The essence of the story, which made it potent as a charm to secure the continued existence of the king (and it was for this reason that it was inscribed upon the walls of the king’s tomb) was that it describes how the ageing king circumvented fate (and the conventions of archaic society) by rejuvenating himself. The elixir of life was the blood of his slaughtered subjects; and the crime that was charged against them—the impiety and disloyalty, the original sin—was that they were murmuring among themselves about the king’s failing health. But when they had been slaughtered and the king had attained a renewal of his youth, he was overcome by the boredom of too prolonged an existence upon earth. So he mounted upon the back of the Celestial Cow and thus reached heaven and attained immortality.
This remarkable story, which was intended as a magical device for securing the same fate for the pharaoh of the fourteenth century b.c. as his remote prototype is said to have attained, also contains the germs of most of the mythology that has lasted longest and spread most widely in the early history of civilization. Although, so far as we are aware, this story is not found in Tutankhamen’s tomb, there is no doubt that it was current at his time, because it was inscribed upon the walls of one of his successor’s tombs little more than half a century later, and the narrative is obviously very old, being packed with archaic allusions and forms of expression. I have referred to it here because the symbolism expressed in some of the funerary furniture in Tutankhamen’s tomb is explained by this mythical story recorded in those of Seti I and Rameses III. The question of interpretation I have discussed in another chapter, dealing with the funerary couches, and I have mentioned the Destruction of Mankind to call attention to the dominant motive—the Giving of Life and the Attainment of Immortality—which inspires every feature of the funerary ritual with tiresome persistence. For in the myth mankind was destroyed to provide the elixir of life for the king so that he might attain to the immortality, which was the distinctive prerogative of a god. The blood of the slaughtered saints was the elixir by which the mortal dweller on earth put on the immortality of a celestial being. The motive assigned in the story for destroying mankind was their sinfulness or disloyalty, which was more exactly defined by accusing them of spreading rumours of the king’s increasing age and weakness, a form of report to which the ruler was peculiarly sensitive, because the admission that his strength and virility were failing was tantamount to a capital sentence. In the remotely distant age, from which the germs of this story came down to the time of Seti I, the ageing king had to be killed to make way for a more youthful and vigorous ruler. Hence one cannot marvel at the king’s sensitiveness when his people murmured about his failing powers.
I have already referred to the fact that this accusation of disloyalty was the earliest version of what theologians call “original sin,” and the story itself the prototype of that which under a modified form appears in the Book of Genesis. The primitive account of the slaying of mankind became confused with the inundation of the Nile, and the blood of the slaughtered human race and the blood-red inundation of the river became identified the one with the other. Though originally both events were regarded as beneficent and identical in their results, that is renewing the king’s strength and the country’s prosperity, when the story spread abroad to foreign countries a certain element of confusion crept into the narrative, and the destruction of mankind was attributed to the Flood. But it found a place in religious literature, not because it exemplified the wrath of the gods against sinful man, but because it explained how the king rejuvenated himself and attained the status of a god. The evidence provided by these Egyptian tombs gives us an insight into the motives underlying the religious beliefs of every people who came into relationship, directly or indirectly, with the arbitrary system of explaining the means of attaining immortality devised by the ancient priesthood of Egypt. It illustrates one of the ways in which these investigations in Egypt can illuminate ancient Jewish literature.
One of the peculiarities of Egyptian customs and beliefs is due to the fact that what the concrete-minded Egyptian naïvely did and said is to be interpreted in the literal and obvious sense that he attached to these acts. Among no other people can we similarly detect all the stages in the logical development of the practices and beliefs of civilization—and not only are the various stages preserved in Egypt, but in so crudely childlike a guise that he who overcomes the impulse to seek for some recondite or cryptic meaning in things which are really simple can read their plain story as their inventors intended it.
It is this fundamental fact that gives the study of Egyptian customs and beliefs its tremendous importance. The essential elements of civilization were originally invented by the Egyptians, who gave them simpler and more obvious expression than other peoples, who borrowed them ready-made without acquiring the connecting stages in their development or the naïve explanation of their meaning.
I have introduced this subject for consideration as an introduction to the study of the funerary equipment of Tutankhamen’s tomb, to which the next chapter will be devoted.
CHAPTER VII
GETTING TO HEAVEN
It is not my intention to attempt to discuss the equipment of Tutankhamen’s tomb. Readers of the daily papers and the illustrated weeklies will already be aware of the vast quantity of furniture and of the fact that even those who were already familiar with the superb design and workmanship displayed in the objects from such tombs as those of Thothmes IV, Yuaa and Tuaa, and Akhenaton were amazed at the new revelation of Egyptian craftsmanship revealed in scores of the things found in Tutankhamen’s tomb, the throne, a superb work of art, the no less wonderful chariots, chairs, couches, statues, sandals, textiles and jewellery, and above all the impressive canopy or shrine. Archæologists familiar with all the marvels of Egyptian art, now treasured in the museums scattered throughout the world, have exhausted their vocabularies of wonder and admiration in attempting to depict the splendours of Tutankhamen’s tomb. The outstanding feature of the discovery is, in fact, the recovery of so vast a collection of superb works of art and the new revelation it affords of the dazzling brilliance of Egyptian civilization thirty centuries ago.
But in this book I am concerned more especially with the cultural significance of the funerary equipment.