Tutankhamun Uncovered

by Michael J Marfleet

  Rashid saw the problem first. The toe end of the lid was resting on the foot of the outer coffin which was standing just proud of the lip of the sarcophagus. For a moment all froze in stunned alarm. They stared at it, trying to think what to do next.

  Rashid whispered sharply, “Get it off! Quick! There is little time! The coffin is too big. We shall have to cut down the foot.”

  The men reinserted their carrying poles into the open end of the lid and levered it up. In their careless haste, one of the poles slid sideways. The imbalance of weight forced the other to slide out on the opposite side and the lid fell back onto the coffin foot, cracking along the old, repaired fissure. The copper dovetail that had held the two broken halves together popped out and fell onto the shroud beneath. In the confinement of the burial chamber the break sounded like a clap of thunder. Rashid could only hope that the music above ground would drown out the noise.

  “May Hathor plug your cow’s teats!” Rashid’s yelling at his men was suppressed, but yelling nonetheless. He whispered emphatically, “What are we to do now? We shall all be impaled by Pharaoh. An agonising and eternal death awaits! Osiris protect us!”

  The tired workers looked one to the other and to their master back and forth for some moments. Then one of them spoke up.

  “Master, Pharaoh will not have heard us. The break is still clean and it is dark in this place. We can repaint the crack. No one will notice. Let us be quick.”

  Rashid accepted the proposal immediately. The alternative was, after all, unthinkable. “Remove this end and the linen quickly and shave the foot of the coffin so that it will fit when replaced. Come on. Come on!” He gestured wildly in the gloom.

  Their energy rekindled with the adrenalin of fear, six of them removed the two broken halves of the lid. Another picked up the loosened dovetail and pulled the shroud off the bottom half of the coffin. Two others used an adze on the foot.

  “Enough! Enough!” Rashid flapped his arms at the men before they did too much unnecessary damage. “Replace the lid. Quickly! Quickly! You two clean up the mess.” Rashid recalled the pots of holy oils in the corner and pointed to them. “Wait! First pour some of that over the foot. Perhaps that will absolve us of the misery of our errors and inculcate the Gods of our innocent intentions.”

  The broken lid sat perfectly within the rim of the box this time. With some haste, one of the men painted over the clean fracture, giving it some semblance of normality. Truly, in the poorly lit room the repair was not noticeable.

  The men gathered up the disassembled wooden members that had made up the gantry and threw them unceremoniously towards the tomb doorway. Assembly of the four shrines was next. These they now had to put together in sequence, one inside the other, to complete the sacred golden structures that would house and protect the sarcophagus.

  “Quickly!” urged Rashid in a strong but low voice. “We shall all be punished if we do not leave this place by the time Pharaoh returns.”

  In his anxiety to make up for lost time Rashid chose not to supervise his men’s efforts but rather stand on one side of the sarcophagus and take up a mallet himself. The various panels that would make up the shrines had been stacked against one wall in reverse order, the smallest outward. The four walls of the innermost shrine were quickly passed among the men surrounding the sarcophagus.

  Unfortunately, with Rashid helping in the assembly of the shrine rather than supervising the construction, symbols painted on each panel, being in any case illegible to his illiterate team, went unnoticed. It soon became clear that the walls were not fitting together precisely and the chamber became loud with the frantic hammering of mallets as the mismatched corners were bludgeoned together.

  The first and second shrines were, in this way, crudely engineered into place. Then the third shrine was quickly assembled and the roof manhandled into place. The canopy frame was constructed over it and, taking a corner each, four of Rashid’s men draped the studded linen pall over the fragile framework. The fourth and final shrine was then forcibly assembled and the roof bashed into place by the hammerings of sixteen frantic hands.

  The job was done. The entire nest of shrines, awkwardly botched in places but to all but a detailed inspection perfectly constructed, stood firmly in position. All was well. The Pharaoh had not reappeared. Either they had made up some time or Ay had fallen asleep again and the others at the surface were having too good a time to notice.

  As Rashid and his team prepared to leave, they stopped short. The dark silhouette of a man stood between the labourers and their exit. Believing the shadow to be that of a royal guard, Rashid broke into a cold sweat and fell to his knees.

  The shadow spoke. “Help me out of here, Rashid, I implore you. If discovered I am a dead man.”

  At the sound of Meneg’s voice Rashid was greatly relieved. “My dear friend,” he began. “You frightened me. But what have you been doing so long within the tomb?”

  Meneg told his embarrassing story.

  “This is not good. If they catch you they will assume you to have been plotting robbery. You are in much danger, my friend. But we also are late and must exit with haste. I cannot hide you. They will count us out as they counted us in. There is no way for me to do this.”

  “We can run out as a group. Chances are by now they will not be of a mind to pay sufficient attention to count us. If I left on my own, however, I would be easily recognised. You must allow me to join with your group.”

  “If we are discovered with you we could all be put to death. I cannot. I love you Meneg but I cannot.”

  The old master carpenter stood back so that the light from one of the oil lamps threw deep, menacing shadows across the features of his face.

  “You are artisans are you not, Rashid you and your men?”

  “That we are and very proud of our work. Look, Meneg, I’m sorry about this but time is short and we have to go. Please do not hold us up any longer. We must go. You must take your own chances.”

  “So you would leave this botched job for me to confess to Pharaoh under torture? Is that what you want?”

  Rashid, in the act of pushing past Meneg, stopped in his tracks. “You would never betray us, Meneg. You would not... would you?”

  “Would I? How do I know what I might say in the agony of torture?”

  Rashid didn’t give the matter a second’s thought. The party picked up their equipment and, with Meneg partially hidden in the centre of the pack, left in a hurry. In the confusion and disarray of their departure, the tired soldiers who had in any case found more interest in watching the dancing gave the scrambling group no more than a cursory look.

  Rashid and his gang pushed through the cordon and ran down the valley track back towards the river. Meneg, once satisfied he was out of sight, stopped. He sat upon a rock and watched the illuminated festivities from a safe distance. He waited his turn. His ordeal was not yet over.

  In the light of the dying fire that had roasted the calf and oxen, the priests signalled to all that the final rituals in the burial procedure must now begin. They led the queen, the Pharaoh and the general down into the tomb one last time. As they entered the empty room that opened onto the burial chamber, the masons were just completing the wall which, but for a remaining doorway, now separated the first chamber from that containing the king’s remains.

  The queen, carrying a bouquet of olive leaves, was assisted down into the sepulchre, the priests following close behind. Each of them held a small magical object. The room was for all practical purposes completely filled with the outermost golden shrine. Just a narrow passageway remained around its perimeter. Working her way around the chamber clockwise, she stopped beside a small cavity cut into the wall near the first corner. She placed the bouquet on the floor in the corner and turned to take the first object, a djed pillar, from the priest behind her. Carefully she placed it in the tiny niche.

  A second cavity was positioned about halfway along the next wall opposite the head of the sarcophagus. She
placed a small model of Anubis here.

  The third cavity was positioned in the wall opposite the first. Here she placed an ushabti effigy of her husband.

  The fourth was cut into the east wall about halfway between the door to the treasury and the south wall. The queen stopped momentarily to take a last look at the diminutive casket that lay on the floor below the outstretched forelegs of the black jackal. The proud head stared directly back at her. She pressed her fingers to her lips and bent down, touching the box gently.

  Turning her back on it for the last time, she was helped out of the chamber, placing the last magical object, a small figure of Osiris, in its niche as she departed.

  Each of those who followed, including the priests who continued their recitals of incantations, had some burden to deposit in a preordained place of significance on the floor of the burial chamber golden sticks, jars, bundles of reeds and, most important of all, the paddles, ten of them, carefully placed in a row along the north wall, all there to help the king safely navigate his journey along the waters of the celestial Nile presently spread across the night sky high above them.

  The Anubis headed priest was the last to leave the sepulchre. Watched by the jackal himself, he squatted at the east end of the shrines and looked through the open doors of each at the sarcophagus inside. In solemn, slow actions he closed, bolted, tied and sealed each door in turn and, rubbing the remaining wet mud from his hands, departed this Pharaoh’s presence for ever.

  By the time the royal entourage had returned to the antechamber, the servant girls had laid out more food and drink on a cloth in the central part of the floor and everyone the priests, the treasurer, the commander of the army under Horemheb, the general himself, the queen and the Pharaoh seated themselves upon the folding stools provided. Having already eaten and drunk their fill above ground, their attention to the tomb feast at this time was little more than symbolic. And, while they nibbled, the painters put the finishing touches to the wall decoration inside the burial chamber.

  Ankhesenamun wistfully watched the shadows thrown by the flickering oil lamps. Her mind drifted to the adjacent room and the huge golden canopy that surrounded the instrument of her husband’s eternal journey. As the workers bricked up the doorway, she could make out the occasional flash of gold as the faint light caught a facet in the engraved surface of the huge shrine wall. But soon there was nothing. The last brick was in place, sealing off the burial chamber forever.

  A secondary priest summoned four men waiting at the top of the stairs. The plasterers filed into the chamber carrying broad, shallow baskets of wet mud. They at once took to plastering the doorway, smoothing the surface with their hands, then left as quickly as they had appeared.

  Together the priests all rose from the feast. Each took a large seal stamp from the satchel secured about his waist. Beginning at the top of the walled up doorway they took it in turns to make impressions. Every bit of the wet surface was covered. They made one last inspection to ensure that no portion of the wall had been missed and then withdrew to the outside.

  This was a signal to the remaining members of the royal party to divest themselves of their funerary regalia. They removed their floral collars and let them drop to the floor amongst the debris of the feast. With some relief Parannefer eased the Anubis mask off his head and let it drop. It smashed into a thousand tiny fragments at his feet. The funeral party followed the high priest up the inclined passage to the steps and to the surface for the last time. The servants stayed behind in the chamber.

  Those who remained below ground could hear the lilting music reaching down the corridor from outside. The servants began to dance. It was a stylised, circular dance. With exaggerated steps, they stamped on the dishes and cups left on the floor until everything was broken into tiny pieces.

  They stopped their dancing and immediately set about cleaning up the debris. The floral tributes, the fragments of smashed earthenware and remains of the food were gathered into the centre of the large cloth. They brushed the floor of the chamber clean, pushing any additional refuse onto the cloth with their brooms. Then, breaking their brush handles in half across their knees, they tossed them onto the cloth along with the other funerary rubbish. Gathering it all up into one bundle, they carried it out of the tomb.

  The two remaining accessible chambers were left clean and empty, ready to receive the last of the grave goods.

  On the surface the royal group were re-established in their seats overlooking the dancers. As they moved to the rhythm of the musicians the dancers were lit from behind by the roaring bonfires which warmed the cold night air and threw long, wildly moving shadows against the valley sides.

  By this time each member at the funerary feast had had his or her fair share of alcohol. The dancing and singing became all the livelier and noisier. The Valley of the Dead vibrated with life.

  Senefer, a servant at the earlier feast within the tomb, stood mesmerised by the joyful carousing. Standing at the top of the stairs with the clothful of feast remains gathered in his clasped fists, he watched the dancing shadows and brightly highlighted silhouettes bending and swaying to the beat of the music. He longed to become a part of it. As he gazed in wonderment at the spectacle before him, the brightly flickering firelight flashed off an object in the sand before him. He bent down and picked it up. It was a small gilded mask not much larger than a baby’s head. For a moment he stared at the tiny golden face. He half thought about pocketing the object, but a sharp prod in the back from his supervisor brought him back to reality. He dropped the mask into his sack and moved on.

  Senefer carried his burden along a track leading up a tributary valley and then turned off to the right to climb a short distance up the gravel slope towards a small pit which had been excavated specifically to accept the funerary rubbish. It would have been hard to find in the darkness of late evening had it not been for a colleague of his who had walked to the spot sometime earlier. Calling to his friend, Senefer found the place easily and together they busily set about stuffing the accumulated rubbish into several large, tall jars. Once the jars were full they sealed them as tightly as they could and stacked them neatly in one corner of the excavated cleft.

  To conceal the deposit, the two dragged gravel down from above with their fingers until they were satisfied that the natural slope had been restored. The job done, they set off over the cliff for Pademi, wife and bed.

  While the burial chamber closing had been taking place, the bearers on the surface, who had done little so far but stand dutifully beside the materials they had carried from the canal, once more took up their stretchers. The palace guard stood shoulder to shoulder the full length of the line, securing it on all sides as it wound back down The Valley.

  The constellation of Orion now glittered high above them in the night sky. The filling of the remaining tomb chambers as complete a supply of grave goods as any dead king might need to sustain him in his forthcoming travels must be accomplished before dawn, thereby permitting Osiris to witness the entire proceedings.

  The first objects to enter the tomb were items of food, drink and aromatic oils. These were placed on the floor at the small, low entrance to the chamber that Meneg had fallen into earlier. Two of the party slid down into the room and began taking the material from the doorway and stacking it against the north wall jars of wine, of oils and unguents, cosmetics, and baskets of fruit a storehouse that would have kept the labourers’ personal households going for many a month.

  The material bric-a-brac of life followed chairs, model boats, beds, weaponry, boxes, games, musical instruments, items of ritual, tools, writing instruments, clothing any objects that would fit with relative ease through the confining aperture, all stacked in orderly fashion and progressively filling the small chamber until there was space sufficient only for the two labourers who had been doing the stacking to scramble out through the small doorway.

  The aperture was quickly bricked up, plastered with mud and sealed a priest reluctantly ret
urning from the festivities above for the purpose.

  The procession of goods resumed. First to be introduced into the antechamber were the two black sentinels fashioned in the image of Tutankhamun. They were placed facing each other at either side of the sealed doorway to the burial chamber eternal guards. Between them stood the tiny golden shrine enclosing the king’s ka statue. Next followed the parts of the three ritual beds. These were carefully reassembled and placed head to toe in a line along the west wall of the entry chamber boxed food, caskets and boxes of jewellery and clothing, alabaster and calcite ornaments, chairs, jars, games, lamps, musical instruments, tools, writing equipment, weaponry, disassembled chariot parts, and effigies of the Pharaoh all neatly stacked in serried rows about the walls, beneath and on the beds. It all fitted to the very last piece.

  At the top of the stairway a solitary, cloaked figure stood clutching an object close to his chest. Meneg, his earlier worries now at rest, had this one final honour. He had made one of the first and he had made the last of the grave goods to be placed with Tutankhamun: a small wooden carving of the head of the king as a child. He had fashioned it with the greatest care and love and he was to place this piece in the centre of the central bed facing the doorway. A headdress of gold and lapis enclosed the scalp. Small, pendulous vulture earrings of pure gold dangled from the ear lobes.

  Alone he walked down the stone steps and disappeared into the dark corridor. As he approached the doorway to the first chamber, the glimmer of the flickering oil lamps gradually brightened. And when he stood at the threshold he found himself surrounded by the glitter of gold chariots to the left, gold sentinels to the right, gold beds between; everywhere the glint of gold.

  He blinked, then kissed the bust softly on the forehead and placed it in the centre of the bed in front of him. Stepping back, he took one last, long look. Truly this king had been buried with all the honours and the grave goods akin to those in the most elaborate of tombs. A tight fit. Not placed in spacious order as within the cavernous halls of Pharaoh Akhenaten but it was all there, just the same. The king had everything. That was what was most important.