ALSO BY DANIEL MEYERSON
The Linguist and the Emperor: Napoleon and
Champollion’s Quest to Decipher the Rosetta Stone
Blood and Splendor: The Lives of Five Tyrants, from
Nero to Saddam Hussein
For
PHILLIPE, (AL)CHEMIST EXTRAORDINAIRE
and
MUSTAFA KAMIL
I HAVE SEEN YESTERDAY. I KNOW TOMORROW.
—INSCRIPTION IN THE TOMB OF
PHARAOH TUTANKHAMUN, 1338 BC
CONTENTS
A Note on the Map of Egypt
Map of Egypt
Tutankhamun’s Family Tree
PART ONE
EXPENSES PAID AND NOTHING ELSE (BUT FATE)
PART TWO
NAKED UNDER AN UMBRELLA
PART THREE
THE WORLD OF NEBKHEPERURE HEKAIUNUSHEMA TUTANKHAMUN
PART FOUR
IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS
PART FIVE
A USEFUL MAN
PART SIX
A FINAL THROW OF THE DICE
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
A NOTE ON THE MAP OF EGYPT
There are two sources for the Nile—one is in Uganda, the other in the Ethiopian highlands. The “two” Niles, the Blue Nile and the White Nile, join in the Sudan, at Khartoum, and begin their long journey toward the Mediterranean. When the Nile reaches Cairo, it fans out into many branches that run through a low-lying delta region to the sea. The area around Cairo and the delta is known as Lower Egypt.
Somewhat south of Cairo (120 km south, to be exact, about a subject that is not exact), we arrive at the city of Beni Suef, which is a good conventional demarcation point between Lower Egypt and Middle Egypt. Middle Egypt may be said to run to a city on the Nile called Qus, which is 20 km north of Luxor. Upper Egypt starts here and runs south, encompassing Nubia, an area that includes northern Sudan (part of Egypt in ancient times).
Ancient Egyptians thought of their country as having two parts: Upper and Lower Egypt. Their history was said to have begun with the unification of the Two Lands (one of the names for Egypt) when the king of Upper Egypt conquered the north. This duality was reflected in countless ways in Egyptian iconography, most prominently seen in the pharaoh’s Double Crown. The basketlike Red Crown, symbol of the north, would be worn inside the cone-shaped White Crown of the south.
Over time, the north/south duality became part of the multifaceted dialectic that obsessed Egyptian thought: North/south, barren desert/fertile farmland, birth/death were not merely facts of life, but inspired art, ritual, and myth for this imaginative, speculative people.
PREVIOUS PAGE: Howard Carter seated beside the coffin of
King Tutankhamun, removing the consecration oils that covered the
third, or innermost, coffin, 1926. © GRIFFITH INSTITUTE,
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
New Year’s Day 1901
Deir el-Bahri, Southern Egypt
EVERYONE WHO WAS ANYONE WAS IN THE DESERT THAT DAY. AN excited crowd had gathered beneath the stark cliffs that rose dramatically behind the two ancient temples. One was dedicated to the soul of Queen Hatshepsut, 1550 BC, and the even older one next to it, Mentuhotep I’s, had stood there in the relentless sun for four thousand years.
It was a place of great desolation and silence. Behind the temples towered the lifeless cliffs; and before them, the blinding white sand stretched endlessly to meet the empty sky. Djeser djeseru, the ancients called it, the holy of holies, the dwelling place of Meretsinger, the cobra goddess: She Who Loves Silence.
And it was here that the noisy crowd descended, chattering, speculating, filled with the nervous restlessness of modernity. In search of sensation, treasure, beauty—how could the goddess bear them as she watched from her barren heights?
First and foremost was the British viceroy, Lord Cromer, a man whose word was law in Egypt. He’d dropped everything, leaving Cairo in the midst of one of Egypt’s endless crises. After ordering his private train, he’d traveled five hundred miles south, then taken a boat across the Nile, and then a horse-drawn calèche out toward the desert valley. The price of Egyptian cotton had plummeted on the world market, pests were ravaging the crops, and starvation stalked the countryside. But what did that matter next to the fact that a royal tomb had been discovered? After months of laborious excavation, the diggers had finally reached the door of a burial chamber with its clay seals still intact—and His Lordship wanted to be present at the opening.
As did an assortment of idle princes, pashas, and high-living riffraff from the international moneyed scene … along with the usual hangers-on of the very rich: practitioners of the world’s oldest profession. Which in Egypt didn’t refer to—to what it usually does, but meant grave robbers (or archaeologists, as they are more politely known).
To dig with any success (“to excavate,” in the polite lingo), one needed knowledge. And one needed money—a great deal of it.
Thus, they often came in pairs, the archaeologists and their sugar daddies. There were famous “couples”—inseparables for all their differences of temperament and background. For example, looking back on turn-of-the-century Egyptology, can one think of the American millionaire Theodore Davis apart from the young Cambridge scholar Edward Ayrton?
Together they discovered a long list of tombs and burial shafts, Pharaoh Horemheb’s, Pharaoh Siptah’s, and “the golden tomb” (KV #56)1* among them. As well as the mysterious Tomb Kings Valley #55—and the animal tombs (#50, #51, and #52): the mummified and bejeweled pets of Amenhotep II. The beloved creatures had been stripped of their jewelry by ancient robbers who had even decided to create a “joke”—perhaps the oldest in existence—leaving pharaoh’s monkey and dog face-to-face. Which was how Davis and Ayrton found them some three thousand years later: locked in an eternal stand-off.
The two men, the millionaire and the scholar, made a striking picture: Davis, headstrong, determined, unwilling to be denied anything he wanted. The entrepreneur stood erect, staring down the camera in his flared riding pants and polished boots and gray side whiskers; Ayrton stood next to him, athletic, boyish, shy, a straw boater tilted at a rakish angle as he smiled absentmindedly staring out over the desert. If it wasn’t exactly a marriage made in heaven—the two had their ups and downs—still their partnership produced significant results.
Or take Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon, another such couple. Carter, irascible to the point of being rabid when the fit was on him, intense, brooding, obsessed. With almost no formal education and a humble background, he was the quintessential outsider whose artistic ability was his one saving grace. Where would he have been without his Earl of Carnarvon, the lovable “Porchy”—bon vivant heir to a thirty-six-thousand-acre estate who came to the excavations supplied with fine china, table linen, and the best wines?
Though they tried to pass themselves off as patrons of the arts and archaeology, the truth was that these high rollers were not selfless. They paid for an excavation because they stood to gain a great deal from it, more than they would have at the racetracks and roulette tables of their usual watering holes.
The laws—or, better, the rules of the game—in Egypt allowed for an equal division of whatever was found: statues, jewelry, papyri. The fledgling Egyptian Museum at Cairo got half the take, the other half went to the wealthy diggers. It was this prospect that drew the British earls and American millionaires to the remote
desert wadis with their magnificent treasures … and their ancient curses and gods.
There was, however, one exception in this high-stakes game, the wild card in the deck: an intact royal burial. A pharaoh’s tomb or a queen’s sepulcher undisturbed since the time of its sealing. In the case of such a discovery, all bets were off and the rules changed. In theory, everything went to the Egyptian Museum—though what would happen in practice no one knew, since up to that time such a discovery had never been made. What was more, it was such a remote possibility that those in the know discounted it. The tombs found so far had all been at least partially plundered in antiquity.
But this discouraged no one, since a plundered tomb could be astonishing enough. What had been worthless to the ancient thieves was often worth a fortune to their modern counterparts. The early grave robbers concentrated on gold and silver, or on jars filled with costly perfumes and unguents. They would pour the oils into animal skins to be easily carried away, leaving behind exquisite works of art. They couldn’t have fenced the finely carved statues. Or the limestone and alabaster sarcophagi, the painted coffins and splendidly illustrated rolls of papyri. Such priceless leavings made the game well worthwhile (a game that in modern terms came to hundreds of thousands of British pounds, or American dollars, or French francs).
Then, too, there were the accidental finds stumbled upon in such “plundered” tombs: amulets overlooked in the folds of mummy wrappings or jewelry dropped in the haste of an ancient getaway. A “worthless” crocodile mummy, brittle to the touch, would crack open to reveal a hundred-foot papyrus roll, a masterpiece of the calligrapher’s art. A mummified arm would be discovered—the arm of Queen Mernneith, broken from her body and thrust into a niche during the First Dynasty (3000 BC). Laden with wondrously worked golden bracelets, the arm had been plastered over by some hapless thief who’d never managed to return for his booty. His loss was his modern “brother’s” gain (the severe and Spartan W. Flinders Petrie, working over the supposedly exhausted Abydos site with a fine-tooth comb).
With so much at stake, is it any wonder that Egypt was a place of feverish rumors and speculation? Competition was fierce: among private collectors, among dealers in antiquities (both real ones and forgeries), and among the great museums of the world. The Louvre, the British Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art all had their unscrupulous representatives at work. Greedy, squabbling children, they were anxious to obtain the finest examples of ancient art: provenance known or unknown—no questions asked.
Of course, they were all there in the desert on that hot, bright November day. The opening of an intact royal tomb was not an event they were likely to miss. Nor would the “father” of this naughty family overlook such an occasion: Gaston Maspero, the mudir, or director, of the Service des Antiquités, a devoted scholar whose job it was to keep his acquisitive children in check.
Portly, middle-aged, unworldly—a French academic—Maspero had come to Egypt in 1881 to become the second director of the newly established service. His position as mudir had forced him quickly to learn the ins and outs of the shady antiquities markets.
His first task had been a very “unacademic one”: to trace the source of a steady stream of treasure, recognizably from royal burials, that had been showing up on the market. With the help of a wealthy American collector (Charles Wilbour) and an agent working for both Russia and Belgium (Mustafa Aga Ayat), Maspero followed a torturous trail. It began with two leather strips, outer mummy wrappings, and led to a notorious grave-robbing family, the Abd er Rassuls.
Maspero had its members “interrogated” roughly. For though he was soft-spoken and humane, when it came to saving antiquities he could be as hard as nails. He ordered a bastinado for the culprits, a beating on the soles of their feet. Ironically, it was a harsher method than the one used on the ancient grave robbers, who were merely lashed on the back to make them talk (the blows given by the hundred, one wound counting as five blows). The bastinado, though, besides causing the whole body to swell, created extreme mental anguish. It left Ahmad er Rassul, the brother who finally confessed, crippled for life (afterward, Maspero was clever enough to recruit him as a service inspector).
The disclosures led to the discovery of a remote desert tomb known as the Deir el-Bahri cache—the hiding place of thirty royal mummies, among them Amenhotep I; Thutmosis I, II, and III; Seti I; Ramesses II and III; and the royal family of the priest-pharaoh Pinedjem. During the breakdown of order in Egypt (in the Twentieth and Twenty-first dynasties), the royal mummies had been taken from their tombs by priests striving to protect their sacred god-kings. Moved from place to place, they were finally reburied here, DB tomb #320.
Here they had remained for three thousand years—and might have remained forever if not for some roaming Arabs. One idly threw a stone into a cleft in the face of the cliffs, and the hollow ringing echo alerted an er Rassul brother who was with them. Keeping his suspicions to himself, he frightened his companions with talk of demons and ghosts in the area. Then he and his brothers returned to investigate. As a result, the er Rassuls had been selling the tomb’s treasures bit by bit for over a decade.
Maspero had the royal mummies taken upriver to Cairo. They made the long trip to wailing all along the way, “the women screaming and tearing their hair,” as Emile Brugsch, Maspero’s assistant, wrote. The peasants crowded to the riverbank, filling the air with a ritual lamentation. Their stylized wailing went back to the earliest epochs of history, when the pharaoh’s death was an act of cosmic significance: It represented the death of a god, the eclipse of the sun, a time of danger and instability. Perhaps moved by some obscure instinct, the mourning villagers now reenacted the same scene that had taken place thousands of years before.
Once in Cairo, the mummies were eventually studied with the most up-to-date scientific methods of the time.2* The notes scrawled on their coffins were translated and the history of their wanderings recorded. Finally put on display, their expressive features—faces from another world—were gazed upon by an admiring multitude. And thus Maspero began his directorship of the service with a resounding success.
Maspero’s position plunged him into the thick of Egyptian politics. Among his many responsibilities was the granting of concessions to excavate. It was up to him to decide which ancient sites went to whom. National passions were at their height in the years before World War I, and the claims of British diggers had to be considered against French ones, not to mention American, Italian, and German rivalries. Complicating matters was the fact that the British exercised political control over Egypt, while the French had been culturally preeminent in the country since Napoleon’s invasion a century before.
By nationality Maspero was French; by extraction he was Italian; and in his sympathies he was Anglophile. But the cause closest to his heart was knowledge. He sought to strengthen the service, hoping in this way to preserve the ancient sites and to stop the unrestrained looting of Egypt’s treasures.
A beautifully wrought work of art had a monetary value on the antiquities market. But when exact information as to where it had been found could be obtained—when it could be put into a historical context—its scientific value increased tenfold.
Both realist and idealist, Maspero knew that money was the key. Money not only to excavate, but also to preserve what had already been uncovered. To guard the temples and tombs, to restore them, to record the inscriptions covering their walls. Since scant public funds were available, private contributions were a necessity—and such contributions often had to come from the very people he had to be most wary of.
In pursuit of his goals, the new director cultivated a wide range of friendships, anyone and everyone who could be of help. There were the poor itinerant scholars: men and women wandering among the ruins, notebooks in hand, their families moving from pension to pension (figures such as James Breasted, whose translations of ancient inscriptions in Egypt and Nubia ran into many volumes and remain a standard work; his son Charles recalls mea
ger meals in backstreet Egyptian restaurants, his parents dividing the food among the three of them with a careful hand).
And there were the wealthy itinerant aristocrats—an international crowd wintering in Egypt. They sailed the Nile on luxurious dahabiyyas or were pampered in fantastically opulent hotels such as Shepherd’s in Cairo or Luxor’s Winter Palace. Maspero was always a welcome presence among them: earnest but never gauche; witty and sociable.
He enlisted the help of pious churchmen, reverends eager to prove the historical truth of the Bible; and he employed impious thieves of every stripe and rank, high and low. An embassy clerk might pass on a tip as to what was being smuggled out in the diplomatic pouch: a rare scarab, a pharaonic diadem, or a bust such as the famous one of Nefertiti that was brought to Berlin in this way.
It is a wonder that Maspero, understaffed and overworked, had the energy not only to fulfill his duties as mudir so brilliantly, but at the same time to pursue his scholarship. But somehow he did—keeping one eye on the fashionable guest list of Shepherd’s Hotel and the other on a papyrus scroll. His knowledge of the monuments was encyclopedic, his writings were prolific, and his work on the pyramid texts was groundbreaking. He was first among the Egyptologists of his generation, at the same time taking under his wing many young hopefuls of the next.
Among those Maspero encouraged was Howard Carter, though the young man fit into none of the usual categories. He had no education, no money, no family background, and no training in Egyptology. He could speak neither Arabic nor French, and his manners were awkward and abrupt. He was taciturn, brooding, and bad-tempered. He didn’t even have the robust constitution required for turn-of-the-century archaeology, when diggers lived for months on tinned food, sleeping in tents or ancient tombs cut into the cliffs. He had nothing but his stubbornness, an iron determination to make good.
In the Valley of the Kings: Howard Carter and the Mystery of King Tutankhamun's Tomb Page 1