Empire: World History - 366. Ancient Egypt: Tutankhamun The Boy King (Ep 5)

Episode Date: June 7, 2026

**Unlock the entire Ancient Egypt series early and ad-free by joining the Empire Club at empirepoduk.com** His death mask is one of the most famous faces in Ancient Egyptian history, but who was the real Tutunkhamun? What do the items found in his tomb tell us about his life? And what myths have been spread about him? Anita and William are joined by Dr Campbell Price, author of Golden Mummies of Egypt, and Curator of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum, to discuss the life of King Tut.  Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/EMPIRE Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Bruno Di Castri Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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He is the most famous Pharaoh who ever lived. His face, that serene golden mask with its striped headdress, is one of the supreme images of the ancient world, recognized on every continent. Millions of people have cooed for hours to stand before the original in Cairo. And yet, in the Egypt of his own time, this man was a nobody.

Not even a man, a child when he came to the throne and dying in his teens. He won no great battles, built no great monuments, left no great inscriptions. So, who exactly was, Tuton Korn? Hello, and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Drupal. And our guest today is the curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum, author of

brief histories, ancient Egypt, of ancient Egypt to 50 discoveries, and of the magnificent golden mummies of Egypt. Dr. Campbell Price, take a bow. Hello again. Hi. Hello again. Hello again. Listen, so great to have you back.

Oh, thank you. A lot of people listening or watching, they're going to know the story of the discovery. of King Tuts Tomb. We're going to have a glorious episode with you about Howard Carter and the Valley of the Kings in 1922. So if you want to hear that, you know what you need to do, become a member of the club. But today, we're going to talk about the boy king himself.

So can we start right at the very beginning? Let's, I mean, it seems like a really basic question, but it isn't straightforward. It becomes quite contested. Who were his parents? Oh, well, Tutankham in a way, as we'll discuss, is kind of the end of the line. He's the end of a dynasty, quite literally.

And there is a lot of debate, as there often is in Egyptology. We're just getting a flavour of that between the EU and Asian. Yeah. There's, yeah, hotly contested in the pages of journals, the identity of Tutankhamman's parents. So as you said in your introduction, he is extremely famous. He's probably the most famous of Egyptian kings.

But we assume, based on relatively few bits of evidence, that his father is a chap called Akanatin. Who we've been dwelling on at some length in this series. Yes, but while that's, I would say that's fairly assured, the identity of his mother is not. And as we'll say, even doing DNA tests, because there are lots of bodies around actual bodies, not just historical inscriptions,

even with the bodies, we're not quite sure. So probably the son of Akenaton, a big religious reformer, and an unknown woman. And he had, Acknarton had, like all, Ferrer's, a number of wives. So it's not entirely surprising that this should be contested. Yes, exactly. His chief wife, Nefertiti,

who listeners will have heard of, no doubt, her bust is in Berlin. She seems to be his favoured wife. I mean, she appears in almost all the monuments. But as you say, the King of Egypt had multiple sexual partners. Okay, but there is a question, because, I mean, We're quite progressed since the days when we wrapped bodies in bandages. Could we, what you mentioned DNA, have there not been DNA studies?

Could they not just definitively tell us, who's the mummy? Who do mummy? You know, to put it that way. Irresistible. Irresistible to say that. Short answer, no, because DNA degrades with time. It is very easy to contaminate. And you've got to remember when these bodies were unwrapped, they were handled.

I mean, the ones that were unwrapped and put in museums were in a, way the lucky ones. They were ground down for medicine, for paint, to make paper. Imagine having your fish and chips from paper made of mummified ancient Egyptians. There's lots of contamination, so it's actually very difficult to be sure. And even if you do extract DNA positively, actually confirming the nature of the relationship, a genetic relationship is very difficult indeed. But most scholars today seem to opt on balance, not definitively, but on balance for Nefertiti as the mum. Yes.

You're looking very, you're looking at all convinced by that same way. He's doing the face of a sceptical face. That's what he's doing, isn't he? As often in Egyptology, it depends who you talk to. I mean, I'm a great believer in the work of Professor Aidan Dodson and on balance he opts for Nefertiti as the mother of Tutankhamun. But another name is a minor wife called Kea. And there are iconographic reasons where she does seem to play a role in the court of Akanatin,

but then disappears. So possibly she is the mother. But we cannot know. And surprisingly, people think, we've got the tomb, we've got all the stuff. Surely there are loads of writings about his parents, there are not. There's a shirt, a quite touching shirt that enshrouds his jackal statue of the god anubis, which has the name of Akanat and his father on it. Otherwise...

Otherwise, we just don't know. Okay, so we'll take all the caveats. Let's take all the caveats. One thing we do know, and, you know, it's one of those really dwelled on, and a really glitzy, schmitsy documentary about sort of doing the CT scan of Tutt himself. We do know a little bit about the state he was in, don't we? That's also contested, isn't it? Because he's got a knock on his head, but no one knows whether it was the unwrapper or an assassination.

So there's a knock on the head, but there's also the shape of the body, which I thought sort of might have told us, if he had. had come from disease or, you know, sort of too close genetic material. I mean, because after all, Nefertiki and Acknarton were cousins, right? So, I mean... Maybe. Yeah. Maybe.

Oh, my goodness. What we do? We know here, Campbell. Okay, sort it all out for us. Right. Okay. So, first off, we must acknowledge the dreadful state that Tutankhamen's body was in after Howard Carter and his team finished with it.

And I saw it up, didn't they? Tutankham was found glued into his inner solid gold. coffin, covered with wonderful artefacts, which had to be extracted. And so Howard Carter and the team totally atomized him, decapitated him, tore him limb from limb to get him out of this black. And that's literally what we're talking at. He's stuck in the thing and they have to just pull. Yeah. So all of that contaminates and compromises the nature of what we would now want to analyze. And they weren't wearing rubber gloves and stuff. They were not. William, no, they were not. They're breathing, smoking, touching things, things that we might not do today.

So the evidence is, I think, to my mind, fatally compromised in that way. But you're right that Tutankhamun, he comes at the end of the line. Even if his parents were not directly related, his father definitely came from what we would call an inbred royal family to keep the royal blood pure. In contrast to other royal families. Well, yeah, it's a common thing to not, to not. And for reasons of inheritance, generally not just royalty, that you want to know who the next generation are and what they're going to inherit. So, Tud and Kaman, maybe one of the reasons

he doesn't have children of his own is because of a genetic issue. But as far as disease goes, and I've been in hospitals where we've done the CT scans of mummified bodies. Often in that scanning room, you're with an archaeologist, an Egyptologist,

a radiologist, a bio-archologist, and no one can agree when the scan comes up what they're seeing on the screen. So things which to us or which to a specialist might look like paleo-pathology,

so diseases endured or not endured in life, or the cause of death, these, in fact, are artifacts of mummification, the fact that the body has been changed by being completely dehydrated, covered in resins, oils, and been left for 3,000 years. So actually, CT scans are very difficult to interpret. So I completely love this. It's, you know, basically give the, give the guy a break. He might have been fine. Yeah. It sounds like he had several breaks by the time

Howard Carter had got about. Well, quite. Well, Camel, let's talk about maybe things that we know a bit more about. So he's born into the most revolutionary moment in ancient Egyptian history. This time when his father rips up the pantheon of gods and says there is only one and that is the sun disk, the Arton. Just from remind us or paint us a picture of first of all what his name tells us because we know him as Tutankarman, but that's not how he started off, is it? No, he's born Tutank Atten or Tutanku Atten. So as you said, that is the same. Sundisk, the gods, the deity who his father favors. So his father is born Aminhotep, so a very traditional name, Aminhotep, son of Amin Hotep. And then at some point early on in his reign,

as you said, he simply rips up the rulebook, moves the court to a really desolate part of Middle Egypt, which he says is not sacred to any god or any goddess, and sets up shop completely afresh. So Tutankan is born into this moment. He's given the name Tutanku Atten, which means something like the living image of the sundisk, which is very appropriate for the time, which you will change in a kind of counter-revolutionary moment, but he must grow up at the site of what we today refer to as Tell El Amarna. This is the site in ancient times called Akhet Atten, not to be confused with Akhen Atten, that's the name of the king, that's Tuck's Dad. Akhet Atten means horizon of the Atten. This is the capital city where Ack-Het Atten, where Aten

at and basically says he's never going to leave. So Tutankhamen as a boy, as a prince, will have had a very comfortable existence as it went and presumably some hopes were pinned on him because he was the male child of the reigning king. Now, Camber, when we go to Berlin to see Nefertiti's bust, in the room beside it, there's all these gorgeous pictures of his daughters. Yes. And there's a whole beautiful set of cases with these very hard stone. images of these unbelievably beautiful girls with slightly odd shapes and slightly alien shape.

I love those girls. And what's the stone called? Quartzite? Is it quartzite? Quartzite is favoured because it's this reddish-orange-ish colour as you've seen. Solar, it's got solar associations.

But something to say about the booming sculpture of the royal family, it is unusual that the children of a monarch are so memorialised. so commemorated, so materialized in stone. Because remember, Achanatans closed all the temples. He said, right, there's only one god, essentially, at the Aten.

And we are only going to worship him. So all the other gods are totally obsolete. So all the temples are going to get closed. I'm moving to a new capital. So the sculptors who trained under his father, the traditional Amunhotep the 3rd, who were producing statues. I've got nothing else to do but do lots of images of their own family. Well, previously there were lots of images of gods.

and people in ancient Egypt like statuary. So the sculptors are just told, right, in the absence of any gods, you can't sculpt a statue of the Aton, the Sun Desk really. He's the god in the sky. Just loads and loads and loads of images in relief and in sculpture in the round of Akanatin, his chief wife Nefertiti.

She seems to see off any other wives. And the whole tribe of girls, but no tut. Six daughters who can only all have been alive, together briefly because there's at least one death pretty soon, as was probably not uncommon to an ancient Egyptian family. Having six children was often accompanied by high infant mortality. What we haven't done, Campbell, is actually put a date on this happy family tableau minus Tud. So I mean, what can just tell people what we are talking about here?

So we're talking about the 14th century BCE. So leading up to about 1350 is the reign of Tutankhamun. So this is, you know, a high point in Egyptian history, what Egyptologists call the New Kingdom, the 18th dynasty. Lots of battles have been waged, lots of foreign territory, has been, if not included in an empire. I'm skeptical about the concept of empire, I should say on a podcast called empire,

in ancient Egypt. But there's definitely raiding and acquisition of materials. So Akinaten, his father, is really pretty magnificent ruler who builds lots and has lots of statutory and rules well over 30 years. And Akenaten and Tutankhamen inherit this, and some would say Akanaten kind of squanders it. So that world collapses when Acknarton dies, doesn't it? And we've had the description of his death in the episode that we talked to. about the fall of Amarna. And at that point, we assume that what,

Tut is a child of eight or nine? Yeah. And his world presumably goes into spin at this point. Yeah, I mean, because Akanaten, whichever way you cut it, I mean, Akhenaten is a very singular individual. He was once described as the first individual in history. He must be quite a commanding guy because she's instituted all these reforms.

So then when he disappears, maybe before he disappears, he takes, as is not uncommon, a co-ruler. So we have the name Smenekh Kare, who seems to be a co-ruler of Akanatans and who may die, disappear before Akanatins' death. And then, for some people,

my colleague, Professor Aden Dodson, included, Nefertiti, the wife of Akenatine, takes on the role of king. So there's a period, there's a kind of interregnum, you could say, between the death of Akanatin and Tutankatin becoming king, before he changes his name, where there's various, yeah, kind of horse trading for power. So he doesn't have his father anymore. He's just been living in an age of enormous tumult. Nobody's seen anything like this where the gods themselves have been, you know, destroyed, if you like.

he's just a boy. Two very powerful adults come into his life, the muscle and the brain, the political fixer and the military commander. So tell us about I and Horam Hebb, who are they? And what parts are they play in his life? So we probably know rather less about I.

He seems to be an elder statesman already in the reign of Akinatan from a powerful family in some way connected to the royal family. We're not quite sure how. For some people, for some Egyptologists, he's the father of Nefertiti. I'm a little skeptical about that myself. He takes on the slightly mysterious title of God's father.

And if you're the God's father, you could say, maybe, I don't know, you're the father-in-law of the king, you're kind of acting as a regent, but he appears in Tutankhamen's shadow pretty much at the same scale as the king, which is a great presumption. If you show yourself as the same scale visually as the Pharaoh of Egypt, must be someone quite important. So he's hanging around. And then there's Hormeb, who we know from his extensive and very beautifully decorated tomb at the site of Sakara, which he was preparing before he eventually became king after Akanathen's death. He is the general. He is in charge of the military,

the army. He's the Sisi of the day. Yes, and Sisi has been compared to him, for sure, the current president of Egypt. And he's interesting. I find Hormeib interesting because he makes great play, which might seem surprising for a, you know, a military guy, with being able to write. He's got the skills of writing and of organising. Is that unusual for a general?

I think so, yeah. They don't put great emphasis on their penmanship. But he has statues showing him as a writer. There's a yeah. Okay, so he's literary, which is unusual, but also the fact that he still maintains, you know, his position as a commander of the army, because

let's face it, Tutankhamin's dad wasn't really that fussed about the army, was he? I mean, we know he neglected starvation around him with all those begging letters that we have from the Amana tablets, which, by the way, we've done some really lovely episodes on if you want to go back and hear in-depth stuff about both Amarna and indeed Aknata. But tell us, I mean, how is it that he still remains this huge sort of muscular figure when the father wasn't really that bothered about armies. Well, I think the key to Horam-Hib success is that he's probably in charge of the army. And if there's an issue... Cyclical there. Okay.

They would bump back. And that's been echoed in the more recent history of Egypt itself. But these two courtiers clearly are the ones that are advising, as you said, this small boy of seven, eight, nine. And when he comes to the throne, they must have their own interests. But it's worth emphasising that Tutankhamen, even as a boy, is the son of a previous king. So he has the legitimacy of that position. So are we assuming that this little kid in the aftermath of this catastrophic revolution that's gone wrong and everyone is peddling back frantically, that he's a puppet which Horamab is controlling, he's pulling the strings or not necessarily? Not necessarily. there is really the belief that this child, especially once he is the Pharaoh, he's the king of Egypt, that he is divine. The advisors, I and Horamheb, can claim whatever they want and may have this kind of command of the real politic, but they are not anointed living gods. So I think you've got to imagine there could be a petulant little nine-year-old saying, I want it this way. And you've got to

follow what the kid wants. But he, Trinininin is in a moment where he must know there is pressure for counter-revolution. So it's about managing that transition

back to tradition in some ways. Okay, so I'm interested on whose idea the counter-reformation is, you know, the putting back of the gods on their pedestal

because, I mean, at nine, can you really imagine that a little boy would say, you know, what we need? What we need in Egypt is our gods back.

I mean, could that possibly have come from a child? I mean, it depends. You know, who has an influence on him personally? We know of a royal tutor who doesn't seem to come to much, a guy called Senefer. So if you have that role of being a teacher, a tutor in some way rearing the young future or current king,

then you are incredibly powerful because you could influence this child's thinking. But there must be an atmosphere in the aftermath of Achanan's death that the... experiment has gone wrong. And so it's about managing, as I say, that transition back to orthodoxy. Well, you kind of, Willie, do you remember we talked about, you know, the fact that even though Akanathen was busy smashing up any mention of any of the other gods, people still hit their little statues of little hippos in their homes. And I suppose in desperation when times are hard, and that man's gone, you can pretty much clamour for what you like. So maybe following the tide rather than having the idea himself.

Yeah, I think leaning into what must have been a fairly common thought that the traditional gods of Egypt had existed for thousands of years. And Akanatans' experiment seems to have pertained mainly to the elite, to the courts surrounding the king. So when the king disappears, you know, the court think, what is in our best interests? So yes, you're right, people in their homes we know of amulets that show all the old traditional gods. And there are economic reasons that closing all the temples, which are huge hubs for agricultural administration, if you do that, you kind of complicate the whole system of taxation of, you know, governance of the country. So there are good reasons probably to revert those things that maybe a nine-year-old wouldn't understand. Campbell, when we were talking about the fall of Amano, we dwelt briefly on the Restoration Stella. Yes.

Does this date from this important document? Does this date from Tutankhamen's reign? Do we think that he might have put it out? Yes, although it's later claimed it's edited to suggest that it was later kings that did it. I mean, yeah, Tutankhamen in a way was relatively insignificant, but one of the, if not the most significant thing he did was the counter-reformation, the counter-revolution,

the restoration of the old gods. This is a very significant historical document, but it should be seen in the context of the fact that any new power, any new king, says that everything that went before wasn't quite right, and I've restored things back to the way they should be. So that is a literary trope. It is used hundreds of years before. So Tutankham, in no way, is following that.

But the language that's used in that inscription, we know of at least two copies of it from Karnak, the home of the traditional god Amun, Amun Ra. The language in it is quite emotive, and you could imagine people felt pretty disenfranchised, and so the king is is doing probably what most people want. So, I mean, what we should say is the Restoration Stella that we're talking about, it's a deeply interesting political document, as Campbell says. And the kind of thing, Campbell that you're talking about, the things that it says, it describes temples fall into ruin, the gods shrines overgrown with weeds, a land in confusion.

divine world, inaccessible. So, you know, as you say, I mean, could it be, I mean, because it is so hyperbolic, more propaganda than anything else? I mean, how do you race? Right. Well, okay. So I don't like to use the term propaganda for ancient Egypt because it has a set of assumptions in the more modern world that probably aren't appropriate.

Most people, you know, 95% people can't read. So any statement that's written is directed first and foremost to the gods themselves, a metaphysical audience we totally underestimate, and then the few elite people invested with any power to convince them that what the state such as it is is doing is the right thing. So I don't think it's propaganda necessarily for the populace. That's a very fascinating thought, just to dwell on a bit. So all the stuff that we're reading that we assume,

people can read and is going out there is actually a lot of it's directed at the gods. It's not directed at human beings at all. Yes, exactly. So I think that's important to bear in mind in a pre-modern setting. But you're right. The writing is emotional in a way, and it does break kind of formulaic customs, although the tropes are echoed from centuries before. And it's very like that Shakespeare sonnet, Beirond, choirs,

talking about the fallen monasteries of the Reformation. And this is the same sort of... Yes. To sing the tune, Willie, because you've got another extract from it. I'm sure people want to know what it says. My John Gilgood voice coming up. Yes, here we go. His majesty drove out disorder throughout the two lands.

And justice was established in its place. Now, when his majesty appeared as king, the temples of the gods and goddesses from Elephantine, down to the marshes of the delta, had fallen into ruin, their shrines had become desolate. The gods turned their backs upon this land. If an army was sent to Jujahi, which is Palestine, to extend the frontiers of Egypt, no success came to them.

If one beseeched any god, he would not come. Hearts were weak in bodies, for what had been made was destroyed. Yeah. I mean, it's poetry, really, isn't it? It's good. It's got that lelting quality to it. So, I mean, again, I'm also obsessed with this idea that this is a message up rather than a message out. But in his life, you know, what he's actually surrounded by, I mean, does he marry? I mean, there's always such a pressure at a young age to marry, particularly if you have. So, I mean, that, to me, fascinating, it's a message up rather than out. But in the out and about and around him, tell me, you know, Is he with somebody? Is he love? I mean, how is that all worked out? Is he happy? What's going on, Campbell?

We love to know. Well, we surely, this kind of historical detail is inaccessible. We do know he marries his sister, or half-sister, a lady called Ankhis N-Pa-Aten, or a girl, really. She might be a bit older than him, but she changes her name to Ankees-N-Pa-A-Moon, as he changes his name to Tutank Amun. So they drop the Aten and they move back to the capital to Memphis

and they start building it Thieves. So this is expected that a young king will marry a relatively close female relative. Maybe it was for love or affection, more likely just for dynastic reasons. And she features in a number of items from his tomb. She's named, she's depicted in. in various ways. So from the get-go, I think, you don't just get a king on his own,

you get a great royal wife, you get a queen as well. Let's take a break. Join us after the break, where, I mean, it all sounds marvellous, a new way of doing things that is the old way of doing things. Everybody happy, they've got their gods back.

A man married, young boy married, to somebody who can build an empire with. It doesn't quite go to plan, though. Join us after the break. This episode is sponsored by Better Help. One of the lessons of history is that uncertain times are nothing new. Kingdoms falter, governments lose their nerves,

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And that's proof of what research can achieve. Like take cervical cancer. Almost every case is caused by HPV, the human papillomavirus. And when scientists uncovered that link, prevention became possible. Indeed, it did by a vaccine. And it's protection that works way before the cancer itself can actually grow. After the vaccine was introduced, cervical cancer rates in England were nearly 90. percent lower than expected in women in their 20s. I mean, we're now genuinely at a point where

this is a disease that is disappearing in younger women in the UK. This is something that I really hope my daughters will never have to deal with. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visitcancerresearchuk.org forward slash rest is science. Welcome back. Campbell, so you're somebody who thinks particularly carefully about objects and the physical things that survive from the ancient world. Tell us a little bit about the people who made these beautiful things that we now flocked to museums to see. Who were they? Who used these objects? Well, I think it's important to say that those craftsmen, those artisans, were specialists, not just in the sense of knowing how to work

materials and specialists in certain techniques, but also religious specialists. So if you were crafting the statue of the king or a statue of a god, you had to be someone who was initiated into not just a kind of trade guild, but into the initiations and the mysteries of the gods. And we know around the time of the restoration, Tutankham and then a couple of reigns later, there are craftsmen who boast about being initiated and going around and restoring, putting back in order all the, all the temples and all the statues that had been smashed up by Akinaten and his agents. So you've got to imagine

there would be a lot of work going about for a specialist stone mason craftsman to set right again what Akanaten had cast asunder. And one of the things that appears in surprising number in that tomb when you look behind all these lovely mummies

and all the gold and everything, there's a lot of walking sticks. Now what's going on there? Now, much has been made of this. So Tutankhaman's Tomb, remember, is the only royal tomb of the New Kingdom period found intact. So everything seems exceptional because we've got it. It survives. And Howard Carter, as I said in another episode, was uniquely placed to know what might be in a tomb because he'd found lots of fragments of these kinds of objects.

And it's really only been in the last 50 or so years with more medical, some might say, clinicised treatments of Tutankhamun, that focus has been on his perceived disability. And so from this narrative springs the assumption, oh, he had lots of sticks and staves because he needed them. Let's spell it out because I mean, you know, I've read things about his club foot, his curved spine, his weak bones, his sort of rickety legs, you know, all of that kind of thing, that actually these were walking sticks because this kid needed help. to walk. I'm skeptical of this. You're skeptical of quite a lot, Cabel.

Yes, you are. Well, that's the fun part of being an Egyptologist. Yeah. To pick a part of your colleagues and papers. So, clearly, in ancient Egyptian iconography, holding a big stick means you can beat other

less important people up. Having a staff is a sign of authority. So, Tutankhamen is a king. One of my favorite objects from the tomb is a stick with an inscription that's been added saying cut by the king's own hand. Really? So a flunky has added this. You know, the king's gone out hunting or whatever in the marshes and cut this down himself.

So these are signs of authority. The iconography shows Tutankham as a king of the time. There is no implication really that he needs to use a stick any more than any other king. Yeah, I mean, quite the country. we see him in his chariot using a bow. He's this sort of heroic sort of young god in some of the pictures. Yeah, there's no reason to suppose he didn't actually go off to active warfare in some kind of foray. The presence of the sticks has been mapped on to perceived evidence of decrepitude of the body.

But this is highly subjective. Not everyone agrees on it. You know, it was suggested at some point, oh, he may have had a club foot. Again, the jury is out on that. that was settled. That's not settled at all. No, no, I don't think it settles. I also thought it went even further than that, Campbell, that, you know, Marfan syndrome, which is this sculling, oh, look at your face.

That Campbell's not buying this at all. No, very skeptical. Let me just say what Marfan's syndrome is. There's a very specific shape of their head that is produced by Marfan, which I thought his father might have had as well, which influenced the whole art aesthetic of the alien chic, as I like to call it, when he finds it very beautiful. I find it very beautiful. You keep looking at thinking it's E.T. I don't like it at all. Yes, I think it's weird. But you're saying no. I'm saying no. I'm saying the aesthetics. I agree, William, they are beautiful and they're of the time. They're highly stylistic. And they emphasize the godliness and the separateness of royalty. You cannot diagnose someone based on their appearance on an Egyptian relief or a statue. That is just a fantasy. So actually the evidence is pretty equivocal. This is all complete revelation.

I thought this was settled and absolutely stand. They were all inbred, that they'd gone weird because they were too many cousins marrying each other for generations after generation, and they had curvature of the spine and fell off his chariot and all the rest of it. None of this, you don't buy it. This podcast is going to lead to a herd of Egyptologists

armed with walking sticks coming for Gamble I'm predicting it is written in the sand this may well happen Can we talk about some of the other things that are maybe less controversial in the tune? Because he had toys

he had, you know, sort of charming childhood things. But now he's shaking his head and I'm afraid of need to... No, no. There are no toys. No boomerangues? Oh my goodness.

This is a really, really important point. And it's quite a sinister and quite a pernicious and persistent idea of ancient Egypt, that things that we don't understand, and if they're small, they get labeled as toys. Ancient Egyptian experiences of childhood were different in construction, I think. More interesting is the things that were into,

and comes to him like heirlooms. There's a lock of his probably grandmother's, maybe great-grandmother's hair, Queen Tea. That's fascinating that he has that. The Victorian is like carrying locks and their grandfather's and grandmother's hairs around with them with little bracelets. It's only a fashion that's gone out of, out in the last hundred years. Yeah, and there are ritual religious reasons you might want to have that material in your tomb.

But more interesting than an interpretation of toys is the fact that there are objects which were used by a child, so child-sized sandals or child-sized furniture, which must be because if you believe the king is a living God, anything which comes into contact with his body is by association sacred, so it has to be kept. Okay, okay. So if you imagine Ramesses the 2nd lived till his 90s, his tomb is massive, partly because he needed

to have all of his wardrobe kept. And there's also another sense in which if a magician, we know this happened, if an ill-intentioned magician got a hold of one of the king's personal possessions, they could essentially do black magic on him. That's still very much a thing in Africa today, isn't it? You've got to hide your toenails and stuff when you go to Kenya and hotels

because people do all sorts of stuff on it. So keeping all of that material together in the tomb was a way of keeping the king safe for eternity. So I don't think there's any definitive evidence of there being toys. There are games that he used as a young man. There are musical instruments, there are weapons, there's a writing kit with one of his sister's names on, which is quite charming.

Back to the idea of female literacy, clearly that was something that was present in the royal family, at least. There are little insights into life, but most of the material in the tomb is about the transformation of Tutankhamen into a god rather than sentimental stuff about his life. I just wanted to make the observation, not since Peter Francapan, have we been beaten up quite so much on a podcast. Not so much since the immortal words are the great Peter Francofan. You lot don't know what you're talking about. I wouldn't go that far. We've got to show this to Anita's mum because she always likes it when Alita's put down. Oh, she loves it when we get beaten up on a podcast.

She absolutely loves it. Completely. So you don't like Anita's toys, but you presumably do go with the fact that there are rather sadly, even tragically, two fetuses. Yes. This is a sad but probably not uncommon fact of life in the ancient world. Although those two stillborn children are not named, which is interesting in itself, they are given very careful treatment.

Their bodies have been mummified and like their father buried in coffins. How many months old are they? They are both pre-birth, less than nine months in age. and they are presumably the children of Tutankhamun and Ankes and Enn-Anamun because we don't know of another wife Tutankham had. I guess he didn't live very long. He only reigned for nine years. A fact we know principally from his wine cellar

because the highest attested date on the wine is year nine. So that's how we know Tutankan was on the throne for nine years. Amazing how much the wine comes into the story of Edgium. We've had it when we were doing Gaza about all the wine being sent, from Gaza under seal. We've come into it again on all these episodes in the Mar-Doh. It's a major form of evidence. Yes, yeah, yeah, because labeling the wine is pretty important.

Labelling containers generally is a very useful thing the ancient Egyptians did for future historians. So yes, the two fetuses seem to be the only known children of Tutankhamun and his wife. And then when he dies, his wife is left alone and there is good evidence of her appealing to foreign powers to help her out. Would that be regarded as traitorous? Because we've come across these letters before,

she writes to the Hittites. Yeah, the ancient Egyptians don't seem to have liked the idea of Egyptian royal women marrying non-Egyptian royals. Yeah, we get lots of women sent to marry male pharaohs. Yes. But we don't summon foreign princes to come and sleep with sacred Egyptian women. Yeah, to supplant the sacred male line of Horus kings, Egyptian Horace Kings, would, yeah, not have been viewed positively. Now, fully accepting the fact that you're going to beat me up, can we talk, dare I bring up the fact that, you know, we've talked about the death of the children.

Can we talk about the death of Tutankhamen? Because there is a thesis around Campbell, didn't just make it up, Campbell, that he was murdered. Now, there's been a martyr. Mastard. Yes. Now, now you're going to tell me, no, he died a very happy old man. How did he die? He died a young man.

I mean, that's all we can say. Really. Lots of theories about this. Again, difficult to say because the evidence is compromised. Not only did Carter extract him so violently from the coffin, but subsequently between the 1930s and the 1960s some rummaging had gone on and basically the front of Tutankham's rib cage

had been removed. So a theory that is based on, you know, major trauma to the chest is difficult to prove because the evidence isn't there. So lots of theories. Was he munched by a hippo or did he die in a chariot accident? which people tend to make much of as if he was a boy racer.

In fact, we know from descriptions, from formal religious descriptions of previous tombs, that the royal burial included a chariot hall. So a New Kingdom king would be buried with chariots. That's just a standard thing. It's not that Tutankhamun was particularly into... You come with your garage into the new world. No, exactly.

It's not the royal muse transferred into the afterlife. So you've got to imagine also specialists in chariotry have pointed out that you couldn't make an Egyptian chariot go very fast. So it would be a stately thing. As we see with Akanat and Nefertiti, they're snogging in the chariot at Tamarna because there are no processions of God, so you have to watch the king and queen necking instead. So I don't think he died in a chariot accident because it couldn't have gone fast enough. He doesn't seem to have had a club foot, so it's not that he just wobbled off. That was the theory that he had a club foot, he fell backwards out, yeah. We'll never know for sure.

It's fun to speculate. I remember being at a book festival and talking about Toot and Carmen, and I said as a joke, maybe he'd been drinking before. And then the next day there was a tabloid newspaper said, Tutton Kamen died from drink driving. It's just nonsense. And, Willie, you were sort of, you know, scratching your head about the hippo. I've heard the hippo thing.

But we should say, and those of you who have grown up in lands of hipbos, they're bloody violence. Yes. The most dangerous animal in Africa still. Can we then talk about the woman who or the girl who is left a widow now because she's still very young and she hasn't got a living child? That I'm assuming is going to make you pretty damn vulnerable. We have her image, don't we? There are pictures of him on the throne with her standing beside her. That is the right, same girl.

And kissing arm and she's on various objects in the tomb. But no, there are no surviving children. So if she had had a son, of course, she could be the Queen Regent, and that could work out well. We've got precedent for that. But there's this extraordinary text from the deeds of Soap Liliuma. We love that name. We might even ask you to say it again, Campbell.

Sucl Lilioma, very unengyptian sounding. So the Queen of Egypt, which is, I mean, based on evidence, is likely to be, because of the reference to the king's name, to be Ankesanaman, his wife, his widow, writes saying to a foreign king, please send a son, I don't want to marry a servant of mine. And so whether this was traitorous behaviour or not,

she's desperate. And it seems that a son is sent, but he's murdered on the way. Werded on route? Yeah. By who? This is death on the Nile ever again. Well, a dash of Agatha Christie for sure.

I mean, given what we've said in this episode, There are people hanging around. There is I and Horamhead. There are suspects, the brain and the brawn, who, you know, it's not in their interest to have another king when they've been, you know, access to all the power. No, no, exactly, to supplant people who may not be of royal blood, but who in some ways maybe think that they've earned the position.

And it's interesting that I, who can only rule for a couple of years, two or three years, doesn't last long. he may be the servant that Anka-Sanamun is afraid of because there is a ring, Bezal of a ring, which names Anka-Sanamun and I together. So maybe there is a brief marriage of convenience between the two of them. For ancient Egypt in general in this period in particular, we've got so much interesting detail and fragmentary evidence.

So there are little bits that, you know, nudge your interpretation in a certain way. I mean, undoubtedly, Horam Heb comes along and rules for well probably over 20 years. So he's a success. He kind of stabilises the country. So we haven't said that clearly. He becomes the next pharaoh. Yes. Horam Heb does, in time, become the next pharaoh. So I gets into the bed chamber and Horamab gets into the throne. That's even more complicated. Yes. I mean, I is an old man for sure by the time he gets to the throne. So he's only around

briefly. And then Horam Hebb secures and consolidates the Reformation position. And he actually writes out Tutankhamun from the story. So he lumps everyone previous in the Amarna period with, you know, negative thoughts, writes them out of history. Horam Hebb connects himself with Tutankham's grandfather, Amunhotep III. So there's a, an elision between the two of them. And that's what history remembers. The great kingslist of Ramesses the second, a few generations later, go from Amunhotup the third

to Horamheb and everyone else has forgotten. Campbell, I've got an urgent question here, because we know from previous episodes that a lot of the old Amarna crew are weaked out of their tombs and shoved into a sort of holding chamber and their nice tombs are taken over and they're not given the honour

that we'd expect from a, Barrow. How come Tutankhamen is left when Atnartan and Nefertiti are bundled into a great sort of chamber together with everyone else from that era? Well, you're right, they're huicht. I think that's exactly the right word, great word.

It's a Billy Connolly word. Yeah. You know a sketch? Again, there's lots of uncertainty about this, about the identity of the people involved. There's kind of musical chairs, musical mummies, both from tombs at Atamarna where people are maybe initially buried

and then brought back to Thebes and then movement at Thebes. So the reason Tutankhamen is left alone is basically because of the situation, the actually very lucky situation, of his tomb being at the base, really the bottom of the Valley of the Kings. So the Valley of the Kings, although it may not seem it if you visited,

can occasionally have flash floods that bring in dust and mud and sand and when that dries it's like cement. So if your tomb is in the bottom of the valley, as Tutankhamans was, it was covered over. Other kings build higher up on the hills and the chippings from the tomb cover Tutton Kamen's sepulchre. And then Tutankhamen, perhaps a benefit of his having been officially forgotten, was that he was struck off lists. So if people were going round trying to find tombs, they wouldn't find him. In the spirit of my learned friend here, I have an urgent question.

Okay. So now that he's been erased, it's an imperative question here, Campbell. Go for it, neither. So now that all of, you know, that Amarna revolution never happened, now that he's raised every member of the family, even those who try to reverse it in the shape of Tutankhamen, do the people of Egypt prosper under this new non-royal bloodied regime that follows? It's military regime as an Egyptian military general yet again. Difficult to know exactly how prosperity trickled down the social pyramid. But as far as stability of government goes, if you judge the prosperity of a country by the stability of the royal house, things do markedly improve. Because Horamhead makes plans, although he doesn't have children of his own that we know of to inherit,

he makes plans for a military colleague Paramesu, who changes his name a bit to become Ramesses the first. And Ramsey's the first is a living son, seti, and probably a living grandson, who becomes Ramsey's the second. So Horam Heb has the foresight, after a fairly successful reign of his own, to set up the next dynasty, dynasty 19. And there you again, a military colleague, aren't they? They're generals. Yeah, they're in the military together. And the military and the administration at that period are pretty close. And the religious hierarchy are pretty close. So things are stable, strong and stable, you could say. So at the end of this period of confusion, Campbell, the Ramesses, who we all know, you go to Cairo, it's Ramesses Square, you know, they're the big, we're often regarded as the golden age of ancient Egypt. So we are leaving this story with a very happy ending in a sense.

Anyway. Well, that's good. Great. For all these disasters. Very nice. And Ramesses is the second, famously, is the only Egyptian Pharaoh with a passport, isn't he? He needed a passport to go to America. Don't start him off again.

He just went supposedly. He doesn't like that story. In that way they had. With that sort of, and they all lived happily ever after. We're going to end this episode. Campbell, we're going to have you back there. To destroy more of our theories. Pots and balloons.

But I think this is wonderful. I think this is so, so useful and interesting. So Campbell, do come back because we're going to talk about Tutmania, where the whole world was gripped with Egypt fever. So do come back for that. Dr. Campbell Price, brief histories, ancient Egypt. It's published by Seven Dials and Ancient Egypt and 50 Discoveries co-authored with Stephanie Boonstra. And it's published by the Egypt Exploration Society. It's also available now. If you have loved Campbell as much as we have, join our club, because you'll hear much more of him. Anyway, till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Durepool. Hey y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder, what if?

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