Tutankhamen (36 page)

Weigall had left Egypt in 1914, returning to England to become both a stage-set designer and a popular author, journalist and novelist. His hugely successful
Life and Times of Akhenaten, Pharaoh of Egypt
(1910) had introduced the general public to the Amarna Age, and underpinned much popular thought about Tutankhamen's family. With the discovery of the tomb, he travelled to Luxor as special correspondent for the
Daily Mail
, full of hope that his insider knowledge and personal contacts would allow him to file informative reports that would delight his readers and earn him a large fee. In this he was, however, disappointed, as the excavation team was not prepared to grant him any privileges. Not unnaturally, Weigall took this rejection badly and his
Daily Mail
reports included stinging denunciations of Carnarvon's high-handed approach to the tomb and his assumption of a monopoly over one of the world's greatest assets.

Weigall included the already well-known tale of Carter's unfortunate canary in ‘The Malevolence of Ancient Egyptian Spirits', a self-explanatory chapter in
Tutankhamen and Other Essays
(1923), a book which he wrote to take advantage of the public's insatiable demand for information. Under normal circumstances it would be unthinkable for a reputable Egyptologist to usurp a colleague's research and publish it. But these were not normal circumstances.
The Times
' exclusivity deal still rankled, and there were important financial considerations. A valuable Tutankhamen industry was developing in Europe and
America and, as a self-employed author, Weigall wanted to be a part of it. He was not the only one. Carter and Mace had to hurry the first volume of
The Tomb of Tut.ankh.Amen
into print in order to beat the 1923 Tutankhamen-themed publications being offered by several eminent Egyptologists, including Wallis Budge of the British Museum (
Tutankhamen: Amenism, Atenism and Egyptian Monotheism
: a book which, despite its title, focuses on Akhenaten), and Grafton Elliot Smith, whose slim
Tutankhamen and the Discovery of His Tomb by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Mr Howard Carter
was based on a series of articles written for the
Daily Telegraph
. As Smith cheerfully admits:

Meanwhile, Tutankhamen was entering the world of fiction. In 1923 the American Archie Bell published the lengthily titled and curiously punctuated
King Tut-Ankh-Amun: His Romantic History. Relating how, as Prince of Hermonthis, he won the love of Senpa, priestess of the temple of Karnak, and through her interest achieved THE THRONE OF THE PHARAOHS
. This, a thrilling tale of seduction and murder on the banks of the Nile, was just the first in a series of imaginative lives of Tutankhamen which has continued unbroken until the present day. It was just one step from page to screen: the short film
Tutankhamen
and the longer
Dancer on the Nile,
which featured ‘Prince Tut', were both released in 1923.

Weigall could not write a complete Tutankhamen book; he had no idea what, if anything, lay behind the Burial Chamber wall. He needed something to pad out his text, and dead songbirds and guardian snakes fitted the bill exactly. He understood the fascination of the Egyptian paranormal and had been one of the first to point out what is obvious to anyone who has spent any time in Egypt: that the modern Egyptians themselves believed strongly in the supernatural:

That these ‘primitive' beliefs were routinely picked up and elaborated by supposedly well-educated tourists was, to Weigall, as inexplicable as it was unsuitable. As Antiquities Inspector he had made a stand against superstition, and banned desperate infertile women from offering before statues of the ancient goddess of healing, Sekhmet. His ban had absolutely no effect: even today, local guides lead women – locals and tourists alike – around the Sekhmet statues to enhance their fertility. In
Tutankhamen and Other Essays
Weigall expands on this theme:

He then, consummate popular author that he is, proceeds to tell the story of Carnarvon and the mummified cat. The year is 1909, and Carnarvon is excavating the elite Theban tombs when he discovers a cat-shaped wooden coffin, coated in black pitch. He takes the coffin to Weigall's house and, as Weigall is away from home, the coffin is placed in his bedroom. Returning home in the dead of night, Weigall stumbles over the coffin. He rings the bell, but no one comes. So he goes to the kitchen, where he finds the servants grouped around the butler, who has been stung by a scorpion. The butler passes into a state of delirium, and imagines that a large grey cat is pursuing him. Weigall returns to bed and lies watching the cat coffin, now illuminated by a shaft of moonlight. A branch of a tree swaying in the wind casts a flickering shadow which causes the cat's eyes to appear to open and shut. On the verge of sleep, Weigall starts to imagine that the cat has turned to look at him. Eventually he falls asleep, only to be rudely roused by a noise like a pistol shot. He leaps out of bed, and as he does, a large grey cat springs on to the bed, scratches his hand, and flees through the window. Weigall sees that the cat coffin has cracked in two. The cat mummy is now exposed, its bandages ripped open at the neck as if something has burst out of them.

Weigall then, making a quick change from storyteller to scientist, explains that a change in humidity must have caused the coffin to crack open with a loud noise. The mysterious grey cat is, in fact, his own pet tabby.

His next story is more sinister. He tells how one day he received a little earthenware lamp through the post. This is not an unusual situation: many tourists, having purchased Egyptian souvenirs, became unaccountably scared by them, and many museums have benefited from fear-inspired donations. Weigall learned that the lamp had been sent by a lady who had suffered bad luck ever since it came into her possession – the only example of bad luck that he was able to recall, however, is that she spilt ink on her dress. Weigall forgot about the lamp until one day a titled lady visitor asked for a souvenir. He gave her the lamp, and again forgot about it. Later, at a dinner party in London, he met a lady who had experienced such bad luck since acquiring an Egyptian earthenware lamp that she eventually threw it into the Thames. Weigall made enquiries, and discovered that his earthenware lamp had been given to the London lady by the titled lady.

These two personal stories are followed by an account of the malevolent British Museum mummy. This harmless artefact – a painted ‘mummy board' rather than an actual mummy
³⁵
– is generally supposed to have caused endless misery to all who owned it. And so he goes on, teasing his readers with stories of possibly supernatural happenings that might also be explained away in a rational manner. This tendency for professed non-believers to suggest evidence of curse activity before denying its existence continues today. Christopher Frayling, for example, outlines a worrying series of near-disasters while filming a BBC television series in Egypt: these included failures in light and sound when standing near Tutankhamen or his mask, a terrifying elevator plunge caused by a snapped cable, a severe respiratory attack following a day spent filming in a tomb filled with dry bat droppings, an attack of gallstones and, in a reflection of a similar story told by Weigall, almost the entire crew contracting conjunctivitis after a night spent filming in the Valley of the Queens. As I have no curse story of my own to offer, it seems appropriate to allow Frayling the last word on the subject:

9

As we have already seen, Tutankhamen's tomb yielded no significant writings. So curious does this seem to our own, highly literate eyes that it has prompted Egyptologist Nick Reeves to make the intriguing suggestion that Carter may simply have looked in the wrong place;
that some of the royal and divine wooden figures recovered from the tomb might actually incorporate funerary papyri, sealed beneath their layers of gilding and paint.
²
This would not be without precedent; wooden statuettes were commonly included in New Kingdom royal burials and one, recovered from the cache tomb of Amenhotep II, included a cavity apparently designed to hold a papyrus. However, it is at present unproven. The most likely repositories for any such documents in Tutankhamen's tomb would be the two guardian statues that stood either side of the entrance to the Burial Chamber. These life-sized wooden images show Tutankhamen with a gleaming black, resin-painted, skin. They wear golden headdresses (one a
khat
headdress, the other a
nemes
headcloth
³
) and golden jewellery, and each carries a stick that reinforces his authority. Their golden kilts, which stand proud of their bodies, providing a possible hiding place for documents, are inscribed with Tutankhamen's name and titles, and one (the figure with the
khat
headdress) claims to be the
ka
, or spirit, of the king and, perhaps of his brother statue: ‘the good god, of whom one be proud, the sovereign of whom one boasts, the royal
ka
of Hora-khte, Osiris, the King Lord of the Lands, Nebkheperure'.
⁴
Sadly, X-ray examination has confirmed that their kilts do not conceal anything.

The idea that Carter, for some reason of his own, suppressed Tutankhamen's papyri has become a perennial favourite in alternative histories and popular fiction. Almost invariably, these ‘lost writings' relate to the Biblical Exodus and seek to link Tutankhamen to Moses, or Akhenaten to Moses, or, in some more extreme cases, Tutankhamen to Jesus. To non-believers this is a curious idea – surely, if there was anyone in the Amarna royal family who was not a monotheist, it was Tutankhamen – and it probably reflects the preoccupation of the 1920s West with the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people. The idea is pushed to its limits in Gerald O'Farrell's
The Tutankhamen Deception
, in which the author suggests that Carter and Carnarvon actually discovered Tutankhamen long before 1922. They
then looted the tomb of four-fifths of its contents before re-sealing it and ‘discovering' it. The mummy's curse was actually a string of murders necessary to conceal the truth; papyrus scrolls, which were indeed hidden in the guardian statues, proved a link between the Amarna court, Moses and Jesus. The consequences of this deception were dire indeed: