The Ancients - Treasures of Tutankhamun

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

One of the most famous names in history - who is Tutankhamun? In 1922 Howard Carter discovered one the most intact ancient tombs in history, filled with 5,000 priceless artefacts from the boy-king's life. But is Howard Carter truly responsible for this momentous discovery? And what can we learn about Tutankhamun beyond his famous death mask?In a special live episode from the Chalke Valley History Festival, Tristan is joined by Egyptologist and author Toby Wilkinson to talk about some of the most impressive finds from the tomb. With a variety of artefacts ranging from precious scarab beetles to Tutankhamun's personal trumpet - what can these wondrous objects tell us about life in Ancient Egypt?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. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program,

they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. It's the Ancients on History Hit.'m tristan hughes your host and in today's podcast well we've now recorded more than 200 episodes of the ancients we've released some 230 episodes it's incredible when you think of that but in our long ancients history we have not yet done a podcast all about tutankhamun and that's going to change

kind of today because in this episode, I'm very excited about this one, we're talking about a select number of objects that were discovered alongside the tomb of Tutankhamun almost a hundred years ago. Now when they discovered Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings alongside years ago. Now when they discovered Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings alongside Tutankhamun's sarcophagus there was also thousands of incredible objects and with me to talk through a handful of some of the most striking most interesting objects and what information they can reveal about ancient Egyptian society, their culture, the extent of their geographic knowledge, warfare, family, social life, etc, etc. Join me to talk through all of that. I was delighted a couple of months ago to interview Professor Toby Wilkinson at Chalk Valley History Festival. So yes, you're right,

this was a live ancients podcast recording in front of a live audience. It was really great fun to do. Toby, he's written a book all about these objects that were discovered alongside Tutankhamun's tomb and he explains all really well in this episode today, so I do hope you enjoy. So without further ado, to talk all about these treasures of Tutankhamun and what they reveal about ancient Egyptian culture, ancient Egyptian society, Here's Toby. Brilliant. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Tim, for that introduction. Love to see you all here today. Ready to talk all things Tutankhamun? Yes,

exactly. Going back to ancient Egypt. Toby, thank you so much for coming on the History Hit stage today. Thanks for having me. Now, these treasures of Tutankhamun, your new book all about Tutankhamun and 2022, it seems like a big year for archaeology, for Egyptology when talking about Tutankhamun. Now, why is that? So exactly 100 years ago, on the 26th of November 1922, Howard Carter stood at the end of a corridor cut into the bedrock of the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. And with him were three companions on that day, his aristocratic patron Lord Carnarvon, Carnarvon's daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert, and an English engineer friend, Arthur Callander. And in front of them, at the end of this corridor,

stood a blocked-up doorway. And the doorway was covered in plaster, and it was stamped with the impression of a seal. Not just any seal, but the seal of the ancient Egyptian royal burial ground. And they knew that what lay beyond that blocked up doorway might, just might, be an undiscovered royal tomb. And Carter took his archaeologist's trowel and made a small hole in the blocked up doorway. Then he held out a lighted candle to test for noxious gases. And then he peered into the gloom. And as his eyes grew accustomed to the light, he saw what lay beyond that blocked-up doorway. And after a few moments of complete sort of dumbfounded silence, Lord Carnarvon couldn't bear the suspense any longer

and he said, can you see anything? And Carter's famous reply came back, yes, wonderful things. Because what they had found was the undiscovered tomb And Carter's famous reply came back, yes, wonderful things. Because what they had found was the undiscovered tomb of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, more or less complete with all of its original objects, over 5,000 individual objects buried with Tutankhamen, which tell us not only about the life and death of one pharaoh, but about the whole of ancient Egyptian civilization. Each object tells a story, and together they transport us back in a way that nothing else

can to the time of the pharaohs. And Toby, what's so striking about all of these objects, more than 5,000 as you mentioned there, seems to be the complete variance in size and splendor and so much more of these objects which they found. And that's what I was really interested to tell in the book. I guess most of us would recognize the king's gold death mask. It's become the icon of ancient Egypt. But how many people know that Tutankhamen was buried with his underwear, with a lock of his grandmother's hair, with his toy chest, with his fire-making kit, with his first aid kit. There are all sorts of quite ordinary, everyday objects. Loaves of bread, joints of meat, jars of honey, lots of wine, all sorts of things buried in the tomb. And they may not be as recognizable as the gold and the jewelry,

but they have amazing stories to tell. They do indeed. And for this talk, we're going to delve into detail of six particular objects. We'll mention other objects too, but we'll go into the detail about six. But first of all, no such thing as a silly question. We've mentioned the name Tutankhamen, but who exactly was Tutankhamen? was Tutankhamun. Do you know the interesting thing is Tutankhamun was one of the least important pharaohs in the whole of ancient Egyptian history. Ancient Egyptian history spans 3,000 years, and Tutankhamun reigned for barely 10. He was a pretty insignificant pharaoh. He came to the throne at the age of about nine, and he died before his 20th birthday.

at the age of about nine, and he died before his 20th birthday. But the fact that we know his name and we speak it every day of the year somewhere around the world, somebody says the name Tutankhamen is down to the discovery of his tomb, because purely by chance, his tomb escaped tomb robbers and was found intact in the modern age. But he was one pharaoh out of 30 dynasties of pharaohs that ruled over Egypt. He came to the throne, as I say, at the age of about nine in about 1332 BC, so 3,300 years ago. And within a decade, he was gone. He died. The average life expectancy in ancient Egypt was about 35. So if you made it into your 30s, you were doing really well. Most people didn't. And Tutankhamen was no exception.

He died before his 20th birthday. So really, he's a footnote in history, or he should be a footnote in history, were it not for the amazing discovery of his tomb. There we go. Minor monarch, but so significant today. I mean, Toby, we had a bit of a chat about this before we started recording. One other thing I'd love to ask about before these objects in detail is the whole design, the nature of Tutankhamun's tomb itself.

Because it's not the biggest. In fact, it's surprisingly small. And if anybody goes to Egypt and visits the Valley of the Kings, you may go into some of the tombs of the other pharaohs of the period. And they tend to be very long, dug deep into the hillside, many corridors and chambers and decorated halls. Tutankhamun's tomb is really tiny. And the reason is that it wasn't a royal tomb at all. Tutankhamun was starting a proper royal tomb, but he died suddenly before

his tomb was finished. And custom in ancient Egypt dictated you had to be buried within 70 days. And there's no way they could finish his tomb in 70 days. So they looked around for a tomb that was empty, and this was going begging. It was probably designed for just a minor member of the administration, so not a royal tomb at all. And it was hurriedly pressed into service. A bit of quick decoration was done in the burial chamber, and the objects were just sort of piled in.

So really not intended as a king's final resting place. But ironically, the reason why it survived unscathed is because it wasn't a proper royal tomb. So let's focus on all the objects found in the tomb itself alongside the body of Tutankhamun. We've got on the big screen here, we've got depictions of the various objects we're going to talk about. So let's talk about the first one now, which is this. Now, having read your book, you know,

near right at the start, it's such a beautiful object. First of all, what is it? So this is an item of jewellery called a pectoral. And a pectoral is something that was worn on the chest, a bit like a big sort of pendant. And there were lots of pieces of jewelry in Tutankhamun's tomb. This one is quite an elaborate composition with lots of different elements. You see the sacred eye in a solar boat. You see the fruit and the flowers, the rearing cobras with the sun discs on their head. And then the central element, which is this beetle with wings. And so it encodes lots of different religious iconography, this particular piece of jewelry.

But actually the reason why I find this fascinating, and it's one of my favorite objects, is because its true significance was unrecognized until just 20 years ago. And I want you to focus on the body of the beetle itself. As you can see, it's made out of a piece of pale green stone. And when Howard Carter first saw this, he identified this stone as Chalcedony. It's a semi-precious stone.

But actually, the truth is way weirder than that. Because this is not Chalcedony. An Italian geologist just 20 years ago was granted permission to look at this in detail using modern scientific analysis. And it turns out that that beetle is made from glass, not man-made glass, but naturally occurring glass. Now, there are only two processes in nature that can fuse sand into glass. One is a volcanic explosion, but there

are no volcanoes in Egypt. And the other is a meteorite impact that has the sufficient pressure and temperature to turn sand into glass. And it turns out now from satellite imagery that there is a big meteorite crater but an awfully long way from the Nile Valley this is way out in the Sahara Desert straddling the modern border between Egypt and Libya so hundreds and hundreds of miles from the Nile Valley and there in one

particular area of the desert you'll find little pieces of green glass scattered over the desert surface. Some are quite small, some are substantial boulders, created by an ancient meteorite impact. So what this tells us is that 3,300 years ago, the ancient Egyptians not only knew of the existence of this desert glass, hundreds of miles, many weeks journey from the Nile Valley. But they were able to send expeditions out into just about the most inhospitable terrain you can imagine to bring back supplies of this magical, almost extraterrestrial material in order to place it in the king's jewelry. So they knew their land better than anybody else, better in fact than the modern Egyptians. And when I tell you that the first modern geological expedition to locate

this green desert glass wasn't until the 1920s, that I think really, it blows my mind. The 3,300 years ago, the ancient Egyptians knew about this. They saw its magical, mysterious qualities, and they sent expeditions to bring it back. And it just completely shatters any notions that we have that the ancient people stayed close to home. They didn't travel much. They were amazing travelers. Toby, I think it's such an amazing story, those distances involved. And for me, I think it's such an amazing story how much the archaeology can tell you, can fill in the blanks for some of these things. You know, for instance, if you were just looking at the literature, I'm going to talk about Alexander the Great. Sorry, but that's what I do. But

obviously crossing the desert to get to the Siwa. Oh, that's an amazing achievement. He was able to cross the deserts and stuff like that. You have no mention in the literature about these ancient Egyptian travelers finding these places. But thanks to the discovery of one object out of 5,000, more than 5,000 in Tutankhamen's tomb, you get this incredible insight, as you say, into the geographic knowledge of people living, well, 3,000, more than 3,000 years ago. As you say, it is astonishing. It is, and this is what I love about every object from the tomb. It's not just a thing of beauty.

It's not just a thing of craftsmanship. But it tells such an extraordinary story about the ancient Egyptians, about their lives, about their abilities, about their beliefs. It really is a kind of window into their world. Absolutely. And just so we can really get an idea, you mentioned it was kind of like on the neck, but how big is this pectoral? Oh, in old money, sort of five or six inches. So yeah, what is that? It's 15 centimeters or something like that. So it would hang on a cord probably, and you'd wear it around your neck.

It's not the most dramatic piece of jewelry from the tomb, actually, but it is amongst the most interesting in terms of its material. And also, just quickly, before we delve into more artifacts around it, you mentioned the beetle, the beetle in the center there,

the design. Do we know why the beetle? Why the beetle? We always associate it with ancient Egypt. Yeah, but you find beetles everywhere in ancient Egyptian art and particularly in jewelry. This isn't just any beetle. This is a dung beetle or scarab. And the dung beetle is so-called because it rolls a little ball of animal dung with its legs, and it lays its eggs in this ball of animal dung

so that there's some food for the baby beetles when they hatch. Now, the ancient Egyptians must have observed this, and their mind worked in all sorts of interesting ways, and they thought, now, this little beetle rolling a ball in front of it, that's a metaphor for the sun god pushing the orb of the sun across the vault of heaven. So the scarab beetle became a symbol of the sun. They saw these little baby beetles

hatching out of a ball of dung, new life coming out of death and decay. And this was miraculous for them. So again, this becomes a symbol of rebirth. So it works on lots of different levels. But the upshot is that the beetle is one of the most powerful symbols of resurrection in ancient Egypt. So a very appropriate symbol to have in a pharaoh's tomb. Now, this is just one object that can reveal more

about the geographic knowledge of ancient Egyptians. There are others too. There are indeed. Shall we go to the next slide? Go on then. And then we can talk about the crook and the flail. So the kind of classic pose of an Egyptian pharaoh is this, right? Hands across the chest, holding these two objects. These are royal regalia. So we've heard a lot in recent weeks with the Jubilee about the

Queen's coronation. And you know that the coronation of a British monarch, they get given all of these special objects to hold. There's the scepter, there's the orb, there are all sorts of other bits and pieces. And each one stands for a particular aspect of royalty, of monarchy. And this tradition of special insignia goes all the way back to the days of the pharaohs. In fact, 2,000 years before Tutankhamen, kings of Egypt carried the crook and the flail. Now, what does this signify? Well, the crook probably needs no introduction. It's a shepherd's crook.

It's exactly the same symbol as a bishop's crozier today in the Church of England. What it symbolizes is that the king is the shepherd of his people. He can restrain his flock by using a crook. So it's a metaphor for the king ruling over his people and having a degree of control over them. The flail is an item that actually has a dual purpose. On the one hand, you can use it in animal husbandry to kind of whip along your recalcitrant sheep when they're not going in the direction you want them to. So again, it becomes a symbol of the king as shepherd of his flock.

But it's also very similar to an object used to winnow corn. If you want to separate the wheat from the chaff, you can either tread it underfoot or you can flack it with a flail and that separates the wheat from the chaff. And so here in the crook and the flail, you have animal husbandry and agriculture symbolized in these two royal sectors. In other words, the king, the pharaoh, was master of the whole natural world, of everything that gave ancient Egypt its wealth and its power. All the natural resources were under his command. command. So it tells us that the origins of power in ancient Egypt, going way back into the prehistoric period, were people who could command flocks and herds of animals, who were seen as rainmakers, who could affect the way that crops grew. And that became associated in the Egyptians'

minds with what it meant to be a king. So not only are they beautiful objects, not only are the only examples of coronation regalia ever found in the ancient world, the only surviving examples, but they also tell us a lot about the way the ancient Egyptians looked at their kings and the powers that they invested them with. Now, you mentioned that just there, where you just said the only physical objects,

because that is so astonishing if these are, as you say, the quintessential items of royal regalia in ancient Egypt. I'm presuming, therefore, if not for these objects, what would be our evidence for these items? Well, you see on the left of the slide there, one of the miniature coffins from the tomb of Tutankhamen, and you'll see the little miniature coffin has its own miniature crook and flail. And there are lots of artistic images of the king holding these things.

But how brilliant to have the actual objects that he would have been invested with at his coronation that he would have held. And it just transports you back three and a half thousand years to what it must have been like to be a king. Were there any other key primary items like this which an Egyptian pharaoh would have used or we know of in a ceremony and something? Crowns is the obvious example. And we have different crowns for different purposes still today.

There's this Edward's crown with which the monarch is crowned, and there's the imperial state crown that's worn at the state opening of parliament. Well, in ancient Egypt, they went better than that. They didn't just have two crowns. They had a whole series of crowns. There was the red crown and the white crown and the blue crown and composite crowns, and each of those crowns stood for a different aspect of the king's role. Now the sad thing is that even in the tomb of Tutankhamen we didn't find an actual crown. So we've got lots of

images of the king wearing crowns but we still don't have a real crown from ancient Egypt. Wouldn't that be a discovery? Well there we go for future Egyptologists, budding Egyptologists, there is something to get your teeth into in the future. Let's move on to the next of our objects, which is this. I think we might know what this is, but go on, Toby, tell us what this amazing military object is. Shout out if you can recognize what this is. It's a chariot. So we might know about the Romans and chariots, but chariots go an awfully long way further back than that. The Egyptians were great users of chariots, but even they didn't invent the chariot. The chariot was invented in Asia, in Central Asia,

and the Egyptians first encountered it when they were fighting in battles against people who had come down from Asia and then conquered the Middle East and then decided to invade Egypt. This is about 200 years before Tutankhamen. And the Egyptian army is suddenly faced with this incredible military technology. And what do they do? They harness it for their own purpose. And within just a few years, they've not only perfected the chariot, but they've used it and turned the tables against their aggressor,

using their own enemy's weaponry to win and defeat their enemies. And then the chariot becomes a really powerful symbol of the pharaoh as a military leader. So the time of Tutankhamun is a time when Egypt has an empire, where a pharaoh is expected to lead his troops into battle and fight to defend the Egyptian empire. And the chariot becomes the supreme example of this role of the king. And it was used for other things as well. So Tutankhamun was buried with multiple chariots. Some were little light runabout ones like this one you see here, which he might have used when hunting at the weekend in the desert, mounted on a chariot, shooting arrows at poor

unfortunate animals that happened to cross his path. But he also had a state chariot, a bit like the state coaches that our own queen uses today, with extensive decoration and gilding and really sumptuous object. And I think the point is, you know, this tells us the... Although the Egyptians were quite a conservative culture, when they saw a good idea from outside, they were very quick to adopt it and then use it for their own devices. And they built up a whole, not only a great mastery of chariot warfare, which defended Egypt's empire for hundreds of years, but they built up a whole series of kind of myth

and symbolism around the chariot and the king's role as the great war leader. And of course, the irony is that Tutankhamen was a boy. He was only nine years old when he became king. He certainly never let his troops into battle. And yet it was such an important part of being a king to have a chariot that he had to be buried with them because otherwise his status would be diminished. So it's an amazing thing on lots of different levels. Because you're absolutely right there, isn't it? So you see on the walls of places such as Karnak, that iconic image of a pharaoh in his chariots with a bow and arrow.

That is everywhere, isn't it? Yeah, and this comes in at the time of 200 years before Tutankhamen, when Egypt has an empire. And all the kind of old ideas of the king as shepherd of his flock and that we saw with the crook and the flail, they're all replaced. The king is now the military leader. He is the commander in chief of the armed forces. And so the classic image of a king then, including in Tutankhamen's time, is of a king and his chariot firing bows and arrows at his enemies and defeating them on the field of battle. So yeah, it reflects

an Egypt that is at its imperial height. So are there any other objects alongside the chariot that can give us an idea from Tutankhamen's tomb about the supremacy of ancient Egypt, the military power of ancient Egypt at that time? Yeah, there's a whole series of weapons from his tomb. There are daggers, there are scimitars, these curved swords. There is also body armor, an incredible leather scale armor that the Egyptians would have worn into battle to protect them. There are shields and a beautiful pair of daggers, one of them in solid gold, the other one in iron. Iron was an incredibly rare material at this time. Egypt was still in the Bronze Age.

It hadn't emerged into the Iron Age. So iron was the kind of, it was the cutting-edge material, if you'll pardon the pun, of the 13th century. It was the titanium. It was the kind of semiconductor. It was the titanium. It was the kind of semiconductor. It was the graphene of Tutankhamun's time. It was the most sophisticated material. And he was buried with a beautiful iron dagger that was probably made somewhere outside Egypt.

It was a really treasured possession. So it was a period of great military advances. Hi there. I'm Kate Lister, sex historian and author, and I am the host of Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society, a new podcast from History Hit. Join me as I root around the topics which have been skipped over in your school history lessons. Everything from the history of swearing to pubic hair, satanic panic, cults,

there is nothing off limits. We'll be bed hopping around different time periods from ancient civilizations to the middle ages to renaissance and early modern right up to now. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Going from the military to another aspect really interesting for the team. I was really stunned by this last one, which is not the image on the left, the iconic image on the left of the face mask. We may well very much get to that. But it's the image on the right, this human, very poignant part of the object. What is it?

This is a very, very sad story. So Tutankhamen was only a boy and his wife was only a girl, but they tried to start a family. And his wife had two baby daughters, but both were stillborn. They didn't survive childbirth. And you can imagine how heartbroken the young couple must have been, trying not once but twice to have children and these tiny little bodies of his stillborn daughters were separately mummified

and placed in their own little coffins and placed in their daddy's tomb and you know from a historian's perspective if either of these little girls had survived the whole history of ancient Egypt would have been different they would have been the next pharaoh. There would never have been a Ramesses. There would never have been some of these more famous pharaohs from later periods. But with Tutankhamen's death and the death of his two little girls, that royal line died out and history changed forever. So it's not only a really important moment in Egyptian history, it's also a really poignant personal family tragedy that we see here. And it reminds us that ancient Egyptians, although they lived a long time ago in a far off land, they were human beings and they experienced the same emotions of love and loss and of grief and of hope that we all feel today.

And for me, studying ancient Egypt and wanting to bring their world to life, this sort of object kind of grabs me and takes me back into that time and what it must have been like for that young couple and the grief that they must have felt and the grief that they must have felt and the emotions that they must have gone through. So it's a really powerful and poignant story, I think. It really is. And I guess it also brings,

you mentioned two stillborn daughters there. I'm presuming infant mortality back in ancient Egyptian times was very high indeed. Yes, if you survive the first few weeks of childhood in ancient Egypt, you were the exception. Most children died in the first few weeks of childhood in ancient Egypt, you were the exception. Most children died in the first few days of life. And if you then made it through to about the age of 10, you were doing really well. Then a lot of people, including Tutankhamen, died in their teens. And if you made it to 20, and goodness me, if you made it to 30,

And if you made it to 20, and goodness me, if you made it to 30, you were really, really an exception. So this is a society without modern medicine, lots of illnesses around. And if you got ill in ancient Egypt, the chances were you weren't going to pull through. So, yeah, it was not an easy place to live, I think. Toby, do we have any similar examples to this in any other royal tombs that have been discovered in the Valley of the Kings or elsewhere or is this quite a quite a unique example? This is the only example we have of two babies essentially being mummified and buried with their parents and normally in ancient Egypt because children dying in the first few days of life was so common children would normally just put in little pottery jars and maybe even Because children dying in the first few days of life was so common,

children would normally just put in little pottery jars and maybe even buried under the floor of the house to keep them close to the family. But because these were royal babies, they were accorded this special privilege of being mummified and buried in a royal tomb. And lastly, you mentioned how no clear heir after Tutankhamun's own death. So just quickly, could you elaborate on that before we go on to the next object? What happens following the death of Tutankhamun in ancient Egypt?

Yeah, so in ancient Egyptian law, the person who becomes the next king isn't necessarily the son of the previous king. It's whoever carries out the burial of his predecessor becomes the next legitimate pharaoh. And it's that act of burying somebody that makes you the next king. Now, when Tutankhamen died, there were no heirs. The royal family had come to an end. And you have this aged courtier who is old enough to be Tutankhamen's grandfather, who's been knocking around at court for ages, sees his chance to get the top job. And so what he does is make sure he's in the right place at the right time

to bury Tutankhamen. And by burying Tutankhamen, he becomes the next pharaoh. And just to make sure that nobody contradicts him, he actually has himself painted in Tutankhamen's tomb, carrying out the burial, just to make the point that he is now the next legitimate king. He only reigns for about three years, and eventually he dies, probably of old age.

But it's a nice illustration of how they got around the problem of there not being any surviving relatives. Of course, yeah, you mentioned that. Of course, is it I? Is his name I? His name is I. I, got it. I could go on a whole tangent about those four paintings, but we're not going to because we're talking about the objects.

So let's move on from this very poignant stillborn daughter of Tutankhamun to the next object on our list, which is one of the most iconic objects having read your book. What is this? Yes, so you may know that my new book is called Tutankhamen's Trumpet. And the hundred objects that I talk about in the book, this is object number 100. And why did I choose his trumpet? Well, again, it tells an amazing story. So Tutankhamen was buried with not one, but two trumpets. One was bronze and one that you see

here was silver. The thing at the bottom underneath it is the wooden core that was placed inside the trumpet to stop it getting battered around and damaged in transit, just as modern brass instruments have a core as well. And we have lots of pictures on tomb walls and temple walls of trumpets being blown at military ceremonies, at special events at the royal court. So we know that music was an important part of ancient Egypt. In 1939, a British army bandsman called James Tappan was given Tutankhamen's silver trumpet to play in front of a BBC microphone. Can you imagine putting your lips to a really fragile musical instrument that is 3,300 years

old and has not been played for that amount of time? And he put a modern mouthpiece into the end, and live on the BBC, he blew into Tutankhamen's trumpet. And he managed to get, you can see there are no valves, this is a natural trumpet, he managed to get three notes out of it. Pretty awful it sounded, I happen to say. You can still listen to the recording online. So this tells us a lot, but for me, it's also an image of how much we don't know about the ancient world, because we have the trumpet, it has been blown, we can hear the sounds that it made, but we don't know what tunes it played. We have no notation of music from ancient Egypt. We don't know whether it was played in conjunction with other musical instruments in a band or whether it was just played on its own.

So there's lots of kind of missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. And for me as an archaeologist, this is what makes the subject so fascinating, because we have the evidence, but it only fits in certain pieces of the puzzle. And the rest is for our imaginations. We know from our own culture the importance of music at

military parades and at state occasions and gatherings. We can only imagine what this must have been used for in ancient Egypt. But we will probably never know. And it is up to all of our imaginations to fill in those gaps. So it's a great example for me of what we know, but what we have still to learn.

Music is such a core of, well, so many cultures, so many ancient cultures as well. Did I hear that right? That apart from these trumpets, we basically have no notation, nothing like that, not like in ancient Greece. We have no notation at all for understanding what they like to listen to. No, we know that if the Egyptians went to a banquet,

they rather liked there to be a little bit of music in the background. So there are tomb scenes showing people having a big family banquet, and there might be a harp player in the background, or there might be dancing girls with tambourines, or there might be people playing lutes and lyres. So it was obviously a culture in which music was really important, but we have no notation. So we have no clue what their music sounded like. Did it sound like modern Middle Eastern music? Did it sound like modern European music? We have absolutely no idea at all. And we will probably never know. We can only speculate. We can only speculate, indeed,

which makes an object like that, as you say, even more astonishing. Bronze and silver. Once again, the materials in these things, bronze and silver, I'm presuming fit for a king, fit for a pharaoh. But speculation, once again, I'm presuming normally these instruments

would be of different materials well bronze was was the kind of everyday material for weapons and probably for trumpets silver now you might be asking yourself why does a pharaoh have a special trumpet made of silver why is it made of gold whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not.

Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. And the answer is that silver in ancient Egypt was more valuable than gold because gold was found in abundance within Egyptian-controlled territory. There were lots of gold mines that the Egyptians controlled in Tutankhamen's time, producing, for the ancient world, masses of gold.

In fact, there's a lovely letter that has survived from the king of Assyria to the king of Egypt, saying, gold in your country is as plentiful as dirt. Please send me heaps of gold. Egypt was renowned in the ancient world as a producer of gold. So yes, gold was a lovely material, but silver, which had to be imported all the way from modern Turkey, that was a real rarity. And it's only in royal tombs that you find this quantity of silver.

So that would have been three or four times as valuable as a golden trumpet of the same size. So we have to sort of switch our ideas. For us, gold is the kind of number one metal, not in ancient Egypt, because they just had bags of it. Goodness, my thoughts about the famous funeral death mask of Susan Cumming has just been changed out of all that gold. Why wasn't it made of silver? Anyways, I had no idea about that, silver more important than gold at that time.

It's kind of like post-Roman Britain, actually, where you have all this Iron Age silver found in places like modern-day Scotland near Edinburgh, where silver was more important than gold. It's fascinating, as you say, getting over that idea that gold is always more precious than silver. But anyways, I go on a tangent too easily because let's get on to the next object, one that I know you wanted us really to talk about. And it's a great, important part of the

story. Well, it is an object, but it's also a picture. What's this amazing story behind this picture? So first, I want you to look at the piece of jewelry that's being modeled in this picture. It's another pectoral with a big chain. And you'll notice that it's made up of yet more beetles. Those same beetles again we saw earlier. Only in this case, the beetles aren't made out of green glass. They're made out of, does anybody recognize the stone? Lapis lazuli.

And lapis lazuli was incredibly rare in the ancient world. It wasn't found in Egypt. It wasn't found anywhere under Egyptian control. It came from the mountains of Afghanistan, which is where it's still mined today. And you can imagine the thousands of miles that that lapis lazuli must have been traded over to reach Egypt.

So this is one of the most sumptuous items of jewelry from the whole tomb of Tutankhamen. So the question then arises, this is a photograph, it's been color tinted, it was originally a black and white photograph taken at the time of discovery. Why on earth was one of the most valuable objects from the tomb given to a young Egyptian boy to model? And the answer is that this Egyptian boy, Hussein Abdel-Rassel is his name, was the person who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen. So we all think we know the story of Tutankhamen's tomb and Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon, but the truth has been hiding in plain sight all these years.

Howard Carter kept a very detailed diary of his excavations, and the entry for the 4th of November 1922 starts like this. Hardly had I arrived on the work the next morning than the unusual silence due to the stoppage of the work told me that something extraordinary had happened, and I was informed that a step had been discovered. Now, what does that tell us? It tells us that an excavation in 1922 started at the crack of dawn. All the Egyptian workers who worked on the dig would have started work as soon as the sun rose.

And only several hours later did Howard Carter arrive on site. No doubt after a leisurely breakfast in his dig house, maybe a second cup of tea, eventually he gets around to visiting the excavation site. And the thing that strikes him on the morning of the 4th of November is the eerie silence. He would normally arrive on site to a kind of cacophony of noise as people were using picks and shovels and clearing all of this, instead of which there's complete silence. There's silence because the work has stopped.

The work has stopped because a step has been discovered. In other words, it wasn't Carter who discovered that first step. It was one of the workers. And we're able now to put a name and a face to the person who made that breakthrough. Now, in 1922, digging in the Valley of the Kings was jolly hot and jolly thirsty work, and there was no running water. In fact, the Nile is several miles away. So what did they do? They employed young boys from the local village as

water boys, and a water boy's job was to go down to the river before dawn with his donkey and a bunch of water jars made of pottery, fill them up from the river, put them on his donkey, and walk to the Valley of the Kings ready to offer water to the workers. Well, an Egyptian water jar is a bit like a Roman amphora. It has a pointed base. So you can imagine Hussein Abdul Rasul, the 4th of November 1922, he gets up really early, he goes down to the river, he fills up his water jars, loads them onto his donkey, walks to the Valley of the Kings, gets the water jars down, and he has to set them down for the people to drink from.

How can you set down a water jar with a pointy base without it falling over and spilling the contents? Answer, you dig a little hole to set it in. And in digging a little hole on the morning of the 4th of November, he thought, hold on a minute, what's this? This isn't sand. There's a bit of flat stone here. And very quickly, that was exposed, and it turns out to have been a step, the step that Carter recorded in his diary that morning. That was literally the first step, and it led to a staircase, which led to a corridor, which led to the blocked-up doorway that I opened this talk with. So we talk a lot about Carter and Carnarvon, and they were both brilliant men in their

own right. But this centenary year, let us not forget that the tomb of the boy pharaoh was discovered by another Egyptian boy, albeit 3,300 years later. And we can finally give Hussein Abdel-Rassul his proper place in the history of the greatest archaeological discovery the world has ever seen. Is he well-known in Egypt today, or is this still a story that's really being revealed now? He is sadly no longer with us. He died a few years ago as an old man. He came from a family which was well known in the area of the Valley of the Kings. The Abdul Rassels were a slightly roguish clan, if truth be told.

They had lived in and amongst the tombs of their ancient forebears and were not averse to pilfering the odd artifact to keep body and soul together. So they were a little bit notorious and they were a big extended family. So not surprising that little Hussein got employed as a water boy, but he would tell this story in his, you know, late in life and, you know, recognized himself in the photograph and was very proud of the part that he played. I mean, he never made a big deal of it. And as I say, the true story was hiding in plain sight in Carter's diaries all of this time. But we preferred to have the kind of heroic Indiana Jones figure of Howard Carter be the hero of the tale instead of a poor Egyptian

water boy but without him we wouldn't have Tutankhamen's tomb or not in the way that we know so it is such an incredible story and I'll wrap up now so then we can open up to the audience to ask some a few more questions to you but from the Egyptian boy, from Abdul to the crook to the pectoral, all of these objects, we've only picked a few really to talk about in the last 40 minutes or so. But from what you've been saying, they are extraordinary. The amount of objects, the variance in these objects, they can tell us such an incredible story, add so much information into the story of a culture that spanned 3,000 years, of one of the most extraordinary civilizations, cultures of ancient history.

Absolutely. And that's what I think makes these objects worthy of having their stories told, because each one is an incredible window into a vanished world. And I'm often asked, what is my favorite object from the tomb? Well, there are 5,000 to choose from, and I'm kind of spoiled for choice. And I could talk about this pectoral or the king's underwear,

which we could talk about, which was also very interesting. But for me, the thing that brings me face-to-face with the real Tutankhamen is his toy chest. This was a little boy. He died before he became 20. Not surprising that one of the boxes in his tube was his toy chest.

And what did he have in his toy chest? He had a board game. Very keen on board games, the ancient Egyptians. He had two slings, no doubt for firing pellets at his younger sisters or something and he had a fire making set because all little boys love starting fires so this object again it just transports us straight back into the reality of not just a pharaoh but but a boy who lived an extraordinary but in many ways, an ordinary life. Well, Toby, this has been an absolutely fascinating chat over the past 45 minutes or so.

Last thing from me is just to say thank you so much for taking the time to chat to us today all about this. Your book is called Tutankhamen's Trumpet, the story of ancient Egypt in 100 objects. Fantastic. of ancient Egypt in 100 objects. Fantastic. Well, there you go.

There was Professor Toby Wilkinson explaining all about these specific objects, these specific treasures discovered alongside Tutankhamun's tomb almost 100 years ago. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Now, last things for me, you probably know what I'm going to say. If you would like more Ancients content in the meantime,

you can, of course, subscribe to our weekly Ancients newsletter via a link in the description below. Every week, I write a bit of a blurb of that newsletter explaining what's been happening in Team Ancient History Hit World that week. And last, but certainly not least, if you'd also be kind enough to leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, wherever you get your

podcasts from, 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.