Not long ago, in my sister’s elementary-school classroom, I met a second grader who seemed well on his way to a doctoral degree in Egyptology. After describing the mummification process in recondite detail—not only why the brain was removed through the nose but how exactly natron dried out the rest of the body—the child drew an elaborate cartouche with the hieroglyphs used to spell my name. He then proceeded to tell me more about the pharaoh Tutankhamun than most of the other students could tell me about their own grandfathers.
It makes sense that a boy king would have an enduring hold over boys, but it is less clear why so many of the rest of us are still enthralled by Tutankhamun more than three thousand years after he ruled over the New Kingdom and a hundred years after the excavation of his tomb, in the Valley of the Kings. Tutankhamun represents an extremely narrow slice of Egyptian history; imagine if, in the year 4850, the world understood the United States largely through the Presidency of Millard Fillmore. Yet the anniversary of the excavation has occasioned everything from new histories and documentaries to travelling exhibitions and children’s books, each of which contains its own implicit argument about Tutankhamun’s appeal.
This latest wave of fascination, which is part of a tide that never fully recedes, has also brought reproach and critique. The Pharaoh is seen by some people as a prop of empire, and by others as a symbol of resistance and revolution; the thousands of artifacts removed from his tomb are presented as the greatest treasures ever found, or as the spoils of an unforgivable act of colonial desecration. Depending on which source you consult, the centenary is an occasion for celebration, for apology, or, most radically, for the eradication of the field of Egyptology.
The original source had no doubts about the significance of his accomplishment. Howard Carter was a working-class artist born in London in 1874 and brought up in Swaffham, an inauspicious market town known only for an auspicious bit of folklore, according to which a local tinker found a buried treasure there. Carter’s own treasure lay further afield. At seventeen, he went to Egypt to take a job reproducing the wall art and the hieroglyphs of pharaonic tombs. Between subsequent stints as an antiquities inspector and an excavation supervisor, he worked as a watercolorist, selling his paintings to tourists around Luxor. Foreigners had been flocking to Egypt since Roman times, but by Carter’s era those tourists could take advantage of an extensive canal-and-railway network that had been expanded to serve Egypt’s cotton plantations, which had been thriving since the American Civil War left much of the world in need of a new supplier.
One of those tourists, George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, began wintering in Egypt to relieve seasonal pain from past injuries, and he soon added to his Thoroughbreds and race cars another patrician pursuit: archeology. The first excavation he sponsored, at the necropolis of Sheikh Abd el-Qurna, turned up only a mummified cat, but he had already begun filling his estate, Highclere Castle (of “Downton Abbey” fame), with coffins, calcite jars, ushabti figurines, and whatever other antiquities he could buy. Eventually, Carnarvon was introduced to Carter, who, despite having no education in archeology or history, had developed a reputation as a pugnacious expert in both, and together the men took over excavating the Valley of the Kings.
Carnarvon acquired the rights to do so from the Egyptian government, which for decades had tried in various ways to regulate the brazen theft of cultural treasures, including by passing one of the world’s first antiquities laws. Nonetheless, mountains of papyri and morgues’ worth of mummies had left the country, bound for museums and private homes, after being spirited away illegally from dig sites or shipped home shamelessly from markets. The supposed golden age of Egyptology was more like the dark ages for Egyptians, who had significant incentives to supply artifacts to wealthy foreigners and little redress in a time when colonial powers controlled the antiquities trade. Locals were also exploited in the archeological excavations; in the years that Carter and Carnarvon collaborated, they contracted hundreds of workers, including children, to dig into the limestone and shale of the massif into which the royal burial chambers had been carved, and to carry away countless tons of rubble, debris, and sand.
By 1922, Carnarvon was low on both money and patience, increasingly worried that the sixty-one tombs already uncovered were all there was to find in the valley necropolis. Pressed by Carter, who was nearing fifty and was more than five years into the search for Tutankhamun, Carnarvon agreed to finance one more season of field work. Within a few months, he was rewarded with a shocking telegram: “At last have made wonderful discovery in Valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact.” Carnarvon returned to Egypt in late November, and watched as Carter opened the door to what became known, officially, as KV-62. “Can you see anything?” Carnarvon asked, as the archeologist held a candle to one of the corners of the tomb’s doorway. Carter answered, “Yes, wonderful things!”
Or so it says in the memoir that Carter later published, with dialogue punched up by a friend. His actual journal includes a slightly less dramatic account, and neither version mentions that he and his patron entered the burial chamber illegally, well before the Egyptian authorities arrived. Recent histories have tried to balance the thrill of the find with its political context. The Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson, in his book “A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology” (Norton), presents Carter’s discovery and the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone, a hundred years earlier, as the bookends of a century of colonial contest for Egypt’s antiquities. Wilkinson chronicles the competition among England, France, and Germany—ostensibly to fill the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Neues Museum, respectively, but also for the right to appropriate the ancient past in their efforts to control the imperial future.
Yet scholarly sobriety can’t dim the treasures of the tomb: lapis-lazuli bracelets and nephrite rings; pectorals made from glass paste, gold, and silver; ornate leather armor and solid-gold sandals; walking canes and fainting couches; chariots, beds, and a fan of ostrich feathers; board games and musical instruments; jars of beer and wine. Later this year, the Egyptian government is slated to open, at last, the billion-dollar, nearly hundred-and-twenty-acre Grand Egyptian Museum complex, which will house all fifty-six hundred items together for the first time. For now, there’s “King Tutankhamun: The Treasures of the Tomb” (Thames & Hudson), by the former antiquities minister and controversial Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, a seemingly encyclopedic volume of the artifacts, with more than three hundred photographs and a series of foldout illustrations.
The scale of Tutankhamun’s riches is unrivalled because his was one of the only ancient tombs to be found nearly intact—or entirely intact, according to those who allege that Carter faked an ancient break-in as a way of circumventing a law that gave Egypt ownership over everything inside an unviolated tomb. (The putative incursion of early grave robbers allowed Carter to claim half the objects for his patron.) A popular National Geographic documentary series, “Tut’s Treasures: Hidden Secrets,” which premièred in 2018, devotes whole episodes to new research on just a few of the artifacts: an iron dagger, rare for the Bronze Age, revealed by X-ray fluorescence to likely have been fashioned from a meteorite; two tiny mummies, proved by genetic analysis to be Tut’s children, both stillborn; and the famous solid-gold funeral mask, heavier than a bowling ball but as delicate as snakeskin, thought by some experts to have been made for the Pharaoh’s stepmother, Nefertiti—it has pierced ears, which were more common for women—and then refashioned when he died unexpectedly.
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All these riches first came to the world’s attention via the photographer Harry Burton, who, when the tomb was excavated, was in Egypt working for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which loaned him to Carter. Although color film was available, Burton opted for black-and-white, which was regarded as more scientific. Even so, each image seemed to inspire new expressions of Tutmania: jazz songs and scarab jewelry, magic shows and mummy films, gloves decorated with hieroglyphs and cigarette cases covered in cartouches.
“Tutankhamun in Colour,” a documentary by BBC Four, presents newly colorized versions of Burton’s pictures and considers the controversy surrounding them. Carnarvon had signed a contract with the London Times which gave the paper exclusive rights to images from the tomb, angering the Egyptian press and the Egyptian government, which understandably wanted more involvement in the excavation. For the next few years, even after his death, the Egyptians fought with Carnarvon’s estate over control of the dig. Carter led a work stoppage, closing the site and posting a huffy notice: “Owing to impossible restrictions and discourtesies on the part of the Public Works Department and its Antiquity Service, all my collaborators in protest have refused to work any further upon the scientific investigations of the discovery of the tomb.” The government revoked his archeological rights.
In the end, only Burton’s photographs left Egypt. Neither the British Museum nor the Metropolitan Museum of Art received any of the artifacts it expected; instead, the treasures went to the Egyptian Museum, and Carnarvon’s estate was reimbursed only for excavation costs. Or, at least, that was the story at the time: a few years ago, the Met repatriated nineteen items believed to have been taken from the tomb, and several other museums are thought to possess their own stolen artifacts. Carnarvon and Carter, for all their talk of ancient grave robbers, are alleged to have taken souvenirs themselves, some of which made their way around the world. (Perhaps the current Countess of Carnarvon will address those allegations in her book “Visitor to an Antique Land,” which will be published later this year.)
Carter got back to work in January, 1925, after extensive negotiations, and later that year he oversaw the opening of Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus. When the lyricist Roger Lewis wrote that “old King Tut was a wise old nut,” neither he nor any of the flappers who danced madly to the song knew otherwise. But an autopsy of the mummy revealed that the famous pharaoh with the fabulous treasure was only a teen-ager. The announcement of the tomb’s discovery, in the wake of the First World War, had given the world good news and a distraction, but now Tutankhamun became a figure of melancholy and premature death, ready-made for a generation mourning their brothers, cousins, and husbands. The boy king’s once triumphant riches now appeared tragic, his death mask a memento mori not only for individuals but for civilizations, which, no matter how powerful, seemed destined to fall. The year that an Englishman found the King’s tomb, the English were forced to recognize Egypt’s independence—reserving some powers, including control of the Suez Canal, but beginning the withdrawal that ended, thirty years later, with the Egyptian revolution.
Tutankhamun may have been seen by the Lost Generation as a symbol of the men who died in the war, but in Egypt the Pharaonist movement took him as an icon of rebirth and self-determination. In America, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People put Tut on the cover of its monthly magazine, and the artists of the Harlem Renaissance embraced him as a figure from African history, and therefore part of their heritage. This was in contrast to colonial archeologists, who, promulgating the racist theory that such fine things could not have come out of Africa, segregated the art and artifacts of Egypt from those of the rest of the continent, as many museums still do today.
Each generation since has found its own reason to tell Tut’s story. Lately, Tutankhamun has been turned into a medical mystery—posthumous diagnoses range from malaria to Marfan syndrome—and the subject of true-crime narratives, including one, churned out by James Patterson’s book factory, called “The Murder of King Tut” (Little, Brown).
In “Treasured: How Tutankhamun Shaped a Century” (Public Affairs), the historian Christina Riggs writes about the pharaoh’s ongoing role in geopolitics. She focusses in particular on a series of global tours that took Tutankhamun’s treasures around the world: first, in the sixties, to raise money to protect the Abu Simbel temples, in Nubia, from being flooded by Lake Nasser during the construction of the Aswan High Dam; then, in the seventies, to raise additional funds to finish relocating the Philae temple complex and to renovate the Egyptian Museum, in Cairo. There have been several such tours in this century, including one, meant to mark the centenary of the tomb’s discovery, that was interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.
Riggs is not the first person to frame Tutankhamun as one of the world’s great cultural ambassadors—the boy king attracted larger crowds than the Beatles did, breaking museum attendance records and generating tens of millions of dollars in ticket sales. But she argues that archeology is an inherently imperial project, and that these exhibitions amounted to a kind of covert statecraft that few visitors understood. According to Riggs, the American tour allowed the Kennedy Administration to ingratiate itself with Abdel Nasser’s socialist regime, and the French government tried to atone for its role in the Suez Crisis through its own exhibition, at the Petit Palais, where President Charles de Gaulle gazed up at the funeral mask, which was making its first appearance outside Egypt.
Tutankhamun again served as a diplomat in the seventies, when Egypt, which had previously declined to loan any of his treasures to the United Kingdom, offered some for an exhibition at the British Museum. After that, the Pharaoh was sent on tour to the Soviet Union, leaving the Nixon Administration scrambling. Only when relations between Egypt and the U.S. were repaired after the Yom Kippur War was the boy king allowed to return to America, via a series of blockbuster museum stops written into the bilateral agreement with Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat. More recently, Tutankhamun has forsaken the public sector: the tour aborted by the pandemic was arranged by a private talent-management company, ostensibly to promote tourism to Egypt after the Arab Spring.
Among the millions of people who came to know Tutankhamun through these travelling exhibitions was Riggs herself. Although “Treasured” is critical of the centrality of Westerners to the story of Tutankhamun, much of it is memoir, rendered in what might be called the first-world first-person: Riggs quotes her Egyptian drivers, confesses her “useless guilt,” and criticizes the Tut glut to which this new book and her previous one, “Ancient Egyptian Magic: A Hands-On Guide,” both contribute. “Treasured” has something in common with “The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World” (National Geographic), by the U.C.L.A. professor Kara Cooney. Cooney, in her previous book, “When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt,” positioned pharaonic Egypt as an arena of female empowerment, but she now calls herself “a recovering Egyptologist,” and “The Good Kings” argues that the entire field of Egyptology is in thrall to authoritarianism. “I can’t help but view my once beloved Egyptian kings,” she writes, “in light of the testosterone-soaked power politics of the patriarchal system in which I live.”
Some critics have suggested abolishing the discipline of Egyptology entirely; others have proposed changing its name, perhaps to Egyptian archeology, so that it no longer equates a brief period of the ancient past with the study of an entire nation. But iconoclasm of either variety, the extreme or the facile, will not substantively change most people’s understanding of the pharaohs or of those people who, through excavation, exhibition, or study, ushered them into modernity. Indeed, sometimes revisionist works seem to simplify what they purport to complicate, substituting one kind of imperialism for another, or justifying their authors rather than elevating marginalized colleagues. But there are some exemplary books that have recovered the work of Egyptian archeologists, historians, and laborers. Stephen Quirke’s “Hidden Hands,” Elliott Colla’s “Conflicted Antiquities,” and Donald Malcolm Reid’s “Whose Pharaohs?” helped bring wider awareness to individuals like Ahmad Kamal, the curator of the Egyptian Museum and among the first Egyptian Egyptologists; to the generations of Qufti laborers who staffed some of the earliest and most significant excavations; and to the thousands of Egyptians—not only archeologists and site workers but also poets and journalists and politicians—who helped excavate their own country’s past.
More than a hundred and seventy pharaohs ruled across roughly thirty dynasties for more than three millennia; Tutankhamun ruled for only nine or ten years, starting at around age eight. The King’s accomplishments, many of them undertaken by one of his advisers, who succeeded Tutankhamun as pharaoh, amounted to reversing his father’s cultural reforms: he restored Thebes (now Luxor) as the capital of the New Kingdom and returned to polytheism after Akhenaten had promoted the worship of Aten above all other gods. (Born Tutankhaten, he changed his name to reflect his renewed worship of Amun-Ra.) Before the discovery of his tomb, he was rarely mentioned in histories of Egypt. Today, many more people can recount his biography than that of Neferkare, thought to have reigned the longest of any pharaoh, for between sixty-four and ninety-four years, starting when he was six; or that of Khufu, who was buried in the Great Pyramid of Giza; or even that of Ramses II, who is regarded as the most powerful of all the ancient rulers of Egypt.
What we learn about the past is as impoverished as what we know of the present, and some of the gaps in our knowledge are self-serving and egregious. We admire Tutankhamun’s beautiful death mask without ever hearing about the radical desecration of his body, which began when Carter and his team first left the Pharaoh’s wizened corpse to melt in the Nile sun and then drenched it in paraffin wax so they could chisel it, piece by piece, out of the sarcophagus, breaking off the arms to remove the jewelry from the wrists and fingers, and then removing the head. Visitors can go to the tomb of Tutankhamun and stare at what remains of him, preserved like a macabre Sleeping Beauty in a glass coffin, but, in a different kind of elision, most of those who do so know nothing of contemporary Luxor. Until very recently, many foreign Egyptologists worked without any functional knowledge of Arabic, obsessively learning hieroglyphics yet not bothering to translate their findings into the language of contemporary Egyptians. During the past few decades, as archeologists giddily excavated the Avenue of the Sphinxes—an ancient highway that connected the temples of Luxor and Karnak—they uncovered numerous historic statues by razing hundreds of modern houses, a church, and several mosques along a path that stretches the length of the National Mall. That excavation represents a double cost to our over-all knowledge of Egyptian history: first, because visitors are far more informed about what was preserved than about what was destroyed in order to do so, and, second, because subsequent generations will never be able to study the modern civilization that was erased to reveal the ancient one.
Still, some gaps are inevitable. History is long, and life is short; it is remarkable not that we know so little but that, about certain things, we know so much. This is a consequence not just of what knowledge is available for us to acquire but also of what subjects motivate us to learn. More children have worshipped Tutankhamun during the past century than ever did in his lifetime; whatever his authority in the ancient world, he now rules over the kingdom populated by dinosaurs and pirates, horses and astronauts. In “Treasured,” Riggs writes of a public-school teacher in the rural Ohio town where she grew up, who bought a lesson guide at one of the first American exhibitions of Tutankhamun’s treasures and went on to share her fascination with classes year after year. Was this teacher an unknowing servant of the patriarchy, as Kara Cooney would argue, or a naïve propagandist of the oil industry, as Riggs herself comes to believe? Or is it possible to acknowledge, within the grand and often destructive movements of global history, individual agency and authentic intellectual curiosity?
It’s true that Tut’s popularity among children is fed, like its grownup version, by a prolific cultural machine. Tutankhamun has been the subject of scores of books for young readers, including a recent one by the Egyptologist Chris Naunton called “King Tutankhamun Tells All!” But few people are more resistant than children to being told what they should love to study. If it were otherwise, they would fill their days with quadratic equations and ancient Greek. It’s hardly surprising that what grabs their attention is a dead boy wrapped in linens, buried with boundless treasures, and discovered centuries later. And it’s hardly a problem. Neither they nor any of us should pay less attention to Tutankhamun. Rather, we should make his story and the broader field of Egyptology more worthy of the attention we are already giving them. ♦
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