In the Valley of the Kings (12 page)

But the junky must have been too high to notice this. He pushed aside a basket boy, got on his knees, and went through the upturned earth with his hands, hoping for something more than the rubble and sand that ran through his fingers.

What was wrong with him? He was probably high as a kite, having stumbled on a stash in one or another of the tombs (as sometimes happened). For sure he’d found some high-quality
Balanites aegyptiaca
sycamore seeds among the grave goods of some brother-junky (who’d planned on staying stoned for eternity).

But no, the young guy was not a junky: It was Carter—and so
changed after a month with the slave-driving Petrie that it was hard to recognize him (his first patrons, whose lapdogs he had sketched at Didlington Hall, showed up at Amarna on their luxurious dahabiyya; and as Alicia Tyssen-Amherst noted, they were shocked by his appearance). And though some
Balanites aegyptiaca
sycamore seeds would probably do him good, it was only Turkish tobacco he’d indulged in, the one luxury available to him here. What was more, he’d indulged in it furtively—ready to toss away his cigarette should his boss show up.

For though Carter had now climbed a rung on the ladder of success from “assistant archaeological artist” to excavator; and though he now received a meager salary for the first time since coming to Egypt (fifty English pounds a year)—he realized that his future depended on acquitting himself well at Amarna.

Forget the terrible extravagance of Turkish tobacco, Petrie did not approve even of using a donkey on their long desert treks. Carter had rashly suggested it, as he recorded in his unpublished memoirs (still remembering the awkward moment some thirty years later): “I had to run almost to keep up with Petrie’s long quick strides. Once I murmured that a donkey would be useful. My request was received by a dead silence. It temporarily upset the mutual equanimity. But no man is wise at all times, perhaps least of all when he is tired.” And the fledgling excavator was very tired! “Excuse my shaky handwriting,” he wrote to his Beni Hasan colleague Percy Newberry, “but I have just been out on a walk with Petrie that lasted from 8am to 8pm.”

The two formed a curious pair as they roamed the Amarna desert—the older man sparse, athletic, and so ragged and unkempt that the Bedu children taunted him with cries of “Beggar!;” the younger man meticulously dressed and struggling for breath as he tried to spot Akhenaten’s boundary stelae amid the barren cliffs. Which was how Carter spent his day off—sometimes. Other Sundays,
he scoured the desert alone, at Petrie’s request mapping the ancient roads, paths, and tracks where Akhenaten’s soldiers had once circled.

The daily grind of excavation, however, was even more strenuous. Standing under a burning sun, he watched through a haze of dust and blinding light as his crew, twenty-two Egyptian men, dug up—nothing. That is, so far. But his luck was bound to change, he was sure of that.

The job required all of Carter’s concentration; he couldn’t look away for an instant. Because in that instant, Petrie had impressed upon him, it would be easy for a workman, shoveling for hours, to miss a mud seal or to pocket a ring suddenly turned up in the sand—irreplaceable finds. Take a ring offered for sale by a Cairo dealer in the 1920s—stolen during an excavation? forged? The names of Tutankhamun’s young widow, Ankhesenamun, and her grandfather Ay were entwined on its bezel, giving us an idea of her fate when Ay seized the throne—if only we could trust it! If only we knew the ring’s provenance, the place and manner of its discovery.

Or take a mud seal. In and of itself worthless, it provides an even better example of the way Carter would learn to conjecture, leaping over wide gaps of knowledge on the strength of a guess. It was not only a question of knowing who was buried where and by whom—although as we shall see in a moment, that certainly was very important (if only because the process of elimination would turn Carter’s attention to Tut, among those pharaohs not accounted for).

However, the real challenge was for Carter to develop intuition—he defined it in his memoir as “a subtle recognition of the facts.” But in archaeology, “the facts” can be understood only together with the desires, fears, and beliefs of an epoch, in this case the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty (Tut was the last in this line). Only a deep understanding of Tut’s time, call it “intuition,” would have
enabled Carter to believe in his quest through seven long years of fruitless digging.

But to return to the nervous young excavator watching over his excavation pit for statues, jewelry—and the above-mentioned clump of mud—that is, the seal of a jar of preserved meat, perhaps; or bee honey, “sweet and of the first class;” or best of all, wine,
nehimaa
, twice excellent.

Its importance was inestimable, whether once or twice excellent. For wine jars almost always were dated (as mentioned, the years numbered from “1” at the time of the pharaoh’s accession and continued in sequence until his death). Thirty-eight vintages were attested to for Amenhotep III, Akhenaten’s father, while Akhenaten’s wine jars ended at year 17.

Let us enter Carter’s mind. “In the course of my work [at Amarna], I often perplexed myself with many conjectures,” he remembered later—and there will be no better way to understand the young excavator than by “perplexing ourselves” with one of these conjectures, too.

This was the real change that Carter went through here. It was not just that he was digging instead of drawing; what was crucial was that he was beginning to “play” with the evidence he encountered, to imagine and speculate and “perplex himself” with the many possibilities of the finds.

So, let us follow a train of thought that takes as its starting point the figure just given us by the wine jars: Akhenaten’s seventeen-year reign. First, we must take these seventeen years together with other evidence (such as the dates at which Akhenaten’s six daughters begin to appear on monuments, in the beginning as children and later with sunshade kiosks of their own in which they worship the Aten). The wine jars and the children allow us to arrive at a life span for the pharaoh: Most probably, Akhenaten died in his early thirties.

So far, so good—but typically for archaeology, there is a delay. The next step takes place fifteen years later (the blink of an eye by Egyptian time)—which is when KV tomb #55 is discovered.
^1*
Keeping in mind the life span established for Akhenaten (that is, having kept it in mind for fifteen years), we can then rule him out as the unidentified royal mummy in #55. For when tomb #55’s young man in the gorgeously inlaid and gilded coffin is examined by the professor of anatomy at the Cairo School of Medicine, Dr. Grafton Elliot Smith, it is found that his epiphyses (or long bones) had not yet fused: one of several anatomical indications that he was in his late teens or early twenties at the time of death.

But can Carter rely on the anatomist’s report? Was Smith correct? From the moment Smith performed his autopsy on KV #55’s mummy, his pronouncements were questioned; in fact, Smith’s successor in Cairo, Dr. Douglas Derry—specialist in mummies, whales, and hermaphrodites—would come up with contrary proofs of his own some forty-two years later. Again typical of the way archaeological deductions proceed, feeling their way forward, step by uncertain step.

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.