In the Valley of the Kings

by Daniel Meyerson

  The archaeologist Arthur Weigall (present at #55’s opening) was firm in his opinion that the mummy was Akhenaten. He based his opinion on other evidence in the tomb: “magic bricks” inscribed with Akhenaten’s name and jewelry adorning the mummy. Besides this, other objections to Smith’s anatomical findings were raised: For example, can we be sure that the fusion of the long bones took place at the same age for ancients as it does for moderns? On close scrutiny, every “fact” Carter had to rely on became questionable, which was where intuition came in—knowing what to believe and what to reject.

  For the moment, though, let us tentatively stick to the deduction that the young man in tomb #55 is not Akhenaten—if only because he shows none of the physical abnormalities displayed on Akhenaten’s colossal statues, the large hips and spindly legs, the breasts and elongated skull, and so on. (Not forgetting that this “proof” might also be objected to: that these statues might be not realistic portraits but simply icons conforming with Akhenaten’s new theology. Or that if Akhenaten indeed had such physical traits, they would match a sufferer of Froelich’s syndrome—indicating that he was sterile and not the father of six daughters and two sons. The back-and-forth is endless.)

  But there is no going forward without a leap of faith. So let us proceed by saying: The youth in the gilded coffin was certainly not Akhenaten (clinging to those unfused long bones of tomb #55’s young mummy—and to our wine seals, the evidence that helped us establish Akhenaten’s longer life span).

  Next: Let us assume that Tutankhamun had his father’s body carried to Thebes after Akhetaten was abandoned (there would be no way to ensure its safety at the deserted capital, a remote, uninhabited place; whereas the Theban valley was carefully guarded and patrolled during the Eighteenth Dynasty). So if Akhenaten’s body is not in KV #55—clearly a tomb used for reburials from Amarna—then perhaps the tomb where he was reburied still waits to be discovered. Or perhaps, again, it does not: Perhaps in ancient times vengeful priests of the old religion dug up his mummy and destroyed all vestiges of it.

  These were the twists and turns that eventually led Carter to Tut. At Amarna, Carter was focused on Akhenaten. He was like a man courting a girl without realizing that the woman he was fated to marry was her sister (Tut), whom he’d passed by unnoticed on the front porch.

  And Tut was very much on the “front porch” at Amarna—his presence was almost tangible here, though he had no great monuments or stelae. Carter walked in his footsteps practically from the moment he arrived. Slipping down to the Nile by night, the young excavator started his career ass backward, burying, not digging up treasure: Burrowing out a hole near the river, he hid whatever cash he had on him (on Petrie’s advice). The same riverbank where Tut performed a wonder some thirty-three centuries earlier.

  For though he was only a child of four or five, Tut had astonished his courtiers by cutting one of the thick reeds that grow here (he could do very little that would not astonish the courtiers). “Behold! A reed cut by His Majesty’s own hand!” a scribe had recorded on the reed. Which ended up in Tut’s tomb together with a pair of narrow linen gloves he’d worn as a child.

  But such mementoes, very human reminders amid the tomb’s jewels and gold, were still in his sealed tomb some three hundred miles to the south. The young Carter burying his money by moonlight as of yet did not even know Tut’s name (Nebkheperure Hekaiunushema Tutankhamun, for short)—though in the course of his career, Carter not only will discover Tut’s tomb, but will become intimately acquainted with all of Tut’s ancestors (either discovering or digging in their tombs).

  Starting with Akhenaten, Carter will go back seven generations to both tombs of the regnant queen Hatshepsut. At Wadi e ‘Táqa e ‘Zeide, an isolated, inaccessible desert valley, he will have himself lowered down the sheer face of a steep plunging cliff, where he discovered her first tomb at the ending of a long winding tunnel dug deep in the cliffside.

  Using a thirty-two-candlepower engine, he will electrify the tomb of Tut’s great-great-grandfather Amenhotep II (the first to be lit up in the Valley of the Kings). Out-Hitchcocking Hitchcock, he will skillfully train the light over the pharaoh’s severe face, leaving the rest of the burial chamber in shadows.

  Driving through traffic in a taxi, Carter will hold Tut’s great-grandfather Thutmosis IV in his arms as he takes the long-haired, ear-pierced pharaoh to be X-rayed at a Cairo hospital.

  And as that minor distraction—World War I—rages he will dig up the foundation deposits in the huge hypogeum of Amenhotep III, Tut’s grandfather, piecing together fine faience shawabtis, or magical figurines, shattered by grave robbers thousands of years before.

  Throughout all his work, the experience Carter received here at Amarna was essential. His steps will be guided by mud seals and broken rings—and the archaeological intuition he was just beginning to develop. “Under his [Petrie’s] acute perspicacity my ideas, sometimes very original, generally melted into thin air, especially when he pointed out to me that there was not the slightest foundation for them. Intuition develops slowly … and with experience, knowledge also develops. Petrie’s training transformed me, I believe, into something of the nature of an investigator, [showing me the way] to dig and examine systematically.”

  Looking back in this passage from his memoirs, Carter was wry about his “very original” ideas that “melt into thin air,” but at the time he was as nervous and tortured by self-doubt as an actor suffering from stage fright.

  Which he should have been—for his responsibility was enormous. After only a week of watching Petrie in action, despite his inexperience he was given Akhenaten’s Great Aten Temple, while Petrie took for himself the palace and the center of the ancient city, its offices, barracks, and houses. But what did Carter know about excavating, really? Very little when it came down to it—almost nothing.

  It was a situation that would not have been possible at any other time. But Egypt was a “house on fire,” in Petrie’s words. Its fragile ruins, important clues to the riddle of humanity’s past, were being destroyed by natural disasters, thieves, and fellahin. Peasants squatted in the tombs and temples, settling together with their goats and camels among the forgotten gods and the ancient dead.

  They used the mummies of their ancestors for firewood, they ravaged the ruins in a search for gold and silver—or simply for sebakh, the nitrous compound formed by the ruins’ rotting mud brick they used as fertilizer. Foreign dealers conducted a brisk trade in patches of friezes and paintings (cut out from tomb walls, provenance purposely disguised)—whatever was stolen disappeared, unrecorded, into private hands; the integrity and significance of the whole was in danger of being lost.

  Catching a thief hanging around the edges of the dig at night, Petrie remembered that “one worker held him down while I walloped him. He swore he would go to the Consul; that I had broken his leg. I let him crawl off on hands and knees some way and then, giving a great shout, rushed at him, when he ran off like a hare.” Other times the swift-footed Petrie chased the thieves into the desert jumping over irrigation ditches and canals. “A run of two to four miles is exercise valuable morally and physically,” he noted with satisfaction.

  The ruins had to be saved and recorded, and the job had to be done quickly. There was no time to be scrupulous about a thief’s broken leg—or about Carter’s lack of credentials and experience. Working at a speed that would be inconceivable today, Petrie drove himself and his new assistant to the limit.

  Carter was very much on his own here. All beginnings are hard, the saying goes, but Carter’s was more difficult than most. Petrie was often remote and withdrawn, preoccupied with excavating the huge site. Carter had to build his own dwelling himself, a mud brick house at the edge of the ruins—rough quarters where he slept on palm fronds and was plagued by insects and scorpions. His command of Arabic was not yet good enough to permit him to communicate beyond basics with the workers. Deepening his sense of isolation, he had just received word from England that h
is father had died, but he had to put off the mourning until after he had made a few discoveries—that was what counted now.

  And the discoveries did come. Slowly, it was true, but the main thing was that one by one they emerged from the huge pit (six hundred by four hundred feet and four feet deep), the finds recorded in Carter’s precise hand.

  Fragment. Neck and shoulders of a figure. Fine limestone

  Two hands with offering table

  Mauve duck. Faience [nonceramic clay]

  Leg, life size. Good stone. Fine work. Dry finish

  Magician’s bronze serpent

  Shoulder, bit of side. Double life size. Good stone. Fine work

  Ear

  Fragments of the king’s face: thick lips, long nose, feminine

  breasts

  Torso of the king. Pure white semi-crystalline limestone

  Nefertiti, hands touching, offering flowers to the sun

  There were broken glass vessels, imported Aegean pottery, scarabs, bezels of broken faience rings, some bearing royal names—the princess Meritaten, Baketaten, and Neferneferure-tasherit (that is, junior, to distinguish her from her mother, Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti Mery-Waenre).

  And there were jars—small ones for eye salve; larger ones marked honey, oil, and fat. And wine jars by the hundreds; their broken bits came up from the earth, along with their discarded seals—stamped with their day, month, and year.

  There were capitals of pillars that supported the temple’s courtyard: palm leaf in form, their dazzling two-colored glazes separated by gold ribbing.

  Vases were found, false necked, wide necked, and pear shaped. Bowls and jewel boxes. Amulets and whips.

  Work stopped the minute there was a find. Carter climbed into the pit and had to judge how to proceed. Sometimes a delicate object would need on-the-spot conservation, without which it would turn to dust. Having the hands of an artist, Carter became known for his light touch (later, a dried floral wreath found on Tut’s coffin—a last farewell from his young wife?—survived only because of his care).

  The large pieces presented different problems—the heavy, fragmented slab of a frieze with its portrait of Nefertiti on Akhenaten’s lap; or the altar table Akhenaten set up at the founding of his new capital. Moving them safely also required a skill he was beginning to acquire—God help him, he could not afford to be clumsy with Petrie just a few ancient blocks away.

  The days passed to this rhythm: long periods of watchfulness followed by the sudden excitement of a find; followed in turn by the slow, painstaking process of preservation, recording, packing. Only after hours, or in the early morning before work began, could Carter relax.

  Wandering among the desert cliffs, the eighteen-year-old sought the company of a group of beautiful virgins of thirty-three … centuries. For the courtiers’ tombs at Amarna were almost all virgins (in the archaeological lingo of the day)—that is, although the tombs had superbly chiseled entrances, and sarcophagus slides, and pillared chambers with friezes cut in intaglio on the plastered walls, the burials for which they were intended never occured.

  On their walls, Carter could see whole the shattered faces and fragmented torsos he had been digging up. In one tomb, Akhenaten and Nefertiti rode out from the palace in gilded chariots, escorted by priests and courtiers and a heavy military bodyguard. In another, the king in the blue (khepresh) crown sacrificed to the Aten, grimacing as he severed the neck of a duck. The young princesses stood nearby, shaking the rattlelike sistrum during the sacrifice and prayer. And in all of the decorated tombs, the royal couple stood on “the balcony of appearances,” showering down golden collars to reward the tomb owners for their service: the steward Ipy #10; the general, Ramose #11; the royal secretary, Any #23; the king’s doctor, Pentu #5.

  Clever, ambitious men, the courtiers abandoned Akhetaten at the death of the pharaoh, fleeing this doomed place of intellectual speculation and religious fervor. But though they returned three hundred miles south, ordering new tombs and reverting to old beliefs, even in those Theban tombs we can see that a change had taken place. Their tomb paintings displayed the new freedom of artistic expression seen everywhere at Amarna—in statue portraits of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, in the friezes from the Great Aten Temple, and most especially on a magnificent decorated pavement that Petrie uncovered one day.

  So enthralled was Petrie with the discovery that from its first moments he sent away the workmen. He insisted on doing everything himself, not allowing even Carter to help.

  On its painted tiles birds took flight with a vivid upward rush of motion that made the reeds tremble. Calves frolicked in the high grass and fish leapt from the waters of trompe l’oeil lakes. Amid its profusion of flowers were representations of Egypt’s enemies, Libyans, Nubians, and Asiatics, prostrate and bound.

  Treading carefully on a specially constructed wooden walkway (that he himself had made), Petrie copied the scenes, though Carter, the better artist, could have produced a finer copy. While Petrie worked, Carter sat idle for once, listening eagerly to his mentor’s ideas.

  For it was worthwhile to hear Petrie conjecture, Carter wrote, even about a thistle—the thistle in this case being one drawn by the ancient artist “with admirable freedom of the branching,” as Petrie pointed out. He compared it with the lotus plant next to it, drawn “with all the formality of the stiffest Egyptian [style].”

  “If one plant was naturally varied, why not the other?” Petrie asked (a question that found its way into Petrie’s publication of the pavement in Tell el Amarna in 1894).

  “Here the artist’s education is seen,” Petrie deduced. “The artist had been brought up to draw the stock subject, the lotus, and he could not see it otherwise; whereas on plants to which he had not been trained, such as the thistle, he threw his full attention for copying.”

  It was typical of Petrie that if he was alive to every ancient nuance, he was also alive to every modern expense. He interrupted himself to mention to Carter a forgotten detail of their arrangements: The price of Carter’s monthly ration of canned food and the paraffin lamp he had been given would be deducted from his salary. Then he returned to his all-consuming task—preserving the wonderful pavement.

  Despite Petrie’s care, however, it was doomed to survive only in his copy. Word spread about the amazing find, and soon the luxurious dahabiyyas of the rich came sailing down from Cairo. The aristocrats trampled through the fields on their way to the site—what were a few pennies’ worth of sugarcane to them? Finally, one night a vengeful peasant farmer, sick of the arrogant khawagas, smashed the pavement beyond repair. Only Petrie’s copy and a few tiles remain to give us a sense of what once had been.

  But still visitors continued to appear, drawn by word of another discovery: the tomb of Akhenaten found in a ravine to the east of the ancient city (a unique orientation—facing the rising, not the setting, sun). The Service des Antiquités’ old steamer arrived among the pleasure boats. It brought Professor Archibald Henry Sayce, linguist, Egyptologist, and Assyriologist, who had come to join Petrie and Carter in their first visit to the tomb. For the discovery of the tomb, announced in Cairo, had caught even them by surprise. It was an example of the fiercely competitive politics of the time. It seemed that the French, in cahoots with locals who had been “disposing” of whatever they could sell, had known about the tomb for some years, not letting the British archaeologists in on the secret.

  Indignant over French duplicity and cunning, Petrie was nevertheless as eager as a boy to visit the tomb, running ahead of his colleagues to be the first Englishman to descend into it. While Sayce copied its inscriptions, Carter sketched a scene in room gamma: Akhenaten, his wife, Nefertiti, and their entourage weep for their daughter Meketaten, who has just died in childbirth. The mourners pour dust on their heads, while in the background a royal nurse looks on as she holds the child. The scene Carter drew, more than three thousand years old, made first-page news in the Daily Graphic of March 23, 1892. A media craze was created over the an
cient findings, though Carter privately wrote to a friend that the tomb, greatly vandalized in antiquity, was “a wash”—an opinion that may be considered a case of sour grapes, seeing as how Carter had had his heart set on discovering it since the days of the Hatnub fiasco.

  But more important than the tomb from a historical point of view were the eighteen ancient letter-fragments Petrie turned up during Sayce’s visit, along with Egyptian/Akkadian word lists, or “dictionaries” (used to translate state documents into Egyptian from Akkadian, the fourteenth century BC language of international diplomacy). They were part of a cache discovered five years before by a peasant woman searching for fertilizer amid the ruins. As she tossed the rotting mud into her cart, she noticed something hard in the earth—more than three hundred baked clay tablets covered in cuneiform, the wedge-shaped script they were written in.

  A specialist in cuneiform, Sayce had been working on the letters, difficult to translate because of the diplomatic jargon employed in their writing—words that had gone out of use even in the fourteenth century BC (old Babylonian formulas and logograms from Sumerian, a language that had ceased to be spoken a thousand years before Akhenaten’s reign)—not to mention scribal errors, words borrowed from Ugaritic, and unusual Canaanite constructions.

  Despite all the linguistic problems, as Sayce read Petrie and Carter his first attempts, the ancient voices miraculously came alive. Taking just one letter—say, the message of Asshurbalit, king of Assyria, to Akhenaten—and putting it together with the colors of Petrie’s glazed tiles and the shapes of Carter’s fragmented statues; with bits of gilded pillars and inlays from temple walls—a moment from the court at Akhetaten magically came alive.

  A letter had arrived in Egypt sometime in the 1370s BC. The men who carried it had crossed plains and rivers. They had navigated the Great Green (the Mediterranean) and finally made the long trip down the Nile. Great Assyrian nobles, they had vied for the honor of bearing their king’s message to Egypt’s strange new ruler.