The Rest Is History - 27. Tutankhamun

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook ask why Tutankhamun remains the best known of the Egyptian pharaohs. They examine the discovery of the tomb by Howard Carter in 1922 and discuss Tutankhamun’s relatives, in particular his father Akhenaten. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Welcome to The Rest Is History, the podcast that needs no vaccine passport to roam freely across the boundaries and the centuries. And today we're heading back in time three and a half thousand years. We're going to be starting by talking about a boy who took the throne in Egypt when he was about eight years old and proceeded to marry his half-sister. Or did he? So much of his life is shrouded in mystery.

Our subject, or at least the subject that we're going to kick off with, is of course Tutankhamen, who's captivated our imaginations since Howard Carter discovered his tomb 99 years ago. But of course, there's more to Tutankhamen than the boy himself or the tomb. Tom Holland is with me. Tom, this is a subject I know you know loads about and has fascinated you since you were a kid. Let's start with just Tutankhamen, because he's the one pharaoh that everybody has heard of.

What is it about him, do you think, that has seized their imagination? Yeah, he's the most famous pharaoh by miles. And yet, when he was alive he he didn't reign for very long he was a very obscure pharaoh and the reason of course that he is famous is that he is the pharaoh whose um tomb full of treasure survived the depredations of robbers and so when we think about the glory of the pharaohs this kind of golden realm we we think of toot and carmen because there we get a glimpse of the incredible wealth the sophistication the uh the beauty of that incredible civilization but on top of that i think there are two further reasons why toot and carmen is so famous and why his story is so haunting the first

is the story of how it was found so the process by which howard carter came to uncover the tomb you know it goes back years and decades and it's kind of the last gasp howard carter is about to have his funding cut and then he discovers this stairway and they peel away the dust and they get down there's a door and it's intact and you've got the story of the curse and everything so that's brilliant but i think even more than that what makes it fascinating from the historical point of view is that obscure though tutankhamen is he is an actor in what is perhaps the most remarkable extraordinary enigmatic period in egyptian history which is associated with the

the guy who was probably his father um a pharaoh called akhenaten who was married to um a queen whose face is almost as famous as tutankhamen's nefertiti's and akhenaten is famous as the pharaoh who essentially initiates an entirely exceptional process of revolution that was so shocking and upsetting to the Egyptians that they buried his name in oblivion and Tutankhamen's name was buried as well and that's basically why his tomb survived because he was forgotten. Okay don't tell us what Akhenaten did because for listeners who don't know that can be our big reveal later on when we get into the Akhenaten story. Because I agree with you, I think the Akhenaten story is one of the, I think it's without any question, one of the single most interesting stories in all world history. And I'm talking about thousands of years.

But let's just focus for a second about Howard Carter. Now, Howard Carter's story, it's interesting, isn't it it because it's one that all children learn certainly all british children um and what is it about it do you think that you know he's working for lord carnarvon i mean i can remember this from the kids i read as a from the books i read as a kid you know he's working for lord carnarvon and there's the story about the curse and the dog barking in Cairo or whatever. That's right. Or dying and all that sort of thing. So how much, tell us, I mean, you all know much more about this than me.

Tell us some of the sort of background to all this. So Carter was, he was a professional archaeologist? No, no, he wasn't. And this is part of the romance of it, is that he was an illustrator. And he went out as quite a young man to Egypt. And and there he met um the brilliantly named flinders petrie um who was an archaeologist and flinders petrie was working at a site called amarna which is about halfway between luxor and cairo and don't spoil the reveal by telling us about i won't but um so this is a part of what howard carter immediately gets gripped by and and this is a buried city that hasn't been excavated before

so it's kind of virgin territory and carter is doing the illustrations for this and he just get completely gets the bug he stays on he um he ends up being employed the french at the time are running the antiquity service in e Egypt for kind of complicated colonial reasons. And Carter is is employed by this colonial French agency basically as a superintendent of antiquities until he gets into a punch up with some French tourists who are essentially being incredibly rude to an Egyptian. And Carter takes the Egyptian side and gets dismissed for this. So the sense that- It's a good story.

Yeah, so Carter is kind of on the side of the angels, but he's a temperamental, difficult man. And from that point on, he stays out in Egypt and he basically hires himself out to visiting grandees, billionaires, Americans, British,ish whoever who essentially coming to egypt and um they get give they buy kind of the right to excavate certain areas and they employ carter and there's a guy called theodore davies who's an american millionaire who comes to the

valley of the kings and carter helps him out um theodore Davies discovers all kinds of fascinating tombs. One in particular, KV 55, so Valley of the Kings 55, is an enigmatic tomb that I'm sure will come to with a mummy in it. It's unclear whether it's male or female. seems to that seems to have been some process of desecration going on no one's quite sure about it um davis uh discovers this in 1912 he then thinks that um or is it 1907 can't remember anyway we'll have to check um he then uh reckons that that the whole of the valley of the kings has every tomb has been discovered but carter because there is a link between tutankhamen and amarna that will come to he's particularly aware of the fact that tutankhamen's tomb has not been found that this is the one tomb that might be discovered and so when lord carnarvon comes out who is is there for his health you know the egyptian climate is seen as being very healthy he comes out um he employs

carter carter says look let's go for toot and carmen and they dig and they dig and they dig and they don't find it and years go by and 1922 comes around and carnarvon says to carter look this is going to be the last season uh and carter goes okay and that's the jeopardy and then carter you know carter discovers it and he has to wait for lord carnarvon to come over um they go down secretly without telling anyone and carter kind of opens up the the the door and carnarvon's behind him and says you know can you see anything and carter says you know there's this pause and then he says wonderful i can see things i can see wonderful things and the romance of it is so incredible it's and it's it's it's the kind of the paradigm of what people imagine an archaeologist's

life is is like but it never is isn't it i mean that's the tragedy it never is no other archaeologist ever has that no no i mean no no archaeologist has ever has has ever had that kind of howard carter experience and then you throw into the mix the story of the curse which is that uh the story goes there's this guy who's a rival of of carter's called arthur vagal who was um employed by the daily mail dominic so very much the lowest of the low uh to cover the uh to cover the excavation and carter and canarvan has given exclusive rights to the Times. So Ogle is there. He's resentful of Carter for this great find.

He's crossed... They were owned by the same group in those days, in the 1920s. That's the irony. He's crossed that the Times has got the exclusive. And so he sees Carnarvon going in, and he's supposed to have said, if he goes in in that mood, I give him, you know, six weeks. And then the story goes that he nicks himself shaving,

it gets infected. And this nick supposedly exactly models a nick that will be found on the face of toot and carmen you're right that the moment he dies um there's a power cut across cairo and his dog back in uh back in high clear which is that which is uh downton abbey um howls and this is the story of uh of of the curse but i mean carter obviously the person who proves that the curse isn't real is is carter because he does not die of it um how disappointing yeah it is okay so there's also i mean obviously with susan carmen a huge element of the appeal um again before we get into that and arts and stuff the huge element of the appeal is that he's a child is that he's a boy pharaoh

and we always have this fascination he's kind of late teens isn't he but he becomes what he's 8 or 9 when he becomes pharaoh I suppose yeah he kind of dies when he's about 17 I think so in other words he's the same age as a lot of children when they first read about Tutankhamen

and it's that sort of sense of doomed youth I think that people it's that sort of sense of doomed youth, I think, that people... It's the sort of... The contrast between the doomed youth and then the gilded but ossified splendour of the remains that I think we often like about the Tutankhamen story. And of course, that's why we go to museums

and we enjoy seeing all the artefacts. But the intellectual appeal of the story, and this is where we come to the big reveal is his it's really his father who's this fellow akhenaten who must be one of the most fascinating and mysterious characters in all human history and i know you are passionate about this so why don't you tell us the you know give us an outline for people who don't know anything about ancient egypt give us the story okay so akhenaten is the son of a pharaoh called amonotep which means um basically amon is pleased and amon amon rey is the by by the time that this is, so this is kind of 1370, 1360 BC. It's in the 18th dynasty of Egypt. And Egypt is...

So Egypt's been going for like... Yeah, it's been going for... More than a thousand years. Yes, yes, yes. It's an incredibly ancient civilization. And under the 18th dynasty, it's incredibly powerful. Egypt had been occupied by Asiatic invaders called Hyksos and they had been expelled by the ancestor of the 18th dynasty and not only had the Asiatics been expelled but the pharaohs had then expanded northwards and

established a kind of loose empire reaching right the way up into Syria. And Amenhotep III is kind of like the Louis XIV of ancient Egypt. He is the sun king. Everything about him is golden. He's wealthy. He ruled for a very long time. Huge statues. So if you go to the British Museum, there's a huge kind of head of him with this kind of enigmatic rather self-satisfied smile as well you might be if you were aminotep the third um and the priests of amun are basically um you know they're they're massive they're a kind of massive power in the land they uh they run these huge vast temples um and aminotep the third's son who will succeed him and become Amunotep IV is actually committed to another god and a few years into his reign he signals this by changing

his name from Amunotep, Amun is pleased, to Akhenaten which means basically you do stuff for the for the Aten and the Aten is the disc of the sun and Akhenaten's devotion to the Aten is such that he basically launches a kind of an attack against Amun. He closes the temples to Amun. He moves to this place that now is called Amarna, where Howard Carter and Flinders Petrie were digging. And which at the time was called, Akhenaten calls it Akhetaten, the horizon of the Aten. And Akhenaten builds an entire city there

devoted to the worship of this god, Aten and Akhenaten builds an entire city there devoted to the worship of this this god Aten and the thing that's astonishing about this and something that has kind of echoed through you know Freud writes about it all kinds of people write about it is that essentially Akhenaten is a monotheist and he's a monotheist who is reacting against the vast array of gods that the Egyptians have always taken for granted and he writes these kind of hymns we assume that Akhenaten writes and we don't absolutely know this for sure but he's conventionally the great hymn to the Aten and he hails the Aten as sole god without another beside him. And in the context of Egyptian assumptions about the universe, about the role played by the gods,

this is so revolutionary that Egypt is left kind of stunned by it. And when Akhenaten dies, the process of kind of rolling this revolution back begins immediately because Tutankhamen is initially called Tutankhaten. So Tutankhaten is the living image of the Aten. Tutankhamen, he becomes a living image of Amun. And Tutankhamen becomes the kind of figurehead

of a counter-revolution, which then he dies. He gets succeeded probably by his great uncle, a guy called Ai. Then Ai dies and he gets succeeded in turn by a guy called Horemheb, who is a kind of general. And it's under Horemheb that the entire memory of Akhenaten and his revolution basically gets flattened. And Akhenaten, Tutankhamen, Ai, they all get written out of the king lists. So that, you know, a few centuries on, although there are very interesting kind of echoes of the horror of this that are buried, Akhenaten's own name and Tutankhamen's name get completely forgotten. And no one has any idea that they existed until Flinders Petrie arrives at Amarna and starts excavating and finding,

digging up all this stuff. And basically, the paradox is that that is what enables Tutankhamen to survive. So there's so much to unpack here. Maybe we'll get to the purely religious stuff, which I know you're fascinated by, and the influence of Akhenaten and the way that people have tried to understand, you you know is he the father of all our monotheistic

religions and all the rest of it but just looking back on this as a sort of historian of the 20th century what's really striking to me about it is you have this guy who come you know he's had a a very domineering father who was the great pharaoh, who was kind of, I think, deified in his own lifetime, Amenhotep III. Then Akhenaten comes in. He says there's a new belief system, a new cultural form. So there's a new kind of art.

If you see the images of him, I mean, they're really weird, elongated kind of faces. And, you know, so the art has changed. He has an entirely new city in the desert, a new site that's away from the old capitals. The temples have changed, so they're open-air temples. Everybody can be seen. You're being surveyed the whole time by the sun,

but also by his police and by his kind of security forces and stuff. I mean, he feels a disturbingly modern figure i mean he's somebody that if you put him alongside you know pol pot i mean it sounds like a ludicrous comparison but again somebody who wanted to completely remake society in the service of an ideology akhenaten you know you can paint him as an ancestor for modern totalitarians. Or do you think I'm being unfair? Well, I think you are being a bit unfair because I think one of the fascinations of this period is also the frustrations. There's just enough material to sense that there's something incredibly important and fascinating going on here. But there's not quite enough material to have a definite sense

of what was actually going on. And we can't ultimately know for sure, you know, really what the revolution involved. We can't know for sure who, you know, even whether Tutankhamen really was Akhenaten's son. All these kind of relationships are up for grabs. And therefore the temptation is always, when you look at someone like Akhenaten,

is to back project your own assumptions. So to begin with, in the kind of high Victorian period, the kind of late Victorian period, people associated Akhenaten with a kind of seen as an effete lover of peace who hadn't had the the cojones to um to stand up and fight for for the egyptian empire and what added to that is that partly because of his statues yeah well it's partly because it's so weird and androgynous in his yeah it's partly because of the but partly because of the hymn to the aton where he's he he it's it's kind of quite a universalist hymn so there's the sense of kind of egypt was being radically different from the lands beyond has gone um and you know this is kind of very kind of radically distinctive approach but it's also as you say yes so that the amarna art

is incredibly odd and akhenaten is portrayed with kind of a huge great cranium, often kind of hint of breasts, a woman's hips and buttocks, and then very kind of thin spindly legs. And when it's on engravings, these look odd, but when you get them as statues and huge statues that were kind of raised at Karnak and which then got buried beneath the rubble and got extracted by 20th century excavations. And they're, I think, the strangest works of art that I've ever seen. They kind of dominate. They're really unsettling, aren't they?

So they're in the Cairo Museum and to stand beneath them and look up at them, you feel there's a sense of power there. And so people have wondered, well, what the's a sense of power there and so people have wondered well what the hell was going on here and so they people have said well maybe he had kind of a variety of medical conditions and this is what it's portraying but actually i don't think it's anything to do with that so again and again through through pharaonic history you look at a pharaoh and you think oh you know there's one who's got huge ears he looks like prince charles

maybe that's what he looked like and then no, it's because the ears are all listening. And the thing about the Aten is that both male and female are contained within him. And Akhenaten is presenting himself as the son of the Aten, who alone among mortals, actually Nefertiti, his wife, does as well. But they're a kind of trinity. And so just as nefertiti is portrayed in quite a masculine sense and in due course after akhenaten's death seems to have ruled as a male pharaoh so akhenaten in his statues is given kind of feminine characteristics um and this is entirely to do with the kind of the the theological sense of what the aton is um and i think that that's the focus of it. It's not, I don't think that by the 30s, by the 40s, into the 50s, people are kind of very prone to see totalitarian dictators

in this figure. Again, I don't think that's quite right. Because Akhenaten is kind of, he's more of, he's closer to Muhammad, I think. he's someone who who for radical reasons is trying to close down the temples of other you know of amman in particular and to give no role whatsoever to other gods and he is prepared to go as far as he can to encourage people to have a stake in that but you know but he's this is kind of bronze age. He doesn't have the apparatus of a totalitarian state to enforce that. And the measurement of that is that when he dies, the whole thing basically,

like a stack of cards falls down. Okay, well, let's hope no one says that of this podcast. We're about to take a break and we'll come back. And I think Tom will be talking to us about religion. Knowing Tom, we shall find out. See you in a minute. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman.

And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets,

head to therestisentertainment.com. head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We're talking about, we started talking about Tutankhamun and we've gone a little bit further back and we're talking about his father, Akanaten, who i think

is personally i find much more interesting tom there's another figure of course which is nefertiti now nefertiti we all i mean nefertiti's been in doctor who i well remember there you go that's the measure of historical significance isn't it she went she went on an adventure called dinosaurs on a spaceship dinosaurs and nefertiti it was the greatest program ever made fighting she was she and a victorian explorer were fighting dinosaurs right um so nefertiti we all remember because the bust there's a great bust of nefertiti and it's this fantastic it's a head of her of her head yeah um the other let yes not the other kind of bust um tell us about nefertiti is she more than a head? I mean, is she more important historically?

She is a very significant figure. So the 18th dynasty has two ruling pharaohs who are female. There's Hatshepsut, great pharaoh who, wonderful Mochi temple, sends a voyage to the mysterious land of Punt. And then you have, it nefertiti um her name means um a beautiful lady has come um nobody's intelligible who her parents were probably a though i think who the guy who succeeds tootin carmen um and she is very important in akhenaten's religion.

So she's signed up to it. She completely signs up to it. And when you, in the tomb images, you have the disc of the Aten and then you have the rays that come down. At the end of the rays, you have hands. And these hands, they bless Akhenaten and they bless Nefertiti. And Nefertiti, unusually for queens who are standing next to their husbands, is the same size. So this is a kind of reflection of the huge significance that Nefertiti has. Now there was... There were images, Tom, where they're holding hands and stuff.

Yeah. They're really extraordinary. Yeah. So the sense of kind of closeness, of connubial closeness is really important. And it was thought that for decades, that after about 12 years of Akhenaten's reign, that Nefertiti vanishes from the record, and that she'd been kind of driven into disgrace. But that's no longer the consensus. And the consensus now is that after Akhenaten dies, Nefertiti takes on a male pharaonic name, and seems to have ruled for several years. And then Tutankhamen succeeds her. So she's a very significant figure, too.

But of course, the reason that she lives in the memory is, as you say, this incredible bust that is in the Berlin Museum that was found in the early 20th century and got taken to Berlin. And the one guy who absolutely adored it, oddly, was Hitler. And Hitler was obsessed by Nefertiti. And Goering at one point was going to return the bust of Nefertiti to the Egyptian government. And Hitler personally stepped in to stop it because his dream was that when he built the great capital of Germania after global triumph,

he was going to build a massive, great complex of a museum to Egyptology and the bust of Nefertiti was going to be kind of under a dome as the central object for it. So what's all that about because the nazis also were really interested in the the atten story weren't they and the worship of the the i mean they were they found all that absolutely fascinating and was that just because they everybody found it fascinating in the 20th century or was the the way that they can um

they can justify uh being enthusiastic about the beauty of Nefertiti is that her name means the beautiful lady has come. So they argue that therefore she wasn't a native Egyptian. They argue that she came of Aryan stock and that this is why she's so beautiful. So she can be enshrined as a kind of icon of Aryan womanhood. And so which is another example of people projecting fantasies onto this onto this subject this is a very nice this is a very nice link um 20th century people projecting fantasies back onto the sort of Akhenaten Nefertiti Tutankhamen period because the most famous person who does this is Sigmund Freud and i think it's his last book moses and monotheism

where now he has this theory which has i think pretty much been debunked but which has lasted i mean it's created all kinds of conspiracy theories and stuff about akhenaten and judaism so do you want to take us through that because this is really is yeah it's well so freud is freud is is thinking about akhenaten and the relationship to moses because of course akhenaten is a monotheist and moses is the legendary founder of jewish monotheism um and akhenaten um is thinking about this as he's preparing to go into exile he comes to london it's the last as you say the last thing he's right freud you mean thank you yes freud so yeah freud didn't slip there um and very good freud freud is wondering not um basically freud is asking the the question why why do people hate

the jews why the nazis hate us why are they doing? And he traces it all the way back to what he sees as a kind of moment of historical trauma. And his thesis is that Moses, he points out, is an Egyptian name. So Moses means child. So Rama sees his son of Ra. And he says that the original Moses was an atonist so a follower of Akhenaten who had this kind of elevated pure spiritual monotheism and he after the collapse of Akhenaten's regime he leads the Hebrews out of Egypt and preaches to them this kind of austere and uncompromising monotheism and the the israelites get so fed up with this that they kill him and instead they worship um a midianite god called yahweh and they conflate the identity of the uh the priests that they've killed with the priest

of this midianite god who's also called Moses who they also come to call Moses and so Freud says that um that that basically uh the foundations of Judaism are this kind of buried moment of trauma that the Jews have forgotten about that they killed their father if you like um if you can see the appeal of this to Freud that they killed yeah they killed this Atenist father and basically what Freud is doing is back project because the thing about about Akhenaten is that he is reacting against the gods of Egypt he's reacting against his own father though isn't he yes he's reacting against the fun but he's also reacting against against the gods and it's this

that makes him hated and it's this that makes him kind of identified with disease and why his memory is buried. So essentially, Freud is saying that the origins of what makes the Jews hated by other people is not actually of Jewish origin. It lies with Egypt and it lies with Akhenaten and his revolution. And you're right, people i mean this is a kind of again it's a it's another fantasy but it it it is expressive of the way in which the the relationship of akhenaten to moses and to the tradition of monotheism is something that people kind of remain completely fascinated by and well let's talk about that a bit because that's something that's so crucial to your recent work so in a way we've kind of undersold what a revolutionist was so if you partly because i i think it's hard for people to understand because they think of religion as something that is a kind of optional bolt on to your life you know you're religious or you're not you kind of it's like a hobby um you go to church on a sunday but for the egyptians and indeed for anybody at that time you know religion wasn't an accessory it wasn't part

of life it was life the gods were around you all the time you're it was your entire cultural and imaginative world so to break with that and to say all those gods are balderdash there's only one god and all the other gods and all the rest of your imaginative and cultural world is a lie or is nonsense. I mean, that's that's a greater break than the coming of communism in Russia in 1917 or anything like that. Completely. I mean, completely devastating because you're erasing the entire mythology that has given meaning to your life and actually particularly to your death so in a sense that's the most radical thing of all is that um for the egyptians normally when you see the sun going through the sky and then it goes down into the underworld and there's a kind of great fight with with with a demon and then it comes back up again and human beings are intimately bound up with this

struggle and as a as a a human you um you don't see you know the gods but you don't see them and then when you die you that's when you see the gods but akhenaten gets rid of all that so he describes the atom going through the sky and then the coming of night and all the kind of mythology for it has gone and so presumably all the mythology about what happens to you when you die has gone as well and essentially um everybody in in um in akhenaten's egypt they can see the sun so they can see the god but they can't know it because the only person who can know it in fact the only two people who can know it are akhenaten and nefertiti so essentially that's must be frightening terrifying completely terrifying and i think that that explains the the kind of the violence of the reaction against what he was talking people

it was a kind of psychic strain that was it was kind of overwhelming but then it also explains i suppose because it's such a colossal break because it's the first time somebody has said there's only one god not lots of gods but it's also i guess the first time that a single individual a powerful individual has said to you know hundreds of thousands millions of other people what you think is wrong you must now follow my new order you know it's the first time recorded his instance in history of somebody creating a new order which is something that we're now very familiar with and because of that it's left this huge intellectual and cultural afterlife hasn't

it so thomas mann wrote about it in his book joseph and his brothers philip glass has an opera about yes yes and scholars still argue about this don't they there's a fellow who i know you Yes, yes. which is essentially about, it looks at how Freud kind of interprets it, but traces it all the way back, actually all the way back to the Egyptian period. And he argues that the stories that are told in the Ptolemaic period, say the period after Alexander, after Alexander has conquered Egypt, and then into the Roman period, that various stories are told in which trace elements of Akhenaten can just about be distinguished. And essentially there's a story by an Egyptian priest called Menethos, who is living in the reign of the second of the Ptolemies the the royal Macedonian royal dynasty and he

Minitho describes how um there is uh a priest who leads lepers out into the desert and the priest is is from Heliopolis so the the the city of Ra so there's a kind of identification with the sun there and he leads people who have a sick with leprosy and with plague out into the desert and he gives them um kind of the the strange teachings in which everything is upended so there are no gods that all the multiplicity of gods have dissolved um there is only one god. All the dietary rules that the Egyptians hold are turned on their heads. And this priest then comes back and he conquers Egypt. He has the Hyksos, the Asiatics behind him. They rule and then the pharaohs come and they kick them out and throw them out for good.

And there's clear kind of garbled trace elements of something about Akhenaten there but it's and and this is why the association is with Freud and the Jews is that it's kind of what what Menethos is doing is he's linking this story with the Jews because the priest who does this Menethos says one of the names that he has is Moses. And so it culminates, you get Tacitus writing in the beginning of the second century AD, who does this, he essentially attributes all this to the Jews. And he says, you know, the Jews, they just turn everything on their heads, whatever most people do, the Jews do the opposite. And so do you think some of this does lie behind sort of historical anti-semitism or or that sort of stuff i i think asmr's case is very convincing i mean i find it very convincing and and i think that the fact that this kind of radical form of monotheism existed, that clearly it was kind of

remembered by the Egyptians as a kind of buried trauma, and that then in the Hellenistic and Roman period it comes to be associated with the Jews, so that the Jews then get associated with this kind of these calumnies that do seem to have inherited, you know, descended down the centuries from the actual time of Akhenaten. I mean, it's impossible to prove, because again, this is kind of the fascination and the frustration of it. But I think it's, I mean, I think it's a really fascinating take on it, really fascinating take. Okay, well, let's, we've got to do some questions, haven't we? Before we do that, I forgot to mention when we came back after the break that we are now doing two podcasts a week and our next podcast is a fantastic podcast about the history of comedy and comedy in history um history as comedy and

our guest is al murray so don't miss that please now questions graham questions. Graham Elliot, Tom, says, was Tutankhamen really run over by a chariot? I hadn't heard this one, but was he? I thought he had suffered from scoliosis. Well, again, there are all kinds of theories about this. Being run over by a chariot's another. Another was that he was a victim of a murder, kind of smashed on the side of his head.

The truth is, I mean, I'm not in any way an expert on this but whenever you look at what people deduce from mummies it seems to change every every decade and the classic example of that is the one that was found in kv55 this mysterious tomb um that was found by theodore davis the american oh yes you were gonna you were gonna listen and huge controversy even about what sex it was was it female was it male at what age was he or she when he died and the consensus now is that it was probably a guy called smenkare brilliant name who may have been tutan karman's half brother may have succeeded uh nefertiti um but again i thought smenkare was a short-lived pharaoh he is he is a short-lived pharaoh, but we know almost nothing about him.

But other people have said that this mummy may be Akhenaten, maybe Nefertiti. And this is the problem, is that we know so little even about the mummies that in a sense you take all the various pieces of this puzzle, of which the vast majority are missing, but you've got just enough pieces to kind of put them together to construct what looks like a kind of plausible picture. But you can never be sure. And the question of how pharaohs die, so how Tutankhamen dies, is a kind of classic example of that. I mean, every decade you will have some new theory that comes up. And the conclusion that I would come to as someone who is in no way qualified to do a kind of cold case

autopsy like this but it would i'm gonna do it anyway i don't think that we'll ever know i don't think we'll ever know right what about this question i mean you mentioned about the gender the the indeterminate gender of some of these bodies and whatnot or the confusion did the egyptians have the same they must have had very different ideas from the ideas that prevailed let's say in the last 2000 years so Nefertiti ruled as a male pharaoh what's all that about again hard hard to be sure and and it's not absolutely definite it's just that this seems to be the kind of the overwhelming weight of evidence. And there does seem to have been a fair degree of gender confusion at Amarna.

So, you know, there are images of Akhenaten with Nefertiti where it's quite difficult to tell the two of them apart they're both wearing um pharaonic headdresses and both kind of have the contours of a female body um it's quite difficult and and the style of also the style of wig in this period it's kind of a nubian style and men and women again they're very similar and so this all is all part of the fun adding to the complexity is you can't even be sure whether you're talking about men or women to add to your to add to your fun i've basically got your dream question here from mike honcho um he says tom he doesn't even bother addressing it to me he just addressed it to you tom do you subscribe to the idea that akhenaten atonism was an important influence on the theology of christianity and he then says a second

question which i think is actually a very interesting question are the comparable examples you can think of an ancient history of a single individual one individual who so completely transformed their culture so let's do the first bit first christianity do you think it was an influence no i don't think so because nobody knew about it i mean it's you know it's that it is thought that uh psalm 104 is um and contains within it an echo of um of the hymn to the art of the hymn to the art and and perhaps you could imagine that i don't know some syrian subject of pharaoh received it and i i mean again almost impossible to know there is also a very enigmatic um line in acts of the apostles where it suddenly says and moses was learned in all the wisdom of the egyptians

which is kind of playing into the you know this idea that moses was it was originally an egyptian but i don't think there's anything i mean i don't think christians were aware of this at all and are there other comparable examples you can think of an ancient history of a single individual that so completely, well, attempted to transform their own culture. In the long run, it didn't work. I can't, again, no, I can't think of anyone.

And I think that that's, that's the kind of, it's the unique fascination of this. But that's what makes him seem so modern, isn't it? The new capital, the attempt to completely remake everything i mean that feels yeah see i can't think of that many examples of people doing that before the 20th

century that feels like something you do with 20th century technology and with the kind of 20th century utopianism i mean that's the weird thing that there aren't people doing that in the 12th century or the 15th century they're just continuing in the patterns of their predecessors but akhenaten is doing something unbelievably radical that we now associate with you know the pol pots and the maus and the stalins and so on yeah but but but to pick up on my contest question it is also quite kind of monotheistic in the sense of of um say christianity or i think particularly islam i think the the the kind of islamic anxiety around images the sense that gods that people have been worshiping are in fact idols and have to be overthrown um if if there's a kind of a prefiguring of of christianity in the idea that akhenaten is the son of the of the

artan there is also a kind of definite you know a sense of islam the the way in which muhammad kind of according to to tradition uh purges mecca of of idol worship there is something there and also i tell you what i also detect tom there's a sort of you know they're both desert religions um there's an austerity to atonism if that's the right word yeah yeah uh that that it seems to share with with islam there's a kind of simplicity in um i don't want to say well i mean purity maybe, maybe. There's a sort of a harsh simplicity to Atenism that you can see why it would intoxicate. It would frighten some and intoxicate others.

Yeah, and I think the harshness is the word. I mean, I think it left very little for people who weren't Pharaoh. And I think that was the problem. Yeah. All right, we've just got time for a couple more questions so lots of questions we had about moses and monotheism which we've kind of done tom slists asks quite a different question what do you think of velikovsky's idea that akhenaten was the inspiration for oedipus oh good question have you are you a fae with you au fait with emmanuel velikovsky i i i actually read him he's bedside reading for me

so velikovsky was um very controversial i think he was an astronomer originally who argued that um venus was in fact a chunk of jupiter that in historical times had had uh kind of migrated and this inspires all the kind of disaster apocalyptic myths that you get and kind of as an extension of that having you know radically uh rewritten astronomy he then rewrites the entire history of of the of the near east as well and argues that the um the conventional uh dating is completely wrong so he identified he said basically he he kind of cuts out a thousand years of history so that um Hatshepsut the 18th dynasty queen is associated with um the queen of Sheba who according to conventional dating had lived centuries and centuries after Hatshepsut so it it's let's say it's not broadly

accepted although there are there are a couple of David Roll is is the kind of example of historians who do make play with this this idea that actually there are there are a couple of david roll is is the kind of example of historians who do make play with this this idea that actually there are centuries that are kind of missing and that if you get rid of them then you can kind of map things up much more much more neatly um but but velikovsky's theory of akhenaten as thompson says is that he was the inspiration for oedipus and um velikovsky identifies Amenhotep III with Laeus, who was Oedipus's father. And he identifies Amenhotep III's wife, Queen Theia, with Jocasta, who is the woman who Oedipus ends up marrying. And there are all kinds of play made with the fact that Oedipus lived in Thebes and Akhenaten lived in Thebes.

And there are sphinxes in Egypt and there's a sphinx in Oedipus. And it's, you know... It seems a bit desperate. It's kind of fun, but it's nothing more than fun. So what do I think of it? It's a gameplay. It's clearly not true. Well, my wife's just brought me a cup of tea.

So that feels to me like, unless you really want to answer that question from Michael Ronson... Oh, the beautiful lady has come. Yeah. Who made the big triangle-y things, Michael Ronson said. Aliens or not aliens, Tom? I don't think aliens, no. Ah, disappointing.

Well, that's it for today. We've got Al Murray to come on Thursday, who's even more interesting than any of the pharaohs or indeed Tom and me. Thank you for listening. Thanks, Tom. Bye for now. Bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.