Discovering Tutankhamun(Part 1)

2007-04-26 15:04:11 [ Big Normal Small ]  Mark Berthold  　Comment

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The belated discovery of Tutenkhamun’s tomb is an archeological epic and the stuff of legend-as well as vindicating the maxim “if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again”. Howard Carter had been searching for a missing tomb in the Valley of the Kings for five years and had already mounted five unsuccessful expeditions. Having persuaded his patient patron Lord Carnavon to finance a final bid, Carter returned to Egypt in 1922 for a last-ditch effort. On November 4 a water carrier trying to secure his water jug came across an unusual rock-a step, actually. Feverish excavation followed revealing the tomb entrance. That very day Carter’s canary was killed by a cobra-symbol of the pharaohs-thus launching the legend of their enduring curse.

It took Carter and his team weeks to explore the complex. This despite it being unusually small for a king’s tomb, with its cramped rock-cut corridors.



King Tut’s abrupt and unexpected death-still a source of speculation-had required the appropriation of a mere courtier’s unfinished tomb. Although the outer rooms had been looted long ago, the burial chamber itself remained untouched: the first intact royal tomb ever discovered. It displays Egypt’s preoccupation with eternity. Egyptian’s believed, like many still, that man like the sun could die and be reborn. To protect the deceased’s body and house the soul throughout eternity they constructed elaborate tombs. On their monuments they left testimonies to their faith and their books of the dead as guides to immortality. Wall paintings were to help the dead king reach the afterlife as they supplied answers to questions he would be asked and spells to deflect dangers along the way. So here we see wailing women bidding farewell to the royal occupant of the coffin.



More oblique are the hieroglyphic symbols and their decoding required the discovery of the Rosetta stone during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. These photos of mine were taken without flash and the low-light conditions required a stabilizing tripod or the shutter speed would have been too slow to avoid camera shake and consequent blurring of the fine details displayed.
　


Fame is funny thing. King Tut died around 1300BC aged just 19 but having already ruled Egypt for almost a decade as half man, half god. Yet as Ramses the Great later appropriated Tut’s contribution to the monuments at Karnak, the only undisturbed historic evidence of Tut’s role remains on the walls of his tomb. The Egyptians believed that to speak the name of the dead is to make them live again; that it restores the breath of life to he or she who has vanished. If so King Tut is very much alive and well and when the exhibition of treasures Tutankhamen and the Golden age of the Pharaohs [http://www.nationalgeographic.com/tut/] reaches London it is likely to eclipse the two million visitors attending the last such show there in 1972. Long live the King!

Mark Berthold Copyright 2007

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