In Our Time - Tutankhamun

Episode Date: December 26, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the discovery in 1922 of Tutankhamun's 3000 year old tomb and its impact on the understanding of ancient Egypt, both academic and popular. The riches, such as the death mask above, were spectacular and made the reputation of Howard Carter who led the excavation. And if the astonishing contents of the tomb were not enough, the drama of the find and the control of how it was reported led to a craze for 'King Tut' that has rarely subsided and has enthused and sometimes confused people around the world, seeking to understand the reality of Tutankhamun's life and times.With Elizabeth Frood Associate Professor of Egyptology, Director of the Griffith Institute and Fellow of St Cross at the University of OxfordChristina Riggs Professor of the History of Visual Culture at Durham University and a Fellow of All Souls College, OxfordAnd John Taylor Curator at the Department of Egypt and Sudan at the British MuseumProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, in 1922, archaeologists found Tutankhaman's tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, unopened for more than 3,000 years. As their leader, Howard Carter, reported it contained wonderful things,

and is still seen as one of the, if not the, most spectacular archaeological discovery of all time. It sparked a craze for the newly named King Tut with countless myths, and it inspired people around the world to learn about ancient Egypt drawn by the golden death mask of the young king. With me to discuss Duton Carmen are, Christina Riggs, Professor of the History of Visual Culture at Dome University and a fellow of All Souls College Oxford, John Taylor, curator at the Department of Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum, and Elizabeth Frood,

Associate Professor of Egyptology, director of the Griffith Institute, and fellow of St. Cross at the University of Oxford. Liz Frood, where's the Valley of the Kings and what does it look like? Well, we're in the south of Egypt, so the modern city of Luxor,

the ancient city of Thebes. And on the west bank of the Nile, just across from the ancient city with its temples, high in the cliffs, sort of nestled in the cliffs, is a ravine, cut out over millennia by seasonal rains, and we have this deep valley in two branches that is the valley of the kings. And it is the burial place of New Kingdom Kings, the kings that ruled Egypt

from about 1540 BCE to 1075. Most of the kings of this period are buried in this necropolis, but not just kings, also members of the royal family, and very high-ranking officials can also be buried in these limestone escarpments. What does it look like now? We have honeycombed into the limestone, sort of tunneled into the limestone, any number of deep tombs that lead, that highly decorated,

some of them go many metres into the limestone. From the entrance area of the valley, there's sort of the later tombs, and the earlier tombs are quite high, quite high up in the escarpment, very, very hidden, very well concealed. But the later terms start to come down the valley a bit more. Aside to know the fact that it was near Thebes, just across the river from Thebes, why did they choose this particular place?

What were its advantages? That's a very good question, and I'm not sure we have all the answers to that question, but it's quite a radical change at the beginning of the New Kingdom. The burial places of the kings are separated from the places of cult practice, of where the memorials of the kings were maintained. Those are done in temples down on the cultivation, and then the tombs are hidden away, and there might be something to be said

for the fear of tomb robbery, so trying to keep the tombs of their burial chambers separate and secret and safe to some extent to try to protect them a little bit more. But that may only be a partial answer to the question. When did the plunder on quite a big scale start for these tombs, because there is a history of plunder. There is a history of plunder. When did it start? How intense was it?

Very intense from probably the late 19th century up until the discovery of the Tomb of Tudun Khamun. But there are records of excavations happening there in the late 1700s. So already it's known as a place of burial, of burial of kings. And then over time, especially in the mid-19th century onwards, you have this increased intensification of excavation and treasure hunting as well. Is it possible distinguish between excavation and plunder? Because what I was interested in is what sort of state was it in in terms of what tombs were intact, what was left, and what had been destroyed, and so on.

By the time we get to the period we're going to talk about. Well, I think sort of from the mid-19th century onwards, you have something more like an archaeological excavation process. So the concession is held. Howard Carter himself is involved in the conservation of some of the tombs. So there is an archaeological academic practice. The great adventurer and explorer Giovanni Balzoni was probably one of the first to map topographically and geologically, the valley of the kings in the 19th century.

So there is this academic recording and interest. By this point, a lot of the tombs have been discovered. Some of them were open to tourists. And then the really intense excavation work begins under Theodore Montgomery Davis. He gets the concession to the Valley of the Kings in 1902. He's an American philanthropist. 1902, he gets a concession. And he holds a concession until 1914.

And I think he boasts of finding a tomb a year. Of course, most of these tombs are already plundered. but he is, by 1914, he thinks the valley has been exhausted, thinks there's nothing left to find. And so he hands a concession on. Thank you. Christina Riggs, what was Howard Carter doing in the Valley of the Kings in 1922? In 22, Howard Carter had been working for several years

as the archaeologist attached to Lord Carnarvon's efforts in the valley. So the fifth Earl of Carnarvan, George Molino, who had become, like many wealthy people like Theodore Davis before him, had gone to Egypt for tourism, for his health, had become interested in collecting Egyptian antiquities, which he did quite a lot of, formed a very fine collection with Howard Carter's help, and also in excavating. So when it became possible in 1914 to get the permission,

the Egyptian antiquities authorities gave him the permission to work in the Valley of the King, And so he shifts his focus there with Howard Carter leading the excavation work, which of course is being carried out by experienced Egyptian archaeologists who are part of this effort and by a great number of local people, children, for instance, employed as basket boys, so called, although there were girls as well. By 1922, they've had several fairly short and not very productive periods of working in the Valley of the Kings. Carter is kind of going back over ground to dig down further, dig closer to the bedrock, as it were. And it's a bit of frustration because it's not yielding very much of interest. But they keep trying and there are various stories about whether this was going to be the last go, this effort in the autumn of 1922. Carter had only just arrived in Egypt.

He'd spent some time in October 1922. He'd spent some time in Cairo, Bendisius' dentist. done some banking and done his usual rounds of the antiquities dealers, because Carter made a nice living for himself on the side and also money for Carnarvan to help fund the digging by buying and selling antiquities. And so we'd only really got back to Luxor, I think, on November 1st, just before November 1st, to reopen the excavation. He'd been there for a few years before then, in the Valley of the Kings.

Yes, well, he'd been living at Luxor for about 20 years by that point. Yes. Yeah. You mentioned the, and you're very, you want to point out very clearly that Egyptian archaeologists took a strong part in this. And you think that they've been underappreciated so far, and that the Western, as it were, I can call them Western archaeologists, thought that they weren't quite up to the job and didn't quite understand it. Could you develop that? I would say that all sorts of knowledge production in the Middle East, including archaeology, relied very much on local knowledge. Carter himself acknowledges in the books that he publishes about the Tomb of Turankhamun.

He acknowledges in a somewhat patronizing tone the Egyptian foremen, or Ruazza, who were led by Ahmed Gerrdigar. Gehrigar was a very experienced foreman, i.e. archaeologists by that point. But these men are never referred to as archaeologists. Archaeologists is a term that's reserved always for the white, kind of European and American people who do the work. But were they in effect, were they, were they archaeologists? They're doing the work of archaeology, yes. And their kind of knowledge...

Sorry, I'm just trying to get this down, pinpoint this. Would Carter think that the chap that you've mentioned had been trained as an archaeologist, as he himself, Carter, would say, I, Carter, I'm trained as an archaeologist, but this chap isn't up? Where are we? Well, what's your training at this point? Carter has no formal education. He's trained in the field as Ahmed Gerriger,

the chief foreman under Carter, was also trained in the field and it would have been the Egyptian foreman who then is responsible for supervising the other people working under him because you needed other people doing the physical labour but also it took an experienced eye

and there were three other Egyptian men who are named by Howard Carter as part of the work who would have been working alongside him throughout the clearance of the tomb. But on the whole this is a gap in the history of the discovery of the discoverers? Absolutely.

The Egyptian-Colterer. contribution is overlooked, not just for the Tomb of Trude Uncommon, but in all archaeology in Egypt. Well, I hope we can come back to that because it's fascinating. John Taylor, how would this excavation compare with others before? Well, there had been a lot of excavations in the Valley of the Kings for many years previously. Howard Carter himself had been involved with quite a few of those. but what had happened on previous excavations is that when the tomb of a king was discovered

it had always been robbed in ancient times or cleared of any remaining objects that had been left behind by robbers so although small fragments of the burial equipment of kings had been found no one had ever seen the complete assemblage totally untouched and this was the goal that Carter was aiming for and of course when he saw the objects in the first chamber for the first time

he as he says he couldn't believe what he was seeing and he struggled to to recognize these strange objects that he was seeing in the candlelight that he put through the open doorway what were those objects through the candlelight through the holding the wall the first of four chambers was the first of four chambers and carter and his team are standing in the entrance passageway which is quite a small space, about six foot wide by ten foot high. And of course it's very dark.

They're underground, they're looking through a hole that Carter has made through the blocking at the end of this passageway. This is a rubble blocking. And he makes a hole and he puts, first of all, he tests the air inside the tomb to see if there's any poisonous gases in there. Having decided that it's okay from that point of view, he then puts his arm through the hole, holding a candle, and then gradually the objects beyond begin to emerge.

And what they see are, first of all, against the far wall of the chamber, three large beds or couches in the form of animals. These are covered with gold and inlaid with precious materials. And on top and underneath these objects, there are piled up chairs and stools and boxes of food, and a whole paraphernalia of objects put there for the king's afterlife. The overall, this is intact, and one of the things it distinguishes is that you have an intact tomb. Can you give us an impression of the range of artistic and funerary stuff there was in there?

The objects in the tomb fall into two main groups. First of all, there are the items which are there to magically transfer the king from the earthly life to the afterlife. So this applies to the coffins in which his mummy is placed, various shrines placed around the coffins, magical statuettes of gods and goddesses. And also we have objects which belong to the king in his daily life. So we've got chairs, beds, stools, boxes full of clothing, we've got food offerings, we've got jars of wine, a lot of jewelry as well. Some of the jewellery is actually on the king's body, others is stored in boxes inside the tomb.

And we have things like Shabty figures. These are magical statuettes representing the king, which act as substitutes for him in the next world, so that he doesn't have to carry out any onerous labour when he's in the realm of the gods. What about the great artistic and priceless treasures that are there? I think we're talking about the golden mask, we're talking about golden coffin, and on and on it goes. Yes, that was one of the great revelations of the tomb that we have for the first time these wonderful artistic masterpieces, which have been robbed in all the other tombs in the valley. We have the gold mask over the head of the mummy, which is itself solid gold, enlaid with lapis lazuli and glass.

We have the inner coffin, which again is made entirely out of gold. And the level of craftsmanship of these objects is of the highest, extremely fine workmanship. Other objects, including the famous throne, which has, it's covered in gold, inlaid scene on the back rest showing the king and queen. Thank you very much. Liz, how did these objects, and others, if you want to continue with the listing, How did they fit in with the current idea of the splendor of the Egyptian dynasty? I think they fulfilled an expectation of what the New Kingdom kings would have had as part of their panoply.

I think it all seemed to fit in with our ideas of a cosmopolitan, outward-looking imperial dynasty that we are seeing the tail end of with Tutankhamun. So some of the objects have designs on them. There's a dagger that has motifs that look very similar to the sorts of things that you get in the ancient Mediterranean kind of context. So there's an international style to some of this material. And the objects fulfill the expectations around that. So this imperialist dynasty with this access to phenomenal wealth, glass, which is a new material of the 18th dynasty. and you import that the Egyptians start to make during the 18th dynasty. So there's these new materials, new refined treatments for the body,

such as oils and things as well. So it all fits in with this idea of the luxurious elite life. But as importantly, or perhaps more importantly, it shows an extraordinary, from what I've read and from what you said, an extraordinary level of advanced craftsmanship and ingenuity and intelligence in the way things are put together. gather in the tomb, the sophistication in the making and in the placing of these things is one of the reasons, I suppose, why it's such a compelling collection. Absolutely. And I think

we as Egyptologists haven't done justice to that material yet. I think something like just over 30% of the objects in the tomb have been fully studied and analysed. Why is you taking so long? There's a lot. So we're talking something like well over 5,000 individual objects. And I think it's overwhelmed the subject a bit. But I also think that amongst Egyptologists, certainly in the 1940s and 50s, until

work was re-inspired by Alan Gardner, there was a bit of a distaste for the material. A bit of almost... In what way? Well, it was almost a bit too sumptuous, too over the top, a bit too glitzy. It becomes associated with

Egyptomania, with the curse stories that kind of the mythologies that's surrounded. And I certainly think it's still true of Egyptologists. I don't know whether my colleagues here would agree with me that there's a certain embarrassment or a bit of a, not distaste might be too strong, but a bit of embarrassment and a bit of just sort of leering away from it a little bit. I think now it's partly because the material is so complex.

So if you're going to study this material from a material science perspective, if you need to have collaborations with experts and different types of materials analysis and conservation. So it's a big task to work on this material properly, but we also haven't taken up the challenge of that. Would you go along with that, Christina? I would, and for all the reasons that Liz has said. Also, it's material that's unparalleled and was at the time,

and not maybe entirely unparalleled, but being a complete assemblage, more or less, and the sorts of things that are represented there, It's very unusual. It doesn't give you any easy answers. It doesn't quite fit any. We have no parallels for it. So there's points of compilander are really difficult to find. It's really difficult to know how to manage certain object classes in the group because there's nothing like it.

Christina Riggs, how did the news reach outside Egypt to the rest of the world? And what was the initial reaction? So the first thing Carter needed to do was inform Lord Carnarvon, who was back in England. And he also then needed to inform the responsible inspector, as they were called, the inspector of antiquities for the region, who was another Englishman named Rex Engelbach. And so they wait, they kind of close things off and wait a couple of weeks

until Carnarvan can get out from Egypt to be present at the opening of the first chamber. And when they realize what they've got and what a find it is, then the plans for press coverage are the next thing in mind. The London Times has a correspondent on the spot, who is given from the start, who is given privileged access. Is he given privileged access or exclusive access? He's given exclusive access in the end. So he happens to be on the spot, so he gets first dibs.

But then the Times, once Carnarvan arrives, well, actually while Carnarvan is on the boat back from Egypt on the way to England, And the Illustrated London News, which was the most popular weekly illustrated paper of the time, sends a reporter, sends its illustrator, its long-serving illustrator, to Marseilles, to meet Carnarvon's boat at Marseilles and get the kind of first interview, what was it like, and do an artist's impression of what the first chamber and the moment of discovery of entering the first chamber looked like. And then once Carnarvon's back in England sort of over Christmas, he's approached by the Times, the London Times, offering him an exclusive contract. which in exchange when he gets £5,000 and then 75% of the profits from selling on the stories and the photographs, which is important, and Carnarvon signs up to that,

and that gives the Times exclusive access, and they also, Carter and Carnarvan, have a close relationship with the Illustrated London News to publish as well. Let's just touch on the photographs, which are very important and they became extraordinary important. Can you just briefly tell us about those photographs? photography was absolutely crucial to the work of archaeology

without the camera archaeology wouldn't have developed as it did and an archaeologist like Howard Carter was a very adept photographer but he says in his notes during those first kind of couple of weeks when he's trying to get his head around what he's found he tries to take photographs of the sealed doorway the first sealed doorway and they're rubbish basically they're no good and so when he's in Cairo waiting for Carnarvan to arrive and ordering supplies for the work to come.

He sees a photographer whom he knew, an Englishman named Harry Burton, who worked nearby. He worked for the Metropolitan Museum of Art excavations nearby in Luxor, on the West Bank of Luxor. And he asked Burton, well, would you take the photographs? And Burton says, sure, I'll have a go. Burton's got a very good reputation as a photographer. And they get then the agreement of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,

who are hoping that they're going to get a share of the finds from the tomb out of this. And so it's Harry Burton, who arrives finally in December of 1922, to take the first photographs. By that time, importantly, the tomb has been rigged for electricity, so he's got electric light to work by. And those photographs then are contracted to the time, so he has to make the prints in Egypt and send them by post. So there's always a couple of weeks delay, but the times are trailing this already to their readers that they're going to have the first photographs. Those photographs are published on the 30th of January, 1923, four photographs, incredible. of the influential and picked up around the world. And so this was the start of what Carter and Carnarbon expected.

They would be plunders. They could take the stuff back and they had begun to take this. The photography was there. The Egyptian archaeologists were learning about what's happening in that country from the London Times. Is that more or less right? Something like that. The Egyptian public, as well as rival newspapers,

are very upset that the Times has this exclusive, contract and that the find has been monetized because they of course want a piece of the action as well without having to pay the times to get the stories and to get the photographs. For the Egyptian press at a time when Egypt has just earned partial independence from Britain because Egypt up until that time had been a protectorate of Britain. It's part of the British Empire and so we're seeing a sort of slow and painful unraveling of empire taking place in Egypt and so it's humiliating for Egyptian press, the Egyptian middle classes

who are following this closely, Egyptian politicians, to be told that they've got to wait for the British newspaper to give them a story that's taking place in their own backyard. It's deeply problematic. John Taylor, who then was it, Tutankhamen? Tutankhamen was the last member of one of the most powerful ruling families of ancient Egypt, the 18th dynasty. And this was a line of kings who had been in control of Egypt for about 200 years by the time Tutankhamun was born.

It was the line which brought Egypt to the peak of her prosperity. Some of these kings built up a foreign empire. They set up very, very flourishing trading links and diplomatic contacts with other countries. How far did the empire reach? In the north, it stretched a... far as the Euphrates and in the south down to about the fourth cataract of the Nile in Nubia, so modern Sudan. And the Sudanese possessions were very important for Egypt because gold mines were situated there. And this gave Egypt a monopoly on gold and this was their

main bargaining counter with many of the other rulers in the Near East. So Egypt was very rich in Tutankhamun's time. And it was cosmopolitan as well because there was a lot of interaction, cultural interaction now with these other peoples. So this was the inheritance of Tutankhamun. Who he was in the sense of who his parents were is still a debated issue.

Most Egyptologists would say that his father was Akanatin. And Akanaten was one of the most controversial rulers ever to occupy the Egyptian throne, because under his rule, a major revolution took place, a revolution in the sense of a religious alteration. Aachenarten tried to promulgate the worship of one single deity, the Aten, the solar disk, which in fact was very unpopular with the rest of the people. So it tried to radically change the whole thing in 20 years,

and it turned out to be not enough because they went back to the other thing. But his mother, they don't know much about his mother, the whispers about Nefertiti, but again, around the table, there doesn't seem to be any way of, anyway. So we have this boy king, who's a boy king. We know he's a king. We know he inherited when he was six.

We know he died and he was 19. There's much has been made of his frailty. Where does that come from? How, what's the evidence for that? There's not much evidence for that. but this image of Tudun Khamun as a frail, disabled boy king. Clubfoot. That came out of one of the more recent paleopathological kind of examinations of his body.

So his body has been subject to autopsy after autopsy since its discovery. And every time there's a new autopsy or a new examination of those autopsy results, different ideas about his body emerge. there was an idea because of damage to the back of the skull that he had been murdered. That was then the damage to the back of the skull was then discovered to be probably just the result of the mummification process. So there's been all sorts of reworking of his body and reimagining of his body. And one of these imaginings is that he had a club foot and bone infection and was therefore disabled. and I have read many times of this weak and feeble child king hobbling across the sand.

And as a disabled woman with bone infection, I dare anyone to call me weak and feeble. So already there's an abelist narrative that Egyptologists buy into and perpetuate in the literature. So you don't know much basically. The fact of the matter is we know that he came to the throne as a child. We know he died when he was about between 18, 17 to 19 years old. We can be sure about his age. Everything else we don't know. But the age thing is interesting.

Why? Because there is another myth in the literature that he was this boy king. And of course, yes, he was a child when he came to the throne. But by the time he's 15 or 16, he's a mature adult. And I think we tend to lose sight of that because we have this idea of what childhood should be, when maturity should be in our own culture and our own ideas around this. And I think we lose sight of the fact that probably by the age of, of 15 or 16, so halfway through his time on the throne, he is a mature adult, and we should

ascribe some potential agency to that. Christina, Christina Riggs, what can we make out of the name? He wasn't Tutankan come on at first, was it? He linked in with who might have been his father, Aten. So what's going on there? That's right. He's born as Tutank Aten. So as John was explaining, the previous king, post, he was.

possibly his father Akhenaten had changed the religion, and the change in name reflects that because the idea is that they're worshipping the disc, the round kind of disc of the son, known as the Aten. Tutach Aten means something like the living image of the Aten. After he becomes king, not before and not at the moment he becomes king, but after he becomes king, he changes his name to Tutach Amun. And those last two syllables are important, because Amun is the traditional God who was the focus of worship of this dynasty of kings and whose cult was based at Thebes. So he becomes the living image of Amun, this kind of creator god, supreme God of Thebes.

Who was one before the radical? Exactly. He returns to the traditional religion. I'm mostly sorry. Was his advisors? How did he get to go backwards? It started probably before Tutankhamun. So between, the death of Akan Atten and the accession of Tutankhamun, you have one, possibly two rulers. It's all a bit shadowy and very controversial. But one of those rulers, or both of them, had already started the return to traditional religion. So that was well underway by the time Tudan Khamun comes to the throne.

There's good evidence of that. And then Tudan Khamun and his advisors, the people around him pick that up and take it further. Do we know what he did, anything that he did in these years of his reign, these 12 years of his reign? And Christina, again, there are books of something approaching despair. No, there's evidence. There's the restoration stealer. So this is an inscription that had been discovered, I think, in 1905, a big stone steele. With where the king, it's a typical kind of royal type of monument.

So there's something formulaic about it. But referring to deeds that Tutankhamen says he's done, to restore and repair the temples of the kings. I'm looking at Liz because she knows much more about this than I do. But that gives us some evidence of, and also scenes that survive in temples of Tudankhamun, sort of in the Temple of Amun. There's a lot of restoration work at Karnak,

or that sort of heart of the traditional religion, which is the Temple of Amun at Karnak. Tudun Karmun or the group around him are commissioning extensive restorations, especially in the so-called public areas, the display areas of the temple. And the steeler that Christina mentioned is a set up, I think, three different versions of that, or three versions of that stealer are set up in the temple that talk about the restoration process. And, you know, right from the fourth cataract, where there are temples between the third and fourth cataract,

there's restoration work happening there. The statues of Amun are being restored. So there's a very active policy of restoration and renewal. and then the change of his name and of his queen's name must go along with one of those programs and some of the objects that are found in the tomb actually have both names so things that had already been made and created for him

in his birth name as Tudankartan like the so-called throne the gold kind of ceremonial chair also then are repaired with bits of the goldwork kind of replaced to show the new name as well Sorry, up to you It's also still debated but there is a possibility that he may have led military campaigns as well.

On an object from his tomb, a painted box, he's shown in his chariot, charging into masses of defeated enemies. This is very much a kind of example of visual rhetoric in Egyptian art, the king is the great superhero. But there have also been found carvings from temple walls, showing Tutankhamun again in battle. These carvings are a little bit more interesting, because they contain very idiosyncratic details

which might suggest that they record historical events. So it could be that he did actually lead armies on the battlefield. And killed an ostrich when he went into it. And killed an ostrich at least once. We know this because one of the objects from the tomb is... A chariot in the tomb. Well, there's a fan. And on the handle of the fan is an inscription

saying that the feathers, which originally were put into the fan, came from an ostrich which the king himself hunted in the desert near the city of Heliopolis. So that's actually probably the only thing that we know for certain that Tutankham did in person, as opposed to acting the formal role of the Pharaoh. I'm interested in the switch to this monotheism, really, which lasted about 15 years of his reign, didn't kick in until five years and then the next 50. Do we know why that stopped?

Did Tutankan, one of anything they do with that being reversed and going back to the old religions, the animal heads and so on and so forth? I think they realise the elites, the court, the whole system, there's a general realisation that what Akanathn had tried to instigate can't hold. It's not popular. It's not being promulgated in the city that Ackernatine himself created, you know, that we don't, we, we still see the traditional gods being worshipped by the people of the city. So it didn't, it didn't take hold. And I think the moment

Akanaten dies, there is all the people who take the throne and the group around that individual decide that the best thing for stability and for prosperity is, is to return to the traditional gods. Christina, Riggs, it sometimes said that Tutankhamen is the best, known but the least important of Egyptian kings. What do you make of that? Well, I suppose you can guess, in a way, or deduce from the sort of things we've been saying. He doesn't rain for very long. He's part of a larger movements that are taking place. So in that sense, maybe historically, he didn't have that much individual influence. And he wasn't very well known before the discovery of his tomb. His name was known, but not much

else about him was, other than that Steeler that we were mentioning. And so in a way, yes. And yet, he had a huge impact on Egyptology's perception of itself as a field and on public perception of Egyptology and has continued throughout the 20th century in different waves of interest that have happened to foster an interest in ancient Egypt for better or worse. When the discovery coincided, as you said earlier, with Egypt breaking away from the British Empire, And he became a emblematic figure, didn't he was very important for, and remained so they keep, Egyptians keep coming back to him as this man who was there at a time when they were great,

great dynasty, independent, rich beyond measure, powerful. Did that obtain right away? It did obtain very soon after the discovery of the tomb because of the Egyptian nationalist movement at that time. And they saw Tutankhamun as a kind of almost political, political figurehead, I suppose you could say, to refer to the great past and the great traditions of Egypt. And so, yes, almost as soon as he became known to the public, he was associated with these kind of political undercurrents. And he's been used right, left and the centre.

Do you think he's been abused right, left and centre as well, Christina? By whom? Well, people commenting on him, people using it for different causes. Well, by the way that exhibitions are put together, for instance. that sort of thing? Of course. I think in a way because there's so little known about him and there's a certain, I mean there's a certain kind of you can project different things on to Tutankhamun quite easily. That's the case from the start. And different people want to want a bit of him, including Howard Carter, who makes a career off the back of Tutankhammon

and off a particular story that he tells, a particular Tutankhammon that he creates for himself. And then as John was mentioning, there's already the Egyptian nationalists in the nationalist movement, which is an anti-imperial movement. Let's be very clear about this. This is a movement against the British Empire and its long-standing military and political interference in Egypt. And they have long already had an idea of looking to ancient Egypt as an independent Egypt before Ottoman rule, before British rule. And so Tudan Kahn becomes a symbol then in the 1920s. And this is a story that the Egyptian middle classes are following very closely, as well as the middle classes of Britain and France and America.

He must have had a mother and he might have had a wife. Do we know much about them? We don't. And that's quite interesting because the royal women of this dynasty are very visible. And royal mothers are very visible. King's mothers are very visible. So for his mother not to be, would point. to her probably dying before he takes the throne.

But there are other powerful women around. So there's his wife, Anka Senamun, who is one of Akanathamun's daughters, probably marries him to secure her own position, if nothing else. And there's also a witness. And this is a great story. So in the 1990s, a French team were excavating in Sakara, a high escarpment in Sakara. came across this very large tomb.

And it's larger than any of the tombs in the immediate vicinity, which are broadly contemporaneous. And it's a woman's tomb. So for a woman to have her own tomb is unusual. And in the first chamber of the tomb, there is a relief carving of her seated with Tutankhamun on her lap and sort of a gesture of affection between them, a stylized gesture of affection between them.

And he is named there as Tudun Karmun, so he has already taken that new name. And the tomb is finished some point after he dies. So she's around for the whole time. We don't know much else about her, but to have such a big tomb, she must have been a powerful individual, if not influential. So there is an entourage around him,

which seems to include, I'd like to think, quite powerful women. To return to Egypt as we're coming towards the end of the program, Christina, Christina Riggs, What of the consequences being for, of that discovery being for people in Egypt? Well, we've talked about its popularity at the time, and it inspired playwrights, novelists, fit into kind of artistic movements within Egypt. Later on in the 20th century, I think other kings, like Ramsey's the Great, become more important sort of as symbols, connections of the ancient past.

But Tudancomen has been on postage stamps, for instance, And the objects from the Tomb of Tutankhamun started to be loaned to other countries beginning in 1961. As part of a program of sort of sharing Egypt being in a position during the Nasser era, so when it is finally post-Suez firmly independent, it becomes an opportunity for Egypt to share as a sort of cultural diplomacy, to share its ancient culture with the world, and to invite Western culture as well into Egypt. And we see that going on today still with the tours continuing.

So, of course, it's not had one meaning, but different meanings for the West and in Egypt over time. I always think about the post-revolution, post-2011 revolution street art in Tahrir Square and in the immediate surroundings in Cairo. And there is a Tutankhamun. There's a transformation of the Tudun Khamun mask, which is part of this post-revolution graffiti

and there are lots of images relating to his possible mother and Nefertiti as well, Nefertiti with the gas mask. So these are still really important icons of revolution, although they take on different meanings. It's almost a century, John Taylor. Is there a great deal more new to be learned from the tomb, do you think? Or from the object to know the term, obviously. I think there is more to be learned, yes.

certainly as Liz was saying many of the objects have not yet been subjected to a full academic study and publication so there is plenty of scope there to analyse the materials that they're made of to compare them with other items from other sources I think also there is a strong possibility of learning more about Tutankhamun from other sites in Egypt

so Liz mentioned the tomb of the nurse that part of Egypt, the Sakara necropolis, still contains many tombs remaining to be discovered and it's quite possible there could be other tombs there which relate to Tutankhamun's reign, which will throw light on the personalities that were behind the throne. Well, thank you very much indeed. Thank you, John. John Taylor, Christina Riggs and Liz Froud.

We take a break next week and return on 9th of January with Catullus, the Roman poet of love and hate, the epic and the insulting, claimed as the finest lyric poet of his time. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did they miss out?

I think one thing we haven't looked at is why did the tomb survive intact? Because it's the... Well, actually it's not the only tomb in the valley that was found undisturbed. But the only other ones are two tombs that are closely related to Tutankhamun. One is Tomb 55

in which someone from Tutankhamun's immediate family or several people were buried. Maybe Akhenaten. Maybe Akhenaten. And then only a few years ago, I think about 10 years ago, another tomb was discovered in the same part of the valley which contained some of the

leftover materials from embalming which quite possibly from Tutankhamun's burial. And the standard explanation for why the tomb was left undisturbed is that a later tomb was built nearby and that all the tune and camus tomb now a Tutankhamun's tomb yeah so a later tomb was constructed a much bigger one nearby ramaziz the sixth and all the rubble from the excavation of that covered the floor of that part of the valley and Tutankhamun was sealed underneath but what is interesting is that at the very end of the

the new kingdom period around 1100 BC the valley of the kings was decommissioned officially. There was a kind of official emptying out of the contents of the tombs. So the bodies of the kings are taken out and secreted in a few small caches and any remaining valuables that the robbers have left behind are then put back into the state coffers. Some of them reappear in the burials of later kings. They're recycled. So we know that they were doing this. There are written records to say that they were entering the tombs for this purpose. graffiti marking the tombs that they've done. Graffiti on the walls saying that, you know, an official has been in to take everything out. So why does Tutankhamun and perhaps Akanatan buried nearby?

Why do they escape this process? I'm not sure it's just chance because later debris covers the tomb. I wonder if it's to do with how he's regarded by posterity, that he and Akanata are regarded as tainted by the heresy of this religious revolution. We won't, we'll never know, but I think it's an intriguing possibility. What do you think? That's interesting. Oh, that's interesting. There's another cache as well of embalming materials from Tudancommon's burial, which was discovered already in 1907 by Theodore Davis. And that's one of the first clues really, although, you know, hindsight is always, is always perfect, and that there might be a tomb in that area, a burial for Tudun Khamun.

He thought he'd found Tudun Khamun. He was like Tudun Khamun, Czech. Yeah, he published it as the tomb of Tudon Khammon in 1907 when it wasn't. It's a It's a cache of these, because mummification is a sacred process. And so everything that is part of that process that comes into contact with the body needs to be treated as sacred material and deposited near the burial or with the burial. So if there's an interesting practice there of these little deposits in that area, that weren't really appreciated until after the discovery of the tomb itself, I think it's also maybe worth remembering that discovery isn't one moment.

The excavation and clearance of that tomb takes 10 years of Carter's life and just to get it preserved, get it to the museum in Cairo, do the recording of it. And things like the mummy mask and the gold coffin aren't actually known to the public. They're not found until the coffins are opened and the mummy's unwrapped in November of 1925 and then the public gets to know them through the media, through photography.

in the press in 1926, because in the meantime, there's a year's break when Carter has a falling out with the antiquities authorities and can't work at the tomb anymore. And it's not until Britain forces a change of the Egyptian government that it's negotiated, everybody calms down, and Carter comes back to work and to get on with the first... Is this falling out... Yeah, of mini-optopsies of the money.

Is this falling out of Keneke with the fact that he and Karnavan couldn't take the stuff away, as they'd imagine that they could or hope that they could. That's the undercurrent. There are lots of tensions. Yeah, there are lots of tensions about more immediate problems like access to the tomb, presenting it to the press. Who can come and visit on off days, you know, Carter. Carter loves to have kind of minor European aristocrats come and visit, but he gets very annoyed when the Egyptian government sends Egyptian ministers to come and visit. But in the background, yes, this becomes a test case. The appointed just around the time of the First World War,

there was a new French director of the Antiquities Service in Egypt, Pierre Lacau, who intended to enforce more strictly Egypt's right to keep prize fines in its own museums and for itself. And too uncommon became a test. This was a test case. And you won? In the end, it took many years. It took many years of negotiating. Carter and Carnarvon took some small.

objects without permission. So it's known that there are small things in private collections and certain museum collections around the world, but the main bulk of the finds stayed in Egypt. But throughout that 10-year period, or most of that 10-year period, they're in this kind of uncertain state about where they're going to wind up. You can understand why in 1939, Guacotta dies in 1939, but between sort of that 10-year period up to his death, he doesn't, you know, once he's finished publishing. in 1933, he's kind of done with it.

And you can kind of understand because he's been battling these political intrigues and fighting his corner to some extent for so long. I think Carter is rather a tragic figure in a way because you can see how the discovery overwhelms him and exhaust him. And by the end, he's very lonely man.

He keeps going to Egypt, but people say they see him sitting in a hotel foyer all on his own. Why don't? It's partly because I think his battles with the authorities that we've been hearing about have left him very embittered. What's he embittered about? Did he expect to take the lot? He got a lot out of it. He got the archive. Well, that went to New York, didn't it? Well, it went to Oxford, actually.

It's the Griffith Institute, so we have his archive. But that it didn't arrive to Oxford until after his death. And some quite a bit, the photographs went to New York. Is that right? Photographs are in New York and in Oxford. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, I interrupted.

Well, I think also, you know, Carter, although he was a very able man, he had a talent for falling out with people. And he's alienated a lot of his former colleagues and friends by the mid-1930s. We know that members of his team, a lot of them, could only just manage to bear working with him because he infuriated them so much. They record all this in their diaries and letters. Well, he was a very stubborn character. he had fixed ideas about how things ought to be done

and it was very, very difficult to change his mind. And this is partly why there was such a lot of problem with the authorities because whereas Carnarvan was much more of a diplomat, he was able to smooth over minor problems, whereas Carter always took a very, very rigid stance and this led to confrontation. So he, in a way, he was kind of the author of his own, unhappiness in the last years.

Did the Egyptian archaeologists take on the task when Carter, as it were, left and moved away? No, the work was done by then, and then it's the material... But you've all told me that there's only 30% of it done, there's much more to do. The curators and the... It went to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and the curators there have done amazing work and probably know that material better than anyone else,

and now that it's being transferred to the Grand Egyptian Museum, in Cairo, there's a whole renewed conservation effort, which I think will spur new work on. And new research being done. But the key point is that in all that debate over where the artefacts should stay, the archive, the notes, the records, the drawings, the photographs are never in question because there's still this assumption that those belong to the archaeologists, and that means that excavation archives, like the Two-Dun Common Archive, left Egypt. and that means that they were still in Western centres like Oxford and New York

for research to be done mainly by Westerners. I said that earlier and you said, no, they weren't in New York. I thought some were in New York. Well, the photographs, Harry Burton's photographs and negatives are in New York. The Oxford collection includes photographs and negatives as well, but it also includes Howard Carter's diary, his journals, his notes, all the record cards, the meticulous. drawn record cards for each object.

They're all now in Oxford and they're all available online as well. Can you give us some idea of the impact of the photographs? Huge. That's how people imagined Tuduncommon and the objects that were photographed and published in the press are sort of still in a way accessible in our minds as the most famous

photographs. So it absolutely shaped the idea of what these objects were and ways in which they were photographed like sculpture, like works of art, a more emphasis was given to certain objects that could be photographed in that way. And then that

gets us thinking about them as works of art, which isn't what they were in ancient Egypt. A lot of these things are ritual objects, they're sacred objects. So there's a different way of thinking about the objects that is shaped through Harry Burton's astonishing photography, but a photograph

is not a fact. A photograph depends on how it's used and how it's taken and then how it's used. I'd like to be on to that, but there wasn't time about how a lot art is a consequence of religion and it doesn't set out to be art. It sets out to be something else. It has its own aesthetic values which are important but it's also meant to be to be used. Yeah, yeah. Well, as the producers come in with his usual announcement, we'd better wind this up, close it down, whatever it is. Simon?

I'd love a cup of coffee. Coffee would be nice. Yeah. Coffee? Coffee. I have a tea actually. Yeah, Melbourne. Coffee, please. How did you feel that was, Marlman? In our time with Melville, Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me,

the funny history podcast for people who don't like history. And if you enjoyed series one, boy, do I have a special festive treat for you. Yes, me and Santa's elves have been bashing away in the workshop. And we've loaded his sleigh with a brand new episode all about, well, you can probably guess. So join me, the hilarious Russell Kane, and our clever historian, Dr Fernbridell, as we crack, cracker gags and get to grips with how the Victorians did Christmas. You can find it now and all the other episodes

Under Your Tree or on BBC Sound.