The Shadow King (5 page)

He started to worship a single, more abstract god, the Aten or sun disc, and appointed himself as the Egyptian people’s sole point of contact with it. He changed his name to Akhenaten, meaning “living spirit of the Aten,” abandoned Thebes, and built a brand new capital city from scratch, in a remote desert spot 250 miles up the Nile.

The site is now called Tell el-Amarna (or Amarna for short), and Carter knew it well as in 1892 he had spent his first season in Egypt there, working alongside Petrie. Akhenaten seems to have largely withdrawn from military endeavors and in inscriptions found at Amarna, he vowed never to leave the city as long as he lived; his now-empty tomb had indeed been found there too. He reigned with his principal wife Nefertiti—famed for her great beauty ever since a bust of her looking gorgeous was discovered in Amarna by a German team in 1912.

Then, just seventeen years after it all began, Akhenaten’s new world crumbled. The beautiful Nefertiti mysteriously disappeared from the historical record, and not long afterward, Akhenaten died. He was succeeded—directly, or after a short intervening reign—by his son-in-law, Tutankhamun, in whose name every change that Akhenaten had put in place was systematically reversed: the old gods were reinstated and the capital was moved back to Thebes. Tutankhamun appeared to have died without any heirs and just a few years later, the Eighteenth Dynasty was over and a new line of kings, descended from a general called Rameses, had taken the throne.

Akhenaten’s brief revolt seemed dramatic, bizarre, unbelievable. Ancient Egypt was pretty much the most stable culture in history. Every few centuries, wars or natural disasters would cause things to fall apart a bit. But the civilization picked itself up and became powerful again with pretty much the same political structure and belief system as before. The artwork, too, barely changed over the centuries. All of the pharaohs were shown as youthful, strong rulers, the idealized symbol of a god ruling on earth. Some kings lived longer than others; some had more military successes to boast about. Their faces differed just enough to be recognizable. But glimpses of the people behind the propaganda are rare. In the records they left behind, each king was basically the same ruler, reincarnated, again and again and again.

Then Akhenaten broke the mold, throwing out those thousands of years of tradition to do his own thing. Instead of going to war, he wrote a poetic “Great Hymn to the Aten” that has been compared to the Bible’s Psalm 104. The art changed too. From a very prescribed, formal style, the depictions being found at Amarna were much more naturalistic. You see the king being intimate with Nefertiti in family scenes, for example, and bouncing his little daughters on his knee.

Then there are his statues. Instead of the usual cookie-cutter image of a young, strong king, the way that Akhenaten represented himself is weird and uncomfortable, if not downright alien. His muscular chest and shoulders mix with burstingly female curves: full breasts, a saggy tummy, and wide hips, and no sign of male genitalia. Yet he makes Egypt’s other kings look fluffy and adorable, almost comical. A long, thin head with high cheekbones and slanted almond-shaped eyes give him a sinister look, like a “humanoid praying mantis” as one scholar put it,9 or the villain in some crazy kids’ cartoon. Staring into the half-closed eyes of one of Akhenaten’s statues gives the eerie feeling of being sized up by a superior intelligence.

No wonder Egyptologists—actually not just Egyptologists, Akhenaten has been written about by everyone from psychiatrists to politicians, and starred in countless novels, films, and even an opera—have been fascinated by him ever since. He has variously been described as a madman, a poet, a pathological study, and a prophet—no less than the inventor of monotheism.

In 1907, very little was known about the whole story beyond what was being discovered at the deserted city of Amarna, because subsequent rulers had tried to remove every trace of Akhenaten and his “heresy” from the record, scratching out the names of him and his family from paintings and statues wherever they were found. Now in tomb KV55, a jumble of objects belonging to figures whom archaeologists assumed had been buried at Amarna was found right in the middle of Thebes.

What were they doing in the Valley of the Kings? Several seals of Tutankhamun were found in the tomb, so it seemed most likely that Tutankhamun, after moving back to Thebes, had removed goods from the burials of several of his relatives in Amarna and reburied them in the Valley for safety, presumably because they could no longer be kept secure at the deserted site.

The idea that Tutankhamun also reburied there Akhenaten himself caused great excitement among archaeologists. It meant that they no longer had to rely just on inscriptions and statues to understand this unique revolutionary. They potentially had the body of the man himself. In decades to come, this mysterious mummy, so harshly treated by Davis, would become central to efforts to solve just what made this king so different. But there were niggling doubts. When Elliot Smith examined the bones, he concluded that they belonged to a young man, perhaps in his mid-twenties when he died, whereas Akhenaten was assumed to be significantly older. He ruled for seventeen years, and as he introduced such dramatic changes was presumably a grown man when he took the throne. He was also known to have several daughters, at least one of whom married during his lifetime.

Throughout all this excitement, Carter looked on. These two tombs discovered by Davis—Yuya and Tjuiu’s and the Amarna cache—both undisturbed since the Eighteenth Dynasty, were close together in the center of the valley and had been hidden from looters long before the Twenty-First-Dynasty reburial efforts by rubble deposited in ancient floods. So perhaps they weren’t all that the floods had covered over. Davis was focusing his search for more tombs in the Valley along the edges of cliffs and the sides of gullies. But Carter reckoned that here, in the valley floor beneath the flood debris, would be the best place to find another intact tomb from the same time period. And he knew just whom he wanted to look for—one of the only Eighteenth-Dynasty kings for whom neither a mummy, nor an empty tomb, had been found.

THE YOUNG, reckless Fifth Earl of Carnarvon didn’t do anything by halves. But then, as one of the richest men in England, he didn’t have to. Thanks partly to marrying the illegitimate daughter of (allegedly) the stupendously wealthy banker Alfred de Rothschild, Lord Carnarvon owned so much land he couldn’t even count it all. He made the most of his circumstances, owning a string of racehorses, sailing around the world, and racing down country roads in one of the first automobiles to be registered in England after it became legal to drive without someone carrying a red flag down the road in front of you.10

“Porchy,”* as he was generally known, survived all kinds of far-flung adventures from tropical storms to elephant attacks, but it was two cattle-drawn carts that nearly killed him. Driving at high speed through German countryside in 1901, he didn’t see the carts, which were stopped in a blind dip in the road, until it was too late. He swerved to avoid them, went off the road, and landed in the mud with his car on top of him.

From that day onward, Carnarvon’s health was shattered and it seemed his days of adventure were over. His lungs were particularly weak, so rather than risk catching bronchitis in chilly England he started wintering in Egypt, and became captivated by archaeology. He threw himself into this new pursuit just as he had his previous sports, and decided that buying up antiquities wasn’t enough. He wanted to dig for them.

In 1906, Maspero awarded Carnarvon a concession, and Weigall, who disapproved of amateurs being let loose in the area, gave him a dud site in some “rubbish mounds”11 on top of the hill of Gurna. Sure enough, his first season brought him nothing more than a mummified cat. His second season wasn’t much better, but Carnarvon wasn’t deterred. For his third season, Maspero suggested that he work with Carter.

The pair were given a more promising site in front of Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahri, where Carter brought professionalism to the enterprise. Despite their very different backgrounds, they became firm friends. When back in England, Carter often visited Carnarvon at Highclere, the lord’s grand estate in Berkshire (now used as the location of the hit British TV series Downton Abbey).

Between them, they discovered a haul of reasonably important tombs, including that of Queen Ahmose-Nefertari, and Carter painted Carnarvon’s baronial crest above the door of each one. When Carnarvon came to visit the dig, he stayed at the plush Winter Palace hotel across the river in Luxor, while Carter built a house for himself, nicknamed “Castle Carter,”12 a twenty-minute donkey ride from the Valley of the Kings.

Which of course is where he still desperately wanted to excavate. But Davis refused to let his concession go, despite diminishing returns in his excavations, until shortly before his death in 1915. By this time, he was convinced there was nothing left to be found, writing: “I fear the Valley of the Kings is now exhausted.”13

Carter and Carnarvon seized their chance, though their peers thought they were wasting their time. Even Maspero, as he signed the concession over to them, said bluntly that he didn’t think the site would repay further investigation. But Carter had carefully studied the scars left in the valley by previous excavators. He was certain there were areas that hadn’t yet been searched—particularly in the central floor of the valley, near the un-looted Amarna cache.

Several of Davis’s finds strengthened Carter’s conviction that this area would yield the tomb of Tutankhamun. First, several items bearing Tutankhamun’s name, including a blue pot, stashed carefully under a rock, and some fragments of gold foil. Second, the seals in the Amarna cache. If Tutankhamun had buried his predecessor here, he might therefore choose a similar location for his own tomb. A third clue was a mysterious pit that Davis had found in 1907.

It contained a collection of large, earthen pots, inscribed with Tutankhamun’s name. They were full of debris—broken pottery, small bags of powder, dried wreaths of leaves and flowers. Davis wasn’t impressed by the lack of valuables and had no use for the pots or their contents, aside from tearing the flower necklaces as a party piece for guests to show how strong they were. He donated them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Carter didn’t yet understand the significance of the pit either, but he saw it as one more sign that Tutankhamun was buried close by.

Before the pair could start digging, world war broke out, and all excavations ceased. Carnarvon, too ill to fight, turned Highclere into a military hospital. Carter worked as a courier for the foreign office in the Middle East, but in an episode reminiscent of the Saqqara affair, he was soon dismissed for a “trivial yet distinct” breach of discipline,14 and returned to Thebes where he carried out some small-scale fieldwork.

During the later years of the war, archaeological activity slowly restarted, and Carter drew up a search plan. He would focus on a triangle between three tombs in the central floor of the valley. Close to the Amarna cache, this was the area he thought had been covered by flood debris in ancient times. By December 1917, Carter and Carnarvon were finally ready to start their search for Tutankhamun.

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* A confrontation between the Egyptian Empire, under Rameses II, and the Hittites, which took place around 1275 BC. It was probably the largest chariot battle ever fought.

* He still looks pretty good today, on show in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, with jet black skin, great bone structure, and a strong, open face. Although perhaps he’s not to everyone’s taste. “He’s handsome!” exclaimed a middle-aged Australian woman standing next to me when I visited, as we both considered his mummy. “But his nose is a bit small.”

* KV stands for Kings’ Valley.

* In 1890, the museum had moved from Bulaq to a site in Giza, a palace donated by the Khedive, after the original building—which was far too small anyway—was permanently damaged by floods. But this still wasn’t big enough for all of the antiquities being unearthed in Egypt, and in 1902, the museum moved again to its present location, a huge, neoClassical building next to Tahrir Square.

* The illustrator and travel writer Walter Tyndale.

* The sun god, Ra, who became merged during the New Kingdom with the patron deity of Thebes, Amun.

* Before inheriting the title of Lord Carnarvon from his father in 1890, he was Lord Porchester.

FROM THE CIRCULAR MAIN HALL of the Sackler Library in Oxford, UK, a short corridor leads to a staircase that takes you down below street level. Through a door marked Archive, office ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights stare down onto cheap blue carpet and a row of plain gray rolling stacks. It doesn’t seem the most fertile ground for archaeological discovery. But the hum of the air conditioner lets slip that this modest room is hiding something special. The temperature is held at 65° F, several degrees cooler than the sunny July day outside, while a humidifier keeps the moisture level tightly controlled.

This is the archive of the Griffith Institute—arguably the best Egyptology library in the world. And this is as close as it’s possible to get today to Howard Carter and his discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, resting place of the world’s most famous mummy. The story of this incredible find has been recounted so many times it becomes more like a myth with every retelling; some of the details wear ever deeper, like ruts, while others have faded from memory. But the notebooks and diaries held in these dull-looking gray stacks contain the thoughts and experiences that Carter wrote down at the time. To learn about the discovery of Tutankhamun and his tomb, this seems as good a place as any to start.

I visit the archive accompanied by its soft-spoken keeper, Jaromir Malek,* and his assistant, Elizabeth Fleming. On the wall hangs another clue that this uninspiring room is something more than cheap office space—a somber portrait of Carter, with small but piercing black eyes gazing irritably down. To be honest, he looks a bit middle management, with the slight awkwardness of a low-grade accountant or banker. But this man had vision, and a sense of beauty. To prove it, Fleming brings out perhaps the archive’s most aesthetically pleasing items—a collection of graceful watercolors, painted by Carter himself.