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

by Grafton Elliot Smith

Hence the belief developed that if the Great Giver of Life and Immortality was both a cow and the moon, she was the appropriate vehicle to convey the dead king to the celestial realms in the sky. And so, as the nursery rhyme puts it, “the cow jumped over the moon.” That the cow represented in the couch is a symbol of the sky is shown by the stars on the under surface of the body. The height of the couches also was an additional indication of their identification with the sky. In all periods of Egyptian history painters and writers were fond of depicting this episode of the conveyance of the dead king to heaven on the cow’s back. This incident is shown and explained in the inscriptions on the walls of Seti I’s tomb, to which I have already referred (p. 95). But in later times it became common to represent the Divine Cow (or its lioness surrogate) conveying the dead man or his actual mummy to the sky, and in pictures of funerals to find the mummy borne on just such couches as have actually been found in the tomb of Tutankhamen. The object of the cow-shaped couch was to ensure by magical means this translation of the deceased to heaven. The story of the Destruction of Mankind gives the Egyptian’s own interpretation of the incident. The influence of this Egyptian conception of animal “vehicles” for gods spread far and wide throughout the world in ancient times, for if such a creature could convey the dead king to the celestial regions and confer upon him the means of attaining immortality, which was the distinctive attribute of divinity, such an animal vehicle was an appropriate symbol and pictorial determinative of a god. The identification of the Great Mother with the cow was the beginning of the social system known as totemism.

The explanation of the lioness form of the Great Mother is also given in the inscription in Seti I’s tomb. When the goddess was called upon to rejuvenate the ageing king, the only elixir of life known in her pharmacopœia was human blood. Hence, she was driven to the necessity of slaying a human being, and her murderous action was compared to that of a man-slaying lioness, with which she was identified. But as the lioness was a particularly appropriate form to symbolize the Great Mother’s ability to protect the mummy from the perils that lurked in the pathway to the other world, it became an even more favourite form of the funerary vehicle than the gentle cow. At any rate, in the pictures of funerary couches the lioness form is much commoner than the cow-form. The same grotesque form of the lion has survived in modern heraldry.

But other ideas found expression in the lion-symbolism. For example, on some of the beautiful pieces of furniture found in Tutankhamen’s tomb the king himself is represented as a human-headed lion trampling on his foes, and many of his predecessors before him, Thothmes IV for example, were similarly represented. Even as far back as the time of the Pyramids was not Mykerinus (2800 b.c.) represented as a human-headed lion in the gigantic Sphinx at the Giza Pyramids?

This representation of the king as a lion, which typifies his identification with Horus, is inspired by another chain of ideas. Although at the time of Tutankhamen, and in fact throughout the whole history of Egypt in dynastic times the sun-god was dominant in Egypt and Horus himself was a sun-god, the rôle that he took as the guardian of the dead was inspired by the more ancient Osirian faith. It was the living king Horus who was responsible for tending the dead king Osiris; and it was believed that the continued existence of the god (the dead king Osiris) was wholly dependent upon the services rendered by Horus. Thus it was Horus who performed the divine function of conferring immortality upon Osiris, and also upon the dead king Tutankhamen, who was identified with Osiris. Presumably the act of being borne upon the lion-couch was symbolically equivalent to being put into the care of Horus, not the Horus represented upon the furniture in the tomb, the lion-avatar of Tutankhamen who tramples his enemies under foot, but the son of Osiris, who holds out the promise of conferring upon the dead king the boons that he is credited with having given to Osiris—eternal life and protection. The confusion between these two aspects of Horus is brought out very clearly in a very interesting picture recently discovered by Professor George A. Reisner (and reproduced in The Illustrated London News, 10th February 1923, p. 204), engraven upon a monument in the Soudan several centuries later than the time of Tutankhamen. The lion-couch is represented supporting the mummy of King Ergamenes, whose head is portrayed in the form of the falcon of Horus. Above the mummy is the star-spangled sky, below which is seen the sun’s disc emitting five streams of life-giving emanations to the dead king. In the Book of the Dead Chapter LXXVIII is called that “whereby one assumeth the form of the Sacred Falcon” and the deceased is represented as saying “I display myself as the Sacred Falcon whom Horus hath invested with his soul for taking possession of his inheritance from Osiris” (Renouf). The possibility suggests itself whether the lion-couch was intended to symbolize, as the cow-couch unquestionably was, the transference of the dead king to the sky to be united with the sun and identified with the solar deity Re. If so, perhaps the five streams of V-shaped emanations pointing to the disc were meant to represent the sun drawing the mummy, the dead Horus, to the sky.

In his monograph of the Tomb of Amenemhēt Dr Alan Gardiner reproduces a text (Plate XXX A) including a pictorial arrangement of hieroglyphs in the form of stars above the mummy borne on the lion-couch, which he translates as a statement that the dead man “wishes to be placed among the stars in the firmament” (p. 119).

The same design occurs in the pictures illustrating the Book of the Dead. The funerary couch is usually represented in the lion-form, the cow- and hippopotamus-varieties being much less frequently adopted.

In the pictures of funerals it is not uncommon to see the mummy borne upon a lion-shaped couch placed within the funerary canopy or shrine (as in the first of the pictures from the Book of the Dead, Fig. 20). Good examples are given by Dr Alan Gardiner and Mrs de Garis Davies in The Tomb of Amenemhēt (1915), Plates XII and XXIV, of the reign of Thothmes III, a century before Tutankhamen. No doubt this is due partly to the significance attached to the conception of Horus as the guardian of Osiris, but also possibly to the idea that Horus fought the enemies of Re and was the best protector of the deified dead.

Fig. 20.—Three vignettes from different papyri of the Book of the Dead, representing the lion-couch bearing the mummy within its canopy, a mummy lying on its funerary couch with three solar emanations coming down from the sky, and a third where the bird-soul is bringing to the mummy the symbol of eternity.

But underlying the whole of the lion-symbolism are two fundamental ideas which gave meaning to it. In the very ancient story of the Destruction of Mankind, which in a relatively modern and much distorted form was inscribed upon the walls of the tombs of several of Tutankhamen’s successors, the goddess Hathor (the Divine Cow) is reported to have made a human sacrifice in order to obtain the blood wherewith to rejuvenate the senile king (in the story Re, the king upon earth who had not yet been elevated on the cow’s back to the sky to become the sun-god). Hence she acquired the reputation as a slayer of men and was identified with a lioness, and called Sekhmet, the Destroyer. Thus the lioness and the cow were both forms assumed by the Great Mother Hathor. But in the development of the myth of the Destruction of Mankind the god Horus takes the place of his mother Hathor, and the bull and the lion take the place formerly occupied by the cow and the lioness. In the case of the funerary couches the Cow of Hathor is found alongside the lion of Horus, but occasionally one finds in late tombs the mummy represented as being conveyed to the celestial realms by a bull instead of the more usual cow. A good example of this is to be seen in the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries in Edinburgh.