Tutankhamen and the Discovery of His Tomb by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Mr. Howard Carter

by Grafton Elliot Smith

Hiding the Mummies

The discovery of the royal mummies in 1881—and this applies with special force to the remains of the famous pharaohs Seti I and Rameses II—gave us the other side of the story, for it revealed the measures taken to protect the bodies of these kings from further injury, and the persistence with which the protectors of the tombs moved the mummies from one place to another in their endeavour to save them. The condition of affairs revealed in the tomb of Tutankhamen brings proof of what has long been suspected, that the work of the plunderer began soon after the closing of the chambers. But during the twentieth and twenty-first dynasties, when there was a rapid weakening of the Administration, tomb-robbing assumed proportions it had never attained before. The record inscribed upon the coffins of Seti I and Rameses II throws a lurid light on the extent of this loss of control. For a century and a half their mummies were moved from one hiding-place to another in the attempt to secure their safety. The mummy of the great Rameses was moved to the tomb of his father, Seti I, whose body for some time remained in its own alabaster sarcophagus, which is now in Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. But in the reign of Siamon (976-958 b.c.) the two mummies were hidden in the tomb of a queen called Inhapi, and about ten years later were moved again, this time to a tomb that had been originally prepared for Amenhotep I at Deir el Bahari. Here they, together with more than thirty other royal mummies, remained undisturbed for more than twenty-eight centuries, until about fifty years ago they were rediscovered, and the successors of the ancient tomb-robbers of Thebes once more resumed the old process of depredation. But the late Sir Gaston Maspero had not studied the papyri of the twentieth dynasty in vain, for he obtained a confession that is worthy of being set beside those recorded in the Amherst and Mayer papyri.

Fig. 13.—The lid of the coffin that contained the rewrapped mummy of Amenhotep III, to show how it was labelled by the Priests of the twentieth dynasty and the record of an inspection written alongside it.

The story of the ill-treatment of the royal mummies and of their repeated removal from one hiding-place to another prepared us in some measure for the discoveries that were made when the shrouds and linen bandages were removed. But in spite of this the investigation was full of surprises. Several of the mummies after being hastily rewrapped (in the twentieth or twenty-first dynasty) were put into the wrong coffins. So that, for example, when the mummy supposed to be Rameses I (of the nineteenth dynasty) was unwrapped, an old white-haired lady was found embalmed in a way distinctive of the early part of the eighteenth dynasty. And again, when the mummy in the coffin of Setnakht (the first king of the twentieth dynasty) was examined, it was found to be that of a woman embalmed in the manner distinctive of the time of Setnakht’s predecessor (Seti II, of the nineteenth dynasty); and it is probable that she is Queen Tausret, the wife in turn of the two kings, Siptah and Seti II. Such discoveries reveal the need for caution in claiming that the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings has yielded up all its hidden secrets. For there are many royal mummies that we know to have been buried there which have yet to be recovered.

If the examination of the royal mummies reveals the thoroughness with which the tombs have been rifled—not one of the series has ever been found undisturbed—they also give us some idea of the value of the jewellery and amulets which excited the greed of the robbers thirty centuries ago. The torn and mutilated wrappings of the mummies often bear the impressions of magnificent pectoral ornaments, and of amulets on the forehead, neck, or limbs; and the occasional finding of fragments of these, made of gold, lapis lazuli, or carnelian, gives us some idea of the value and beauty of this extravagant equipment of the dead. But I have known only one instance of an object of any considerable intrinsic value escaping the diligent searching of these experienced robbers. During the examination (in 1909) of the badly plundered mummy of Queen Hontaui I found a large and beautifully embossed plate of pure gold, unique in size and in the elaboration of its design.

From these considerations we can safely predict that if, as seems now to be certain, the unplundered mummy is found in the tomb of Tutankhamen jewellery of great value and beauty of design will probably be found on it. The superb workmanship displayed in making these ornaments and amulets is known to us from the discoveries made by M. de Morgan in the Pyramids at Dashur in 1893. These gold pectoral ornaments inlaid with precious stones were wrought with an amazing perfection of technical skill many centuries before the time of Tutankhamen; but the jewellery of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties now exhibited in many museums (especially the Cairo Museum and the Louvre) reveals that the skill in making such works of art had not been lost. The quality of the workmanship revealed in the objects found in the first chamber of Tutankhamen’s tomb should prepare us for the discovery on the mummy of ornaments even surpassing those of Rameses II in the Louvre (see Maspero, Egyptian Art).

But the chief interest in the discovery should be in the mummy itself, for the welfare of which all the elaborate arrangements were made. It is not merely because the mummies enable us to form some idea of the physical features of the kings and queens, and by appealing to our common humanity give their personalities a reality they would not otherwise possess; nor is it because they often reveal evidence of age and infirmities; their chief interest is the light they throw on the history of the period and upon the development of the art of embalming.

Perhaps I can best make plain what is meant by this statement if I refer to specific illustrations of the former kind of contribution the study of mummies makes to the fuller understanding of history.

When in 1907 the bones were found that had once formed part of the mummy wrongly assumed to be the famous Queen Tiy, I discovered that they were the remains of a young man’s skeleton, for which, if it had been normal, it was difficult to admit an age of more than twenty-six years, if indeed as much. Now the archæological evidence seems to leave no loophole of escape from the conclusion that these bones are actually the skeleton of King Akhenaton; but, on the other hand, the historical evidence seems to demand an age of at least thirty years (or, according to a recent memoir by Professor Kurt Sethe, thirty-six years) for the famous heretic pharaoh. This apparent conflict between the two classes of evidence has stimulated an intensive study of the historical data and of the medical history of Akhenaton himself; and the final outcome of the investigations is likely to provide a most illuminating revelation of the inner meaning of perhaps the most human and dramatic incident that has come to us from ancient times. The peculiar features of Akhenaton’s head and face, the grotesque form assumed by his legs and body, no less than the eccentricities of his behaviour, and his pathetic failure as a statesman, will probably be shown to be due to his being the subject of a rare disorder, only recently recognized by physicians, who have given it the cumbrous name Dystocia adiposo-genitalis. One of the effects of this condition is to delay the process of the consolidation of the bones. Studying the history of modern instances of this affection the possibility suggests itself that Akhenaton might well have attained the age of thirty or even thirty-six years, although his bones are in a condition which in the normal individual is appropriate to the years twenty-two to twenty-six. It is tempting to speculate on the vast influence on the history of the world, not merely the political fate of Egypt and Syria in the fourteenth century b.c., but the religious conceptions of Palestine and the whole world for all time, for which the illness of this pacifist poet may have been largely responsible.