Tutankhamen (30 page)

It is not possible to tell the full and accurate story of Tutankhamen's life and death. There are still too many unanswered questions; too many blank areas. It may be that some spectacular future discovery – a lost diary, perhaps – eventually allows us to understand everything, but this seems highly unlikely: the ancient Egyptians did not, as far as we are aware, keep personal diaries. What is far more likely to happen is that regular, small amounts of new information – derived from the re-analysis of already known artefacts, further scientific examination of Tutankhamen's body, the discovery of a new text or statue fragment – will continue to expand our knowledge. For me, like many other Egyptologists, this does not really matter; it is the journey towards the complete story, the intricate teasing out of detail and the linking together of disparate facts, that fascinates. It is probably no coincidence that many Egyptologists, both professional and amateur, have a longstanding and occasionally productive interest in detective fiction.
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In the meantime, anyone who claims to be able to write a ‘warts and all' biography of Tutankhamen is being either economical with the truth, or naive, or, perhaps, works in television: the reluctance of television producers to accept that Egyptology is a developing subject with few black-and-white answers is one that causes professional Egyptologists to grind their teeth in annoyance as they endure yet another ‘documentary' that simplifies a highly complex subject down to its most basic level.

Everyone who attempts a biography of Tutankhamen will write a different story. What follows here is not the definitive account of his life, merely the one which, in my opinion, fits best with the evidence – biological, historical and archaeological – to date. At some points these different types of evidence contradict and so, although I have tried to make this account evidence-based, I have had to make some assumptions. The most important of these are:

Where there is doubt, I have followed the principle of Occam's Razor: entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity (often paraphrased as ‘other things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one'). Because this is my own interpretation of the evidence already presented in this book, I have avoided the use of footnotes.

Nebmaatre Amenhotep III, son of Tuthmosis IV, was born to the harem queen Mutemwia. As Tuthmosis had other, more important, wives, it was unlikely that the young prince would ever succeed to his father's throne. But the gods smiled on Amenhotep and his mother and, at maybe ten years of age, he inherited the richest and most powerful kingdom in the Mediterranean world.

Egypt's kings could not rule without a queen by their side. Amenhotep's consort, Tiy, was to become one of Egypt's most influential and conspicuous queens. Her name and image were included alongside her husband's on official monuments and more personal items, she appeared alongside him in statuary, she was even mentioned in the diplomatic correspondence that linked the great Near Eastern states of the Late Bronze Age. Tiy was a fertile queen, and she bore her husband many children, including four daughters and two sons.

After thirty prosperous years on the throne Amenhotep celebrated a
heb sed
jubilee; a festival of renewal and rejuvenation which was marked by an impressive building programme and nationwide revelry. From this time onwards he indulged a developing interest in his own divine nature; a divinity which he expressed through art and
architecture. Traditional theology decreed that only at death could Egypt's semi-mortal kings become fully divine. Yet already, preserved for eternity on the walls of the Luxor temple, Amenhotep's birth legend hinted at an earlier, more earthly divinity. In far away Nubia he took things a step further, by dedicating a temple to himself as the divine being ‘Amenhotep Lord of Nubia', while a subsidiary temple at nearby Sedeinga celebrated his equally divine consort, Tiy. This interest in personal divinity went hand-in-hand with an increasing interest in solar religion. While the traditional state cults were never neglected, Amenhotep paid particular attention to an ancient and hitherto obscure sun god known as the Aten. The genderless Aten is difficult to classify, but appears to represent the light of the sun, rather than the sun itself.

A further two jubilees followed and then, after thirty-eight years of rule, Amenhotep died and was buried in a large and beautifully finished tomb in the Western Valley. He did not intend to lie alone; his architects had provided additional suites of rooms for his closest female relatives, and for Queen Tiy. His highly conspicuous memorial temple, the largest royal temple ever to be built, was situated on the desert edge. Filled with colossal statues of the king as a god, its avenues lined with images of jackals and sphinxes and an astonishing 770+ statues of the goddess Sekhmet, it was an awe-inspiring sight. Today all that remain of this magnificence are the Colossi of Memnon; two figures sitting in splendid isolation beside the dusty modern road.

As her eldest son, Tuthmosis, had predeceased his father, Tiy's second-born son succeeded to the throne as Neferkheperure Waenre (the transformations of Re are perfect, the unique one of Re) Amenhotep IV. The new king was already married to his cousin Nefertiti, daughter of Tiy's brother Ay. She, like her aunt, proved to be a fertile queen, supplying her husband with six living daughters and an unrecorded number of sons.

Amenhotep IV started his reign as an entirely typical – albeit extraordinarily wealthy – 18th Dynasty king, crowned by the god
Amen and ruling from Thebes and Memphis. As the workmen started to cut his tomb in the Western Valley, a new town was founded in Nubia, its temple dedicated to Amen. Meanwhile, building work continued in and around the Karnak temple where Amenhotep preserved
maat
– the ideal state of affairs – by completing his father's unfinished projects. Year 2, however, brought an unexpected change. There was to be a
heb sed
celebrated, not after the traditional thirty years of rule, but on the third anniversary of Amenhotep's accession. A festival required new buildings. Heliopolis, Memphis and Nubia benefited from new solar temples while Thebes – the heart of the cult of the great state god Amen – received a series of chapels and temples all dedicated to the worship of the Aten. This architecture would be dismantled and recycled soon after Amenhotep's death, so that, instead of a collection of impressive solar temples, we are today faced with a gigantic jigsaw made up of thousands of inscribed and painted sandstone blocks. The scenes preserved on these blocks make it clear that the traditional pantheon, Amen included, were very obviously excluded from Amenhotep's festivities. The Aten, in contrast, played a highly conspicuous role in the celebrations.

By the end of Year 5 the Aten had become Egypt's dominant state god. The copious offerings that had once been presented to the temples of Amen were now diverted to the Aten temples so that the cult of Aten grew rich as the cult of Amen grew poor. Soon the old temples were closed, and the decision was taken to relocate the court to the purpose-built city of Akhetaten in Middle Egypt (Horizon of the Aten; a city known today by the Arabic name Amarna). Rejecting the personal name which linked him with the despised Amen, Amenhotep (Amen is satisfied) adopted a new identity. From this time forward he would be Akhenaten (Living spirit of the Aten).

Akhenaten felt free to distance himself from his inherited obligations by turning his back on the state gods. This was a blatant rejection of the most important aspect of his kingship: his duty to maintain
maat
. By challenging the status quo he was embarking on a path fraught with danger for both himself and for Egypt. The ordinary people may not have been unduly troubled by this; they had always been excluded from state religion, and what little evidence there is suggests that they simply continued to revere the eclectic mix of demigods, ancestors and local deities that had been worshipped for many generations. But the elite – the courtiers who surrounded Akhenaten and who were forced to follow him to Amarna – must have found it very difficult, as they were required to show public acceptance of the new regime. The new god, a faceless, bodiless disc, shone down on the royal family alone. While Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their children worshipped the Aten, the elite worshipped through Akhenaten and his family, helped in their private devotions by stelae bearing images of the king and queen. As the royal family effectively replaced the old gods, they assumed the roles formerly played by the solar creator god Atum (now the Aten), and his twin children Shu (the atmosphere: Akhenaten) and Tefnut (moisture: Nefertiti). Their growing band of daughters was featured alongside the royal couple; they offered their feminine support to their king and his god while serving as living reminders of their parents' fertility.

This was unusual, but it would perhaps not have been too bad. What would really have hurt is the fact that, along with many of the old gods, Osiris and his kingdom of the dead had been swept away. Denied access to an afterlife in the Field of Reeds, Akhenaten's courtiers were condemned to dwell in their tombs until the end of time. This new theology is reflected in the tombs that they cut high into the cliffs to the east of the city. Traditionally, 18th Dynasty tombs would be decorated with images of the tomb owner going about his daily business. At Amarna, however, the tomb owners are mere spectators, or, at best, bit part players, in the lives of the royal family. Even Ay and Tiye, the most important of Akhenaten's courtiers, are relatively insignificant in their own tomb.

Egypt's new capital lay on the east bank of the Nile, almost equidistant from the southern capital, Thebes, and the northern capital, Memphis. Construction started during Year 5 and progressed swiftly; by the end of that year the king was staying in temporary quarters while he inspected progress on his palace. By Year 9 Amarna was fully functional, and a ready-made population had been imported. The city offered a full range of amenities: stone sun-temples, mud-brick palaces, spacious villas, workshops and offices. Outside the innermost city a workmen's village housed the craftsmen who laboured in the elite tombs and the multi-chambered royal tomb, hidden in the Royal Wadi. In defiance of the long-established tradition that the king should be peripatetic, constantly displaying himself to the people of his long, thin country, Akhenaten rarely if ever left his new city – he showed no interest in participating in the occasional military campaigns, for example – and all his younger children were born here. It was therefore at Amarna, in Year 12, that the most important event of his reign occurred. A great and unique festival, the ‘durbar', saw a host of ambassadors and vassals summoned from Nubia, Libya, the Mediterranean islands and the Near East. There was feasting, self-congratulation, many hours spent standing in the hot sunlight, and the reception of a huge amount of tribute including horses, chariots, women and gold. This was a time of plague in the Near East; it may therefore not be a coincidence that Tiy and the three younger princesses died soon after the celebration.