Dan Snow gets close to the treasure
Historian Dan Snow gets a close-up view of treasures from the ancient burial place
The Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza is part museum, part archive, but with the feel of a high-security laboratory. In January, I visited the giant, soon-to-be-finished attraction next to the pyramids for a Channel 5 documentary about Tutankhamun, to coincide with the blockbuster exhibition that has just opened in London. As I was let through one vast steel door after another, it reminded me of the time I was ushered into the heart of a Ministry of Defence biowarfare facility to be shown a Petri dish containing Yersinia pestis, the plague bacterium, on the far side of an airlock. Security at the Egyptian museum is just as tight, but for different reasons.
For it is home to the breathtaking contents of the most complete royal tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings, that of the teenage pharaoh Tutankhamun. A fraction of its artefacts, such as the famous death mask and outer coffins, are on permanent display in the Cairo Museum in the heart of the city, while a few other key pieces are on a worldwide tour, currently at the Saatchi Gallery in London. But everything else was right here, from the giant day beds supported by gold-painted carvings of leopards to the pharaoh’s make-up case, complete with a miniature brush to apply his “guy-liner”. It was an enormous and rare privilege to be let in and watch the curators and conservators preparing the collection for public display ahead of the gallery’s opening next year.
There is an intensity in being so close to treasures that you know so well from books and television. Two conservators were using fine brushes to clean the famous chariot. I knelt beside them as they worked millimetre by millimetre across the surface of gold leaf. I could see tiny inconsistencies in the swirling geometric patterns, evidence of the humanity of the creator, a skilled New Kingdom artisan, whose work, once completed, was buried in darkness under the desert for more than 3,000 years.
Tutankhamun was an Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh, son of Akhenaten and his wife, who was also, in established pharaonic tradition, his sister. His father was a controversial figure who had jettisoned the Egyptian pantheon of gods and replaced them with one supreme deity, Aten, the sun god. Tutankhamun succeeded his father as a child and ruled from around 1334BC until his death in his late teens.
Although he restored the traditional religion of Egypt, subsequent rulers found it useful to lump him in with his apostate father and cleanse the record of their existence. Monuments and statues were destroyed, their names excised from lists of kings. However, Egyptologists heard whispers of him, his cartouche appeared on fragments of masonry, but no tomb was ever discovered, nor objects from it.
Then, in the early Twenties, Howard Carter, the archaeologist, was searching a site in the Valley of the Kings, outside modern Luxor, 250 miles south of Cairo. This vast necropolis was dotted with tombs of New Kingdom rulers. He was interested in what lay beneath the foundations of huts used by workers who built a gigantic royal tomb around 150 years after Tutankhamun. On the morning of Nov 4 1922, a young boy who kept the digging team supplied with water found a step as he prodded around in the sand and rock. Carter’s team investigated and found it was the start of a staircase leading into the earth. Carter uncovered a door at the bottom, seals intact. He summoned his patron, the Earl of Carnarvon. Weeks later, side by side, Carnarvon and Carter made a hole in the door. Hot air escaped the tomb, Carter’s candle flickered. His eyes slowly adjusted to the dark and he saw the outlines of animals, statues and “everywhere, the glint of gold”. Carnarvon asked him: “Can you see anything?” Carter replied, “Yes, wonderful things.”
It was the single greatest discovery in the history of archaeology. Tutankhamun’s tomb had been robbed in antiquity, but the damage made good, implying it took place within a few years, at most, of his death. Essentially, it was an intact royal tomb. Now I was in the Grand Egyptian Museum surrounded by “wonderful things”, with my excitement level only a few notches below that of Carter himself.
It is the gold that distracts initially. But you soon look beyond the large, gaudy objects – chariots, statues and beds – and see the magic of the smaller, everyday items. Tutankhamun was buried with a very generous supply of clean underwear. There were more than 100 walking sticks which, together with analysis on his skeleton, suggested that he walked with a limp, possibly as a result of a genetic disorder caused by his family’s relentless inbreeding.
I was entranced by his bows, nearly 50 of them, many with intricate carvings at either end of human forms, some recognisable as depicting the Nubians, the ancestral enemies of Egypt who lived further south in what is now Sudan. Tutankhamun’s shield was stunning, lined with leopard skin, his royal cartouches emblazoned in the centre. Pharaohs such as Tutankhamun depicted themselves as warrior kings; there is a fierce debate about whether he might have led troops in battle, or whether the shield and the bows were ceremonial signifiers of his exalted status.
Much of his life and death remain a mystery. Yet he is now one of the most famous humans to have ever lived. The discovery of the tomb made him a household name, while scientists and archaeologists still pore over the artefacts recovered from his tomb, ensuring that our knowledge of him and his life will go on being deepened and enriched for generations to come.
The leap in our understanding of King Tut is evidenced by the Saatchi exhibition. The huge crowds that flocked to see the young pharaoh’s collection when it arrived at the British Museum in the early Seventies were given a more primitive interpretation than anyone who treats themselves to an expensive but worthwhile day out in Sloane Square (with peak-time admission costing up to £37.40 per adult, a family of four could pay in excess of £100 for entry).
And perhaps there are slightly fewer of the most totemic pieces from the tomb on this visit, but you don’t miss them. Curators – here, and at the Grand Egyptian Museum – are literally sifting through an embarrassment of riches.
I was entranced by his bows, many with intricate carvings