Tutankhamen (17 page)

In order to make sense of Tutankhamen's tomb, we have to understand how he came to be buried in a warehouse full of goods. Was this simply a convenient means of disposing of the unwanted, and maybe even unlucky, possessions of a deceased king? Was it a fairly meaningless following of long-established tradition: Tutankhamen was buried this way simply because kings had always been buried this way? Did Tutankhamen actually intend to use his property after death? Did his plans for the provisioning of his own tomb reconcile him to the inevitability of his own death? The answer is probably a combination of all of these, and more.

Official religion is of surprisingly little help here. The theology that Tutankhamen promoted as the living representative of the gods in Egypt taught that a dead king who experienced the correct rituals would be reborn to become one with those gods. Funerary texts – writings for the tomb designed to help the deceased achieve an appropriate afterlife – show that this belief stretched as least as far back as the Old Kingdom pyramids, built more than 1,000 years before Tutankhamen's birth. It would continue more or less unbroken to the end of the dynastic age. A dead king, having passed through a series of ordeals, was more or less guaranteed to achieve an afterlife away from the tomb. He might twinkle in the night sky as an unborn star, or descend to the underworld to become one with Osiris, king of the underworld, or ascend into the sky to sail in the solar boat of the sun god Re. In theory, then, a dead king had little need of extensive grave goods, as he would not be lingering to enjoy them.

Egypt's elite were less fortunate. Throughout the Old Kingdom (
c.
2686 – 2125 BC) they, too, expected to live beyond death, but they did not expect to leave the tomb. As the tomb would be their home until
the end of eternity, and as the dead had the same basic requirements as the living, they needed to cram in as many goods as possible. More and more items were packed away – food, drink, clothing, toys, games, toiletries, even toilets – until it was realised that the situation was hopeless. No tomb would ever be large enough, and no family ever rich enough, to provide sufficient grave goods. The elite now started to rely on magical provisions: these might be offerings left by visitors to the tomb, small-scale models, or scenes carved and painted on the tomb walls. Given the correct rituals, all three could supply an eternal sustenance.

This situation underwent a profound change at the end of the Old Kingdom, when Osiris opened his kingdom to anyone who could afford the proper rituals. As a minimum these included a mummified body, a properly conducted funeral, and an appropriate set of funerary texts. The elite, who could afford all these things, had a reasonable expectation that one of their three spirits, the
akh
(the immortality of the deceased), would embark on the perilous journey to the next life. Their other two spirts, the
ba
(the soul or personality of the deceased) and the
ka
(the spiritual essence, or life-force, of the deceased), would remain closer to the corpse, sustained by the offerings left by the living. The illiterate poor, the vast majority of the population, could afford none of the necessary rituals. As we are unable to read their words, we are unable to understand what, if anything, they believed would happen after death.

There was now no need for anyone to invest in extensive grave goods. Nevertheless, the elite never quite lost the habit of packing for their final journey and kings, too, persisted with the tradition. As Tutankhamen's is the only New Kingdom royal tomb to survive substantially intact, it is not possible to state exactly what, or how much, others took with them. It is tempting to assume that a more ‘successful', longer-lived king would have had his far larger tomb crammed to the ceiling with immensely valuable objects, so that, for example, the tombs of Amenhotep III (the New Kingdom's wealthiest king) or
Ramesses II (the New Kingdom's longest-lived king) would have been veritable treasure troves. This is, however, an illogical assumption. It may be that Tutankhamen was provided with a fairly standard set of grave goods and that, were we able to examine the untouched tomb of Amenhotep III or Ramesses II, we would find pretty much the same assemblage – a carefully calculated mixture of ritual and personal objects, new and old – more aesthetically displayed in its spacious surrounds.

It is, however, clear that Tutankhamen's tomb was not big enough for the goods it was to hold. This was a question of size, rather than quantity. The funerary shrines and the quartzite sarcophagus – designed for a more spacious tomb? – were quite simply too large to pass down the entrance steps and through the first doorway, and the workmen were forced to cut away the last six steps of the entrance stairway and the door lintel and jambs. The damaged areas were later restored in stone, wood and plaster. Carter's men would have to perform a similar operation when they extracted the shrine panels from the tomb.

This evidence – the small tomb and the jumbled and mis-sized grave goods – has led to the popular supposition that Tutankhamen's burial was a ‘cut price and makeshift affair'; ‘fast and careless … with a rag-bag mix of whatever new, old and adaptable funerary equipment was readily to hand'.
¹⁴
;
¹⁵
This has in turn been cited as evidence that Tutankhamen was unloved at his death; that he may even have been murdered by whoever arranged his funeral. Again, there is little logicality in this assumption, and we have no means of knowing how atypical Tutankhamen's burial really was.

Our scanty knowledge of Theban funerary rituals is largely derived from non-royal sources. These show the coffined mummy travelling to the cemetery on a sledge dragged across the desert sands. A series of ceremonies was performed at the tomb entrance, the most important being the ‘Opening of the Mouth', a ceremony designed to animate the eyes, ears, nose and mouth and, in so doing, convert
inanimate images into beings heavy with the possibility of coming alive. The mourners ate a last meal with the deceased, then sealed the tomb. The last person to leave swept the ground behind him, so that his footprints would not disturb the harmony of the tomb. As night-time fell, the spirit prepared to embark on the long journey to the afterlife, a journey that would invariably involve some form of test. Ultimately, with all trials overcome, the righteous king would be united with the gods.

Confirmation of this basic ritual may be gained from the painted walls of Tutankhamen's Burial Chamber, where the artists depicted the more important of the funerary rites. The east wall shows Tutankhamen's funeral. The king, in an anthropoid coffin which looks nothing like his real coffin, is dragged to the cemetery on a wooden sledge pulled by men dressed in white. Included among them are the shaven-headed viziers of Upper and Lower Egypt. The North wall has three scenes which are intended to be read from right to left. The first shows Ay, Tutankhamen's successor, as he dons the leopardskin of a priest to perform the Opening of the Mouth ceremony on the mummy. Ay appears young and fit: a good example of royal propaganda in action, as he must have been well into his sixties by the time of Tutankhamen's death. The middle scene shows Tutankhamen, a man rather than a bandaged mummy, being welcomed to his afterlife by the goddess Nut. Finally we see Tutankhamen and his
ka
spirit, embracing the god Osiris. The South wall is the partition wall which houses the tomb doorway, and so was partially destroyed when the burial chamber was opened. Here we are shown Tutankhamen as he is greeted by the funerary deities Hathor, Anubis and Isis. Behind Isis once sat three gods of the underworld. The West wall presents a scene from the funerary text known as the
Book of the Hidden Chamber which is in the Underworld
(more popularly known today as the
Amduat)
. As the solar boat sails through the night-time terrors of the underworld, twelve baboons, the gods of the twelve hours of night, provide their support.

All three of his coffins, and his funerary mask, depict Tutankhamen as one with the king of the dead, Osiris. The myth of Osiris had a particular relevance to Egypt's kings, for Osiris, too, had ruled Egypt before being murdered and dismembered by his jealous brother Seth. His sister-wife Isis was able to use her potent magic to restore him to a semblance of life, but the resurrected Osiris could no longer live in Egypt. As he journeyed into the west, to rule the land of the dead, his son Horus inherited his throne and ruled the land of the living.

Osiris invariably appears as a neatly bandaged being whose crossed arms hold the crook and flail which symbolise royalty, and whose unwrapped head is fitted with a curled beard and elaborate, composite crown. In his bandaged body we can find a neat explanation for the similarly bandaged mummies who occupied Egypt's elite tombs. To modern eyes, Osiris is an uncompromising and uncomfortable reminder of the inevitability of death. But to the ancients he was a life-affirming god of rejuvenation, agriculture and the inundation, whose occasionally erect penis served as a reminder of his original role as a fertility god. Osiris beds – seeded and watered Osiris-shaped troughs – were placed in New Kingdom tombs so that they might germinate and serve as a living symbol of resurrection. One of these beds was discovered in Tutankhamen's Treasury, filled with Nile silt and seeds.

It is always difficult to force ancient Egyptian artefacts into modern systems of classification – ritual, practical, decorative, sentimental, etc. – as it is very apparent that, in a land where the most mundane of objects might be capable of multiple interpretations, and even colour might carry ritual significance, many artefacts simply defy classification. Writing equipment, for example, had a very obvious practical use, yet it was possible that the deceased might become the scribe of the sun god. How, then, do we classify Tutankhamen's fifteen writing palettes and associated paraphernalia – are they practical, or ritual? Headrests were supremely practical artefacts designed to allow a good night's sleep (however unlikely that might seem to those of us accustomed to soft pillows). However, night was a time of extreme danger, a time when evil spirits might invade the dreams of the just, and the decoration on Tutankhamen's ivory headrest – the god Shu and the twin lions of the eastern and western horizons – offered a protection to the king when he was at his most vulnerable. Tutankhamen's four game boards might have simply have been provided as a distraction, to allow him while away the long hours. But board games were a means of communicating with other worlds, and Tutankhamen's games may have provided him with some reassurance that he would indeed achieve his afterlife.

Bearing these caveats in mind, it is possible to divide Tutankhamen's grave goods into two broad categories. Some were practical objects which the dead king might use in his afterlife. Others were sacred or magical objects provided to help the funerary rites become effective. Shrines, amulets and magic bricks fall neatly into the latter category: they may have some decorative appeal, but they have no real practical use. Coffins and canopic jars have a more obvious practical
application as boxes to store body parts, but they too may be classed as ritual objects, as their primary function is to assist the deceased. While a few ritual objects were found in the Antechamber, most were discovered in the Treasury and the Burial Chamber where, lying close to the mummy, they could best perform their sacred function. This distribution was immediately clear to Carter, who classified the contents of the Treasury as:

That these two rooms suffered least from the attention of the robbers may be no coincidence; the ritual objects would have been less marketable than the practical, everyday objects that filled the Antechamber and Annexe, and there are clear signs that the robbers selected their loot with some care, rejecting large and unwieldy objects, and anything made of gold leaf rather than solid gold.

Included among the ritual objects are a large number of images of the king. These range from the two life-sized guardian statues to gilded statuettes housed in wooden shrines. These small figures show the king striding forward (three statues), harpooning (two statues), and precariously balanced on the back of a leopard (two statues), and may be ranked alongside the twenty-eight statuettes of twenty-five different gods recovered from the Treasury. Also included in this category are Tutankhamen's
shabti
, or servant, figures. These figures were included in the tomb so that they might work for the tomb owner in the afterlife when, animated by a magic spell, they would perform any menial labour that Osiris might allocate. Tutankhamen had 413
shabtis
: a labourer for every day of the year plus thirty-six overseers
(one for each ten-day week) and twelve supervisors (one for each month). These servants came complete with a range of miniature tools – baskets, picks, hoes and yokes – which would help them to toil efficiently in the fields. Taking
shabtis
to the grave was far from unusual; the elite often included them in their burial equipment. Tutankhamen, however, did not really expect to perform manual labour in his afterlife; he expected to become an undying star, or a god. Yet he could not be certain of this and, perhaps more importantly, he had no wish to tempt fate by challenging a long-established funerary tradition.
¹⁷
This reluctance to abandon the
shabti
– which had clearly come to represent more than its original purpose – is even seen at Amarna where both Akhenaten and Nefertiti, who almost certainly did not expect to enter a conventional Osirian afterlife, were provided with servant figures.