains of these ancient pharaohs all the information
they can give us.
The importance of the study of the technique of mummification as a
means of revealing the past history of civilization (by affording
evidence of the diffusion of culture which was the chief factor in the
process of cultural development) is too large a subject to embark on
here. I mention it only because most of the exact information we have
of the history of embalming has been derived from the royal mummies
themselves.
In my pamphlet _The Migrations of Early Culture_ (1915) I made use of
the evidence afforded by the geographical distribution of the practice
of mummification to demonstrate the diffusion to the ends of the earth
in ancient times of elements of culture that were derived directly or
indirectly from Egypt.
In the _Revue Neurologique_ for 1920 two French physicians, Drs M.
Ameline and P. Quercy, published a very curious memoir with the
title “Le Pharaon Aménophis IV, sa mentalité. Fut-il atteint de
Lipodystrophie Progressive?” I have used the adjective curious with
reference to their work, because they have put forward a carefully
reasoned statement in support of the diagnosis they suggest, but do not
seem to have made any attempt to make themselves acquainted with the
evidence provided by the remains of the pharaoh. When it is recalled
that in 1912 I gave a detailed account (_The Royal Mummies_, Catalogue
Générale du Musée du Caire) of the broken bones which were all that
was left of the mummy of the pharaoh (no trace of the mummy of his
mother, Queen Tiy, has been found), it is surprising to find in a
scientific journal the following statements, written ten years after
the appearance of my official report was published:—“on a retrouvé
récemment (1905), à Thèbes même, les _momies_ du pharaon _et de sa
mère Tii_,” and, referring to the remains of Akhenaton, _i.e._ the
broken fragments of the skeleton, “La momie, recouverte de feuilles
d’or délicatement repoussé et d’un réseau d’or avec pierres et verres
colorés, _est également exceptionnellement belle, mais ces ornements
empêchent naturellement d’examiner le corps du pharaon aux rayons X et,
a fortiori, d’en practiquer l’autopsie_?” (_op. cit._, p. 451. All the
italics are mine).
[Illustration: FIG. 14.—An inscribed stone from Tell el Amarna, showing
Akhenaton, his queen Nefertiti, and their daughters, all represented by
the sculptor as suffering from the same dystocia as Akhenaton himself.]
I have quoted these purely imaginary statements to emphasize the
fact that the distinguished physicians who made them were totally
ignorant of the conditions revealed in the skull, and based their
diagnosis wholly upon the pictures of Akhenaton and the history of his
achievements. They describe the condition of progressive lipodystrophy
as an affection characterized on the one hand by a progressive and
complete disappearance of the subcutaneous fat of the upper part of the
body; and, on the other, by a marked increase of the adipose tissue
below the loins. The first example of this strange affection was
described by Barraquer in 1907, but it is exceedingly rare in adult
men. In fact the authors remark that “it would indeed be curious if a
pharaoh, dead for thirty-five centuries, should provide a second case
(after Gertsmann’s) of the occurrence of this condition in an adult
man.”
It is unfortunate that these physicians neglected to study the report
which I wrote for the General Catalogue of the Cairo Museum, published
in the volume _The Royal Mummies_ in 1912. For they would then have
realized that the slight hydrocephalus, the indication of an early
overgrowth of the jaw such as occurs in acromegaly, and then the
gradual assumption of a feminine contour of figure, with a delayed
union of the epiphyses, suggest the possibility that Akhenaton may have
been the subject of Dystocia adiposo-genitalis.
[Illustration: FIG. 15.—A painted wooden portrait bust of Nefertiti,
wife of Akhenaton.]
The form of the head in Akhenaton, his daughters and some of the
members of his family, more than half a century before his time, raises
a problem of great difficulty and complexity.
[Illustration: FIG. 16.—The skull of Akhenaton seen from the left side.]
There is no doubt that the slight malformation of Akhenaton’s head
was due to pathological causes. It is equally certain that the gross
distortion of the heads of his daughters, represented in the statues
from Tell el Amarna which are now in Berlin, are the result of
artificial deformation such as was and still is practised upon young
children in Asia Minor and Northern Syria, with the royal family of
which Akhenaton’s family was linked by close ties. But in addition
the mummy of a boy in the tomb of Amenhotep II, which was certainly
embalmed in the reign of that pharaoh and is probably the body of his
son, has a skull which is exceptionally broad and flat, and when viewed
from the front presents an appearance curiously similar to the portrait
statues of Akhenaton’s daughters. The full significance of these
peculiarities cannot be interpreted until the royal mummies now in the
Cairo Museum are submitted to a thorough re-examination.
CHAPTER VI
THE STORY OF THE FLOOD
Just half a century ago[2] the proprietors of _The Daily Telegraph_
arranged with the Trustees of the British Museum to send Mr George
Smith to Mesopotamia to search in the ruins of the library of
Ashur-bani-pal at Nineveh for missing fragments of inscribed tablets to
fill the gaps in the _Chaldean Account of the Deluge_. The announcement
of the discovery (in December 1872) aroused an intense and world-wide
interest, and _The Daily Telegraph_ provided the funds for the new
expedition. Although this version of the Story of the Flood was
discovered in an Assyrian library no older than the seventh century
B.C., Mr George Smith predicted that the future would reveal it to
be the survival of a more ancient version that had also indirectly
been the inspiration of that recorded in the Book of Genesis. The
recent discovery of the Sumerian prototype of this story, which
was put into writing more than twenty centuries before the record
in Ashur-bani-pal’s library, is a remarkable confirmation of George
Smith’s prediction.
It will come as a surprise to most people to learn that the Valley of
the Tombs in Egypt has provided the information which is destined in
time to afford the explanation of the early history of the Story of the
Flood, before it began to exert a strange fascination upon the minds of
men that led to its diffusion throughout the world.
Inscribed upon the walls of the tomb of Seti I in the Theban
necropolis—less than seventy years after the burial of Tutankhamen—is
the remarkable story of the Destruction of Mankind. In spite of the
fact that it was inscribed in this tomb as recently—in comparison
with the Sumerian story—as 1300 B.C., the strange confusion of
archaic references which has made it so unintelligible to most modern
scholars reveals the fact that its origin must be referred back to the
fourth millennium. Although in the narrative found in Seti’s tomb the
destruction is not brought about by the Flood, it is clear that the
Egyptian and the Mesopotamian stories have a common origin and a common
motive. For the essential incident in the latter is not the Flood, but
the Destruction of Mankind which it brought to pass.
If it be asked why this venerable story should be inscribed in the
tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh, the answer is that its aim was to secure
for the dead king those boons the attainment of which was the central
motive of the tale. It records how old age began to affect the king,
upon whose strength and virility the welfare of the whole community
depended (see Chapter IV), and he became very sorely troubled when his
subjects began to murmur about the failure of his powers, because in
olden days the only way of safeguarding the prosperity of the kingdom,
which was supposed to be wholly dependent upon the strength of its
ruler, was to slay him when he began to fail and put in his place one
whose vigour was at its prime.
The essence of the story, which made it potent as a charm to secure the
continued existence of the king (and it was for this reason that it
was inscribed upon the walls of the king’s tomb) was that it describes
how the ageing king circumvented fate (and the conventions of archaic
society) by rejuvenating himself. The elixir of life was the blood
of his slaughtered subjects; and the crime that was charged against
them—the impiety and disloyalty, the original sin—was that they were
murmuring among themselves about the king’s failing health. But when
they had been slaughtered and the king had attained a renewal of his
youth, he was overcome by the boredom of too prolonged an existence
upon earth. So he mounted upon the back of the Celestial Cow and thus
reached heaven and attained immortality.
This remarkable story, which was intended as a magical device for
securing the same fate for the pharaoh of the fourteenth century B.C.
as his remote prototype is said to have attained, also contains the
germs of most of the mythology that has lasted longest and spread most
widely in the early history of civilization. Although, so far as we
are aware, this story is not found in Tutankhamen’s tomb, there is no
doubt that it was current at his time, because it was inscribed upon
the walls of one of his successor’s tombs little more than half a
century later, and the narrative is obviously very old, being packed
with archaic allusions and forms of expression. I have referred to it
here because the symbolism expressed in some of the funerary furniture
in Tutankhamen’s tomb is explained by this mythical story recorded
in those of Seti I and Rameses III. The question of interpretation I
have discussed in another chapter, dealing with the funerary couches,
and I have mentioned the Destruction of Mankind to call attention
to the dominant motive—the Giving of Life and the Attainment of
Immortality—which inspires every feature of the funerary ritual
with tiresome persistence. For in the myth mankind was destroyed to
provide the elixir of life for the king so that he might attain to the
immortality, which was the distinctive prerogative of a god. The blood
of the slaughtered saints was the elixir by which the mortal dweller on
earth put on the immortality of a celestial being. The motive assigned
in the story for destroying mankind was their sinfulness or disloyalty,
which was more exactly defined by accusing them of spreading rumours of
the king’s increasing age and weakness, a form of report to which the
ruler was peculiarly sensitive, because the admission that his strength
and virility were failing was tantamount to a capital sentence. In the
remotely distant age, from which the germs of this story came down to
the time of Seti I, the ageing king had to be killed to make way for
a more youthful and vigorous ruler. Hence one cannot marvel at the
king’s sensitiveness when his people murmured about his failing powers.
I have already referred to the fact that this accusation of disloyalty
was the earliest version of what theologians call “original sin,” and
the story itself the prototype of that which under a modified form
appears in the Book of Genesis. The primitive account of the slaying
of mankind became confused with the inundation of the Nile, and the
blood of the slaughtered human race and the blood-red inundation of the
river became identified the one with the other. Though originally both
events were regarded as beneficent and identical in their results, that
is renewing the king’s strength and the country’s prosperity, when the
story spread abroad to foreign countries a certain element of confusion
crept into the narrative, and the destruction of mankind was attributed
to the Flood. But it found a place in religious literature, not because
it exemplified the wrath of the gods against sinful man, but because it
explained how the king rejuvenated himself and attained the status of a
god. The evidence provided by these Egyptian tombs gives us an insight
into the motives underlying the religious beliefs of every people who
came into relationship, directly or indirectly, with the arbitrary
system of explaining the means of attaining immortality devised by the
ancient priesthood of Egypt. It illustrates one of the ways in which
these investigations in Egypt can illuminate ancient Jewish literature.
One of the peculiarities of Egyptian customs and beliefs is due to the
fact that what the concrete-minded Egyptian naïvely did and said is
to be interpreted in the literal and obvious sense that he attached
to these acts. Among no other people can we similarly detect all the
stages in the logical development of the practices and beliefs of
civilization—and not only are the various stages preserved in Egypt,
but in so crudely childlike a guise that he who overcomes the impulse
to seek for some recondite or cryptic meaning in things which are
really simple can read their plain story as their inventors intended it.
It is this fundamental fact that gives the study of Egyptian customs
and beliefs its tremendous importance. The essential elements of
civilization were originally invented by the Egyptians, who gave them
simpler and more obvious expression than other peoples, who borrowed
them ready-made without acquiring the connecting stages in their
development or the naïve explanation of their meaning.
I have introduced this subject for consideration as an introduction to
the study of the funerary equipment of Tutankhamen’s tomb, to which the
next chapter will be devoted.
CHAPTER VII
GETTING TO HEAVEN
It is not my intention to attempt to discuss the equipment of
Tutankhamen’s tomb. Readers of the daily papers and the illustrated
weeklies will already be aware of the vast quantity of furniture and
of the fact that even those who were already familiar with the superb
design and workmanship displayed in the objects from such tombs as
those of Thothmes IV, Yuaa and Tuaa, and Akhenaton were amazed at
the new revelation of Egyptian craftsmanship revealed in scores of
the things found in Tutankhamen’s tomb, the throne, a superb work
of art, the no less wonderful chariots, chairs, couches, statues,
sandals, textiles and jewellery, and above all the impressive canopy
or shrine. Archæologists familiar with all the marvels of Egyptian
art, now treasured in the museums scattered throughout the world, have
exhausted their vocabularies of wonder and admiration in attempting to
depict the splendours of Tutankhamen’s tomb. The outstanding feature
of the discovery is, in fact, the recovery of so vast a collection of
superb works of art and the new revelation it affords of the dazzling
brilliance of Egyptian civilization thirty centuries ago.
But in this book I am concerned more especially with the cultural
significance of the funerary equipment.
In the first place the objects found in the tomb belong to two distinct
categories, those which were used by the deceased when alive, and
others specially made for funerary purposes. This distinction seems to
be brought out most clearly in the comparison of the chariots in the
vestibule and in the burial chamber respectively.
I do not propose to enter into any further discussion of the contents
of the wonderful shrine or canopy which is to be investigated next
winter, nor to attempt to anticipate the result of the examination of
the so-called “canopic” chest, which is said to be a unique example of
the sculptor’s art. The experience gained in investigating the contents
of such chests in other tombs gives one confidence in assuming that
the heart of Tutankhamen will not be found in it, as so many writers
imagine, but that its four compartments will contain respectively the
liver, lungs, stomach and intestines of Tutankhamen, his “heart and
reins” being left in his body.
From the cultural point of view the most interesting articles of
furniture found in Tutankhamen’s tomb are the three lofty couches
fashioned in grotesque shapes to represent conventionalized animals,
cow, lion, and hippopotamus respectively. Although such couches are
thoroughly Egyptian in design and are familiar in pictures from Egypt
and the Soudan, they have never been seen before. They are worth
discussing in some detail, because they express the concreteness and
naïvety of Egyptian belief mentioned in the last chapter in a way that
brings home to us the essential distinction of the religion of the
ancient dwellers in the Nile Valley.
The problem of getting to heaven after death was approached by
the Egyptian theologian as though it were essentially a physical
proposition. How was the dweller upon earth to reach the world in
the sky? What vehicle could he employ to reach the celestial realms?
Speaking recently of Christian Englishmen in the twentieth century,
Dean Inge is reported to have said that “a topographical heaven, so
impossible scientifically, was so difficult to dispense with as an
aid to the imagination.” But to the ancient Egyptian belief in such a
topographical heaven was a cardinal article of faith, and the geography
of the Elysian fields and the details of the path leading to it were
mapped out with all the meticulous precision of a modern guide-book.
The dead man was often provided with a chart to find his way along the
path that teemed with difficulties and dangers.
But although there were scores of different devices for securing a safe
transit to the celestial regions, there was one vehicle which from the
very beginning of Egyptian history enjoyed a special reputation as
the appropriate means of protecting the dead and conferring life and
immortality upon him by conveying him to the other world. The Celestial
Cow Hathor not only conferred life upon mortals by giving them birth:
she also sustained them throughout life by giving them the divine milk,
and at death she conveyed them to the sky.
In the famous inscription upon the walls of the tomb of Seti I, to
certain passages of which I referred in the last chapter, there is a
remarkable story of the function of the Divine Cow Hathor or Nut as a
means of raising the dead king to the sky to reach the home of the
gods. After being rejuvenated by the goddess the king became oppressed
with the boredom of life upon earth amongst his tiresome subjects,
who had shown their disloyalty to him by referring to his old age and
failing powers. So he decided to leave the earth and proceed to the
sky. Hence he mounted upon the back of the cow and got to heaven, where
he assumed his godhead by becoming identified with the sun.
This function of the cow in acting as a vehicle to convey the mummy
to its celestial home is one which was repeatedly depicted in the
ancient Egyptian monuments. But the cow’s solicitude for the welfare
of the dead was frequently shown in other ways. A favourite _motif_
for the Egyptian sculptor was the representation of the Divine Cow,
Hathor, protecting the dead king or permitting him to obtain an elixir
of life by drinking milk from her udder. In his book _Egyptian Art_
(1913) the late Sir Gaston Maspero devotes to this subject a whole
chapter (XI) illustrated with six beautiful photographic plates of such
cow-statues ranging from the time of Amenhotep II (1440 B.C.) to more
than a thousand years later. But we know that the protective function
of the Cow Hathor was portrayed in other ways as early as the time of
the Pyramid-builders (for example, the beautiful slate statuettes found
by Professor Reisner in the Pyramid Temple of Mykerinus of the fourth
dynasty, about 2800 B.C.), and the still earlier representation of
her upon the slate palette of King Narmer of the first dynasty, about
3400 B.C. For several reasons this palette is a historical document of
unique importance. Engraved upon it is the earliest example of writing
that has come down from antiquity: but it is of interest in connexion
with the discussion in this chapter. For at the upper corners of the
palette the cow-headed Hathor is depicted and as a further protection
the king wears upon his belt four cows’ heads (Fig. 18) in place of the
cowrie amulets of more primitive peoples.
[Illustration: FIG. 17.—Cow carrying a dead man to heaven.]
The Celestial Cow, Hathor, was a divinity of the dead, for she was the
Giver of Life who was supposed to be able to prolong existence beyond
the grave, and as she was also identified with the sky she became the
appropriate vehicle to convey the dead to the celestial regions where
the sun-god dwelt.
[Illustration: FIG. 18. Narmer’s belt with four Hathor cows’ heads,
_circa_ 3400 B.C.]
The most bizarre objects found in the vestibule of Tutankhamen’s tomb
are the three ceremonial couches, one representing the Celestial Cow,
Hathor, the second the same goddess in her lioness form, or more
probably her son and representative Horus in the form of a lion, and
the third Tauert, the hippopotamus goddess, who was the divine midwife.
In the numerous accounts of these remarkable monstrosities that have
appeared, I have not seen any attempt to explain their significance.
Although such grotesque examples of mortuary furniture have never been
seen before, the bas-reliefs upon the walls of tombs in Egypt and
Ethiopia, and the pictures illustrating the Book of the Dead inscribed
on papyri, have made us familiar with them. Moreover, the chapters of
the Book of the Dead relating to “the raising of the funeral bed” leave
no doubt as to the ritual significance of these couches.
The sides of the Hathor couch are grotesque models of the Divine Cow,
the earliest of the Great Mothers who were believed to have bestowed
life and prosperity on mankind. It may seem strange that the artists
of Tutankhamen’s time should have perpetrated such a monstrosity as
this Hathor couch. When religious motives impelled the designers to
fashion a piece of furniture in imitation of so uncouchlike a creature
as a cow, the artist was set a task which was almost impossible of
realization unless he sacrificed his artistic ideals. There can be
no doubt that in this case he escaped the dilemma by repressing his
æsthetic feelings and abandoning himself whole-heartedly to the task of
devising a model which was almost wholly religious in conception.
To understand why the cow, of all creatures, should have been selected
for this purpose, we must remember the relentless logic and persistency
that inspired all the preparations of the tomb and its furniture.
The mummification of the body and the elaborate arrangements for
protecting it and ministering to its wants were due to the belief
that the continuance of the deceased’s existence had been secured by
these preparations. But to make doubly certain, no device that would
contribute to the attainment of this aim was neglected. Inscriptions
were made on the walls of the tomb, on the sarcophagus and coffins,
and on papyri to ensure the identification of the deceased king with
Osiris, so that he might be made to share the god’s fate. A figure
of Osiris was made, as I have explained elsewhere (p. 61), out of
the sacred barley, every grain of which was regarded as a model of
the life-giving Great Mother, and as such a supply of vital essence
to maintain the deceased’s existence. From time to time dramatic
ceremonies were held at the tomb (or in the temple associated with it
in far-off Thebes) to reanimate the dead and help him to persist.
[Illustration: FIG. 19.—Pictures of three couches represented on the
walls of the tomb of Seti I, from Belzoni’s sketches.]
For, once the ancient Egyptians had persuaded themselves that they
could work out their own salvation, and that the kingdom of heaven
could be attained by certain physical and magical procedures, they
spared no pains to pursue this train of thought and action with
tiresome persistence to the most surprising ends.
The Great Mother was originally nothing more than the personification
of an amulet, like a cowrie shell or a grain of barley, that was
supposed to be able to exert the essentially maternal function of
life-giving. Then, when cattle were domesticated and mankind discovered
for the first time that cow’s milk could be used for feeding human
children, people were profoundly impressed with this revelation of
the cow’s kinship with the human family. They regarded her as the
foster-mother, and then as the actual mother of mankind, and identified
her with the Great Mother Hathor, whose earliest form was (even sixty
centuries ago) that of a Divine Cow. But if the Great Mother was at one
and the same time a cowrie, a grain of barley, and a cow, she was also
identified with the moon, which in a very special sense was supposed to
control the life-giving powers of womenkind.
Hence the belief developed that if the Great Giver of Life and
Immortality was both a cow and the moon, she was the appropriate
vehicle to convey the dead king to the celestial realms in the sky.
And so, as the nursery rhyme puts it, “the cow jumped over the moon.”
That the cow represented in the couch is a symbol of the sky is shown
by the stars on the under surface of the body. The height of the
couches also was an additional indication of their identification with
the sky. In all periods of Egyptian history painters and writers were
fond of depicting this episode of the conveyance of the dead king to
heaven on the cow’s back. This incident is shown and explained in the
inscriptions on the walls of Seti I’s tomb, to which I have already
referred (p. 95). But in later times it became common to represent
the Divine Cow (or its lioness surrogate) conveying the dead man or
his actual mummy to the sky, and in pictures of funerals to find the
mummy borne on just such couches as have actually been found in the
tomb of Tutankhamen. The object of the cow-shaped couch was to ensure
by magical means this translation of the deceased to heaven. The story
of the Destruction of Mankind gives the Egyptian’s own interpretation
of the incident. The influence of this Egyptian conception of animal
“vehicles” for gods spread far and wide throughout the world in
ancient times, for if such a creature could convey the dead king to
the celestial regions and confer upon him the means of attaining
immortality, which was the distinctive attribute of divinity, such an
animal vehicle was an appropriate symbol and pictorial determinative
of a god. The identification of the Great Mother with the cow was the
beginning of the social system known as totemism.
The explanation of the lioness form of the Great Mother is also given
in the inscription in Seti I’s tomb. When the goddess was called upon
to rejuvenate the ageing king, the only elixir of life known in her
pharmacopœia was human blood. Hence, she was driven to the necessity
of slaying a human being, and her murderous action was compared to
that of a man-slaying lioness, with which she was identified. But as
the lioness was a particularly appropriate form to symbolize the Great
Mother’s ability to protect the mummy from the perils that lurked
in the pathway to the other world, it became an even more favourite
form of the funerary vehicle than the gentle cow. At any rate, in the
pictures of funerary couches the lioness form is much commoner than the
cow-form. The same grotesque form of the lion has survived in modern
heraldry.
But other ideas found expression in the lion-symbolism. For example, on
some of the beautiful pieces of furniture found in Tutankhamen’s tomb
the king himself is represented as a human-headed lion trampling on his
foes, and many of his predecessors before him, Thothmes IV for example,
were similarly represented. Even as far back as the time of the
Pyramids was not Mykerinus (2800 B.C.) represented as a human-headed
lion in the gigantic Sphinx at the Giza Pyramids?
This representation of the king as a lion, which typifies his
identification with Horus, is inspired by another chain of ideas.
Although at the time of Tutankhamen, and in fact throughout the whole
history of Egypt in dynastic times the sun-god was dominant in Egypt
and Horus himself was a sun-god, the rôle that he took as the guardian
of the dead was inspired by the more ancient Osirian faith. It was the
living king Horus who was responsible for tending the dead king Osiris;
and it was believed that the continued existence of the god (the dead
king Osiris) was wholly dependent upon the services rendered by Horus.
Thus it was Horus who performed the divine function of conferring
immortality upon Osiris, and also upon the dead king Tutankhamen, who
was identified with Osiris. Presumably the act of being borne upon the
lion-couch was symbolically equivalent to being put into the care of
Horus, not the Horus represented upon the furniture in the tomb, the
lion-avatar of Tutankhamen who tramples his enemies under foot, but the
son of Osiris, who holds out the promise of conferring upon the dead
king the boons that he is credited with having given to Osiris—eternal
life and protection. The confusion between these two aspects of Horus
is brought out very clearly in a very interesting picture recently
discovered by Professor George A. Reisner (and reproduced in _The
Illustrated London News_, 10th February 1923, p. 204), engraven upon
a monument in the Soudan several centuries later than the time of
Tutankhamen. The lion-couch is represented supporting the mummy of King
Ergamenes, whose head is portrayed in the form of the falcon of Horus.
Above the mummy is the star-spangled sky, below which is seen the
sun’s disc emitting five streams of life-giving emanations to the dead
king. In the Book of the Dead Chapter LXXVIII is called that “whereby
one assumeth the form of the Sacred Falcon” and the deceased is
represented as saying “I display myself as the Sacred Falcon whom Horus
hath invested with his soul for taking possession of his inheritance
from Osiris” (Renouf). The possibility suggests itself whether the
lion-couch was intended to symbolize, as the cow-couch unquestionably
was, the transference of the dead king to the sky to be united with
the sun and identified with the solar deity Re. If so, perhaps the
five streams of V-shaped emanations pointing to the disc were meant to
represent the sun drawing the mummy, the dead Horus, to the sky.
In his monograph of the _Tomb of Amenemhēt_ Dr Alan Gardiner
reproduces a text (Plate XXX A) including a pictorial arrangement
of hieroglyphs in the form of stars above the mummy borne on the
lion-couch, which he translates as a statement that the dead man
“wishes to be placed among the stars in the firmament” (p. 119).
The same design occurs in the pictures illustrating the Book of the
Dead. The funerary couch is usually represented in the lion-form, the
cow- and hippopotamus-varieties being much less frequently adopted.
In the pictures of funerals it is not uncommon to see the mummy borne
upon a lion-shaped couch placed within the funerary canopy or shrine
(as in the first of the pictures from the Book of the Dead, Fig. 20).
Good examples are given by Dr Alan Gardiner and Mrs de Garis Davies in
_The Tomb of Amenemhēt_ (1915), Plates XII and XXIV, of the reign of
Thothmes III, a century before Tutankhamen. No doubt this is due partly
to the significance attached to the conception of Horus as the guardian
of Osiris, but also possibly to the idea that Horus fought the enemies
of Re and was the best protector of the deified dead.
[Illustration: FIG. 20.—Three vignettes from different papyri of the
Book of the Dead, representing the lion-couch bearing the mummy within
its canopy, a mummy lying on its funerary couch with three solar
emanations coming down from the sky, and a third where the bird-soul is
bringing to the mummy the symbol of eternity.]
But underlying the whole of the lion-symbolism are two fundamental
ideas which gave meaning to it. In the very ancient story of the
Destruction of Mankind, which in a relatively modern and much
distorted form was inscribed upon the walls of the tombs of several
of Tutankhamen’s successors, the goddess Hathor (the Divine Cow) is
reported to have made a human sacrifice in order to obtain the blood
wherewith to rejuvenate the senile king (in the story Re, the king
upon earth who had not yet been elevated on the cow’s back to the
sky to become the sun-god). Hence she acquired the reputation as a
slayer of men and was identified with a lioness, and called Sekhmet,
the Destroyer. Thus the lioness and the cow were both forms assumed
by the Great Mother Hathor. But in the development of the myth of the
Destruction of Mankind the god Horus takes the place of his mother
Hathor, and the bull and the lion take the place formerly occupied by
the cow and the lioness. In the case of the funerary couches the Cow of
Hathor is found alongside the lion of Horus, but occasionally one finds
in late tombs the mummy represented as being conveyed to the celestial
realms by a bull instead of the more usual cow. A good example of this
is to be seen in the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries in Edinburgh.
The third couch is modelled in the form of a grotesque caricature of a
hippopotamus, Tauert, another representative of the Great Mother Hathor.
But her special duty was to act as a midwife at the births of gods
and kings. In pictures she is often associated with the Hathor Cow at
the door of the tomb in the Mountain of the West; and presumably her
function was to preside at the rebirth of the dead king by which a new
lease of life beyond the grave was conferred upon him.
If it seems far-fetched to regard the hippopotamus couch as symbolizing
rebirth, it should not be overlooked that in the so-called “Birth
Terrace” of the temple at Deir el Bahari[3] lion-headed couches are
represented in the birth scene of Queen Hatshepsut. As I have pointed
out already all three animals, cow, lioness, and female hippopotamus,
represent primarily different forms of the same goddess Hathor.
[Illustration: FIG. 21.—Scene from The Book of the Dead (Papyrus of
Ani) in which the three givers of divinity are seen, the cow at the
entrance to the tomb, the hippopotamus with her, and Horus on guard.]
The Egyptian custom of making these grotesque animal-shaped couches
to symbolize the transference of the dead to the celestial regions
and the conferring of immortality and deification upon them exerted
far-reaching and manifold effects as it was diffused abroad among other
peoples. I shall mention three examples of these diverse influences.
The belief implied in such symbolism that a king borne by such an
animal vehicle was transformed into a god led to the use of such
designs in the representations of gods. Hence it became common in Syria
and Mesopotamia, in Greece and India, and far away in outlying parts
of the world where the influence of these civilizations played some
part, directly or indirectly, to find gods and goddesses represented on
animal vehicles, such as the bull or cow, the lion or lioness, or some
fantastic composite monster, dragon or makara. The whole conception
of animal vehicles, which plays such a large part in the religious
symbolism of India, Eastern Asia and Central America, is a purely
Egyptian fancy that finds such grotesque expression in Tutankhamen’s
funerary couches, no less than in the borrowed symbolism that was
spread abroad from Egypt to Asia and America.
[Illustration: FIG. 22.—The goddess Astarte borne on her lioness,
symbolizing the attainment of immortality, which was the distinctive
attribute of a deity.]
Another expression of the essential meaning of these couches was
the belief that the placing of the corpse or mummy on a raised
stage was magically efficacious in transferring the deceased to the
sky-world. The use of such raised platforms is practised over a very
wide geographical area, and for the reasons given in my pamphlet _The
Migrations of Early Culture_ (1915). There can be no doubt that it
gives expression to the same belief as the lofty and uncouth funerary
beds in Tutankhamen’s tomb have forced upon our attention.
Another wave of diffusion of culture is represented in the adoption by
European furniture-makers of the Egyptian method of designing legs for
chairs, beds and couches. In Egypt itself such a practice can be traced
back to the first dynasty 3400 or more B.C. But the lion paws were
adopted in Europe as a design for legs of chairs, etc. almost as soon
as the Egyptian craft of carpentering and joinery was introduced. Long
after the Queen Anne period Chippendale introduced the Chinese variant,
the dragon’s feet grasping the moon-pearl symbol. But as I explained in
_The Evolution of the Dragon_ (1919) the dragon is really a blending
of Horus’s falcon (eagle) and lion into one composite beast.
Thus the study of these couches has revealed the development in Egypt
of a very peculiar but distinctive series of symbolic expressions, each
of which is so arbitrary and unexpected that one is able to recognize
it and refer it to its true source, in whatever part of the world and
at whatever historical period it manifests itself. Hence we are able
to use the evidence provided by these three distinct aspects of one
essential idea to demonstrate different waves of cultural diffusion
which spread from Egypt throughout the world both in ancient and modern
times.
CHAPTER VIII
THE ETHICS OF DESECRATION
With the awakening of a world-wide interest in the tomb of Tutankhamen
there has been a good deal of not altogether relevant discussion about
the ethics of desecration, which is none the less unfortunate because
it is inspired by ignorance of the real facts of the case. By inflaming
feeling it may help to defeat the object everyone concerned is doing
his utmost to achieve, that is, to secure the adequate protection and
reverent treatment of the dead pharaoh and his fellow-sleepers. Hence
it is necessary to put the issue in its true light.
It seems to have been overlooked by those who write about leaving the
royal mummies in their own tombs that in the past only one of them was
actually found in his own tomb, and that this pharaoh, Amenhotep II,
was left there reposing in his own sarcophagus. It is equally important
to note that it was Mr Howard Carter, who is in charge of the present
work for the late Lord Carnarvon, who was at that time Inspector of
Antiquities at Luxor and was largely responsible for this decision. Nor
is it any secret that those responsible for the present work propose to
leave the mummy of Tutankhamen in the tomb, provided that the risk of
damage can be guarded against.
The issue raised by the oft-repeated protests against desecration is
complicated by the fact that in every case the mummies of the pharaohs
were plundered and grossly maltreated by their own subjects more than
thirty centuries ago; and, except in two or three instances, were
unceremoniously removed from their own tombs and hidden away in any
place that happened to be convenient.
If archæologists did not open and examine these tombs there is no doubt
that in time the native tomb-robbers of Luxor, the most experienced
members of their craft to be found anywhere, would in time discover the
hidden tombs, plundering them and destroying the historical evidence.
There can be no question that the work of the archæologist when
conscientiously done saves the ancient tombs from wilful destruction
and gives the mummies and the furniture a new lease of assured
existence. So long as these tombs are left alone there is always the
risk that they will be desecrated at any moment.
The problem which the archæologist has to solve, once he has opened
a tomb, is what is the proper course to take with reference to the
mummies and the funerary equipment. It is claimed by many writers to
the Press that at any rate the bodies of the kings ought to be restored.
But even if it were possible to replace the royal mummies in their
own tombs, and to persuade the museums of the world to return their
sarcophagi and funerary equipment, it would still be a moot point
whether such procedures would save them from desecration. For, unless
large sums of money are spent in equipping the tombs against the
attacks of robbers and providing guards, such measures would defeat the
purpose that prompted them. For the mummies would become the lure for
the greed of the Theban population, which for sixty centuries and more
has been habituated to tomb-robbing, and has shown little respect for
the mummies of even the most famous of its rulers. In fact, the most
powerful sovereigns of Egypt have suffered worst at the hands of the
people of their own metropolis. The mummies of the greatest emperors
and wisest statesmen of the eighteenth dynasty, such as Thothmes
III and Amenhotep III, were stripped and badly mutilated; and it is
more likely than not that the mummy of the famous Hatshepsut, the
Queen Elizabeth of Egyptian history, was totally destroyed. Even when
Amenhotep II (together with the mummies found with him) were left in
his own tomb, it was not long before the tomb was entered by plunderers
and wanton damage inflicted on the bodies left in it. In my volume of
the Official Catalogue of the Cairo Museum, dealing with the royal
mummies, gruesome evidence is given of the mutilation effected upon the
bodies of a prince and two princesses in this tomb, both by ancient and
modern robbers.
The moral of all this is that unless the tomb is rendered
burglar-proof, and in addition is protected by adequate guards, it is
inviting desecration to leave the mummies in them. Everyone immediately
concerned with the problem of Tutankhamen’s mummy agrees that, if it is
feasible, it should be left in its own tomb and adequately protected
there after a thorough examination of it has been made, and all the
information as to age and infirmities which the X-rays can afford has
been obtained. The late Lord Carnarvon was strongly in favour of this
course of action, and Mr Howard Carter has always been in favour of
leaving the mummies in their tombs. But if this is done they must be
adequately guarded. For it is not an exaggeration to claim that in the
past the removal of the royal mummies to the Cairo Museum saved them
from destruction, or from being broken up for disposal to tourists, as
in former centuries some of them were sold to druggists. For, as Sir
Thomas Browne expressed it two and a half centuries ago, “The Egyptian
mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth.
Mummy is become merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold
for balsams.”
But, apart from such considerations, the fact has not received due
acknowledgment that the archæologists who are investigating the tomb
of Tutankhamen are clearly not engaged in a work of destruction or of
desecration, but are striving to preserve his remains and his treasured
possessions, and to secure his name and his record from the oblivion
which he himself and his representatives strove so hard to avert.
The relatively slight disturbance of the antechamber holds out the
prospect that the mummy also may have been spared that wanton
destruction which was the fate of so many pharaohs of his dynasty,
although it is to be expected that the valuable gold objects upon the
body are not likely to have escaped the plunderers.
If the mummy is found, an examination of it by means of the X-rays will
be made; but, whatever measures are adopted for wresting from it the
story it has to tell, no one need be anxious about its desecration.
No damage of any sort will be inflicted upon the body; but every
precaution will be taken to assure that prolongation of its existence
within its own sarcophagus which the embalmer of thirty-two centuries
ago aimed at achieving.
In the commentary on the discoveries in Tutankhamen’s tomb I have dealt
mainly with aspects of the new revelation of Egyptian customs and
beliefs that to most readers may seem less impressive than the dazzling
display of artistic treasures which has aroused in them an interest in
archæology.
But to the student who is interested in tracing out the origin of
the customs and beliefs which have shaped the fabric of civilization
and influenced the trends of even our own thoughts, the objective
expression of ancient beliefs displayed in Tutankhamen’s tomb is the
most important outcome of Mr Howard Carter’s discovery.
For it enables us to realize more vividly than before the relentless
and persistent logic with which the ancient Egyptian theologian strove
by any and every device he could think of, to make as certain as any
physical or magical procedure could make it, to give a new lease of
life or existence to the dead. Many modern scholars object to the use
of the word logic to apply to a series of procedures inconsistent the
one with the other except in their ultimate aim, and are constantly
emphasizing and marvelling at their lack of cogency and consistency.
But the modern psychologist has recently been insisting that we
ourselves, and, in fact, all mankind, are just as illogical as the
Ancient Egyptian priesthood. In our everyday life we are hourly doing
things as glaringly inconsistent the one with the other as anything
that the Egyptians ever did. It is merely that our wider acquaintance
with the nature of matter and the properties of living creatures
enables us the more readily to hide our inconsistencies and rationalize
our statements so as to hide our ignorance and lack of cogency.
In this connexion it is important to try and put ourselves in the
position of the theologians of Tutankhamen’s time, and ask whether it
is likely that they really imagined the ceremonial couches to be potent
to transfer the dead king to the sky. They knew perfectly well that the
couches could not effect this physical transference to a topographical
heaven. But long usage had accustomed them to attach a definite
symbolic meaning to the ceremonial practice of placing the mummy of the
king upon such couches. This was supposed to confer upon the dead king
immortality and divinity, to identify him with the sun-god Re in the
sky.
The problem which is perhaps responsible for most disagreement between
Egyptian scholars to-day is the relationship of the two gods Osiris
and Re, with both of which the dead king was identified as a means of
attaining immortality. The obvious connecting link between them is the
rôle assigned to Horus, who, as the son of Osiris, is charged with the
function of securing for the dead king the same boons which he was
able to confer on Osiris. Yet as a sun-god, intimately associated with
Re, Horus could also secure for him the solar heaven and enable him to
dwell with Re, if not be identified with him, in the sun.
There is a profound difference of opinion whether Osiris or Re was the
earliest god. Philologists like Professor Breasted and Dr Blackman, who
derive their knowledge from the literary texts (which, however, were
not put into writing until all thought and expression were dominated
by the sun-cult and the Pyramid Texts were actually written by
Heliopolitan priests) insist on the priority of the sun-god Re.
Ethnologists who know how relatively recent is the belief in a
sky-world and in sun-worship insist upon the priority of the god
Osiris, who was originally a king on earth. To my mind the whole
conception of deity and the attributes of the earliest gods can be
understood and explained only if we admit that Osiris was the first god
and that Re acquired his reputation secondarily from Osiris.
In Tutankhamen’s tomb the one idea that informed the funerary ritual
and equipment was this identification with Osiris, and the solar
embellishments are clearly additions to the more ancient practices. I
have entered in detail into the interesting problems of the funerary
couches in order to bring out in a definite and concrete form the
essential meaning of the whole equipment of Tutankhamen’s tomb.
What renders the obtrusiveness of the Osirian element in Tutankhamen’s
ritual additionally significant is the fact that he had been a
worshipper of the sun’s disc, the Aton, and had just been converted
to that denomination of the Re-cult which was associated with Amen.
But although these different forms of the sun-cult were in turn his
confessed beliefs, it is a striking demonstration of the fundamental
nature of the Osirian cult that it dominates the ceremonies of
Tutankhamen’s death and burial.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Ancient Records of Egypt_, Vol. II. pp. 420-427.
[2] This was written in January 1923.
[3] See Egypt Exploration Fund publication, _Deir el Bahari_, II,
Plate LI.
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- Blank pages have been removed.
- Redundant title page removed.
- Some hyphenation variations made consistent.
- “Taurt” changed to “Tauert” for consistency, although both seem to
be in use.
- “The Tombs of Harmhabi and Touatankhamanou” changed to “The Tombs of
Harmhabi and Touatânkhamanou” to match actual book title.
- “The Life and Times of Akhanaton” changed to “The Life and Times of
Akhnaton” to match actual book title.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Tutankhamen and the Discovery of his Tomb" ***
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