Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History

by Patrick Hunt

  But the original “hanging gardens” may not have been Babylonian or even in Babylon. Because we can now read the scribes’ texts, commanded to be written by Ashurbanipal and his grandfather Sennacherib, we know they also had gardens in Nineveh that “hung” or were terraced. These gardens were filled with thousands of imported plants and trees, brought from all over the known world, including cedars from Lebanon and pines from Aleppo. We also know Sennacherib’s canals and aqueducts were not just for his people in Nineveh but for watering his pleasure gardens. We know from the Assyrian library that Ashurbanipal’s wife, like Nebuchadnezzar’s in the account of Diodorus, missed her mountainous homeland with its verdant forests, so her husband had an artificial mountain built for her in Nineveh. Diodorus says the Babylonian queen was from the land of the Medes (Zagros Mountains) and elsewhere says that Semiramis was the mythical queen who built the walls of Babylon, but his texts are often confused. For more evidence at Nineveh, there are at least fifty holes on one side of the top of Kuyunjik mound in Nineveh that have been interpreted as artificial root ball sockets for imported tree plantings. Furthermore, remains of the Ninevite canals and aqueducts are still visible, bringing water from the mountains of Kurdistan to the north, channels that in some cases stretch for almost forty miles.

  My own personal involvement in this story is small but interesting to relate. When I was a postdoctoral research fellow working with David Stronach at Berkeley around 1992-94, he had me involved in various stone-related assignments, including stone provenance (looking for geological sources of archaeological stone) and photogrammetry assessments of the 1989-90 Berkeley excavations of Nineveh. David Stronach is frequently acknowledged to be one of the world’s preeminent archaeologists of the twentieth century, so I was fortunate to be able to learn directly from him. I’ll never forget sessions with Stronach at his home along with Mark Hall, another research fellow, when we spent some time examining maps and aerial surveys of the remnant walls of Nineveh, comparing 1958 British Royal Air Force aerial photographs around Mosul, in which the walls were still very much visible against the bare land, with new panchromatic GIS satellite maps. Using stereoscopic glasses on parallel photos makes flat features pop out in relief. Employing both old aerial photos and new satellite imagery together can result in a good symbiosis for topographic analyses.

  On the mound of Kuyunjik I noticed fascinating infrared data on the west side where a close-up of reflected infrared light—compared to the old RAF aerial photos for a baseline—showed that the material of the mound itself contained many types of different composite materials, most likely soils for special plant habitats. My minimal work as a team member of the postexcavation research at Nineveh suggests that some portion of Kuyunjik was augmented with artificial or special soils for first Sennacherib’s and then Ashurbanipal’s gardens. David Stronach and now others have not challenged Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus on whether such marvelous hanging gardens existed but merely raised the question of where they originated. Unlike the site of Babylon, which was buried but never completely forgotten, the rediscovery of Nineveh around 1850 still raises enormous implications: not only is it possible that Nineveh instead of Babylon was responsible for this wonder of the ancient world, but there may yet be undiscovered stories and forgotten histories recorded and waiting to be found in the now accessible texts of the Assyrian library at Nineveh.

  Conclusion

  The same fire in 612 BC that destroyed the city of Nineveh also baked the clay tablets of the Assyrian library, preserving them for 2,500 years until 1850. This collection of some twenty-six thousand clay tablet fragments, now mostly at the British Museum, tell us more about Mesopotamian life than any other single source. The story is filled with intrigue and perspicacity, courage and hardship, all because resourceful and intrepid individuals like Austen Henry Layard, Henry Rawlinson, Hormuzd Rassam, George Smith, David Stronach and many others, including Mesopotamian scholars like Irving Finkel, John Curtis and their museum colleagues in London, all wanted to know more about ancient Mesopotamia. These individuals, spread out over the last few centuries, refused to let a difficult region of the Near East and a daunting script from antiquity stand in the way of a greater understanding of the past.

  Chapter 4

  King Tut’s Tomb

  The Key to Egypt’s God-Kings

  Valley of the Kings, Egypt, 1922

  Even in late November, an intense desert heat that was stored underground also filled the darkness that had been concealing deep secrets for millennia. Sweat soaked the shirts of the men who were trying to keep the dust out of their eyes and lungs. They were impatient with their slow progress and were worn down from day after day of removing rubble from the long tunnel seemingly reluctant to be cleared. Whoever had filled the stairways and chambers so many ages past had wanted it to be an undisturbed resting place and eternally safe from tomb robbers. Now the moment had finally come to break through the last barrier of bricked-up wall. The hubbub of echoing voices that had relayed muted instructions suddenly hushed altogether as every eye peered and no one breathed for a moment. With a softly scraping sigh, the last brick and mortar tumbled inward and a black hole appeared amid the dust. When his beam of light passed through the settling dust, a gasp was heard from Howard Carter. The light reflected back from polished gold everywhere; the gleaming sight almost stopped his heart.

  In 1922, Howard Carter’s astonished eyes were the first to witness the intact grandeur of an Egyptian pharaoh for almost 3,400 years, and Carter will be forever attached to his discovery of Tut’s tomb. In a combination of dogged persistence and rare good luck, Carter was able to achieve a dream that few are even able to consider. After five long frustrating years, from 1918 onward, in his active search for this one elusive tomb—the last of the Egyptian pharaohs to be accounted for—Carter was able to use practical logic to pin down the most probable location. This was because the rest of the space in the Valley of the Kings was crowded with other royal tombs from the New Kingdom’s prior and succeeding dynasties. Since no one had ever found Tutankhamun’s resting place, nor had any of his grave goods ever surfaced in known history, Carter was convinced the tomb existed. Although Tut was not even important enough to make the Egyptian king list known from Greco-Roman times, Carter suspected this was due to the upheavals of civil war. All this mystery fed Carter’s hope that he could locate an intact tomb with a sealed treasure, unheard of in Egyptian circles, since almost all had been robbed out millennia ago. What silent tombs remained in the valley were barren of their once fabulous wealth. Had Carter even found an empty tomb clearly identifiable as Tut’s with hieroglyphic royal inscriptions, that would have been satisfaction enough for most archaeologists. But instead he found untold pharaonic wealth in a boy king’s forgotten tomb and Carter himself became instantly famous. We can ask why King Tutankhamun’s tomb discovery was so earthshaking, and here are some likely answers.

  King Tut’s tomb is the most spectacular archaeological find of the twentieth century, and the tomb contents and sarcophagus are the richest to have survived from ancient Egypt, as these treasures fill an entire wing of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The dramatic discovery was made more rewarding by Howard Carter’s earlier failures. After decades of study, Tut’s traveling exhibitions since the 1970s have drawn more visitors than any other museum event and Tut’s tomb has stimulated “Egyptomania” more than anything else from Egypt has—millions of people worldwide instantly recognize Tut’s golden death mask. Yet, despite all that we can discover today by modern science, the mystery surrounding Tut’s death continues to invite enormous speculation and contributes to his allure.

  These are only a few of the most important reasons why King Tut’s tomb and its contents have made such a lasting impression on the world since 1922. The story is a dramatic saga, so we will look at excerpts of the discovery in Carter’s own words. While archaeologists might find added reasons to list this discovery as perhaps the most important of the past century or so,
it is probably more a popular choice than a scholarly one. Nonetheless it is hard to argue against, since Tut’s name is one of the most famous in modern history, heavily influencing our understanding of ancient Egypt. The greatest irony in this discovery is our realization of how little impact he made in his own time. Proof of this is demonstrated by how quickly his name and tomb were lost, which is astonishing to anyone who has seen Tut’s treasures.

  A tomb is sealed, 1323 BC

  Long ago, in the year now known as 1323 BC, a small procession wound its way quietly at sunset through the Valley of the Kings. The Egyptian horizon still glowed gold and pink from the sun but the sky was rapidly turning from turquoise to purple. The prayers to the gods were almost finished and all that remained were a few ceremonies and the sealing of the tomb. It would be sacrilege to dishonor the gods with excessive noise, so the group of workers and priests observed silence as they walked carefully down the cut stone steps into the tomb. The priests were to place the last food offerings and make final prayers, and the workers were to move some heavy gold objects and a few other sacred relics before they filled around the tomb door with rubble and then placed hard limestone seals around the underground lintel. Descending in their linen loincloths, the workers had to blink their eyes in the diminished light. The torches held above the shaved heads of the priests flickered in the dark tomb as they surveyed the spread of riches stacked up in orderly fashion around the hastily cut rock. The priests first counted and recorded all the items in the tomb, directing the workmen to move and rearrange many inventoried objects. All could see that the unseemly chisel marks could not be disguised or plastered and painted over with traditional scenes of blessing. A few of them, those who had family members working as craftsmen in the workers’ village on the western bank of the river, knew it had all been done too quickly.

  The royal tomb was astonishingly small, hardly befitting a god-king pharaoh as all of them knew, but then this boy king had not ruled long and, through no fault of his own, had many enemies. The priests made a few final sacrifices and offerings, singing songs that were spells to protect the dead. The standing workers waited, quietly looking on in approval at the centerpiece of the tomb, the king’s triple-nested stone sarcophagus with its outermost cover hiding the gleaming gold underneath. Deep inside this stone sarcophagus they knew his embalmed mummy lay unmoving, although they could not see it. It had taken seventy days to embalm the dead boy king, after which the intricate coffin had swallowed him up, with its three enclosing cases, each elaborate and priceless after months of craftsmanship by the royal artisans, gold workers, enamel workers, stoneworkers and many more. The silent onlookers knew his mummy was guarded against decay with endless layers of wrapped linen soaked in natron. Sewn into this fine royal linen of the dead young pharaoh’s mummy casing were hundreds of tiny amulets carved in precious stone, protecting the body against all kinds of disasters not covered by embalming.

  The workers’ eyes scanned across the several chambers, seeing his great gilded couches for resting and the huge gilded shrine with intricate scenes, so tall it almost touched the rough-hewn rock ceiling, topped by gold cobras with their flared hoods. While other shrine scenes in the tomb gave promises of safety and strength for the dead boy king’s passage through the underworld, this one had magnificent gold scenes of the boy king and his family in happier days that surely would return in his afterlife. The four figures of the great golden goddesses, Isis, Nephthys, Selkis and Neith, faced inward with outstretched arms in all four directions, and the workmen knew that inside their chest shrine were the king’s canopic jars in which his entrails soaked in oil, palm wine and natron. Over there was his royal chariot with its polished and gilded wood, ready for hunting in the afterlife. Everywhere was ivory, gold, blue-green faience and painted wood. The eleven great oars for moving his underworld boat were placed along the northern wall. A brightly painted ivory chest was decorated with hunting scenes. All around were stacked fine carved alabaster vessels and golden cups for enjoying the afterlife. This boy king and god, albeit a lesser one compared to his many predecessors, would be sent off in fitting style to the afterlife.

  The priests finished their last rituals amid clouds of incense, signaling it was time to leave the tomb and seal the inner chamber. Their last glimpse was of the eyes of the vigilant linen-wrapped statuary sled of Anubis, the jackal-headed god who protected the cemeteries. Then the workmen sealed the door with plaster, over which the priests added more seals. It took many hours after that to move blocks of stone and rubble into the corridor, but they had nearly all night. They were all thankful to have seen the wonders and treasures inside the tomb, visions that would remain with them for the rest of their lives. When they at last filled in the great outer door and plastered it as well, the priests added final seals and the stairway cut down into the rock was filled with stone, mud and sand, step by step until it was flush with the floor of the valley. They stamped their feet over and over to compact it, then threw sand over it to cover it completely. The stars were blazing overhead in the middle of the night when they finished. The procession left the valley under starlight in the same silence they had entered with, for this was a sacred place.

  This event over three thousand years ago was somehow remarkably forgotten, as was the tomb location of one of Egypt’s most minor and short-lived kings. In the civil war that followed King Tutankhamun’s death, his memory was hardly worth keeping as new dynasties struggled for control. Later kings like the far greater Rameses family ruled, and members of this dynasty put tomb workers’ huts right over the forgotten and buried doorway to King Tut’s tomb. A few grave robbers had entered the tomb at some point, strewing some of the contents and seemingly leaving just as hastily in fear. These robbers had probably come not long after the tomb was sealed, possibly led by some of the less reverent workers or even priests who had seen it sealed. The bulk of the treasure of King Tut’s tomb waited millennia to be rediscovered, so it did not share the same fate as nearly every other royal tomb, all of them larger and more elegant, carved and finished over the lifetimes of their eventual occupants, but nearly always robbed and emptied out within a few centuries of their construction. It appears that there were cynical unbelievers even in ancient Egypt, possibly even among the ruling class or the priests. Either grave robbers did not fear tomb curses or they knew there would be no revenge from defunct dynasties that had no descendants to protect them. Tut’s tomb escaped that typical fate because of civil war and general instability.

  King Tut ’s tomb is the most spectacular archaeological find of the twentieth century

  Although many modern archaeology finds deserve mention, none compares to the story of Howard Carter’s search and the drama of his discovery. In addition, the sheer value of the grave goods in Tut’s tomb exceeds all other finds. Then there is the lure of Egyptomania, a topic whose magnetic appeal reaches around the globe, not only to people of all ages but to all time. Part of the attraction is Egypt itself, but here it is coupled with the mystery of Tut’s life and death. Much of the academic world was surprised at Howard Carter’s tenacity and faith in his search when many others would have given up under such unpromising circumstances. The fact that this is the rarest of tombs to have survived intact at all only adds to the spectacular nature of Carter’s quest. Conventionally, the tomb is named KV 62 after its location in the Valley of the Kings (KV) and its number 62, which cannot nearly convey the legendary lure. Although only a few years ago another tomb was discovered nearby, named KV 64, its contents are relatively poor and fragmentary since it was mostly emptied out like so many others or used merely for storage.

  Among the many amazing elements in the spectacle of Tut’s tomb, first is that although all the gold is no doubt beautiful to look at, very few realize how very hard the sarcophagus is, carved from quartzite, the hardest stone the Egyptians traditionally worked. The Egyptians didn’t have steel and this stone is harder than steel. So the staggering amount of work to carve a huge sto
ne box almost nine feet long and then decorate it with figures at the corners is compounded by the quartzite being so very hard. This was not possible to do quickly, so the work may have been started at Tut’s accession to the throne as pharaoh when he was around sixteen years old. Second, many precious objects in the tomb actually belonged to his family predecessors like the heretic king Akhenaten. These objects tell us much about these family members’ wealth and power as well, remarkable because the Theban priesthood of Amun had destroyed most of Akhenaten’s city, Amarna, and his personal material goods.

  Third, the inventory of items must represent a fairly complete set of royal tomb goods only a god-king of Egypt could expect in order to secure a better afterlife. There are so many hundreds of religious objects imbued with afterlife “magic” power that we can much better understand Egyptian religion from a royal perspective. In this case, however, nearly every object is made of precious or semiprecious material, which the Egyptian commoner could never afford. Fourth, because mention of triple-nested coffins is rare even in documents, finding one intact is almost beyond belief. This is especially relevant because in addition to the immensely hard quartzite stone sarcophagus cover, the two outer coffins are made of gilded wood, whereas the innermost coffin is of the purest solid gold. Fifth, few people realize that Howard Carter also excavated Thutmose IV’s tomb (KV 43) in 1903. Although it had been heavily looted and the grave goods were damaged and incomplete, it had enough pharaonic artifacts (for example, a carved-relief throne and carved chariot of decorated wood with stucco) that Carter knew what sort of objects he might expect to encounter in a previously unknown tomb like Tut’s, one that he hoped had not been systematically emptied by looting. Sixth, the wide range of materials used in Tut’s tomb not only provides great insight into Egyptian crafts of the time and includes gold, silver, electrum (gold-silver alloy) ivory, faience, turquoise, blue lapis lazuli, carnelian, glass, woods (including cedar, ebony and others), textile (mostly fine linen) and many other materials, but also showcases the royal consumption of luxury goods. Some of these rare and beautiful stones are so hard as to require labor-intensive craftsmanship. Thus, despite the fact that he was a poor king in a turbulent period, we learn an enormous amount about ancient Egypt and its god-kings through what was preserved in Tut’s tomb.