The Ancients - Tutankhamun

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

Tutankhamun is one of the most famous names in ancient history. Known as the 'Boy King', he ascended the Egyptian throne at the age of 9 and ruled for just under a decade. In this time, there's evidence of his sporting activities, his religious restoration, and even his penchant for an ancient Egyptian board game. But is there more to the Boy King than his tomb tells us?In this episode, Tristan is joined by Professor Joyce Tyldesley to launch our new November mini-series diving into all things Tutankhamun. Together they discuss what the available sources tell us about Tutankhamun's life, and help debunk some of the popular myths out there about King Tut.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 Words November, it's 2022. This month is 100 years since the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings, one of the most significant, if not the most significant, archaeological discovery

of all time. We're going to be doing a small mini-series all about Tutankhamun, the discovery of his tomb, his legacy, Valley of the Kings, so on and so forth, every Thursday this month. Tut Thursdays. Hasht hashtag Tut Thursdays. There you go. And to kick it all off, we have got the brilliant, the awesome Professor Joyce Tildesley back on the podcast. Joyce, she works at the University of Manchester. I headed up to her office a few weeks ago when I was up in that part of the world. And Joyce, she's just absolutely brilliant. Any of you have heard Joyce's voice before, she was part of our Rise of Cleopatra multi-contributor podcast episode. She also explained all about Nefertiti last year. And she's back now to talk through everything regarding

the figure of Tutankhamun. We're not talking about his tomb or the discovery of his tomb in today's episode. We're focusing in on who Tutankhamun actually was. What is the archaeology and the hieroglyphs? What does this all reveal about who he was, about his life, about what he enjoyed doing, about his reign, his whole reign? What do we know? There is so much that we don't know. There are so many theories that still abound about several parts of Tutankhamun's story.

But who better to go to to learn more about this figure than the brilliant speaker, than the wonderful Professor Joyce Tilsley. You're going to love this episode, it's a wonderful episode to kickstart our new Tut Thursdays mini-series this November. So without further ado, to talk all about Tutankhamun, here's Joyce. Joyce, it is great to have you back on the podcast today. Thank you for inviting me. It's great to be here. And it's wonderful to be doing it in person. We've had you on the podcast before to talk about Nefertiti, and you also starred in the podcast, multi-contributor one,

about the rise of Cleopatra. And now, Tutankhamun 2022 it's a big year in the story of Tutankhamun isn't it but the actual figure of Tutankhamun although his name is so well known is he a pharaoh still shrouded in quite a lot of mystery he is a pharaoh shrouded in mystery having said that lots of the pharaohs are actually shrouded in mystery and Having said that, lots of the pharaohs are actually shrouded in mystery. And we know their names, but we don't actually know a great deal about them. So even if you go right back to the beginning of Egyptian history and you think of like the great pyramid builder Khufu, actually we know very, very little about him apart from the fact he built a great pyramid. Rameses II after Tutankhamen we know quite a bit about. But again, there's still a lot missing.

So yes, he's a man of mystery, Tutankhamen, but this isn't unusual. We shouldn't think there's anything sinister or strange about it, that we don't know a great deal about him. And because there is quite a lot of debate, mystery surrounding this figure, are there also quite a few misunderstandings too? There are misunderstandings about Tutankhamen, but we're not really sure what are the misunderstandings and the misinterpretation and what the truth is. What there are with Tutankhamen, but we're not really sure what are the misunderstandings and the misinterpretation and what the truth is.

What there are with Tutankhamen is a lot of theories. A lot of experts have different theories or slightly different theories that they interpret the same evidence in different ways. So depending on whose book you're reading, you will read a different account of Tutankhamen. Now, I think this is great because I love it. It means that readers can make their own mind up. You can't just read one book and have the definitive Tutankhamen, but you can maybe read two or three or watch two or three documentaries. You'll get different views of it and then you can form your own opinion of it. And that to me is the joy and the beauty of Egyptology is that everybody can join in and have an opinion on it. But I do know, I understand that for some people, this is quite frustrating that we have so many gaps that we have to fill in with deductions and speculative guesses.

And so as an Egyptologist, that sounds great, all the theories there, and with all these various people putting forward these different theories. But to create these theories, what types of sources do you have available when you're trying to look at the life of Tutankhamun? you have available when you're trying to look at the life of Tutankhamun? Well we have some texts but not as many as we'd like and we don't have texts really from his earlier years at all but by the time he becomes king he's putting up texts but the trouble is they're quite formulaic. The buildings that they went on aren't necessarily there so we've got fragments of these texts and we don't have anything like a personal history so we don't have anything that tells us for example who his parents were which would be quite interesting or if he had children who survived that sort of thing is completely missing

but we do know from his surviving texts that he saw himself as a restorer king as a traditional king of egypt and we have that In addition to texts we have archaeology in its broadest sense which is everything from surviving monuments to little tiny domestic goods that you might find in the remains of a city and we particularly we have the city of Amarna which is where he was brought up and we have the cities of Thebes and Memphis which are surviving less well than Amarna and then of course for Tutankhamen we have his tomb and that has an awful lot of information in there in the form of grave goods not really much written material it's one of the sad things about Tutankhamen's tomb that actually Egyptologists were quite disappointed when it was opened up that

it was all this fantastic gold which is great but they were really hoping for a library as well and a diary maybe today i did this and today i did that and my parents are and there was none of that the writings in the tomb is very formulaic again you know prayers and things like that so it doesn't really enhance our knowledge of his period and we have to take all this evidence and we have to fit it together and when we've done that it quite often gives us different scenarios and then we have to pick which we think is the most likely one because the objects in the tomb they're more than 5 000 aren't they ranging from like his dead children to his underwear to his toys yes absolutely and a lot of them haven't been studied because there are so many and obviously howard carter i, did a very good job in trying to conserve them with the skills available to him at the time.

But basically he took them out of the tomb, did some conservation work and sent them to the Cairo Museum. And the Cairo Museum has guarded them, but hasn't been able to study everything in the detail that we would like it to be studied. So there are some aspects of his tomb that are studied. For example, his chariots have been studied. The games boards have been studied. But not everything has yet been studied. So there are some aspects of his tomb that are studied. For example, his chariots have been studied, the games boards have been studied, but not everything has yet been studied.

So there's probably still a lot of information still to be gleaned from what we have. Well, let's focus on the time period of Tutankhamun and his early life. You mentioned names like Amarna and you said the Restorer, King Pharaoh just then. So set the context, when are we talking about an ancient Egyptian history just before Tutankhamun comes to the throne and what is ancient Egypt looking like at this point? Dates in ancient Egypt are really difficult and this is not just an excuse for me to be a bit waffly about the dates but it's hard to tie them into our calendar dates which is why Egyptologists tend to say like year two of Tutankhamun, year three of Tutankhamen. But he comes to the throne in roughly 1336 BCE. And he comes to the throne at a strange time in Egyptian history.

The preceding king, Akhenaten, has ruled for 17 years. But he's an unusual king in that he developed an affinity for one god. He didn't worship all the gods of Egypt like pharaohs traditionally did. He worshipped one god called the Aten. It's the disk of the sun. We just call it the Aten or the disk. And we can see it in Akhenaten's art. It shines down on the royal family.

So the royal family will be below, obviously in the sky is this sun. It's a faceless disk and it's got long thin rays that come out of it and the rays have little hands on the end and they hold out the anchor of life to the royal family this is unusual and actually quite serious for ancient egypt because the pharaoh traditionally is the head of all the cults of egypt so he is responsible for maintaining the cults. And of course, the Egyptians, they're polytheistic people. They absolutely believe in these gods. And the worry is, if you have a pharaoh who suddenly turns his back on many of the gods and just worships one god, is this going to cause problems in Egypt? It's going to cause chaos. Will

the rejected gods turn their back on Egypt and punish them them maybe he didn't know so this isn't just a theological happening it's actually a really serious issue that could potentially threaten the well-being of egypt i think it shows us that akhenaten must have been a very determined character so he did this he went this route he dedicated himself to one god and he built a new city to worship this god in the city today we call it amarna and it's in middle egypt so it's halfway between the two traditional capitals which would be thebes in the south which is modern luxor and memphis in the north which is just outside modern cairo so that is where tutankhamen was almost certainly born and raised of this new city of Amarna. So he was brought up in a very new city.

It had hardly been there. Sparkling tilework, you know, really new, clean, modern garden city. But he didn't, when he came to the throne, he didn't maintain this new religion. He changed it back to the old one. This is a blip. It's a blip in Egyptian history of about 20 years. How interesting. So he's actually raised in this new radical Egyptian system, but he does change it.

And we'll get back to that in a bit. But I mean, keeping on his family a bit longer, do we know who his mother was? Do we know his relationship with his mother at all, Tutankhamen? No, we don't know who either his mother or his father was, actually. We have to do, again, a bit of guesswork here. And I'm not going to talk about the DNA evidence at at the moment because i would like to put that on one side because the dna evidence not everybody believes it some people firmly believe that the dna that

you get from mummies is very valid and works and some people think it's too badly contaminated and the results are suspect so i'll put that one side and we look at the archaeological evidence what we can see and we know this from his tomb it's a kind of circular story we didn't realise until his tomb was discovered that Tutankhamun was very young when he died and he was only about 18 years old because we have his body we can see that and we know it's him because he's in his own tomb and he's not been disturbed one of the few facts that we can be clear of that he dies at about 18-19 years of age, this suggests that he came to the throne quite young. We have wine jars in his tomb and they're dated by his year dates and the highest year date that names him is year

nine. There's also a year 10 wine jar. So assuming that these wine jars were filled during his reign, which seems very likely, then we can see that he was on the throne for about 10 years. So from this, we can deduce that he came to the throne at about eight years of age. So going back to your question, the fact that he came to the throne at about eight years of age indicates that he didn't marry his way into the royal family or he didn't take the throne of Egypt in any way. He actually inherited it. We would love his tomb to tell us who inherited it from, but of course it doesn't. So we have to look at who was around. The obvious candidate is Akhenaten, who's been on the throne for 17 years before he dies, and his

wife, Nefertiti. So ideally, we would say, well, it's a natural succession, Akhenaten and Nefertiti, their son Tutankhamen inherits. But there is another individual around at this time whose name is Smenkaray. And there are quite good archaeological evidence to suggest that he married the eldest daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. So who is Smenkaray, by the way? Smenkaray just pops up towards the end of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. So who is Semenkaray, by the way? Well, Semenkaray just pops up towards the end of Akhenaten's reign, it's about the same time that Tutankhamun pops up. There are several possibilities. You might wonder why I'm saying that these sons pop up, yet I'm being quite confident in talking about daughters. We know that Akhenaten and Nefertiti had six daughters

because they appear on their monuments, they're shown and they're named. But the convention at this time in 18th Dynasty Egypt is that you will show your daughters if you're a king. You don't show your sons. Because the kings, I think, it's not explained why this happened, but presumably the daughters kind of will always be part of your family, will always be very supportive and protective, and that's one family group.

Whereas the sons are potential kings, and they will eventually have their own monuments but you don't put them onto your monuments so there's nothing sinister in the fact that neither Tutankhamun or Smenkhare's children appear on the monuments while the six princesses do appear on the monuments but suddenly towards the end of Akhenaten's reign these two characters Tutankhamun and Smenkhare pop up Smenkhare seems to be the older and there's evidence that he marries the eldest daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti who might well be his sister or half-sister Tutankhamun marries the third princess Ankesempa Aten who might well be

his sister or half-sister I always wonder actually whether there wasn't a third prince who popped up between Smenkhare and Tutankhamun and married the second daughter. It would make neat sense but if there was he died young and she died young too. So we're in a position where towards the end of Akhenaten's reign we know that there is someone called Smenkhare married to the eldest Amarna princess and it's generally assumed that this Smenkhare was Akhenaten's intended heir. And that before Smenkhare had his own heirs, Tutankhamen, possibly his brother, would be his heir. But Smenkhare disappears and seems to die. So then Tutankhamen becomes the important one. Personally, I think that Smenkhare and Tutankhamen are brothers.

Their sons born to Akhenaten and either Nefertiti or another woman but not everybody thinks this some people think that they're brothers of Akhenaten so that they would be three brothers Akhenaten, Smenkare then Tutankhamun and some people think that Smenkare is the son of Akhenaten and Tutankhamun is the son of Smenkare. So he will be Akhenaten's grandson. And I've tried to do the maths. It's difficult because you don't know when everyone's born, but it's just about possible, yes. So we even have three possible fathers for Tutankhamen.

On the balance of probability, because I tend to go with this Occam's razor type theory, I would go for Akhenaten being his father. It is so interesting that, you know, trying to link it all together, and it would be lovely to see Nefertiti, arguably one of the most famous women from ancient Egyptian history, directly linked to Tutankhamen, the most famous man from ancient Egyptian history.

Yes, yes. I mean, she could well be. She has six daughters, but she's married to Akhenaten for a long time. When Akhenaten takes the throne, they're already married. So they might already have children. She might already have sons. And then she has has these daughters but there are gaps between the daughters so it could be that those are where the sons came in we just don't know we certainly can't rule her out but we also know that Akhenaten as a pharaoh had a harem of queens so there are other women and we know of at least one prominent royal woman called kia who appears

in a manor art and who is known to have a child as a daughter did she have a son could she be tutankhamen's mother it's very difficult to tell but as you say one of the joys of egyptology in that these various theories they come to the fore it is it is i mean you can pick up bits of evidence to support any of these theories i could probably if we had three Egyptologists here we could each debate one of them we could each support the argument well it's quite interesting because everyone thinks that ancient history is so settled and done and dusted and it's not. Oh absolutely not trust me I've done the wars of the successors and exactly the same and so many other periods too I mean Joyce it is fascinating and if we go back to the story of Tutankhamun if

you say he inherits the throne very young the circumstances surrounding him coming to the throne it doesn't seem people are putting him on as a coup or anything like that it very much seems to be a natural succession does it does seem to be a natural succession there's no mention of anything like a coup i should probably qualify that a bit to say that the Egyptians never write down bad things because writing is sort of magical hieroglyphic writing is magical and it could cause them to happen and also there's a natural politician's desire not to write down bad things in your own reign so if that did happen they would probably try and hide it but there is no evidence of any problem at all there is a slight gap. It could be that the succession went

straight from Akhenaten to Tutankhamen. It could be that it went from Akhenaten to Smenkar-Re for maybe a year and then to Tutankhamen. It's not very easy for us to tell because we don't have the documentation. But certainly, I would say within two years of Akhenaten's death, Tutankhamen is very firmly on the throne. And once he's on the throne, there's no evidence of anyone trying to take it off him. So which is, I think, would be an indication that there would be problems. So Tutankhamun, he's just a boy. He's just a kid. You know, he's still playing with his toys. Do we have any idea, therefore, about his temperament,

about his health when he comes to the throne? You know, this is just a little kid at the end of the day. It is a little kid. He's probably been trained because he comes to the throne. You know, this is just a little kid at the end of the day. It is a little kid. He's probably been trained, because he's a royal prince, whoever he is, he would have probably been trained to be a potential successor. Because I'm fairly sure that in ancient Egypt, death in childhood was such a common thing,

you wouldn't necessarily know who was going to succeed you pretty much until the point of succession, actually. So all royal princes would be trained in case it was them that got the call so he would have probably been trained he would have been able to read and write he would have probably had some sort of military training we know that other princes from other times were given this sort of training if we look in his tomb we can get a few clues maybe to his character for example he's got a lot of board games in there. So we can deduce that he liked playing board games.

Board games are also, in their own way, quite magical. By playing a board game, you can communicate with another world. So they can be connected with death and the passage into the afterlife as well. We sometimes see images of people playing board games on tomb walls with no opponent. And it's almost as if they're playing death. The famous decorated tomb of Queen Nefertari. There's a picture of her in there playing a board game with no opponents. So it's part of the funeral ritual, but he has so many

that it suggests that this is what he likes doing. On the other hand, he's got very few musical instruments and the ones he has are kind of connected. Like he's got two trumpets, but they're army equipment rather than musical. So he's probably pushing it too far. But, you know, I like to think that he enjoyed a board game but he wasn't particularly musical we've got a lot of his clothes as a child which I think is very interesting because it suggests that from the point of which he became king we haven't got baby clothes but certainly we've got the clothes that would fit an eight-year-old child it suggests that these have been saved which would suggest that there's something about them that you save a king's clothes because they

would have been very very expensive and the normal practice in a normal egyptian house was a garment would be worn till it literally fell apart and it would be used as patching or it become bedding or used as a towel and all used in mummification to make bandages so the fact that his clothes are all saved first of all shows how really rich he is, which we knew anyway. But also, maybe they have some sort of magical powers that they can't be passed on. So maybe this would have happened to all kings

because, of course, Tutankhamun's is the only intact tomb. We can't compare it to anything else. But maybe once you become king, your garments are sacred. We know that the clothes that the statues of the god were were also extremely valuable so maybe a king's clothes are the same anyway whatever the reason we have all these children's clothes for Tutankhamun and we can see that he actually had quite bright colourful decorated clothes which comes as a bit of a surprise because if you look at tomb walls you see everybody wearing

white don't you white sparkly garments and some jewelry but his actual clothes are not they're embroidered they've got spangly sequins sewn on them and they're colorful so he wore those which is the dyes getting the dyes of course i guess if there's purple or whatever you know it emphasizes your wealth very expensive linen isn't easy to dye either it's a difficult thing to do and embroidering most egyptian clothes aren't embroidered they don't go in for this sort of fancy clothing it's quite simple sewing is not a great skill in ancient egypt but for the king's wardrobe it is and he has all all this clothes we can see this we can see that when he was a little boy he wore earrings which for an 18th dynasty man the grown-up men didn't wear earrings but children did so you would take your earrings out as you grew up possibly when he became king or

shortly after and that's very interesting because his death mask also had holes for pierced ears but they were covered up so whether that was his death mask as a child and then it was adapted for him being an adult or whether as has suggested, it was for somebody who did have pierced earrings and was borrowed and was given to him and they were covered up, we can't tell. But it's interesting. It's fascinating to actually have the clothes of this young kid when he came to the throne, still surviving. But of course, at the end of the day, he is still a child when he ascends the throne. Do we know of any prominent figures these advisors that would

have surrounded him that we know surrounded him during his tenure yes we know of several prominent advisors included amongst which have to be his eventual successor i and successor after that horum heb who was actually tutankhamen's heir but actually didn't inherit the throne from Tutankhamen. It's obvious because he was eight years old and because, as we've said, he was born at Amarna. He had really no knowledge of traditional Egypt. He only knew Amarna life. So for him to do what he did, to come to the throne and restore the traditional gods of Egypt, he's clearly been guided by someone. We also know he had a nurse, Maya, she's called. we've got her tomb at Saqqara in northern Egypt and we're not quite sure what she did for him.

We generally describe her as a wet nurse and assuming that she probably was a wet nurse but she also raised him a bit just because he's not just all male influence that's all I want to say you know there's a female influence there but as a prince he did have male tutors who helped him as well and it's quite clear that his reign in the beginning was guided by other people I think also what tended to happen if a young prince inherited the throne from his father his mother would guide him and it's almost as if some queens of Egypt rule themselves they almost have hidden reigns where they're helping their young son to rule until he gets of an age where he can do it himself we don't know who Tutankhamen's mother is but we do know that the eldest Amarna princess

Mary Tartan married to Smenkhare was probably still alive it's possible that Nefertiti was still alive and his wife is a Nemanja princess. So he also has this feminine input here who will also support him in his reign. So he's got quite a few people guiding him. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, host of the new podcast American History Hit. Twice a week, I'll be exploring stories from America's past to help us understand the United States of today. Join me as I head back in time to witness Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence,

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All of these people who are guiding him, whether it's Maya or Horemheb or so on and so forth, you mentioned this restoring of the old gods in Tutankhamun's reign. It seems to be the major achievement of his reign. Do we have any ideas of how Tutankhamun and his advisors, how they went about doing this, achieving this? Yes, the restoration of the old ways was, I think, in many ways, very, very simple. They left Amarna and they moved back to the traditional cities. So Memphis and Thebes flourished again. I mean, they'd never closed down.

It's one of the odd things about the Amarna period that we're so focused on amarna city and we have relative large amount of archaeological evidence from there that we tend to not know what's happening outside amarna but presumably memphis and thebes continued much as they had done before but without the main temples flourishing he reopened these main temples throughout the land and he went around restoring them restoration for an egyptian king is a really good thing. It shows that you're friends with the gods. The gods crave this sort of restoration. They like things being put back as they were,

so it's a really good thing to do because it shows his people that he's effective, but it also shows the gods that he's effective as well. And even the art style, which changed under Akhenaten, it had to change because it had to reflect the new god so it changed in composition in that the new god was in the sky where it's traditionally gods on earth or on the same plane at least as the kings that they're talking to or serving or whatever so that was put back to how it was but also figures had become elongated and Akhenaten

was depicted in a very exaggerated style this moved largely back to the traditional Egyptian art again so that changes as well and yes it must have been an amazing thing to do because for the Egyptian people who'd been told that they had to worship one god and then suddenly to have the old gods put back again I think for most people the peasants who lived in the villages they probably didn't notice much difference because they're not really involved in state religion. But for the elite who surround the king, this would be a really important thing. I think particularly for them, one of the problems with Akhenaten's religion is it's very much focused on the king and it's been seen as a way almost of worshipping the royal family. It didn't offer an

afterlife to anybody else because Osiris, the god of the dead, had gone with the other gods. So the elite during Akhenaten's reign, when they died, would just be trapped in their tombs and maybe allowed to haunt the Aten temple, which wasn't very satisfactory. Tutankhamen comes along, puts Osiris back in his right place as god of the dead and suddenly the elite can once again look for an afterlife in the field of reeds and you know it must have been very very popular i would think i mean the popularity of it absolutely and in regards to tutankhamen himself with this restoration of the old ways from the archaeological evidence that we have surviving from these temples that are reopened do you have any idea if Tutankhamun himself

preferred any of the old gods aligned himself closely with any particular of these gods Tutankhamun does seem to be particularly dedicated to Amun the god Amun of Thebes that might be though because we're getting our evidence from Thebes, because it's quite clear that as a king, you would worship the local god. So if you were a king and you went to Memphis, you would show your devotion to Tar. Or Apis, maybe, or one of the two. Yeah, the main god would be Tar. But yes, but that group, that family group of people, and if you went to other places, it would be the local gods. So a lot of evidence comes from Thebes. Amun and his family are worshipped at Thebes.

But he changes his name, which is quite interesting, because he wasn't born Tutankhamun. He was Tutankhatun, after the old god. And he changes it to Tutankhamun, and it's not Tutantar. That seems quite clear. And his wife changes her name. She changes it from Ankesempa Aten to Ankesem Amun. So that, I think, is a very clear thing. It's emphasising who is actually the main head god, you're guessing, isn't it, with Amun,

who's by this time god of the universe, creation, and everything. It's not us anymore. It's Amun who's the head of it. Yes, and it's a reminder that things have changed I think the problem with Akhenaten's reign it wasn't sustainable it was so basically focused on him and his beliefs that when he wasn't there it kind of all fell apart it was a bit falling apart anyway Amarna city was beautiful and it was built very quickly but it was already crumbling and it was having to be rebuilt even though they were only there for 17 years so really going back to the old way was a sensible thing to do it's an experiment that didn't really work but it is interesting because as we said he could have had no knowledge

of this he was born at amarna he'd never experienced anything else he would have been raised in the cult of the art and and he's been told to do this must have been. And it's also interesting because we have the odd image of him as a restoring king, and he looks, you know, about 40 years old, which clearly he's not. I mean, age doesn't matter in these. They're not portraits, they're representing what you want to be. But he doesn't look... We've fallen into the bad habit, I think, of regarding him as a boy king,

and it's quite clear that he himself does not want to be regarded as a boy. He wants to be regarded as a king. That is so interesting. So I want to go on to that right now. And actually, now that you mention that Amun, this god aligned with Tutankhamun, it makes sense given his name, doesn't it? And let's keep on Thebes because Karnak, mighty temple complex, you do have a statue of Tutankhamun surviving, do you? And he

does quite look adolescent in how he's depicted in that statue. Yes, they do. But we also have one at Luxor where he and his wife are together and they're depicted as the god Amun and his wife Mut. So we have all sorts of examples. It depends what you want to show. As a king, as a mature king, you might be depicted as a child with the gods. Or as a young king, you might be depicted as a child with the gods. Or as a young king, you might be depicted as an adult with a completely adult body. Because Egyptian statuary is not portraiture. It's very much showing the propaganda that the king wants to convey. And we make a big mistake if we try and imagine that people look like the statues, because they didn't necessarily. They might have done a bit but basically it's supposed to inspire the people, inspire

the gods so you might want to appear as a young king. We have a beautiful head of Tutankhamun as a young man again coming out of a lotus leaf that came out of his tomb and that's equating him with the young sun god emerging from a lotus at the beginning of creation. He appears in different guises. That sounds very similar to how he's portrayed at karnak as well if it's related with the sun and everything like that so it's yeah he doesn't want to be depicted as anything different i think he's very traditional and you would be wouldn't you if you've just come from a religious experiment that hadn't really gone well you would want to be very very traditional and

yes to get back in good favor and everything with the elite that was surrounding you. Yes. If we focus a bit more on Tutankhamun now, and we want to talk about leisure. Do we know what he'd like to do? You mentioned board games already, but from the archaeology that we have surviving about Tutankhamun, the objects from the tomb or other sources alongside that, do we know what other things he'd like to do as pharaoh? It's an

interesting question well they're all interesting questions but as with all the others there's a different aspect to it as well because there's a lot of debate over tutankhamen whether he had damage to his leg which would give him mobility issues his mummy has a damaged left foot and it has been suggested that he might have had a club foot but club feet quite often or not club feet but the appearance of a club foot appears in a mummy if you bandage the foot too tightly too soon so again we have divided experts with some seeing Tutankhamun as basically a disabled pharaoh who can barely walk and some seeing him as having no walking issues at all nothing wrong with him it's just his foot was damaged after death when he was bandaged so

depending on how you interpret it depends how you see his life as a child as well i think there's a lot of sticks in his tomb and it's been argued that these are walking sticks so they support the idea that he had mobility issues but the stick in ancient Egypt is a symbol of authority a lot of people carried sticks a bit like as I imagine Edwardian and Victorian gentlemen used to carry sticks didn't they they just did it just habit people don't do it these days but they did and from the stories we have the fictional stories and so on it seems that quite often people would whack other people with the sticks lesser people there's even a saying that the school boy's ear is on his back meaning that you beat the school boy so that he will learn

properly he'll listen to what you're saying so the idea of walking with a stick doesn't necessarily mean that you need that stick it might be a symbol of your authority and it might be a symbol, it's kind of a mini weapon sort of thing that you're not going to use really, but it's there if you need it. So again, we have two very different portrayals of Tutankhamen because in his tomb, we have chariots and we have hunting equipment

and we have images of him fishing and hunting and riding in this chariot. If he was severely disabled, he might not have been able to do that. But if he wasn't, he could do it. But I've already said that art isn't portraiture. It doesn't necessarily mean that the scenes showing him doing these things are real. My personal view is that they are real, that he did hunt, that he did use his chariots, that he loved speed.

Because he's a young man. Young men do tend to love speed. And I think this, my view is that the damage to the foot happened afterwards, but you'd be able to find someone who would argue the other way around. And some of the reconstructions of Tutankhamen's body that are out there on the internet now, they show him with a quite badly withered leg,

which he might not have had. That debate once again, isn't it? It is, it is. But it's, you know, that hunting, is it ostrich eggs or something? That hunting ostrich, which is normally put forward, it's like what he loved doing. Yes, I mean, we have a scene of him.

Well, the best piece of evidence is his fan, which was found in the burial chamber, not too far away from his actual body. And it would have been a big ostrich fan, but the ostrich feathers that would have fringed the top of it have gone but we know from the inscriptions that they're alternate brown and white ostrich feathers and it is not like a lady's fan that we have today it's like a fan on a stick that someone would have held and fanned him with it so it's quite a big thing and there's a scene of him going out to hunt ostriches this is a scene of him coming back with

ostriches and i have always personally felt that coming back with ostriches. And I have always personally felt that this is a massive clue left to us. You could argue that I'm possibly going into the realms of fiction here, but this is quite close to the king's body. And if we look at the king's body, we can see it's very badly battered. So I've always felt that this is a clue that's been left to us that maybe he died as a result of an accident at speed, that he sustained racing over the desert hunting ostriches. Because hunting ostriches is a great royal sport. It's something that the Egyptians couldn't do until the New Kingdom, which is when Tutankhamen lived,

because prior to that they didn't have the horse and chariot. But he does have the horse and chariot. We don't know that he fought in any battles, so speed hunting would be the next sort of big thrill for him. And personally, that's what I think he enjoyed doing. Well, you've led me on right on to the next question, which was going to be, how did Tutankhamun die? But it sounds therefore like, so you've got this theory,

and so there are many theories, therefore, as to why he reaches his end at such a young age. Yes, I think we can say it was unexpected because his designated heir, Horemheb, wasn't there. Horemheb is a general in the army. He was possibly off subduing people outside Egypt. And Tutankhamun, actually, sorry, tangent. So Tutankhamun, we don't know,

but maybe he had accompanied Horemheb on campaigns during his life. Maybe he had. There's no evidence for that. I don't know why, but I don't think he did. I think there wasn't a campaign serious enough for him to need to do that, perhaps. But some people do think he did. So we'll just have to leave that as a bit of an open question. But we do know that he was campaigning around about the time of his death. We know that Horemheb wasn't there to take the throne,

and that I, who coincidentally, not only succeeded Tutankhamen, but is possibly Nefertiti's father, so may have been Tutankhamen's grandfather. This is very old. So he's not going to have a very long reign. We know that, or we can guess that it's unexpected because things aren't in place as they should be and I think if he'd been expected to die, his successor would have been there. The body is very badly battered and obviously it's really difficult with a mummified body. Did the damage occur immediately before death or immediately after death? It can be very very difficult to tell but I think the fact that the heart is missing is quite important. Normally you would sew the heart back inside the body if it became detached because a dead Egyptian might need it in the afterlife.

And Tutankhamen's heart isn't there, which suggests that it decayed before he got to the undertakers. And because of that, I think he died away from the palace in an accident. And I think this clue of the fan being close to his body, I like to think, well, I don't like to think of him dying. close to his body. I like to think, well I don't like to think of him dying, but if I do think of him dying, I think of him dying in an ostrich chase, maybe being trampled, being, you know, coming out of his chariot. So what do we therefore know about the process itself when he's brought to the Valley of the Kings, the deceased king? Do we know much about how he was buried? It would have been difficult when he died because Akhenaten died at Amarna, we assume, and there hadn't been a royal burial for quite some time because Akhenaten had been on the throne

for 17 years and Tutankhamen's got another 10, so it's been at least 27 years before there's been one, which is quite a long time in ancient Egypt. And there hadn't been a burial, a royal burial, in the Valley of the Kings. We assume that his body was taken as quickly as possible to the undertakers and he seems to be mummified in pretty much the normal way but we have to be careful here because the other royal mummies from the valley of the kings weren't found in their own tombs. They were taken from their tombs at the end of the new kingdom and they were unwrapped and re-wrapped so their wrappings are not necessarily what the original undertakers would have put them in and sometimes it's easy to say well the undertakers made a

mistake because they didn't do this and they didn't do that but actually we have to allow for both natural changes in techniques and the fact that the mummies that we're looking at that we're used to seeing aren't in their genuine original condition. So having said that seems to be a fairly standard mummification but he's very badly battered so there's damage to the rib cage, there's damage to the leg, he's got a broken leg, obviously the bandaging on the foot isn't right, the heart's missing and when he's put in his coffin he's absolutely coated in unguents which is presumably part of the ritual but these cause a lot of damage. In fact while he's put in his coffin, he's absolutely coated in unguents, which is presumably part of the ritual. But these cause a lot of damage.

In fact, while he's in his sarcophagus and coffins, they even seem to char the body. They react with the body and there's a bit of charring going on there as well. So it means that his mummy was in far less good condition than we would have liked it to have been when it was recovered. How interesting, because I remember visiting that tomb not too long ago and seeing the pictures on the wall that scene is the scene for the book of the dead if i'm not mistaken yes it's being pulled across the desert and well there's eye on the right and he's got the oh yes he's doing the opening of the mouth opening of the

mouth ceremony that's yes i'm not an expert it seems to be that in ancient egypt you you're expected to bury your predecessor so that if you do bury your predecessor you're pretty much bound to be king and that's what Ai is doing but there's another scene where we can see him being pulled to the tomb and he's being pulled by dignitaries there are the elite who are pulling him there I mean we've just seen the royal funeral and you can see how it becomes a real important state occasion obviously this was the same thing we haven't got many pictures. There's only the burial chamber that's decorated,

and it's not very big at all. But we can see a bit of what's going on, that he's dragged across the desert from the undertakers, that he's then, I will prop up his mummy and do the opening of the mass ceremony, and then they go into the tomb, and then he's left alone. And he's left alone there, and following his death, with I and then Horemheb, and then all those ph alone. And he's left alone there and following his death with Ai and then Horemheb and then all those pharaohs that then succeed them. What happens to Tutankhamun's

legacy? In ancient Egypt at least. He is pretty much forgotten and this is because of his links with the Amarna period with Akhenaten. Nobody really respects Akhenaten and his legacy and so when the Ramesside kings who come after Horemheb who's after Ai who's after Tutankhamen start to write the history of Egypt and this is their history that we tend to read they cut him out of Egyptian history so the his father Amunhotep III is acceptable because he didn't deviate too much from the norm but the son Akhenaten is cut out of history. Unfortunately Smenkar-Re and Tutankhamen and I are also cut out of history. So it's just like they never were. So the official written history at this point goes from Amenhotep III to Horemheb with this little gap.

goes from Amenhotep III to Horebheb, with this little gap, which caused all sorts of problems when we started to be able to translate the king lists, and there were kings missing, because they'd just cut them out. And as I previously said, hieroglyphs are magical, so by cutting them out, it's almost as if they didn't exist. But we assume this happened not because they were particularly personally against Tutankhamen, but he was just too closely associated with what had gone on before. It seems a bit unfair because Tutankhamen really worked to restore Egypt

but he only had 10 years. If he'd had 30 years on the throne, 40 years on the throne, it would have been I think very, very different and he might have become a great pharaoh so they're cut out of history but of course you're not cut out of the archaeology you can't do that so we still as we've mentioned we have statues of Tutankhamen.

He was still in his tomb and Amarna city still survived. So there was evidence for Tutankhamen. His name wasn't entirely forgotten. It's just that he wasn't in the official history. But this has caused confusion when people have tried to reconstruct the history. But because he was a relatively minor king, and he was forgotten for the official history, his tomb was also forgotten.

And it's this that really allowed him to survive. This plus one other important fact, that when I buried Tutankhamen, he seems to have swapped tombs. So I didn't bury Tutankhamen in Tutankhamen's tomb that he'd been building for the ten years. He buried it in the tomb that he'd been building for the 10 years. He buried it in the tomb that I himself would have been buried in. And I took Tutankhamun's tomb.

I, in Tutankhamun's original tomb, was robbed in antiquity. We don't have his body. Tutankhamun, in I's little tomb in the bottom of the Valley of the Kings, was covered in flood debris not long after and survived. So by swapping the tombs, I in fact saved Tutankhamun and condemned his own mummy to be destroyed. It's kind of ironic, isn't it? Very ironic. There you go. I had no idea about that whatsoever. I mean, having talked through that, because sometimes with Tutankhamun, some people say most famous name in ancient Egyptian history today, but perhaps one of the most insignificant pharaoh that ever lived. But from what you're saying there, although his reign is forgotten

by these later pharaohs, his role is pretty significant in bringing back the old way. So it begs the question, I'm asking you, how significant a pharaoh do you think Tutankhamun was? I think he was significant. All right. When he came to the throne, he was about eight years old and he wasn't directing things. He was very much under the people's influence. He was probably being told what to do. But gradually he was growing into his authority. We've seen that the old gods were restored, the temples were opened. There was fighting in the Near East that might have continued. There's no reason why Tutankhamun couldn't have built an empire like the Ramesside kings did. It's just the fact he was cut off too

soon. So I guess I would say he had potential and it's sad for him that that potential was never met. Also of course he didn't have children that we know of to survive and I think if he'd left a son who would promote his legacy. I think that's made a huge difference to the fact he went back to Ai who was more strongly associated with Amarna and his links to Nefertiti and the royal family possibly even than Tutankhamen has done him no favours because it's easy to sandwich Ai together with Akhenaten and you just kind of lose sight of Tutankhamun between the two. So there you go. It's so interesting to hear that. I've learned so much more during this conversation than the actual, like into the actual significance of Tutankhamun and how history, ancient history has damped him in many ways. So it's good to be looking at the archaeology to

learn so much more about that. Joyce, I could ask so many more questions. I will ask one slight tangent question before we completely wrap up, because we see normally with pharaohs, they have two different names. So Tutankhamun, Hatshepsut is one name, but she's also got a different cartouche as well. With Tutankhamun, did he also have a different... He has five names. They have five names, the kings of Egypt. Tutankhamun is what we call him today the names that we use for the pharaohs are not the names that they use for themselves but it's too complicated to try and we've got into the habit it's too complicated to try and reverse that now the same way I have to say that we say that he's in the 18th dynasty he wouldn't have known that they didn't have the

dynasties either this is a modern thing as well so we are always looking at to john carmen through slightly modern eyes but i'm hoping this isn't blinding us to actually seeing him as a real person it's too easy with him isn't it to see him as just as a dead boy king but actually i think there's so much more to him than that well absolutely and in this year of all those years you know very important in the story of Tutankhamun and his discovery. Joyce this has been absolutely brilliant last but not least you've written a couple of books and your most recent book on Tutankhamun is called? It's called Tutankhamun Pharaoh Icon Enigma and I try and explore the real Tutankhamun not just the boy

king persona. Fantastic well Joyce absolute pleasure and brilliant to have done it in person. And it all goes for me to say thank you so much for coming back on the podcast today. Oh no, thank you for having me. Well, there you go. To kick off our new Tut Thursdays series this November,

there was Professor Joyce Tildesley talking you through what we know about the figure of Tutankhamun himself. I hope you enjoyed the episode. There is so much more to come. We're going to be talking about the discovery of his tomb, the Valley of the Kings, legacy, and so on and so forth. Last things from me before I let you go.

You can, of course, help The Ancients podcast today. You can leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from. It greatly helps us because we want to continue this mission of sharing these incredible stories from our distant past with you and one way you can help us do that is by leaving us a lovely rating on apple spotify wherever you get your podcast from and we incredibly appreciate it it is much appreciated by the whole team as we continue our mission but that's enough rambling on from me i will see you in the next episode this sunday