Tutankhamun Uncovered

by Michael J Marfleet

  To the people, whatever the circumstances of King Tutankhamun’s death disease, madness or contrived his double, his spirit, his soul, his ka must now be released to thrive in the afterlife. The artisans’ most present and immediate responsibility was to ensure the dead king’s smooth and correct passage and his continuing sustenance. Their workshops were a hive of activity. The death mask had been taken and was already with the goldsmiths. Meneg assembled the finished body, legs, tail and head of the wooden figure of Anubis.

  On the other side of the river, in a private, dimly lit chamber deep within the temple complex, the punctual and ordered business of preparing the king’s body for its ultimate interment was under way. The body had been cleansed and lay on a bed of sculpted alabaster. Throughout the forthcoming process, in the presence of the king’s wife and many others, the high priest, standing in the background and draped in a complete leopard skin, would read from the scriptures at prescribed intervals.

  Moving slowly across the walls like black flames, limpid, flickering, pointed shadows were thrown by the stilettoed ears of the head of Anubis borne upon a man’s body. His name was Meneptah and it was he who was privileged to perform the act of disembowelment. He was a high official of the dead king’s court. Masked with the head of the black jackal and clothed with a thin ceremonial white apron about his loins, a bodice of stitched lapis about his torso and a collar of beads of assorted colours, he moved to address the pale, stiffening body.

  He began by placing a small piece of inscribed papyrus on the dead king’s face. The priest behind him sprinkled incense over a bowl of flaming oil. There was a brief crackling and the heavy vapour with its thick odour quickly filled the chamber. Meneptah unrolled the papyrus text of Tutankhamun’s ‘Chapters of Coming Forth by Day’, the complex and lengthy multitude of spells that would protect the dead king against all dangers and adversity during his forthcoming journeys.

  He read, “My heart is with me and it shall never come to pass that it shall be carried away. I, Nebkhprerure, am the Lord of Hearts, the slayer of the heart. I live in right and truth and I have my being therein. I am Horus, the dweller in hearts, who is within the dweller in the body. I live in my word and my heart hath being. Let not my heart be taken away from me, let it not be wounded, and may neither wounds nor gashes be dealt upon me because it hath been taken away from me. Let me have my being in the body of my father, Seth, and in the body of my mother, Nut. I have not done that which is held in abomination by the gods; let me not suffer defeat there but let me be triumphant.”

  He passed the papyrus back to the priest and turned. With his arms outstretched he addressed the body. Firmly drawing his spread palms over the torso, he felt for a softness. With the third and fourth fingers of his left hand pressing on the spot, he picked up a scribing instrument and painted a diagonal line on the left side of the abdomen.

  A third priest drew close by the body. He was named Asmat. With some ceremony he raised a crescent shaped flint blade from the table beside the bed and, after performing an exaggerated looping motion with his hand, brought the knife close to one end of the inscribed line.

  There was a gasp of anticipation from the queen.

  The blade had a somewhat dull edge and it was with some difficulty that Asmat finally penetrated the skin and cut, almost tearing, a gash the length of an index finger from the centre of the belly down to the hip. Abdominal fluid and some blood ran over the stomach and collected in the king’s navel. Ankhesenamun winced but continued to watch. She had not witnessed the like before, but stopped herself from showing further signs of emotion. The whole process was as entirely necessary and as normal as the ritual that had attended their marriage.

  A brief pause and silence followed the cutting. Asmat laid down the cutting instrument and looked about in nervous anticipation. Without command and all at once, those officials who were present rose and began shouting abuse and throwing handfuls of crushed gypsum at he who had with such grace and reverence just defiled the king’s body.

  Asmat turned and, as fast as his legs could carry him, ran from the scene along the long colonnade of the ceremonial parade and into the bright sunlight. Those in the chamber did not cease their ranting until the echoes of his footsteps had died away to a whisper. The ritualistic scolding was customary.

  Silence descended on the chamber once more.

  Meneptah reached to the floor, picked up the discarded knife and replaced it on the table. Offering up a short, reverend prayer to Osiris, he turned back to the body. Slowly he slid his left hand through the opening in the skin until only the upper half of his forearm remained exposed. He drew out the king’s viscera, organ by organ, placing them separate from one another upon the table at his side. As the priest’s head was totally enclosed in the clay mask, those about him could not see the strain in his expression. The perspiration ran down his cheeks and neck and appeared, in the light of the oil lamps, as glistening rivulets coursing down the centre of his chest and between his shoulder blades.

  The other priest acting as Meneptah’s assistant brought a bowl of palm wine to wash the embalmer’s thickly bloodied arms and hands. Tutankhamun’s intestines, his liver, stomach and lungs also were washed. Each cleansed organ was placed to one side in a small bed of natron salts. Much later, when sufficiently dried, they would be stuffed with spices and gum, smeared with unguent and bandaged with strips of linen. As was the custom, each strip would be penned with the names of the four sons of the god, Horus the faces of a jackal, a hawk, a man and an ape.

  Smenkhkare’s canopic chest, now emptied of its original contents, stood on the floor to Meneptah’s right. The four cavities in the sepulchral container would house the organs of the king for posterity. The chest had been carved from a single block of delicately veined calcite, in the form of a cube, slightly elongate vertically and tapering towards the top. On each of its outer corners in relief were almost identical depictions of the four tutelary goddesses who, as order prescribed, would take the king’s viscera under their special supervision. Their forearms stretched horizontally along each panel as if to hold the hallowed contents in close protection. Once entire, the object would be housed close by the king’s corpse. As it stood today, the chest was anonymous. The texts that had identified its original owner had been excised and those that would ultimately identify it with Tutankhamun were yet to be carved.

  After washing his hands, Meneptah turned back to the prone body. The lower thorax was now collapsed the abdomen evacuated of the stomach and entrails. He took some linen rags and soaked them with wet salts. He introduced them into the body cavity along with the heart the heart to restore the body’s soul; the salty rags to restore its natural shape and help cleanse and leach its bloody tissues.

  The man in the Anubis mask looked down at the face of Tutankhamun. The eyes of the dead king stared straight up at the lofted ceiling. Painted angels borne upon the brightly coloured wings of vultures looked down on him. Meneptah gently drew the body back so that the head fell over the end of the bed.

  Ankhesenamun stiffened. She knew what was going to happen next. Preordained process or not, the forthcoming mutilation of her young husband’s face would be more than she could bear to witness. She extended her arm with the flat of her hand vertical in a symbolic gesture and turned her head away. Meneptah understood the queen’s action and turned his body to block her view.

  Religious incantations were recited by those standing motionless in the shadows.

  Meneptah once more asked for the blessing of Osiris and carefully closed the dead eyelids. Now came the final evacuation. He introduced a copper needle into the king’s right nostril. He then gave it a sharp, firm tap and, with no apparent resistance, it broke into the cranial cavity. Withdrawing the needle quickly, he passed a long, hook shaped instrument up the nasal passage and pushed it into the brain case. He rotated it back and forth within the cavity, slowly puréeing the grey matter into a jelly.

  With the help of two attendants, the bo
dy was turned on its side and the head raised back to allow the pulp to drain from the nose into an alabaster bowl. This offal was of no importance to the ritual and would be summarily discarded. Warm rinsing fluids were poured into the cranial cavity to remove all remaining tissue and liquids. When Meneptah was sure that all residue within the cavity had been cleared, the body was rested back to its former position.

  Ankhesenamun lowered her arm and turned to face the body. Her husband looked little changed. The expression remained peaceful. But there were clear indications that the drying fluids were beginning to take effect. The skin was discolouring and starting to wrinkle. A rancid odour began to fill the chamber.

  Meneptah sensed it himself and hurriedly performed the final cleansing. He cleaned out the unfilled portion of the body cavity thoroughly with a brine solution and, wrapping his right hand in rags, dabbed all about inside until the interior of the cadaver’s torso felt relatively dry to the touch. He scooped up more salts and introduced them into the slit in the stomach. This completed, and the abdomen more or less the shape it had been in life, he pinched the sides of the wound together with his knuckles until the opening had fully closed. He placed a single half disc of pure gold sheet on it, hiding the gash from view.

  Taking hold of the body under the armpits, he pulled it towards him until the head was drawn back over the end of the bed again. With the nose now inverted, he poured hot resin through the open nostril and into the cranial cavity until the resin vessel was empty. An assistant at the foot of the bed dragged the body back by the ankles, replacing it in its original position. Meneptah held the head so that the closed eyes remained fixed on the ceiling.

  Finally, all the priests helped to heap the entire body from the neck downwards in piles of natron. The body’s shape became totally obscured beneath a long mound of salt.

  Ankhesenamun leaned forward and delicately touched her dead husband’s forehead with hers, the last time she would feel the touch of his skin now strangely warm from the fresh resins within. Pulling herself slowly erect, she turned and with measured steps walked out of the chamber. She did not look back. To those who watched her leave there had been a strength of purpose in the queen’s stride that they had not observed before.

  Meneptah’s duties ended with a final sprinkling of natron to conceal the head. He cleaned up the remaining pink fluid residue from the drainage bowl at the bottom of the alabaster bed and packaged up the embalming instruments and soiled cloths. Moaning a last solemn prayer, he and the remaining priestly officials and attendants turned away from the corpse and followed the queen through the single doorway.

  The room was left in the twilight of the dying oil lamps. As prescribed in the scriptures, as practised for centuries, the king’s body would lie pickled within its pile of salts for almost ten weeks, allowing the minerals to draw the last of the body fluids and complete the drying process prior to the final dressing and wrapping of the mummy and the funerary ceremonies.

  More than two months would pass before Ankhesenamun would see her husband’s mummy; two months before the sealing of his tomb; two months in which she would have to make haste to complete her private wishes two months with much to do and much anxious waiting.

  Time passed. Soon it was weeks, not months, that remained before the state funeral.

  The queen had inspected the new tomb where Tutankhamun was to be laid to rest. It certainly lacked grandeur too small and not deep enough but the queen was realistic. The tomb in The West Valley was barely half excavated and there was no time to complete it. She had but one concern the location. The requisitioned tomb was cut in the bottom of the valley in a main, dried-up watercourse. The risk was high that it could become flooded during the infrequent but violent storms that tore down the valley tributaries and there was no well to catch the flood water.

  The queen was aware of the priorities. To effect a trouble free transition of the king’s spirit to the afterlife it was far more important to complete all preparations within the allotted time than await excavation of an underground ‘palace’. The body must not be allowed to overstay its time in the land of the mortal. The king must be set upon his barque to cross the river of life and enter into the necropolis at the time appointed, and no other.

  Great piles of stone chippings had accumulated around the stepped entrance to the mouth of the tomb. To ensure it would have the capacity to store the quantity of grave goods that would normally accompany the body of a king on his eternal journey, the general had had the cavity slightly enlarged from the original. Much of this debris would ultimately be used to fill the entranceway after the tomb doors had been sealed and, in an effort to mask the position of this holy place, be spread all about the immediate area to merge with the natural flood debris of the valley floor.

  The stonemasons were completing the final dressing of the walls. They had already finished the chamber in which the king’s sarcophagus was to be placed and the plasterers were at work preparing the walls for decoration. The relative coolness of early spring allowed them to work throughout the day and night in shifts.

  The inscribers were first into the burial chamber. Along the shorter wall they were drafting small figures of baboons in three rows. Larger figures would cover the longer wall of the chamber. The painters would follow later to fill in their drawings.

  At his workshop in the village, Meneg had now completed the bier on which the dog carving would rest. He had varnished the assembled jackal in black as the messenger who had called on him weeks earlier. His neighbour, a worker of semiprecious stones, had crafted and set eyes of obsidian and alabaster. The entire piece was now with the gilders. His artwork completed, he now had to turn to more mundane tasks. He supervised the carpenters who were constructing the additional panels of the wooden shrine that would be assembled over and around the sarcophagus.

  Meneg also had to supervise the manufacture of the various panels making up the shrine that would surround the king’s viscera lesser in size than that over the sarcophagus but no less grand. Statuettes of the four tutelary goddesses of the compass were to be carved to embrace the canopic shrine. Meneg had selected his two best young carpenters for the job, each with a proven reputation for a steady hand and a reverent eye.

  The outer wooden coffin also was being crafted by specialists. All woods had to be selected with care for grain, dryness, hardness, and weight. Meneg recalled the horror of an error during the preparations for the interment of a local noble. Just last year he had all but completed the detailed carving on the upper surface of the coffin when, without warning, the huge lid had split right down the centre. The entire piece had to be started again with a new piece of wood. On this occasion there would be no time for such errors. The greatest care was taken in assuring that the woods were free of imperfections.

  Two life-size statues that would guard the entrance to the burial chamber would come from existing furnishings in the king’s quarters. At least that was one difficult task that would not have to be repeated.

  The goldsmiths were the busiest artisans of all. The scavenging of Smenkhkare’s tomb notwithstanding, there was considerable bullion to be melted down, moulded, engraved, polished and inlaid with coloured glass.

  All this work was accomplished in the royal foundry under a prolific, powerful and omnipresent guard. This is where the king’s death mask lay in waiting for the likeness it would shortly be used to create. There were no less than thirty goldsmiths working together in that room at any one time.

  The most formidable task of all was the casting, dressing and engraving of the king’s principal coffin. No mistakes could be made in its internal and external proportions. The wrapped body of the boy king must fit snugly within it. The coffin itself must fit comfortably within the second of his brother’s coffin set. The engraving must be perfectly balanced. Above all, there must be no errors in the fit of the upper and lower halves. At the appointed time they would have to come together like hand in glove.

  The weight of resp
onsibility would have overpowered the most articulate of artisans had it not been for the divine faith they held in the inevitability of their departed king’s forthcoming passage. The process was ordered; mechanical almost. In their execution of the work, they were carried by a belief in themselves and in the journey they would help to initiate for their dead king. Without this inherent trust and allegiance he would not reach the afterlife. Worse still, ultimately they may not be permitted to follow.

  Meneg was resolute. He had toiled long and hard to complete his charge. It had turned out as good a carving as he had ever accomplished. All the better for the depths of apathy from which he had dragged himself. The god had spoken to him, he told the goldsmiths, and the same would happen to them. They, too, would create their best work for Tutankhamun, the young king to whom they had grown so attached after the religious depredations of his father-in-law. The king would rejoice in the eloquent artistry of his people.

  Meneg visited the goldsmiths on a number of occasions during the process. He enjoyed drinking with them, relishing the inside stories about palace life. He liked to be kept up to date on the latest regal news. Even if it were largely speculation, it always made good listening. And, all this besides, he intensely admired their work. Their expertise, handed down and matured for centuries, was second to none.

  On the occasion of this visit he had heard it rumoured that Ankhesenamun had sent word to the Hittites, but for what?

  “Could it be for a new husband?” speculated Dashir.

  “A new king?” asked Meneg.

  “And a great army to take power from the king’s consort, Ay.” added the master goldsmith.

  “I heard the queen had received a messenger into her chambers last night,” said Meneg.

  “Not inside?” queried several almost together. Then voices came from everywhere. “’Tis not proper.” “It’d be ‘proper’ for me! She’s got to be frustrated by now. That queen needs a real man.” “Tuck in your stupid tongue, fool, before I pull it out with my bare hands.” “Nut is watching. She will protect us.” “She’d watch you die and no mistake. And enjoy it. Stupid man.” “The gods’ mercy on your tongue, or cut it out.”