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

by Grafton Elliot Smith

Fig. 18. Narmer’s belt with four Hathor cows’ heads, circa 3400 b.c.

The most bizarre objects found in the vestibule of Tutankhamen’s tomb are the three ceremonial couches, one representing the Celestial Cow, Hathor, the second the same goddess in her lioness form, or more probably her son and representative Horus in the form of a lion, and the third Tauert, the hippopotamus goddess, who was the divine midwife.

In the numerous accounts of these remarkable monstrosities that have appeared, I have not seen any attempt to explain their significance. Although such grotesque examples of mortuary furniture have never been seen before, the bas-reliefs upon the walls of tombs in Egypt and Ethiopia, and the pictures illustrating the Book of the Dead inscribed on papyri, have made us familiar with them. Moreover, the chapters of the Book of the Dead relating to “the raising of the funeral bed” leave no doubt as to the ritual significance of these couches.

The sides of the Hathor couch are grotesque models of the Divine Cow, the earliest of the Great Mothers who were believed to have bestowed life and prosperity on mankind. It may seem strange that the artists of Tutankhamen’s time should have perpetrated such a monstrosity as this Hathor couch. When religious motives impelled the designers to fashion a piece of furniture in imitation of so uncouchlike a creature as a cow, the artist was set a task which was almost impossible of realization unless he sacrificed his artistic ideals. There can be no doubt that in this case he escaped the dilemma by repressing his æsthetic feelings and abandoning himself whole-heartedly to the task of devising a model which was almost wholly religious in conception.

To understand why the cow, of all creatures, should have been selected for this purpose, we must remember the relentless logic and persistency that inspired all the preparations of the tomb and its furniture. The mummification of the body and the elaborate arrangements for protecting it and ministering to its wants were due to the belief that the continuance of the deceased’s existence had been secured by these preparations. But to make doubly certain, no device that would contribute to the attainment of this aim was neglected. Inscriptions were made on the walls of the tomb, on the sarcophagus and coffins, and on papyri to ensure the identification of the deceased king with Osiris, so that he might be made to share the god’s fate. A figure of Osiris was made, as I have explained elsewhere (p. 61), out of the sacred barley, every grain of which was regarded as a model of the life-giving Great Mother, and as such a supply of vital essence to maintain the deceased’s existence. From time to time dramatic ceremonies were held at the tomb (or in the temple associated with it in far-off Thebes) to reanimate the dead and help him to persist.

Fig. 19.—Pictures of three couches represented on the walls of the tomb of Seti I, from Belzoni’s sketches.

For, once the ancient Egyptians had persuaded themselves that they could work out their own salvation, and that the kingdom of heaven could be attained by certain physical and magical procedures, they spared no pains to pursue this train of thought and action with tiresome persistence to the most surprising ends.

The Great Mother was originally nothing more than the personification of an amulet, like a cowrie shell or a grain of barley, that was supposed to be able to exert the essentially maternal function of life-giving. Then, when cattle were domesticated and mankind discovered for the first time that cow’s milk could be used for feeding human children, people were profoundly impressed with this revelation of the cow’s kinship with the human family. They regarded her as the foster-mother, and then as the actual mother of mankind, and identified her with the Great Mother Hathor, whose earliest form was (even sixty centuries ago) that of a Divine Cow. But if the Great Mother was at one and the same time a cowrie, a grain of barley, and a cow, she was also identified with the moon, which in a very special sense was supposed to control the life-giving powers of womenkind.