The Ancients - The Legacy of Tutankhamun

Episode Date: November 24, 2022

Since the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings, the phenomenon of “Tutmania” has continued to capture the worlds imagination on an unprecedented scale. From innovative museum exhibitions that took the phrase 'blockbuster' to a new meaning, to SNL sketches and collectable memorabilia - there is no doubt that this once forgotten Pharaoh will now live on forever. But how did the Boy Pharaoh become a celebrity - and is his worldwide fame a force for good?In this episode Tristan is joined by Dr Campbell Price, the curator of Manchester's Egypt and Sudan collection, to discuss the extraordinary legacy of Tutankhamun. Looking at his Cold War arrival in America, to feuding Museum Curators, and delving into the world of virtual autopsies - what is Tutankhamun's legacy, and is it too late to change?For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, we are wrapping up our special mini-series this November all about the boy pharaoh Tutankhamen,

a hundred years after his tomb was discovered in the Valley of the Kings. We focused on Tutankhamen himself, the ancient Egyptian pharaoh. We focused on the discovery of his tomb. We've looked at the Valley of the Kings more generally and today we're going to be focusing in on the legacy of this boy pharaoh since his discovery. How has Tut Mania seized the world over the past 100 years? Well joining me for this huge topic we cover various parts of the world, we're going to be hopping between various decades of the past 100 years. Joining me to talk through all of that I was delighted to get on the podcast Dr Campbell Price, the curator of Egypt and Sudan

at Manchester Museum. He's also part of Manchester University. We go from an incredibly significant exhibition that occurred in the United States, the Metropolitan Museum, this tour of certain objects discovered within Tutankhamun's tomb, how this influenced the displays of exhibitions going forward, and the power of gift shops attached to these exhibitions. We look at street art and how Tutankhamen has influenced that in certain areas of the world in Egypt. We also focus in on more recent history and the legacy of Tutankhamen more recently with certain scientific advancements, and so much more.

So without further ado, to talk about these various aspects in the legacy of Tutankhamen over the past 100 years, here's Campbell. Campbell, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today. Great to be on the podcast today. Great to be back. Well, yes, you say back, you've been on Dan's History Hit podcast before, but this is the first time on the Ancients podcast. I'm so sorry. This is the first time on the Ancients. I'm so sorry. It's okay. Dan's podcast episodes have been preparing you for this, the Acme, the pinnacle point. Yes, building up to this to be part of the instance.

Absolutely. And for what a topic as well, the legacy of Tutankhamen. We've already talked about the tomb itself and the figure of Tutankhamen, but I think it's fair to say the legacy of this incredible figure, it endures down to the present day,

doesn't it, Campbell? Very strongly. Absolutely. And in 2022, celebrating the centenary, what a time to reflect not just yet on the king's life and the contents of the tomb and the whole story of discovery, but the last century of Tutmania. Really an incredible cultural phenomenon in its own right. And that word, Tutmania, which we're definitely going to be delving into, because right at the heart of this story, there's this fascinating Cold War story about when Tutankhamen's treasures went to America.

So it should come as no surprise that archaeology, museum exhibitions are all deeply political things. People talk about museums being neutral. Of course, museums are not neutral. They don't simply transmit facts, they create facts. And in the case of Tutankhamen, yeah, at some point, beginning in the 1960s, actually, the decision was taken to tour some of those objects. And initially, there was a tour in the US in the 60s that didn't really generate much interest. Well, it generated some, but because of Egypt's political position, the revolution in Egypt, the president of Egypt, Nasser, his political alliances, there were at different points, there was a greater degree of closeness between Egypt and the USSR. But then at some point that shifted and there was a greater closeness to the United States and to the West.

And undoubtedly Tutankhamen played a part in that and was a result of that political shift. Fascinating. I love that. So let's definitely delve into this story. But first of all, to set the scene, in the 1960s, introduce two of these, seem to be these key key figures protagonists in this great story I've got the names Hooving and Brown here Campbell who are these figures? So the real prime mover as far as I can see and of course I'm a museum person is a guy called Thomas Hoving and he was the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art an incredibly charismatic guy I remember in the 1990s growing up watching a TV programme called The Face of Tutankhamen, which looked at some of these issues, presented by a guy called Christopher Frayling. And Thomas Hoving was interviewed in that. I remember he made an

impression on me. Very dynamic. And he, being a museum director who thought outside the box, wanted a bigger impact for Tutankhamen in his own museum, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So I think it was Thomas Hoving who really pushed ahead with the logistics, the planning and the commercial side of the Tutankhamen second show that came to New York in the 1970s. So there was the initial tour of some objects in the 1960s, but the one that made the real cultural impact happened in the 1970s. So there was the initial tour of some objects in the 1960s, but the one that made the real cultural impact happened in the 1970s. Right. I mean, Campbell, then take it away with this commercial side of this whole exhibition, and then I guess how these certain objects therefore do come to America at this important, very climactic time in the Cold War.

So the reason ultimately for touring objects from the tomb of Tutankhamen was to raise publicity, but also to raise funds for the so-called Nubian Rescue Campaign, the UNESCO campaign, to move a number of temples in the south of Egypt, which were going to be flooded by the raising of the Aswan High Dam. So this was an incredibly momentous project, more momentous than building the pyramids. Major kind of set piece of the modern Egyptian state. It also flooded the homeland of local Nubian people and many hundreds, thousands of people were displaced. And that tends not to feature so much in the

general story of the great saving of the Nubian temples. Anyway, to increase publicity and to raise funds, it was decided there would be this tour. And it was also a way of, you know, using soft power, of using Tutankhamen, as they said at the time, as an ambassador for Egyptian culture. So the tour in the 1970s, which was brokered between the authorities in Egypt, right up to the president of Egypt, and political authorities in America, key mover there undoubtedly was Thomas Hoving, who wanted the so-called treasures of Tutankhamen to come to his museum, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But in terms of finance, most of the funds raised, of course, were going to the

rescue campaign. So one way of generating funds for the host institutions was to sell merchandise, to sell replicas. Now, up till that point, before the 1970s, you know, museums obviously had had exhibitions, but not quite on the scale of that set of exhibitions in the 1970s around Tutankhamen. Tutankhamen was featured on this famous and wonderful sketch on Saturday Night Live. Steve Martin was singing away dressed up as an ancient Egyptian, but that was a critique of the commercialisation of the pharaoh. And so therefore this commercialisation of the pharaoh, when the exhibition does open with these objects now in

the US at the Metropolitan, how popular does it prove to be? And therefore, how does that affect the commercial, I guess, benefits of this exhibition? Sure, I think museums learned a lesson then. You know, if you asked people in the queue, why are you here? And there were many, many, many people in the queue. It was the blockbuster. You know, there were more people going around each block than probably ever before, hence symbol of ancient wealth, power, status, glamour, because the objects were so glamorous. And it's interesting, there was a lot of debate about the precise pieces that would travel. And there's one piece in particular,

a sculpture of a goddess, which is very unusual for ancient Egyptian conventions, canons of artistic convention, because it shows a woman with her arms outstretched, but her head is turned slightly to the side, which usually you don't get in the rather rigid, stiff, formal pharaonic style. And I think Hoving and the commercial people

saw the potential of this very contemporary-looking figure with this clingy, figure-hugging dress on. I think the Franklin Mint were involved and they were producing replicas of these things and they just sold lots. This is the power of the gift shop, isn't it, in the 1970s? But Campbell, so it sounds therefore, of all the objects which come to America for this exhibition, for this tour, there are certain objects from the tomb of Tutankhamun that you know Hoving and the rest realize have more commercial power than the rest yes absolutely I think they

made special cases for for example this image of the goddess which initially the Egyptian authorities were reluctant to let travel at the time I think they thought the piece was integral to the so-called canopic shrine where the king's internal organs mummified internal organs were stored but Hoving said you know if I can remove literally remove this piece from the canopic shrine in placement then can I have it and they said all right then that may be just an anecdote among many that he recorded in his writing about the time but definitely there was an eye on reproduction, what was best to and most distinctive to sell. And of course, Egyptian art in general

is very distinctive. People might confuse classical sculptures, you know, Greek, Roman, they might confuse Mesoamerican sculpture, but you know Egyptian sculpture, pharaonic Egyptian sculpture. And I think particularly Tutankhamen's period in Egyptian history, the end of the 18th dynasty, after this period that we call the Amarna period, was just more sensual to a Western eye. It was more attractive, it was less formal, it was less rigid. And this had struck people in the 1920s when the objects were first uncovered, and in the 1970s, 50 years later, it became a runaway success again. Do you think this is the first time that we really see a Tutsmania frenzy in the United States of all places, therefore? I think that there was an

initial interest in the 20s, as there was probably around the world, but the very fact that the treasures, so-called the objects from the tomb, were traveling to the US, so you could come face to face with one of the images of Tutankhamen or with one of those goddesses, that made it much more immediate. So that fueled, I mean, if it was on Saturday Night Live, millions of people would be watching that on television. So absolutely, that was a peak of the Tutmania movement. Cabral, it is absolutely fascinating and i mean how commercialized does the whole tour of these treasures of tutankhamen in the us become does it get involved does it get more and more commercialized as the tour goes on i mean i think they knew they were onto a winner you know as soon as it opened i think one venue jacqueline kennedy opened the show in the kind of preview so So you get that sense of celebrity.

I mean, there are pictures of Elizabeth Taylor and other contemporary celebrities who wanted to show their own cultural cachet, I guess, by being involved with Tutankhamen. So once those initial headlines had been established, sure, the next venues were trading on that. I mean, still today, there are in circulation, you know, publications from that time, from posters, books, catalogues, that were produced in such numbers that if you go into a secondhand bookshop today, you'll find one of those from the 70s. Overall, with this tour, Campbell, how significant do you think it therefore proves to be in the whole legacy, in the story of Tutankhamun, and how I

guess it influences museums, exhibitions, you know, tours across the world. How significant do you think this particular tour exhibition, Tutankhamun 1 is? I think extraordinarily significant because it set a new precedent for what was possible. Naturally, it was trading on the top things, Egypt, gold, pharaohs, kings, royalty, all of those things, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. And so those lessons were taken on and adopted in later exhibitions in the decades since. There have been various attempts to rekindle that magic. They've not been entirely as successful so various permutations of the title Tutankhamen's golden afterlife and the treasures of the golden king and whatnot but they never reached that initial peak of the 70s in the US also in Europe and in the UK as well. Just one

last question therefore on the US tour of Tutankhamen's treasures when you look at that particular tour and you look at ThyssenKarmen's treatment in museums at that time and then I guess also over the last 50 years, has that kind of evolved over the past decades, including the time that it was in the US? Yeah, I think in the 70s there was a real focus on the objects, on the the gold and with time there has been maybe a slightly misguided attempt to humanize the king through facial reconstruction ct scans and actually i don't think that's been so successful i mean there's the idea of the glamorous boy king which is in some ways best off left alone as a sort of ideal. When you start grafting in these

scientific results, they in some ways let light in on the magic and make the king less glamorous. But I also think they are misleading and we shouldn't put too much stock by facial reconstructions based on the mummy. So yeah, there has definitely been a change over time. There's been an attempt to get to the real boy king the real person the human being but i suspect that's impossible because we simply don't have the evidence surviving for him as an individual that's so interesting also in its own right i mean if we go into a more modern reception in more modern times therefore how the legacy of tis and carmen really very much endures to this day and very strongly that continued interest that continued talking about Tutankhamun is it

because as you've highlighted there that we have these developments scientific developments these abilities to revisit this figure and almost kind of create a new picture of him with these new developments yeah rightly or wrongly we do keep revisiting the figure of Tutankhamun the mummy through various forms of imaging how How much, as I say, that adds actually to our real knowledge of Tutankhamen, I'm sceptical about personally, but I guess that's a trend across museums, you know, across cultures, trying to understand ancient people better. I mean, the real success of Tutankhamen is that he is really still a household name, you know, of any Egyptian pharaoh, comparable to Cleopatra

perhaps. But, you know, there have been shows about Ramesses II, not quite so successful. Tutankhamun just has that glamour, that kudos, that golden panache, that luster. And the fact that we keep revisiting is just to keep his name on the tip of the tongue. Can you talk in a bit more detail, therefore, about this virtual autopsy which happened for Tit and Carmoon in 2014, and talk us through what this all was and how this kind of contributes to our story of the legacy of Tit and Carmoon today? I think the, well, it's true of Egyptology in general, of museum practice in general too, that a lot of these exhibitions, shows, interpretations are based on revelation. So you're discovering, unveiling, revealing something. So the tomb is

opened, the treasures are revealed, the king's body is revealed, the mask is revealed, the king's body is dissected, pulled apart to reveal there's hardly anything left of him but we still want more in 2014 this autopsy based on latest ct scan so the latest technology led to various speculations about how he died you know was it a chariot accident was it a hippo was it something we'll probably never know the evidence is equivocal so i know at man Museum, we're preparing a new exhibition, Golden Mummies of Egypt. We are not including any CT scans or x-rays because that's what people expect.

The exhibition is not about biomedical revelation. It's about understanding the process of transformation of the human body, the corpse, into a divine effigy, an image of a god. That's what the burial of Tutankhamen was all about. But we've forgotten that if we ever knew it to start with. And we focused on this modern biomedical demand, this expectation that we can find out every detail of his DNA, everything that was wrong with him. But actually, you know, mummification as a chemical process

destroys a lot of that evidence or makes it difficult to interpret so i think although museums are and scholarship tends to be quite positivist and saying yes we can know this this and this actually in reality i think we've got museums especially have to be a bit more honest about the limitations of our knowledge and the fact that we won't know that's fascinating in its own right for yourself and your position you know in Manchester with the museum when talking about a figure like Tiz and Carmen before we started recording you mentioned how you've done a lot about Tiz and Carmen recently but I mean obviously when looking at the legacy of this feature we've talked of this figure we've talked about his presence in America in the 1970s and the significance that has on the

commercial and I guess the diplomatic front as well but is it interesting when you're approaching your own shows your own exhibitions coming up when looking at the legacy of someone like Tutankhamun and the influence that figure and that figure's discovery has had on audiences in the US in the UK and so on and so forth over the past century. Is it interesting to learn about when creating your own exhibitions, lessons you can learn from those previous exhibitions, but also how you can also make sure that there are some differences between them too? Oh, absolutely. I think you've got to do your research into kind of what the general area that you want to be exhibiting on. And in the case of Tutankhamen, I mean, we've got an exhibition called Golden Mummies of Egypt.

You don't call something that and tour it in the US and China and then bring it back to the UK without knowing those are the punch points to interest the public. And I think the exciting thing in museums is if you can take a stereotype, a widely held belief, and maybe challenge that or deconstruct it or reconfigure it in some way. I mean, we had a discussion recently about how you might create something like a 3D mask that children could wear of a god or a king, and how it shouldn't look too much like Tutankhamen, because we don't have the mask of Tutankhamen in the collection but you want the general public to get the visual idea based on an example in our collection so there's a lot of thinking goes on of course about the curatorial and ethical

considerations to a show about Egyptian mummies Egyptian human remains but also you're very conscious of that commercial potential in a time when museums are struggling to keep their doors open. Absolutely. In the wake of this new post-lockdown, post-COVID world as well, isn't it, Campbell? It's really, really interesting looking at the legacy on the present day. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, the host of the brand new podcast, American History Hit. Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how codebreakers uncovered secret Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway, visit Chief Poetin as he prepares for war with the British,

see Walt Disney accuse his former colleagues of being communists, and uncover the hidden history that lies beneath Central Park. From pre-colonial America to independence, slavery to civil rights, the gold rush to the space race, I'll be speaking to leading experts to delve into America's past. New episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday, so join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. With the figure of Tutankhamen there, Paul Campbell, what factors do you think play into his continued media presence, whether it's just these particular stories of him or whether it's

an exhibition or something like that? What do you think are some of the key factors in why the media continues to be really, really interested in this one figure? I think it is both his own position in the Egyptian historical context, because although he didn't rule Egypt for very long, less than 10 years probably, he did actually exist in an interesting and exciting time, as I said in the post-Amarna period, post-major religious revolution led by his father, maybe his grandfather Akhenaten, but also the aesthetics of Tutankhamen. Quite apart from the gold, the aesthetics of that face, the face of the mask,

which of course wasn't a portrait, it was an idealised image of a god, that accounts for the ongoing popularity of Tutankhamen as a brand. But also the discovery by that Egyptian team, led by Howard Carter, sponsored by Lord Carnarvon, English aristocrat is the quintessential archaeological discovery so what you're coming back to the reason we still make these documentaries and of course I have a stake in that as someone who contributes to them the reason we make them is because people want that thrill of discovery of being Carter looking into the tomb for the first time I think it's kind of testament to the amount of focus that there has been on Tutankhamen so far this year.

And then the amount of different avenues you can go down to tell the story of Tutankhamen, whether it's his objects, whether it's the discovery, whether it's looking at the photography of it as well. There are so many different avenues with which you can tell the story, but I guess also retain a unique insight. You know, you have that unique angle into telling the story too. Sure. As you said, quite rightly, photography played an incredibly

important role in the publication, the dissemination of the discovery. Those absolutely iconic images by Harry Burton, a photographer who worked with Howard Carter. That highly stylised form of photography with lots of kind of sleight of hand involved to convey this sense of this pristine, untouched burial. I remember, you know, as a kid leafing through a 70s reprint actually from the time of the exhibitions, just being absolutely transfixed by that black and white photography but then now you know since the Arab Spring since the Egyptian revolution you know just over 10 years ago the image of the Tutankhamen mask has been reused adapted in street art and it has a strong visual signature of course entirely appropriate and totally to be expected that people in Egypt would use an image so iconic from their own history and their own culture to convey a new

and contemporary political idea. It's so interesting. Actually, I'd like to ask, therefore, about yourself, therefore. Forgive me, I'm going on a tangent again, Campbell. But when you were growing up and you obviously developed this incredible interest in ancient Egypt and its amazing archaeology, and you mentioned the 70s there at the time of the exhibition in the US. Were you seeing at that time, because I remember when I was growing up, I see depictions of Tutankhamun's face mask on the TV shows and sometimes in the front pages of magazines, etc. When you were growing up, you mentioned these pamphlets. Do you start seeing all these pictures of Tutankhamun and his treasures appearing everywhere?

these pamphlets do you start seeing all these pictures of Tutankhamun and his treasures appearing everywhere? Even if you had only access to you know material from the 20s and 30s when the objects were first being published still they are so visually arresting and of all the pieces the mask with the striped head cloth and the vulture and the cobra on the brow is unlike anything else we have preserved yet known from pharaonic egypt so it has this visual code it has this visual signature that it stands for all of ancient egypt and it can pop out of as you said like a magazine cover you see it even in a kind of collage of images and it stands out. And for me, and I know a lot of other current practicing Egyptologists, people who would consider themselves Egyptologists, it was that image that was the first hook. So like I said, other cultures have produced wonderful,

beautiful, equally fascinating things, but their visual appeal is not quite the same. And I often say if we'd had another pharaoh, Thutmose III, Ramses II, Cleopatra, if those tombs had been found intact, I don't think they would have made such an impact on popular culture. There is something about Tutankhamen in particular, post-Amarna period, the size of the tomb, the story of the king, that just was the magic, the sweet spot of interest. Let's move on therefore to one other key aspect that I love to talk about, and that's going to Egypt itself. And the Tutankhamun and his objects in the Grand Egyptian Museum, you know, this great museum for the display of all of his objects in one place. Do

you think this is incredibly important significance, know the seeing of everything together and we're getting that context everything is right there so that people visiting seeing these artifacts learning in a story everything is there in one place together yeah i think this is incredibly exciting i've been fortunate and privileged to have visited egyptian colleagues working in the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza a few years ago, working on the material, because it is the biggest museum project, I guess, in the world right now. Previously, people might have seen one of those exhibition tours of a few objects. They may have been lucky and gone to the old Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo. But this will be the first time ever everything

including pieces which were in storage down in Luxor have been brought together and displayed as one unit so I think that will be in itself a major attraction the kind of forefront of a museum interpretation but Tutankhamen is remade with every generation goodness knows how he'll be displayed in a hundred years time hence but for now I think it will offer a really well-rounded fantastic way of seeing and appreciating the objects the craftsmanship and the fact that they were made to be one unit so they were all objects targeted at the transformation of the king into an eternal being they're not all just objects of daily life that he was taking into his tomb to use again no that doesn't seem to be the case but seeing them all together will

be fantastic i guess for yourself in the position that you hold of course in the museum in manchester it must be really interesting i guess exciting you for this new museum, as a collection of everything in one place, to tell a narrative, to tell a story. And I guess for a curator like yourself, a kind of an appreciation of that, you know, when you're creating exhibitions, the amount of time and effort that must go

into creating things like this in the background. As you mentioned there, perhaps one of the greatest, biggest museum projects in the world at this time. For someone like you, looking at that, that must be really, really interesting. Yeah, I mean, for anyone who doesn't necessarily need to have an archaeology or art history background, it will be a spectacular display, I'm sure. But we've waited long enough. The museum was inaugurated, I don't know, 20 years ago at least.

And I know how much hard work by my colleagues in Egypt has gone in to conservation because some of the objects I mean hadn't been touched since Carter put a glass case literally constructed a glass case himself around the big gold covered shrines an absolutely superhuman feat to move those objects and to conserve them and to display them will be a major highlight of my professional life for sure to see those. And I guess one other thing I'd like to ask quickly before really really wrapping this up is we've talked a bit about the legacy of Tutankhamen over the past hundred years and this Tut mania which seizes so many parts of the globe at different times but do we ever know over time in the last hundred years when Tutankhamen, the interest, the mania in him wasn't actually that strong?

Well, that's a good question. I think other colleagues, you know, people who have an importantly have an interest in Egypt in modern times, people like Donald Reid has written about this. He has charted the use and the appearance of the name Tutankhamen in the press over the years. And so if you look at something like the Times of London, there is a slump after the 30s, because there was the Second World War, into the 50s. And then there's a bit of a resuscitation in the 60s. And then it peaks again in the 70s. So the 50th anniversary, you know, anniversaries are always kind of flashpoints of interest and as

we're living now in 2022 it's 100 years this month november 2022 since that momentous discovery we forget maybe because there's such a focus and you and i are talking about him right now there were times yeah when the objects were on display if you went in the early 1950s but not much else was being discussed about tootin' carmen so yeah it's peaks and troughs peaks and troughs and the importance of anniversaries for something like that are so interesting of course the 50th anniversary in the 1970s 1972 of course campbell this has been great i mean the story of the legacy of tootin' carmen it's such a huge topic we've talked about the exhibition in america but are there any other particular parts of his legacy, of his story, that you find especially fascinating that you'd love to talk

about now? One thing that people tend to underestimate is, well, the fact that despite the fame of the king and the tomb, in fact, actual scholarly attention focused on the objects from the tomb has been very patchy. So not everything from the tomb is fully published. There was no detailed excavation report from Carter. He wrote a popular book account with his friend Arthur Mace. But, you know, things like the leather work from the tomb, absolutely astonishing pieces of, you know, footwear, only now, 100 years after the tomb was found, only now are those things being published by colleagues. The texts from the tomb

were actually rather limited. Textiles, models, other aspects of the things, the kind of paraphernalia of the afterlife, were always kind of taken at face value, I think. And it's only now that a lot of those things are being re-examined. So will there be a major anniversary in a hundred years' time? Most probably. And I hope more attention has been paid

to the smaller and less impressive objects by that time. Absolutely. And the stories that those less, well, smaller objects may well still tell about ancient Egyptian culture and society at that time, connections and so much more. Absolutely. And the stories that those less, well, smaller objects may well still tell about ancient Egyptian culture and society at that time, connections and so much more. That's also, I know I'm saying exciting a lot, but it is exciting. It's really exciting in the future, isn't it, to learn more about the ancient Egyptian civilisation at that interesting

time in ancient Egyptian history post the Amarna period, isn't it? Yeah. And while the tomb was an incredible find for archaeology, as I said previously, I think we need to, Egyptology and museums and commentators in the media, need to realise there are lots of things we simply will not know because we don't have a time machine, they haven't been preserved, and you have to make peace with that you won't probably know how tootin kaman died is it important to know how tootin kaman died so i think that will maybe teach us maybe a greater sense of empathy actually for ancient egypt by accepting what we don't know well camel this has been brilliant i'm looking forward to chatting to you on the 200th anniversary

of tootin kaman's tomb discovery okay Make a date. Yeah, there we go. There we go. But it just goes for me to say, wrapping up our small tut mini series on the ancients, welcome to the ancients for the first time. And thank you so much for coming on the pod. It's been a pleasure. My pleasure entirely. Thanks, Tristan.

Well, there you go. There was Dr. Campbell Price explaining all about the legacy of Tutankhamun over the past 100 years. We travelled around quite a bit, but I hope you enjoyed the episode. Campbell is a brilliant speaker. That's enough from me. Last but not least from me, if you'd be kind enough to leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from,

well, we, the whole team, would greatly appreciate it as we continue our mission to share these incredible stories from our distant past with you. But that's enough from me, and I'll see you in the next episode.