Short History Of... - Tutankhamun

Episode Date: September 12, 2021

In November 1922, in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, a young water boy called Hussein Abdul Rasoul makes a remarkable discovery. A set of stone steps lies concealed beneath the desert sand - a staircase leading to a long-lost tomb. The mummified pharaoh within will capture the imagination of generations to come, becoming the very embodiment of Ancient Egypt. What do we know of this boy king and his premature end? And why the extraordinary opulence of his burial chamber? This is a Short History of Tutankhamun. Written by Luke Kuhns. With thanks to Dr. Chris Naughton, Egyptologist and author of King Tutankhamun Tells All! For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's November the 4th, 1922. It's 107 degrees Fahrenheit in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. On the surface, this ancient burial site is a desert wasteland. A harsh, lifeless landscape. But looks can be deceiving. And under the earth, this valley contains untold treasures. Sweaty and thirsty diggers hack their way through limestone and marl. Wheelbarrows of rock and dirt are dumped to one side. Most employed here are local Egyptians.

All are searching for signs of the long-lost tombs of the ancient pharaohs. The site, nestled amidst the Thebes hills, is filled with the buried royals of the 18th, 19th and 20th dynasties of ancient Egypt, which reigned from 1550 to 1077 BCE. Regular excavations have been undertaken in the valley since the 1820s, but with valuable discoveries becoming increasingly rare, by the 1920s many believe the site has given up the totality of its treasures. The tombs that are to be found have been raided by grave robbers, leaving them essentially worthless. The English financier of this dig, George Herbert, the 5th Earl of Caernarfon, has declared this will be his final venture.

He will not be funding any further such projects once this digging season concludes. In this context, Howard Carter, the British archaeologist in charge of the excavation, is under significant pressure. He's desperate for a discovery, but his hopes are dwindling each day as the season approaches its end. Little does Carter know, a junior member of his team, a lowly water boy no less, is about to transform his fortunes. Twelve-year-old Hussein Abdul Rasool leads a donkey into the camp with jugs of water strapped to the saddle. Hussein wears a dusty turban and once white jelabiyah, a long cotton shirt now flecked with dirt and sand from his journey. As Hussein unloads the jugs for the

thirsty workmen, he plants them firmly in the ground. He begins to pull sand around the base of one of the receptacles to hold it in place. As he does so, his small hand brushes over a smooth stone just beneath the surface. Quickly scooping and brushing the sand away, he uncovers what appears to be a step. Howard Carter darts over to the water boy's discovery. Hussein has indeed found the top of a staircase. A staircase to a lost tomb. The steps are cleared of sand. Carter and his team descend carefully, tentatively, their hearts racing.

They stop at the sealed entrance. The tomb's door displays a cartouche, a nameplate. It clearly states the identity of the pharaoh interred inside. He is perhaps the most famous ancient Egyptian of them all, Tutankhamun. Tutankhamun. It's sometimes said that every person dies twice, when they cease to breathe, and when the last person who remembers them dies.

In 1922, Hussein Abdul Rasool and his boss, Howard Carter, have resurrected a pharaoh whose name and memory had been forgotten for 3,000 years. The discovery of Tutankhamun will trigger Tutmania, a mainstay in Western pop culture from the 1920s on, a phenomenon with this ancient king at its centre. From the US President Herbert Hoover, who dubbed his German shepherd King Tut, to the 1966 Batman villain of the same name. Tutankhamun's influence is everywhere.

One cannot visit the market stalls in Cairo and Luxor without seeing an abundance of replicas of the pharaoh's famous gold death mask. But what do we actually know of Tutankhamun? The public perception of this historical figure is somewhat unforgiving. He's viewed as a frail child, as an infant weakened by illness and manipulated by his advisors. A pharaoh whose opulent burial site belies an unimpressive reign that spanned no more than ten years. Was he merely a boy monarch? A puppet ruler after his dictatorial father? Or was he perhaps a warrior king who died a sudden and unexpected death?

A ruler who flexed power at all those who dared to threaten Egypt? Is there more to this pharaoh than meets the eye? I'm Paul McGann, and this is A Short History of Tutankhamun. It's November the 26th, 1922. It's been a fortnight since Carter's discovery. In that time, he and his team have shown remarkable patience and restraint They've withheld from entering the tomb itself Carter has insisted on waiting for the arrival of his employer, Carnarvon, first

Finally, after two long weeks, the Earl has made it to Egypt It's a scene right out of Indiana Jones or The Mummy. Clutching flickering lanterns Carter, Carnarvon and the Earl's daughter Evelyn descend the steep limestone stairs to the dark tomb below. Carter begins to chisel a hole in the door. It's muggy down here. Sweat drops off the end of Carter's nose. Carnarvon dabs his brow.

Evelyn chews on her lip and grips her father's arm. Finally, Carter breaks through. The hole is big enough that he can pass through a light and poke his head through. He examines the other side. Can you see anything? Carnarvon asks. Yes, Carter replies. Wonderful things. It truly is an incredible sight. The light from Carter's lantern casts long shadows and reflects against golden objects.

There are golden beds and couches, statues, vases, caskets for food, intricately designed boxes, shrines, chairs, an alabaster cup and much more besides. All of this is there for one express purpose, to assist Tutankhamun in his journey to the afterlife. Excavation begins immediately. It will take Carter years to clear the site. Some 5,000 objects will be meticulously documented and removed from the tomb.

Egyptologist Dr Chris Naunton is author of Tutankhamun Tells All. And it turned out that this was an intact tomb. And not only that, it was the intact tomb of, at that time, very little known, obscure pharaoh called Tutankhamun, who in fact was on a list of, by this time, a very small number of kings whose tombs probably ought to have been in the valley and hadn't been found. So Carter was aware that there was a possibility he was going to find the tomb of Tutankhamun, and it turned out he was right, in probably a bigger and more glorious way than he could ever have imagined. Almost nothing like this had ever been discovered. So most of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings had been robbed out. So when they were discovered, they were, yes, incredibly beautifully decorated, some of them,

and yes, some of them did contain some objects, but usually only a very small fraction of the objects after the robbers had come in. So this is essentially the first time that a royal tomb had discovered with all of its stuff still in it, and it is absolutely full to bursting. But then news reaches Carter of an unexpected death, one that threatens the progress of his project.

On April 5th, 1923, Lord Carnarvon lies in a bed at the Continental Savoy Hotel in Cairo. An infected mosquito bite has given him blood poisoning, and now he suffers pneumonia. He's weak, feverish and pale and there is nothing to be done He succumbs to the illness and dies just months after entering the tomb of Tutankhamun To Carter's relief the rights to the dig are retained by Carnarvon's wife, Almina Herbert which allows the excavation to continue without any significant disruption

Carnarvon's death is sensationalized in the tabloids which allows the excavation to continue without any significant disruption. Carnarvon's death is sensationalized in the tabloids, with speculation rife that he died because of the curse of Tutankhamun. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the famous author of the Sherlock Holmes stories and outspoken spiritualist, buys into it, saying, It is neither decent nor safe to take from their resting places the bodies of old kings. The Egyptian Heaven's death is only the beginning. This curse will continue to tantalize and fascinate the public for decades to come, becoming the focal point of numerous novels and films. Two years pass, but despite all the jewels and trinkets unearthed, Carter and his team are still yet to lay eyes on the pharaoh himself.

The tomb is a layered construction. Everything that has been retrieved so far has come from the outermost sanctum. By now this antechamber has been cleared, but further walls stand between the archaeologists and the inner burial chamber itself. So Carter has to remove the screen wall that separates the antechamber from the burial chamber.

He's then confronted with what appears to be, within the burial chamber, a sheer wall of gold. And that is, in fact, the outermost one of a series of shrines made of wood, but completely covered in gilding, in gold, the largest of which is about the size of a small freestanding garage. So it almost completely fills that chamber. The shrines are made of cedar, held together by oak tenons, Christ's thorn wood and bronze. Their doors are held shut by ebony bolts and silver-coated copper staples. It's long, painstaking work to dismantle the shrine walls.

Carter will later write, We bumped heads, nipped our fingers, we had to squeeze in and out like weasels, and work in all kinds of embarrassing positions. But finally, they reach the treasure within, the pièce de résistance. Carter's eyes light up. Behind all the many layers of gilded wall, at the heart of this opulent burial chamber, is a stone sarcophagus. It's perfectly intact. The next careful phase begins, removing the heavy stone lid.

With the sarcophagus open, Carter leans in for a closer look. Crammed inside the stone box is a large wooden coffin. It too is covered in gold and bears the image of the king himself. That coffin had to be lifted out of the stone sarcophagus, which remains in place on the floor. It proved to be incredibly heavy. Carter wasn't sure why at this point, but he lifted it out and then placed it on the floor by the side of the sarcophagus so that he could investigate further. The lid of this coffin is lifted and inside there is another coffin again it's made of wood covered in gold and other precious materials the lid of that coffin is then lifted revealing a third coffin and this is where he realizes why the whole thing was so heavy the third coffin the innermost one is made

of solid gold so it's a human-sized anthrop, human-form coffin of solid gold with precious inlays of various kinds. And only when he was able to lift the lid of that third innermost coffin did he find the mummy itself wrapped with all sorts of jewels and other adornments over it, including, most famously, the death mask. But this is the start of the story, not the end. But this is the start of the story, not the end. And while Tutankhamun may finally have been found, the mystery is only just beginning. We all think of Tutankhamun as the boy king. And, you know, if people know anything about Tutankhamun apart from the gold and the tomb and Carter's discovery, it's that he was a boy, or at least he was a very young adult at the time he lived and indeed at the time he died. That wasn't known until the discovery of the mummy itself.

And it's the examination of the mummy by Carter, but more importantly, with a team of anatomists as well, that established that Tutankhamun died between his 18th and 20th years. Who is this boy king, contained for the ages within this many-layered tomb? And why is he almost entirely absent from the historical record? Way back when, in life, Tutankhamun reigns in ancient Egypt, from 1333 to 1323 BCE. Historical records this far back are sparse. This limits what we can ever know about Tutankhamun. But from the fragments, we can put together something of a picture of his life.

His ascension to the divine kingship at eight or nine years old comes at a time of social and political turmoil. He begins his reign in the long shadow of Pharaoh Akhenaten, who ruled for seventeen years, exercising an iron-like grip over his people. We do not know for sure, but it may well be the case that Akhenaten was Tutankhamun's father. Inheriting the throne, Tutankhamun it seems wastes little time in undoing what his father has established. Throughout the 18th dynasty, as this period of history is known, the religious capital is Thebes, a thriving city on the river Nile.

The political centre is Memphis. Not Memphis, Tennessee, of course. This city is 20 kilometers south of Egypt's modern capital, Cairo. The spiritual beliefs and practices of the ancient Egyptian people are polytheistic. That means they have many different gods. Somewhat similar to the gods of ancient Greece, these deities embody different aspects of the natural world. They are sometimes benevolent, but often capricious. They are extremely powerful, but not all powerful.

Under Pharaoh Akhenaten, or Pharaoh Amenhotep as he used to be known, everything changes. On the orders of their leader, the Egyptian people are forced to abandon their polytheistic traditions. Instead, they are told to focus their spiritual attention on one single god, Aten, the sun disk. This radical change is unwelcome and devastates many people who are devoted to other deities. Egyptian soldiers march through the dusty streets of Thebes. They enter the grand temples of Karnak and Luxor. Priests and worshipers are forced out. The holy places of Osiris, Horus, Ra and Anubis are closed,

repurposed and destroyed. Akhenaten, the divine king, the supposed spokesman of Aten, has spoken, and the people must obey. A man who came to power as a god-king has become a divine dictator. The disk of Aten, an emblem of the sun, becomes the symbol of an oppressive religious order. There's only one god present, and that's the sun god, and in a specific form, a sun disk called the Aten, which is depicted as a circular disk with its rays descending downwards towards the ground and terminating in little hands which are often holding signs such as the sign for life as if to convey that the sun is passing on qualities such as life to the people on earth and specifically to Akhenaten himself and his queen Nefertiti. But refocusing religious

practices is only one of Akhenaten's drastic changes. Thebes is a bustling city of traders and merchants. It also houses a full civil service. But at the pharaoh's behest, it's deserted. For generations, this has been the centre of power for successive pharaohs. Now, it's ditched. Pharaoh Akhenaten wants to begin anew. He's already changed his own name. He used to be called Amenhotep, like several pharaohs before him.

Now he orders the construction of a brand new city, a brand new Egyptian capital. He calls it Akhenaten, after himself. The name means Horizon of the Aten. And after around about four years, four or five years of his reign, Amenhotep, King Amenhotep, changes his name to Akhenaten, confirming that, you know, everything is now focused on this particular form of the sun god. And he also decides that he's going to build a brand new capital city

on a completely virgin site in Middle Egypt, away from the main centres of power in Egypt at the time. And within a few years, he builds an entire capital city. Under a scorching sun, a young boy with dry, cracked lips labours in the middle of the desert. His hands are bruised. He struggles to push a cart loaded with rock out of the busy construction site. Overworked and malnourished, the boy collapses.

He dies face first in the hot sand. His body is chucked into an open grave with other dead children, most aged between 10 and 15. Akhenaten's labour force includes boys as young as six. Many are worked to death in the name of Aten. Today mass graves in Amarna, as the archaeological site of Akhenaten is known, continue to throw up the remains of the pharaoh's workforce. The site has been the focus of lots of archaeological work.

It really was a fully functioning city with all the buildings you'd expect, palaces, temples, administrative buildings, houses of all kinds, not only for the elite but also for the lower classes. It's estimated that it was occupied by between 30,000 and 50,000 people. So this wasn't just a sort of trial run or an experiment that didn't work. It really did work. There were thousands and thousands of people living there. But it all came to an end.

Akhenaten died in his 16th year, and it seems the city was abandoned quite soon after that. It is here, in the new capital, where Tutankhamun is likely born. And it is from here that the boy king will rejuvenate Egypt. Tutankhamun lived and indeed was king at an incredibly interesting point in Egyptian history. This is because his reign follows almost immediately, not quite clear about that, but almost immediately a period when Egypt is turned on its head. The first three years of Tutankhamun's kingship are a whirlwind of change. After the upheaval and the neglect of the old gods under his predecessor,

the new pharaoh puts an end to Akhenaten's heresy. Not only is the site of Amman abandoned, but there's also an initiative to restore the political center of Memphis and the religious capital of Thebes. Like the old pharaoh, Tutankhamun and his wife undergo a name change once in power. The sun god Aten is abandoned, while Amun and the other old gods are restored. He was born Tutankhaten rather than Tutankhamun. So when he was born, he had a name which meant the living image of the Aten, Akhenaten's god. But that then changes and he becomes

the living image of the god Amun, signifying this transition. His wife, one of the daughters of Akhenaten, who was born Agasen par-Aten, becomes Agasen par-Amun, again showing this change. These are significant changes for a boy king to implement, especially in a reign as short as his. To what extent is Tutankhamun really involved in these developments? How much are they the brainchild of a circle of pushy advisors? At this stage, Tutankhamun is only 10 or 11 years old. Guiding his rule is his advisor, a man called Ai, as well as a group of chief priests.

It all points to this idea of a shift away from Amarna, which is the place where Achanon's revolution has played out, back to Thebes and the Valley of the Kings, which is where the old ways were centered as far as religion is concerned. The thing is, we can't really know who's really behind this. You know, whether it is Tutankhamun who's driving this, you know, was Tutankhamun actually a secret Amun worshipper from the beginning of his life and, you know, wanted nothing more than to put things back. It seems, given how young he was, very unlikely that it was him.

It's possible that this general shift back to the old ways is a much bigger project, spanning the lives of multiple pharaohs. It's clear that there was at least one other pharaoh around at this time, I think probably two, and it's unclear to what extent those two others were beginning to move things back. We don't know much about this other pharaoh. We know their name to be Smenkhikara, but it's unclear if they're male or female. Some scholars hold that this pharaoh is actually Akhenaten's brother, or even his wife, Queen Nefertiti. To what extent Akhenaten's religious subjugation actually affected the common people also remains unclear.

And the vast majority of the population in Egypt would be ordinary, mostly agricultural labourers. Those people don't leave much trace for us. So it's very difficult for us to know whether the man in the street or the man in the field would have been in any way influenced by Akhenaten's new way of doing things, his new religion, or whether they wouldn't really have cared. In fact, the evidence that we have, and it is very thin on the ground, but the evidence that we have for people from lower classes, particularly when it comes to their graves, these people were buried with grave goods, minimal grave goods, but which seem to evoke the old ways of doing things. they're decorated with images of gods who under Akhenaten's way of doing things really ought not to have existed they just don't exhibit the same the same signs of this great sweeping change whereas you know if you look at the tombs or even the houses where the evidence survives of the

people in the elite they of course absolutely swallow the new way of doing things but even then we don't know to what extent even those people really believed wholesale the changes. 3,000 years into the future, in 1924, Howard Carter continues his examination of Tutankhamun's mummified body. There's evidence of a severe injury on the left knee. The cause of the wound is unclear. In fact, even today it continues to be a source of debate. It's widely agreed that this could well have been a contributing factor in Tutankhamun's death.

This would rule out the idea, popular for a time, that the boy king was the victim of an assassination. Carter also spots an abnormality with the boy King's left foot. It's clubbed. The discovery of over 100 walking sticks and canes in his tomb will give rise to the image of Tutankhamun as a frail boy. Over the years, the evidence from the mummy, and it's been examined, is examined by Carter and his team, it was re-examined in the 1960s by a team from the University of Liverpool, it was re-examined a few years after that and x-rayed, then it was CT scanned in the early 2000s and a DNA sample from the mummy has also now been investigated. So it's really been looked at very very thoroughly over

the years and the list of various different ailments that Tutankhamun has been thought to have been suffering from over the years is absolutely enormous. A study led by Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Awas suggests Tutankhamun's left foot abnormality is due to necrosis, a death of bone tissue. A death of bone tissue. Further genetic studies reveal Tutankhamun may have suffered from various forms of malaria that would have weakened his immune system. However, in Germany, the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine challenged Hawass' findings that malaria killed Tutankhamun. They proposed that he died from sickle cell disease. And it's up for debate whether he actually suffered from any of these diseases at all.

A medical expert, Frank Rooley, a few years ago, which listed all of the things in the literature that's ever been suggested he suffered from, and they conclude by saying, so, you know, there was a huge long list. He can't possibly have been suffering from all these things. And by the way, it's quite possible that he was suffering from none of them because we can't conclusively say that he was the victim of any of these illnesses. Further DNA tests reveal Tutankhamun's mother and father were siblings. Thus, the physical abnormality he suffers could be a result of incestuous breeding,

which is fairly common at the time. But if Tutankhamun is such a frail boy king, then why is his tomb rammed with weapons and depictions of him in battle? Sifting through the items, Carter catalogues bows, arrows, and even whole chariots which display signs of use. On many of the boxes and gold work are depictions of Tutankhamun either hunting or riding his chariot into battle. These certainly do not tally with the image of the frail boy. The extent to which Tutankhamun was a warrior of any kind really depends on how you interpret the

evidence that we have. You can see if you want Tutankhamun as this sort of frail weakling. He would at the very least have been very young. He was never a very big guy. We can tell that from his mummy. But that's not to say anything about his character. We have no idea whether he was sort of timid and shy or whether he was a really fierce and courageous individual. There's one ostrich feather found in particular in the tomb,

which shows an image of Tutankhamun in a chariot, racing along, chasing after some ostriches, or with a pet dog, if I remember rightly. And there's an inscription on this, which describes how Tutankhamun went hunting in the district of Heliopolis, which is to the north of where he would have been living. The detail there is so specific that it seems very unlikely that this is just a sort of, you know, made up. The

king went to Heliopolis and he went hunting. It's just too detailed. It seems to really capture an event in his life. And if this is true, then maybe he really did go hunting and maybe he really was capable of riding a chariot. And this puts us in mind of the very fragmentary temple reliefs. We've only got bits of the jigsaw puzzle, but again, these show Pharaoh Tutankhamun apparently in battle. On the one hand, the people who favour the idea that he never did any such thing would say, well, this is just not ideological.

Pharaoh is supposed to go into battle. He's supposed to show his superiority over foreign nations and his military prowess and his physical prowess. So, of course, he hasn't self-depicted in battle. It doesn't mean he really did anything. But, again, there are details in these reliefs which are not just from the standard sort of design book for battle reliefs. These are apparently very detailed unique

images which appear to show details which either are just sort of invented in the minds of the designers the sculptors or they really derive from events that happened and we don't have any other evidence to corroborate this we don't have an inscription saying and in such and such a year whatever did two dark go into battle but it's not impossible that he really did. So I think the whole thing really hinges on how you want to see this. The image of the brittle young king begins to melt away. A new picture begins to emerge of a pharaoh who was perhaps not constrained by physical limitations. Two of the objects in the tomb in particular perhaps have caught people's imagination and

attention and maybe speak to a king who had been involved in military activity. One is the dagger which was found on the body very close to the mummy of the king itself. The other one is a leather, the word is cuirass, which is a kind of, it's a form of armour made of overlapping segments of quite thick, toughened leather, which would have provided it a fair degree of protection from attack by sharp objects. During Tutankhamun's reign, Nubian colonies threatened Egypt's southern borders. At the same time, Libyan tribes make incursions from the northwest, and the Hittites expand their kingdom, threatening to encroach on Egypt. Whether these depictions of Tutankhamun are realistic or simply symbolic, Egypt was under siege, and there was a clear need for the pharaoh to project military might.

As his armies largely keep the enemy at bay, despite his own tender age, the pharaoh's thoughts turn to succession. Life is fragile in ancient Egypt. He knows he must have a child in order to continue the dynasty. Tutankhamun's wife, Anka-Sanaman, becomes pregnant with twins. It's a time of joy for the royal family. Tutankhamun's legacy will live on through his children. Anka-Sanaman's water breaks. She's taken to a room where she squats on two birth bricks. This is the standard method of delivering a child at this time.

Birth for the ancient Egyptians is a deeply religious event. Painted on these bricks is a mother and child, along with the cow goddess Hathor, who is associated with motherhood. The first child is delivered. The second follows. The wait is over. The news is brought to the king, but it's not what Tutankhamun expects.

The twin daughters are stillbirths. Anka-Sanaman and Tutankhamun are crushed. The pharaoh decides his offspring will still be granted mummification, a rare honour for stillborn children. Tutankhamun had no children of his own. In fairness to him, he hadn't lived that long. He hadn't been an adult for very long. You know, he hadn't had very long to try to have children. And we also know, this is one of the saddest aspects of the tomb, that he was buried along with two mummified fetuses who apparently were his children. This was a really sort of huge and tragic event in Tutankhamun's life.

You know, perhaps he was desperately, desperately trying to have children to make sure that the family line could continue. And by the time he died, it just hadn't succeeded. It's 1323 BCE. Anka Sanaman has just been met with another tragedy. The nation mourns with her. In the palace at Thebes, Tutankhamun himself is dead. His body is laying on a bed. His recently injured left knee shows signs of infection. His recently injured left knee shows signs of infection. With no children to carry on the lineage,

this marks the end of the 18th dynasty of ancient Egypt. And another significant fact of Tutankhamun's reign is that he's the end of the 18th dynasty royal line, which perhaps has its roots even further back into the preceding 17th dynasty. That's not entirely clear. But certainly it was a royal family which had been on the throne of Egypt for many generations, for decades and decades, a couple of centuries at the very least. And we can't say for sure how he died,

but of course everybody's desperate to know why it was that he died at such a young age. So the debate rages on and on. But speculation surrounds more than just Tutankhamun's death. It appears there's something odd about his mummification process. Mummification plays an essential role in life and death in ancient Egypt. The first Egyptian mummies appear during the Old Kingdom, otherwise known as the Age of the Pyramids, circa 2688 to 2181 BCE. It's an honored and hallowed process, a deeply spiritual one. The ancient Egyptians believed the physical body plays a vital role in the afterlife. So upon his death, Tutankhamun's body is preserved to be as lifelike as possible.

So as part of the mummification process, the embalmers removed certain internal organs, the liver, lungs, stomach and intestines, and wrapped and mummified them and preserved them separately. They put them into jars, which we call canopic jars. them separately, they put them into jars which we call canopic jars. They were removed from the body because that helped to slow down the decomposition. The mummy is then purified with neutron salts and then finally embalmed in unguent oils. All of this of course you know is designed to ensure that the physical body can be preserved and in the Egyptian mindset that's very important because the body itself needs to survive in order that it can continue to receive offerings

and essentially eat and drink and breathe in the afterlife. What Carter and his team notice is that Tutankhamun's own mummification process appears to have been rushed. Tutankhamun has a star in approximately the right place where we can see the embalmers would have removed the internal organs, but it's not quite in exactly the right place and it's much too big. And the embalmers were really very good at this kind of thing at this point, very precise,

very accurate. And so this makes it look as though, you know, something went a bit wrong. It's not just the larger than normal scar. Tutankhamun is missing his most vital organ, one that should never be removed. He also is missing his heart, which was not one of the organs that was usually removed. And in fact, in the Egyptian belief, the heart was where your thoughts came from. So it was essential that the heart stayed inside the body. And in Thu Dung Kamen's case, it's missing. We don't really understand why.

There's quite a lot of packing material inside the chest cavity, which suggests that something went wrong. Why Thu Dung Kamen's heart is missing remains unknown to this day, as do the reasons for his rushed mummification. There's some speculation that he might have died in a foreign land, where mummification processes were less developed or formalized. That might explain the poor job and the prominence of the scar. Tutankhamun's unexpected death creates another issue. He needs a tomb, but his tomb is

not ready. Items for his journey into the afterlife are gathered. I, Tutankhamun's advisor, now assumes the role of pharaoh. I must decide whereabouts in the Valley of the Kings his former boss is to be buried. Tutankhamun's premature death means preparations for his burial are nowhere near complete. Time is precious. They must finish the job while his body might still be preserved, and seal him within his tomb before his physical being decays. The people who are in charge of preparing the burial are already thinking, right, okay, we need food, we need drink, and they really did bring those things into the tomb. We need a load of boxes. We'll need their jewelry.

We probably want a lot of their clothes from their whole lifetimes. We'll need lots of religious objects, lots of little totems and gods and goddesses that will symbolically, magically help them. We're going to need chariots. We'll need armor. Not necessarily because they used them, but just because this was the stuff that you had. And because they would need it symbolically in the next life. In order to stock the tomb with the items Tutankhamun will require in the afterlife, there's no other option but to repurpose pieces from another royal family member. Many of the 5,000 objects from the tomb are only starting to reveal their secrets today.

The shabtis, small figurine depictions of Tutankhamun, do not match his physiology. This suggests they were originally intended to depict someone else. The coffins that house the pharaoh also appear to have reworked faces. The coffins that house the pharaoh also appear to have reworked faces. It's possible that the repurposed items even include the most renowned object in the tomb, Tutankhamun's famous death mask. It isn't as though all of those objects revealed everything there is to know about them, you know, sort of instantly. And they are, they have been, and they are still revealing more and more and more new information to us it's widely believed the repurposed items originally belonged to queen nefertiti the wife of akhenaten contemporary examinations of the death mask have revealed

that tutankhamun's own name is actually inscribed over that of another. Neferin Feru Atem, the longer version of the old queen's name. And there are other signs that the death mask was first intended for a woman. The ears of the death mask appear to have been reworked. So they are definitely pierced, and there's no problem with that because men in ancient Egypt did wear earrings. The problem is that they only wore them, males only wore earrings in childhood. So in images of adult royal males from this period,

we would expect to see ears pierced, but not wearing earrings. And in fact, the argument is that the ears of the death mask had originally had holes in, and would in fact have had earrings as part of the mask, which is an indication that this was originally the mask of a woman. Tutankhamun's mummified body is finally placed within the complex of coffins, with the death mask the final layer covering his visage. The lids are placed one on top of another, the shrines are shut and locked. Enclosed within his treasury of precious items, Tutankhamun's death is just the beginning of another journey. Now, according to the beliefs of his contemporaries,

he, along with his massive weapons, chariots, foodstuffs and relics, begins to pass through the underworld on the way to paradise. In the Egyptian belief, he's then going on a journey. So once the tomb is sealed, the king begins this journey to the next life. And at the end of this journey is kind of heavenly existence, which takes various different forms according to different strands of Egyptian belief. But you can imagine he essentially goes into a kind of idyllic form of life on earth where everything's very beautiful and peaceful.

And he just wiles his day away sort of being fanned and drinking gin and tonics and having everybody do all of his work for him. But he has to get there first. And that involves a journey through the underworld during the night. And in this, the king is accompanied by various good guy gods and goddesses, but also encounters various demons and other baddies that he has to get past. And the way the story is told is this is very perilous and there's no guarantee that he's going to get to the end.

But notably, he and the other gods and goddesses who are on his side, at the key moments when they encounter the baddies, the worst of which is a giant snake called Arpet, they are equipped with knives. That's very clear. And this dagger was found very close to the king within the mummy wrappings on the torso, as if it was as close to the body of the king

as it could possibly be. As if this, you know, if he needed to reach for the first thing, maybe for us it would be a mobile phone. In the 18th dynasty, it's a dagger. And that, you know, that's what he's going to need. So, you know, could it be that it's so close to him because he was a military guy and he was always using it and he used in battle and he used it to slay his enemies in the battlefield maybe but could it be that he

needed this for his journey to the next life and could weun's death, the ascension of his former advisor, Ay, to the supreme position of pharaoh is significant. For a start, Ay is not a member of the royal family. In fact, he is the first in what will prove to be a series of commoner pharaohs, as ancient Egypt moves into a new phase. It passed to a man called Ai who'd been prominent under Akhenaten at Amarna. The main title that he uses on becoming king is God's Father, which is a slightly ambiguous title. I don't exactly know what it means. It may have had a kind of priestly connotation. It's not one of the high-ranking titles. He doesn't use the title of chief priest of this or

vizier, which is the title used by the right-hand man of Pharaoh. It's this title, God's father. In any case, he must have been very clearly very high-ranking, trusted, the leading candidate for one reason or another. But he himself, it seems, was already quite an old man by the time he took the throne. He didn't reign for very long, just a few years. He was succeeded by not one of his children, but by another commoner, the commander-in-chief of the armies under Tutankhamun, a man called Horemheb. And in fact, he himself was succeeded by another commoner, another military general, a man called Par Ramesu, who took the throne as Rameses I. And Rameses I was succeeded by his son, Seti I, who was succeeded by his son. So that's the inauguration of a new line, the 19th dynasty line.

But after Tutankhamun, there were these three successive commoners, in some ways sort of emphasising the point that the Aedua, the royal royal family had come to an end with his premature death, Tutankhamun's premature death. With his fall into obscurity and the loss of his tomb to the ages, Tutankhamun dies two deaths, that is, until Howard Carter unearths and immortalises him. For his part, following the epochal discovery, Carter goes on to become incredibly wealthy and a global celebrity. He embarks on a sold-out speaking tour in the United States, writes up his account of the discovery of the tomb, and plays host to a raft of celebrities and royals.

He ushers in tutmania, which continues to this day. Since Carter, plenty of attempts to match the scale of his find have failed. I don't think anybody could have anticipated anything even approaching what he eventually did discover in the tomb of Tutankhamun. And it's also worth remembering that since that time, we have had nothing even approaching it.

A number of royal tombs of the 21st and 22nd dynasties were discovered in the late 1930s, early 1940s, a decade or so after Carter's discovery. And those, in some cases, were discovered intact, absolutely unviolated, but the treasure was just not on anything like the same level. Since the discovery of Tutankhamun, he has morphed from unknown mummy into frail boy king,

then into the religious and political rejuvenator of Egypt, a plausible warrior set atop a chariot, a king who powers through his disability. The investigation of his remains and the thousands of objects recovered from his tomb will keep archaeologists, historians and scientists busy for decades to come. What we can know of his life will always be limited. But clearly, in death, Tutankhamun has achieved a fame far beyond that of any other pharaoh, at least of any pharaoh yet discovered.

Next time, on Short History Of, we'll bring you a short history of the black death it is in times of real terrible strife like the black death that you find out what really makes a society tick because that is what they will get down to their baseline and they will begin to behave as they really kind of feel when they are in hot water. That's next time on Short History Note.