Tutankhamen (4 page)

The survival of Tutankhamen's near-intact tomb was a lucky accident: the result of a fortunate combination of natural and man-made causes. But, contrary to public perception, its rediscovery in 1922 was a deliberate act: the culmination of years of well-reasoned archaeological detective work. When Howard Carter started to excavate in the Valley of the Kings, Tutankhamen was a virtually unknown late 18th Dynasty
pharaoh who had been omitted from Egypt's official history, yet had left enough monuments and inscriptions to confirm his existence. His ‘tomb' – KV 58 – had already been discovered and published: his body had never been found.
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Carter could not accept this. Refusing to believe that the Valley had yielded all its secrets, and unable to agree that the meagre KV 58 might have been a royal tomb, or even a secondary royal burial, Carter determined to find the missing king. To understand Carter's road to Tutankhamen we need to go back to the Valley of the Kings at the start of the 18th Dynasty.

For many centuries Egypt's kings had chosen to be buried, and to be remembered, in enormous pyramid complexes raised in the vast desert cemeteries of northern Egypt. These complexes included both the tomb where the body rested and the temple where regular offerings could be made to the dead. Then, at the start of the 18th Dynasty in approximately 1550 BC, the large-scale pyramid complex was abandoned. Kings would now build two entirely separate funerary monuments. Their mummified bodies would be buried in relative secrecy in rock-cut tombs tunnelled into the Valley of the Kings on the west bank of the Nile at the southern city of Thebes. The Theban mountain (el Qurn, or ‘the horn' in modern Arabic), which rose to a sharp peak above the new necropolis, would serve as a natural pyramid, maintaining a link with the beliefs of the past for those who wished it. At the same time a highly visible memorial temple, appropriately situated on the border between the cultivated land, home of the living, and the sterile desert, home of the dead, would serve as the accessible public focus of the royal mortuary cult. Here the deceased kings would receive, until the very end of time, the offerings necessary to ensure their existence beyond death.

It is not entirely clear why the pharaohs instigated such a major
break with tradition, but it seems likely that there were several contributory factors. The 18th Dynasty kings hailed from Thebes and, as southerners, may have wished for burial close by their revered 17th Dynasty ancestors – kings of Thebes, but not of the whole of Egypt – who had raised small, steep-sided pyramids in the Dra Abu el-Naga cemetery on the west bank at Thebes. Their increasing devotion to Amen, patron deity of Thebes, almost certainly contributed towards their decision: while the northern pyramid fields had been strongly associated with the cult of the sun god Re of Heliopolis, the new tombs and memorial temples belonged to one enormous sacred landscape incorporating Amen's extensive east bank Karnak temple complex and his smaller Luxor temple. Re was certainly not forgotten – Egypt remained polytheistic – but Amen was generally regarded as the major state god of the 18th Dynasty. More practical considerations – cost and security – must also have influenced the decision. While the pyramid complexes had proved extremely expensive to build and maintain, the new-style tombs required virtually no raw materials and employed a far smaller workforce: scores of specialist artisans as opposed to the tens of thousands of temporary, unskilled labourers needed to build a pyramid. The problem of feeding and sheltering these artisans – a logistical nightmare for the pyramid builders – was quickly solved. By Tutankhamen's reign the royal tomb-workers, known as the ‘Servants in the Place of Truth', were full-time state employees in receipt of a generous salary. They, and their families, lived a self-contained life at Deir el-Medina; a purpose-built west bank town originally built to accommodate the more transient labourers employed on the earlier 18th Dynasty tombs. Meanwhile, the many hundreds of workers required to build the stone memorial temples could be housed in full view of the general public: near the temple, near the cultivated land and the water and food supplies, and far from the precious cemetery.

Necropolis security would always be an issue in a land where the
elite insisted on being buried with a vast array of valuable goods. Ineni, architect to Tuthmosis I, the first king known to have been buried in the Valley, highlights this concern when he tells us on the wall of his own tomb (TT 81) that he ‘supervised the excavation of the cliff tomb of His Majesty alone, no-one seeing and no one hearing'. The Valley was the ideal site for a secret cemetery: remote and difficult for a stranger to access, admission had to be effected either via the narrow, guarded Valley entrance or by sliding down a noisy scree-covered slope. The principal weakness would always come from the tomb-workers, who had both the knowledge and the practical skills to rob the kings they had just buried. The reduction in worker numbers was therefore a major advantage; the fewer people who knew about the tombs and their contents, the better. Strict security measures were enforced: entrance to and from the Valley was controlled and metal tools were secured at the end of each shift. After the funeral the tomb doors were blocked, plastered and sealed with one or more of the official necropolis seals. No seal could prevent robbers from entering the tomb (although, as the sealing was a ritual act, it might cause the superstitious to hesitate) but any tampering would be obvious to the inspectors who regularly patrolled the cemetery looking for signs of damage. Violated tombs were quickly made superficially whole again. If thefts could not be stopped, they could at least be concealed, allowing the necropolis officials to pretend that all was well.

As a self-proclaimed devotee of Amen, Tutankhamen would have wished to be buried alongside his ancestors in either the Valley of the Kings or its offshoot, the Western Valley. This was not simply a question of conforming to 18th Dynasty tradition, although that would have been an important consideration for a king who promoted himself as a restorer of traditional royal and religious values. Cemeteries carried their own potent magic, and dead kings, now one with the gods, had powerful spirits that might benefit others. Burial among his divine ancestors would therefore help the newly deceased Tutankhamen to
achieve his own afterlife. We may speculate that Tutankhamen would have wished to construct his tomb in the Western Valley, close by that of his revered grandfather, Amenhotep III (KV 22), and we may reasonably expect that work would have started on his tomb as early as possible in his reign: no king wanted to run the risk of dying without a secure home for his body. As Tutankhamen initially ruled from Amarna, a city with its own royal cemetery, this would suggest that work on his Theban tomb started during his regnal Year 2 or 3, soon after the abandonment of Amarna. As there had been a twenty-five-year hiatus in the Valley building programme, things may have got off to a slow start, but his workmen would still have had a good seven or eight years to construct his last resting place.

Whatever he may have intended, we know that Tutankhamen was not buried in a splendid royal tomb in the Western Valley. He was instead buried in a cramped, non-royal tomb cut into the floor of the main Valley (KV 62). The accepted explanation is that Tutankhamen simply died too young to realise his ambitious plans. Tradition allowed just seventy days in the embalming house before the funeral, and this was nowhere near long enough to make his unfinished tomb usable. Tutankhamen therefore had to be buried in a substitute tomb – most probably the tomb that his successor, the elderly courtier Ay, had been preparing for himself.

However, we might reasonably question the assumption that Tutankhamen's builders ran so seriously out of time as to make his chosen tomb uninhabitable. Three decades after Tutankhamen's death, the 19th Dynasty Ramesses I ruled for a mere two years, yet his architects were able to adapt his unfinished tomb (KV 16) to accommodate his burial in a suitably regal manner; Ramesses' great-grandson, Merenptah, ruled for ten years – the same reign-length as Tutankhamen – and was buried in a magnificent tomb (KV 8). It seems far more likely that Ay, inheriting the throne as an elderly man, and realising that he himself might run out of time, made a strategic swap. Just four years
after Tutankhamen's death, Ay was buried in a splendid, yet unfinished, tomb in the Western Valley (KV 23), close by the tomb of Amenhotep III. It seems reasonable to suggest that just as Tutankhamen had been buried in Ay's intended tomb, so Ay was buried in Tutankhamen's. It may even be that KV 23 was originally started for Amenhotep IV, son of Amenhotep III, before he changed his name to Akhenaten and moved his court and tomb to Amarna.

The tomb was the hidden aspect of Tutankhamen's funerary provision. The visible aspect – his memorial temple – would have been situated among the row of temples that fringed the Theban west bank desert edge. But this temple, along with many others, vanished long ago, its valuable stone blocks recycled in later buildings. Dozens of dynastic blocks have been recovered from medieval housing on the east bank, near the Luxor Temple. Some of these date to the reign of Tutankhamen, and may have originated in his memorial temple, although it is equally possible that they came from a separate east bank building, the ‘Mansion of Nebkheperure in Waset [Thebes]', which we know was built by Ay as a memorial to Tutankhamen and which has since vanished. The carved blocks show Tutankhamen in action: processing on the river, making offerings, purifying statues and leading his troops in campaigns against Egypt's traditional Nubian (southern) and Asiatic (eastern) enemies.
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The ruined Temple of Ay and Horemheb provides a valuable clue to the location of Tutankhamen's lost temple.
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Situated on the west bank, close to the remains of the memorial temple of Tuthmosis II and the far more intact memorial temple of the 20th Dynasty king Ramesses III, it has yielded a pair of damaged, red quartzite seated colossal statues originally carved for Tutankhamen, then inscribed by Ay and finally usurped by Ay's successor Horemheb. Today these statues are housed in the Cairo Museum and in the Oriental Institute, Chicago. It is likely that Ay took these statues from Tutankhamen's temple which, given the size and weight of the colossi, was presumably nearby:
possibly either the ruined building known today as the ‘North Temple' or the equally ruined ‘South Temple'. However, given the complicated history of Tutankhamen's tomb, it is tempting to suggest that the Temple of Ay and Horemheb itself may have started life as Tutankhamen's memorial temple, before being usurped by Ay. Although few foundation deposits inscribed with Ay's name have been recovered from the temple, these might well belong to a later building phase.

Tutankhamen's last resting place was a typical late 18th Dynasty non-royal rock-cut tomb, one of three (the others being KV 55 and KV 63) cut into the limestone floor of the main Valley. It was accessed via a flight of sixteen descending steps. At the bottom of the steps, a doorway opened on to a narrow, sloping passageway (measuring length 8.08 × width 1.68 × height 2m) leading to a second doorway.
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This led into a rectangular chamber (7.85 × 3.55 × 2.68m) cut some 7.1m below the Valley floor and orientated north – south. This first chamber – a storeroom dubbed the ‘Antechamber' by Carter – allowed access via a sealed doorway to a subsidiary storage chamber known as the ‘Annexe' (4.35 × 2.6 × 2.55m; orientated north – south). The floor of the Annexe was almost a metre below the floor of the Antechamber. The Burial Chamber (6.37 × 4.02 × 3.63m) was separated from the Antechamber by a plastered dry stone partition wall that contained a hidden doorway. The Burial Chamber was orientated east – west, and its floor, too, was also nearly a metre lower than the floor of the Antechamber. Opening off the Burial Chamber was a subsidiary storage chamber, the ‘Treasury' (4.75 × 3.8 × 2.33m; orientated north – south).

Eighteenth Dynasty royal tombs were traditionally decorated with exclusively royal texts and scenes taken from a collection of religious writings known as the
Books of the Underworld
or the
Guides to the Afterlife
. These were provided to help the king on his journey to the afterlife by recalling the night-time adventure of the sun god Re. Every day the young and vigorous Re sailed his boat across the
placid sky, bringing light to Egypt. Each evening, now old and frail, Re transferred to his night boat and entered the
Duat,
the dark and hidden world of the night-time sun. If all went well, he would be reborn in the east at dawn. In Tutankhamen's small-scale tomb the passageway, Antechamber, Annexe and Treasury remained unplastered and undecorated. Only the Burial Chamber was plastered with gypsum and painted. The humidity damage suffered by a number of the grave goods suggests that this plaster may not have been fully dry when the tomb was sealed; an indication that the tomb was made ready for the king at the last minute. The decoration is similar in composition and style to the decoration in the tomb of Ay; this is hardly surprising, as the tombs are near-contemporary, and it seems likely that both were built by the courtier Maya, ‘overseer of works in the place of eternity' and ‘overseer of works in the west'.