by
JOHN SCHERBER
IN THE TOMB OF TUTANKHAMUN
In the fall of
2009, the location search for my Nile mystery, The Amarna Heresy, took me to Luxor, one of several capitals of
ancient Egypt. In the second and third millennia B.C. that city was known as
Waset. It sits on the east bank, and across the river and up in the hills is
the dual necropolis of the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens. My
goal that afternoon was to visit the tomb of Tutankhamun and those of several
other pharaohs.
My interest in
ancient Egypt went back many years, and in high school I had even painted tomb
figures on my bedroom walls at home.
One of my first
stops was the tomb of Horemheb, a military leader and the final ruler of the
Eighteenth Dynasty, of which Tut was third from last. The old general had
ordered the ceiling of his huge tomb painted a midnight blue and embellished
with thousands of stars. He would have felt he was on one last campaign, in a
desert bivouac.
The much
smaller tomb of Tutankhamun is not far away. You enter down a flight of steps
and through a low doorway leading to a gradually sloping ramp. There are four
rooms in all, two of which are annexes and are not accessible. The room you
enter is the largest and contains the unwrapped mummy of the pharaoh and little
else. He is covered by a sheet to the shoulders and enclosed in glass, but it
is possible to get quite close to his face.
This young man,
who died in about 1327 B.C. at the age of eighteen or nineteen, was in poor
health most of his life. His principal significance was that his eight or
nine-year reign was a pivot point in an enormous struggle between two religious
factions in Egypt.
His father was
Akhenaten, originally named Amenhotep IV, who decided that the 200 gods that
were worshipped when he took the throne were false and heretical. He changed
his name to Akhenaten, and proclaimed that there was but one god, the Aten, or
sun disk. This set up a conflict with the enormous established priesthood in
Waset (today’s Luxor) that eventually forced the pharaoh to move north and
establish a new capital at what is now Amarna. It is not clear how much of the
country he still controlled at that point. Upon his death some time in the
1330s B.C., his child heir took the throne. At that time the boy was stilled
called Tutankhaten, and had been raised in the new religion.
He was destined
to be a pawn from that moment. The date is not known, but some time in the next
few years the old priesthood forced young Tutankhaten to change his name to
Tutankhamun and reestablish the government at Waset. Young and sickly, there
was nothing about him that could have enabled him to stand up to this kind of
pressure, no matter what he wanted to do.
This was what
was going through my mind as I stood at his side 3,335 years after his burial
in that tomb, the only intact royal burial ever discovered in Egypt. One side
of that first room opens to a second at a lower level. This is the burial
chamber, once filled wall to wall with three nested shrines. The stone
sarcophagus at the center is all that now remains. The lid lies on the floor
next to it. It was broken in two pieces in antiquity, quite possibly as the
burial was being assembled, and no one had the time or inclination to replace
it and delay the completion of the ceremony. Inside the sarcophagus is the
second of three nested gold mummiform coffins, the one pictured in this post.
All the rest of the tomb contents, including more than 100 canes and two
mummified infants––one wearing a pharaoh’s headdress––have been removed to
the Cairo Museum. This entire family was prone to club foot and scoliosis.
But it is the
great wall painting on the far side of this room that caused my blood to chill.
Here is the traditional Opening of the Mouth ceremony, which was the means of
conferring eternal life on the deceased. The pharaoh’s mummy stands upright
before the chief priest of the land. Instead of the traditional headdress of
priesthood, however, the man wears the pharaoh’s war crown, used in battle and
ceremonies, something I have never seen before in this setting. It is Ay the
priest, the successor of Tutankhamun, the man who led the overthrow of
Akhenaten’s Amarna government, and brought the young pharaoh back to Waset and
the old religion.
And now this same
man, Ay, who has no right to the throne, has taken Tutankhamun’s young wife,
Ankhesenpaaten, as his own, since the royal blood line descends through the
female side of the family. He has taken the government from Tutankhamun (and
some speculate, his life as well), and now, in an enormously insulting move,
has positioned himself on the wall of his tomb, acting his role of priest but
wearing the pharaoh’s crown, so that the young king has to look up at him and
contemplate his own defeat every day for eternity.
I looked back
into Tutankhamun’s ancient blackened face. Within his slightly parted lips, his
teeth were still fairly good. I was suddenly struck by the enormous passage of
time that framed his story.
He had been a
tragic witness and a player in history beyond the imagination of most of us. When
Tutankhamun died, the Great Pyramid was already 1200 years old. He had been
dead for a thousand years when Alexander the Great died in Babylon in 323 B.C. I
had already known most of this story before I entered the Valley of the Kings
that day, but it was the sight of the Opening of the Mouth mural that brought
it all together in a shattering way. Look at the illustration from the tomb
wall. Look at the headgear of the priest and think how many times you’ve seen
it before on all the pharaohs of the New Kingdom. Think also how inappropriate
it would have been on the head of the chief priest with no claim to the throne
as he awakened Tutankhamun into eternity.
Before his exit
into the tomb with the starry night sky, Horemheb had condemned all three of
these players: Akhenaten for his betrayal of the old religion, Tutankhamun for
his weakness, Ay the priest for his naked usurpation of the throne. Horemheb’s
own usurpation would have been justified by the need to repair the chaos of the
three previous regimes. He had gone so far as to dismantle much of Akhenaten’s
new capital at Amarna and recycle the stone into other projects.
The fact is
that Akhenaten had simply failed to sell the idea of a single god to the great
majority of the Egyptian people. Most of the 200 plus deities were regional or
hometown favorites that had been incorporated into the national pantheon at the
time of the unification of Egypt around 3000 B.C. These were loyalties not
easily overcome, especially in the face of the headwind generated by a bloated
and entitled priesthood.
As I made my
way back up the steps of the tomb into bright sunlight, a question occurred to
me. What had happened to those who chose to stay with the new monotheistic religion
and not return to Waset? They would have been the last heretics, and nothing
left in Amarna would have supported them anymore. Estimates of the population
reached around 20,000. I paused on the main path in the Valley of the Kings,
for I suddenly thought I knew what had happened to all those people.
My book, The Amarna Heresy, is today’s story launched
from these events. It is about a trio of archaeology grad students on a field
trip with their erratic professor, and the inadvertent discovery of the real tomb
of Akhenaten. There is some evidence that Akhenaten was buried in the Valley of
the Kings, in the looted and damaged tomb called KV 65, but I have never
believed this. I don’t think that Tutankhamun, on his return to Waset, would’ve
had the power anymore to move his father’s burial, nor do I think that the
triumphant Ay would have allowed the great heretic to come to rest among the
historic royal dead of that sacred place.
The story of The Amarna Heresy, fueled by the fictional
discovery of that tomb, reawakens the religious struggle of that time and
confers it with contemporary ramifications that, if true, could shake the
Judeo-Christian tradition of the West to its core.
There’s a
sample on my website:
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