The form of the head in Akhenaton, his daughters and some of the members of his family, more than half a century before his time, raises a problem of great difficulty and complexity.
Fig. 16.—The skull of Akhenaton seen from the left side.
There is no doubt that the slight malformation of Akhenaton’s head was due to pathological causes. It is equally certain that the gross distortion of the heads of his daughters, represented in the statues from Tell el Amarna which are now in Berlin, are the result of artificial deformation such as was and still is practised upon young children in Asia Minor and Northern Syria, with the royal family of which Akhenaton’s family was linked by close ties. But in addition the mummy of a boy in the tomb of Amenhotep II, which was certainly embalmed in the reign of that pharaoh and is probably the body of his son, has a skull which is exceptionally broad and flat, and when viewed from the front presents an appearance curiously similar to the portrait statues of Akhenaton’s daughters. The full significance of these peculiarities cannot be interpreted until the royal mummies now in the Cairo Museum are submitted to a thorough re-examination.
CHAPTER VI
THE STORY OF THE FLOOD
Just half a century ago[2] the proprietors of The Daily Telegraph arranged with the Trustees of the British Museum to send Mr George Smith to Mesopotamia to search in the ruins of the library of Ashur-bani-pal at Nineveh for missing fragments of inscribed tablets to fill the gaps in the Chaldean Account of the Deluge. The announcement of the discovery (in December 1872) aroused an intense and world-wide interest, and The Daily Telegraph provided the funds for the new expedition. Although this version of the Story of the Flood was discovered in an Assyrian library no older than the seventh century b.c., Mr George Smith predicted that the future would reveal it to be the survival of a more ancient version that had also indirectly been the inspiration of that recorded in the Book of Genesis. The recent discovery of the Sumerian prototype of this story, which was put into writing more than twenty centuries before the record in Ashur-bani-pal’s library, is a remarkable confirmation of George Smith’s prediction.
It will come as a surprise to most people to learn that the Valley of the Tombs in Egypt has provided the information which is destined in time to afford the explanation of the early history of the Story of the Flood, before it began to exert a strange fascination upon the minds of men that led to its diffusion throughout the world.
Inscribed upon the walls of the tomb of Seti I in the Theban necropolis—less than seventy years after the burial of Tutankhamen—is the remarkable story of the Destruction of Mankind. In spite of the fact that it was inscribed in this tomb as recently—in comparison with the Sumerian story—as 1300 b.c., the strange confusion of archaic references which has made it so unintelligible to most modern scholars reveals the fact that its origin must be referred back to the fourth millennium. Although in the narrative found in Seti’s tomb the destruction is not brought about by the Flood, it is clear that the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian stories have a common origin and a common motive. For the essential incident in the latter is not the Flood, but the Destruction of Mankind which it brought to pass.
If it be asked why this venerable story should be inscribed in the tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh, the answer is that its aim was to secure for the dead king those boons the attainment of which was the central motive of the tale. It records how old age began to affect the king, upon whose strength and virility the welfare of the whole community depended (see [Chapter IV]), and he became very sorely troubled when his subjects began to murmur about the failure of his powers, because in olden days the only way of safeguarding the prosperity of the kingdom, which was supposed to be wholly dependent upon the strength of its ruler, was to slay him when he began to fail and put in his place one whose vigour was at its prime.