So how did I come to be in the Valley of the Kings on an early June morning looking into the faces of three people who had died over three thousand years ago? It’s a long story.
It began thirty-seven years ago in Barnsley, an industrial town in Yorkshire. Anyone born in Yorkshire will generally tell you so within the first few minutes of meeting, and although I’m no exception, my flat vowels give the game away even sooner. I’m obviously not a product of the Home Counties, and I’ve never pretended to be. Yet for all its finer points, Barnsley isn’t known as a hotbed of Egyptological research. So why did I want to become an Egyptologist and study mummies?
Much of it can be traced back to my wonderful aunt, born the year before Tutankhamen’s tomb was discovered. Some of her earliest memories were of the spectacular finds that appeared in the press during the decade-long, painstaking clearance of the tomb by Howard Carter and his team, and she was one of thousands gripped by ‘Tutmania’. Remaining fascinated with ancient Egypt for the rest of her life, she inspired much of my own passion for the subject following my introduction to it via my parents’ history books. These included Tutankhamen: Life and Death of a Pharaoh by French grande dame of Egyptology Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, its colour plates a source of great fascination to me even before I was able to read.
The discovery of the tomb by Carter and his patron, the Earl of Carnarvon, was a tale regularly told to me by my aunt, with plenty of colourful touches added from her childhood memories of pictures of golden thrones, lion-headed couches and gilded statues appearing from the depths of the tomb. In 1968 the BBC screened Tutankhamen’s ‘post-mortem’, the first re-examination of the king’s remains since Carter’s day. My aunt’s descriptions of the royal mummy beneath the famous gold mask had tremendous appeal, adding to my growing interest in bodies, burials and all things relating to the graveyard which developed throughout my childhood. One of my special treasures was an Airfix model of a human skeleton, which stood in my bedroom side by side with an Egyptian doll, resplendent in golden headdress and snake bracelets, which still sits on my desk today.
In 1972 the UK braced itself for Tutankhamen’s treasures as they toured the world. As a six-year-old completely besotted with the boy-king, I watched television pictures of huge numbers of people queuing for hours in the London streets surrounding the British Museum. But I wasn’t going to be one of them. Events closer to home took precedence, for my sister was born that year and my parents were kept busy at home.
I did, however, acquire a nice collection of Tutankhamen memorabilia – books, newspaper cuttings and posters which family and friends collected for me. I spent hours reading and rereading all my books, as well as everything the local library had to offer about ancient Egypt. One of my favourite books demonstrated how the ancient Egyptians removed the brain during mummification. When I told my parents about this over dinner one day, they told me that it was actually possible to study Egyptology as a subject. Apparently it was even a career for some people, and there was nothing to stop me becoming an Egyptologist. So there I was at the age of eight, my life and career all mapped out. Everything seemed pretty straightforward, the only catch being that I would have to work hard at school before I could finally go to university and study.
School was fine most of the time, except for the occasional run-in with one or two history teachers as a result of my growing obsession. Even though ancient Egypt was not part of the curriculum, I tried every way I could to bring my favourite subject into as many lessons as possible. At O-level I concentrated on the arts, including Latin, figuring this was as close as I would get for the time being. But as I soldiered on with Romulus, Remus and those most tortuous verbal constructions, the Romans really made me suffer – and I’ve still not forgiven them.
My final year at school, when I was fifteen, coincided with my aunt’s retirement, and to mark the occasion she had planned a two-week trip to Egypt. As I was so determined to become an Egyptologist, my parents felt it would be the perfect opportunity to test the water. With considerable foresight, they let me accompany her. And despite the assassination of Egypt’s President, Anwar Sadat, only days before we were due to leave, we kept to our plans.
The effect of that first visit was incalculable – mind-blowing is perhaps a more apt description. Completely mind-blowing. Flying into Cairo at night, we saw the Nile sparkling below us and I was nearly sick with excitement. On that first night the sight of the famous river right outside my window made so much of an impression that I hardly slept at all, and I was ready to leave several hours before our guide, Miss Azmar, arrived to take us to the Cairo Museum on our first scheduled tour. At last I was going to see King Tut’s treasures and all the things I’d read about for so long.
The museum is an enormous building with a great domed roof. After passing through the gardens with their pool filled with papyrus and lotus, ancient Egypt’s heraldic plants, we entered the huge foyer. Right in front of us, flanked by monumental statues, was the largest object in the place, a colossal statue of Tutankhamen’s grandparents, Amenhotep III and his wife, Queen Tiy, their smiling faces distinctly recognisable from the books I knew so well. There were statues and arte-facts in every direction, just like old friends in a crowd. I could hardly wait to see all these things up close, as our guide set off at a cracking pace. We followed her from room to room, craning our necks to glimpse the things she was pointing out. ‘King Djoser, builder of the Step Pyramid at Sakkara . . . King Mycerinus with the goddess Hathor from his pyramid at Giza . . . the female pharaoh Hatshepsut with her false beard...’
With only a few minutes at each piece, soon we reached the Amarna Room with ‘the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten and his beautiful wife Nefertiti’, and some of the most extraordinary-looking figures I’d ever seen. And then we were off again, puff, pant, up the stairs. Although the Mummy Room had recently been closed after Sadat had declared it disrespectful to Egypt’s ancient kings, we headed on to King Tut’s treasure. We struggled to keep up as we passed black and gold statues and animal-headed couches, the reclining black jackal, flower bouquets from his coffin, his clothing, sandals, wig box – wig box? – and amazing jewellery, past the human-headed canopic jars for his mummified entrails, and then, with a flourish, to the golden death mask as a finale!
Desperate to do it all again, but more slowly, we were instead herded back on to the bus and carted off to Giza to see the pyramids. Now although an Egyptologist shouldn’t really say it, I can take or leave the pyramids. Of course they are very big and very impressive and very old, but I just couldn’t relate to them, especially after such an intense morning in the museum.
Looking up in awe, my aunt described how my uncle and his friends, when serving in North Africa during the Second World War, had taken part in the challenge to hit a gold ball from the top of the Great Pyramid in an attempt to clear the sides. Yet none of them was able to do so on account of its sheer size. This really brought home how big these things were, and like every visitor before and since I wondered how on earth they had been built. Then I started to think about who had built them and, ultimately, why?
The Giza Plateau was perhaps the best place to try to understand what ancient Egypt was all about, and why thousands of people would risk their lives to create something to commemorate a single individual, just because they were told to. And this is when I twigged that there must have been far more to it – that these people were motivated by something other than wage packets and clocking-off time. Built to glorify the king, the pyramids also glorified the country and the people themselves, who truly believed that their efforts would guarantee them a place in the Afterlife. Eternity in paradise had obviously been a great motivator.
As we gazed up at the largest pyramid ever built, some four and a half thousand years ago, our guide rattled off statistics like a bookie on race day. ‘The Great Pyramid’, she announced with a flourish, ‘was originally 481 feet high, its base is 756 feet long, the angle of incline is 51 degrees and it contains 2,300,000 limestone blocks, each weighing as much as 2.5 tons...’ It was built as the final resting place of King Khufu, known later to the Greeks as Cheops. There have, however, always been those who for some reason need to believe that the pyramids were built for anything other than the purposes of burial, even though assorted mummified body parts have been found in many a pyramid burial chamber.
Although Khufu himself was no longer at home, the opportunity to venture inside the Great Pyramid was not to be missed. It was definitely a bit of a hike through the steep ascending passageway, especially in the hot, stale air, until suddenly the narrow passage opened out above us into the Grand Gallery, its soaring roof an awesome piece of architectural achievement. At the top, when we reached the red granite-lined chamber at the pyramid’s heart, it was impossible not to think about the million tons of rock pressing down on the cantilevered roof above our heads. Yet I was also struck by just how plain and simple the room was. Although we were told this was the royal burial chamber, there were no wall scenes, no inscriptions, nothing except the monolithic stone sarcophagus which had once held Khufu’s mortal remains. As whispers ricocheted round the walls of the atmospheric, almost eerie room it wasn’t difficult to imagine the king’s final burial rites by the light of a flickering torch. As the funerary priests withdrew for the last time, a series of stone portcullises would slowly have descended to seal the room for eternity, while the king’s soul came and went at will, rising up through narrow shafts to join the stars in the night sky.
A sudden clap of hands signalled that it was time to leave, and back down in the daylight we ended our whistle-stop tour at the Great Sphinx. Made in the likeness of the pharaoh Khafra, Khufu’s son, and eventually regarded as an image of the sun god, his friendly face had watched over the site for four and a half thousand years. Having gazed out at over one million, six hundred and sixty thousand sunrises, the Sphinx now stars each evening in the cheesy yet strangely wonderful ‘Sound and Light’ show against a backdrop of coloured lights.
Although Giza was still an impressive place, it was difficult to imagine its original appearance because so much of the ancient stonework was dragged off to build Cairo. Founded in ad 969, much of the early city was made of the limestone that had once given the pyramids their smooth-sided, gleaming surface. This reuse of ancient blocks also explains why rows of hieroglyphs can be spotted halfway up the city walls. The mosques and minarets which give Cairo its distinctive skyline were also on our itinerary, the unexpectedly glitzy interior of el-Rifai mosque with its carpets, glassware and fragrant woods providing an appropriately plush backdrop for the remains of Egypt’s last king, Farouk. We also saw the burial place of the newly interred Shah of Iran, who had spent his last months in Egypt following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, whilst next door the altogether more austere interior of the Sultan Hassan mosque gave us views across to the massive citadel of the famous Saladin, who had battled with the Crusaders in the Middle Ages.
Yet the thing which struck me most about Old Cairo was the City of the Dead, the vast cemetery that houses the dead and living literally side by side. Cairo’s population had long since outstripped the available housing, and we were told that the homeless had been living here since the fourteenth century. Today the addition of TV aerials, shops and cafés has made the marble-lined tombs a viable form of dwelling. People also visited the tombs of loved ones with picnics on holy days, and although the religious authorities were trying to stamp out such ‘un-Islamic’ activities, the Egyptians have long been comfortable in the company of their dead.
Leaving Cairo’s sprawling mass behind us, a day-trip out into unspoilt palm-fringed countryside brought us to Memphis, Egypt’s first capital, established around 3100 BC. Known in ancient times as Ineb-hedj, ‘White Walls’, the city was sacred to the creator god Ptah who was believed to have simply thought the world into being. His vast temple here was known as the ‘House of Ptah’s Soul’ or Hut-ka-Ptah, which the Greeks later pronounced Aiguptos, the origin of our word Egypt.
Although the ancient city had once spread for miles across the Nile’s wide floodplain, some serious imagination was required to make anything of the few scattered ruins we were shown. In fact I realised I’d never seen an ancient house, whereas tombs and temples were all over the place. It was easy to see why people believed the ancient Egyptians were a morbid bunch obsessed with religion and death. We were told that in most cases the ancient housing simply lay underneath the modern settlements, although its absence also had a lot to do with the difference in building materials and location. Whilst ancient houses were made of mud-brick close to the river, tombs and temples were built of stone on the edge of the desert away from the limited amount of fertile land. It didn’t take a genius to work out that one would last considerably longer than the other.
This was particularly clear at Memphis, where the city was long gone but the tombs of its ancient inhabitants survive up on the desert escarpment at nearby Sakkara, stretching out for some five miles to link up with the pyramids of Giza, Dahshur and Medum to form one vast graveyard. The most frequently visited part of Sakkara was the great Step Pyramid, the world’s oldest monumental stone building, which had dominated the site for nearly five thousand years. It had even impressed the ancient Egyptians: across walls already 1500 years old appreciative graffiti had been scrawled by the scribe Hadnakht ‘on a pleasure trip west of Memphis’.
The pyramid was the final resting place for King Djoser, whose stern, long-haired statue we’d seen a few days before in the Cairo Museum. The discovery of assorted body parts in one of the pyramid’s granite-lined chambers had long ago confirmed the building’s original function, its seven great steps forming a stairway on which Djoser’s spirit could climb up to heaven and join the gods, who are even described in some of the funerary texts as hauling him up by the hand. The pyramid’s revolutionary stepped design was created by the king’s chief architect, Imhotep, and although his own tomb has never been found, searches for it in the 1960s led to the discovery of millions of mummified ibis, left as offerings for Imhotep’s immortal soul in vast secret catacombs beneath the sands. Sacred to the god of wisdom, these stuffed birds were felt to be the appropriate thing to offer to Imhotep, someone so revered he’d eventually been deified. Sakkara’s subterranean catacombs had also housed a complete menagerie of mummified animals, from embalmed bulls to sacred cows, baboons and falcons; there is even said to be a lion cemetery out there somewhere beneath sands which have never been excavated.
Only a few years before our visit, archaeologists had begun to find the tombs of officials who’d served Tutankhamen and his father, Akhenaten, close to those built a thousand years before, during the Pyramid Age, for men such as the vizier Mereruka, the doctor Ankhmahor and Ty ‘the Rich’. The walls were covered in intricate scenes of daily life, depicting all manner of busy little figures going about their everyday business, farming the land, producing food, haggling in the market, dancing and even having a punch-up, while all around flourished flora and fauna bursting with life. Crocodiles lurked in the shallows, hedgehogs munched on tiny insects and startled birds flapped about in riverside marshlands. The emphasis was completely on the now, the real and the tangible, and every scene seemed to scream out the command ‘Live!’ in its attempts to revive the soul of the deceased, using reminders of what life was all about and how to go on living it, albeit in another dimension. Since the ancients believed that a person’s likeness could be magically reanimated in the Afterlife, it was essential to show every feature as clearly as possible. So figures in wall scenes have a clear profile of nose and mouth to allow them to breathe, and their eye is shown whole as if seen from the front, allowing them to see. So strong was this belief that the features of statues and wall carvings were sometimes hacked out to render the figures senseless and therefore harmless to the living – a superstition which persists to this day.
After several days in and around Cairo and Sakkara, we did what most tourists do and flew south to Luxor, the site of ancient Thebes. Once the religious capital of the Egyptian Empire, visited by people from across the ancient world, it was now tourist heaven, filled with visitors from the modern world attracted by its combination of perfect climate and a reputation as the largest open-air museum in the world. It was here, amidst the colonial charms of the Winter Palace Hotel, that Carter and Carnarvon had discussed their excavation strategy sixty years before, the rarefied atmosphere still present amidst the potted palms and polished floors. With the Luxor Temple looming large outside my window, the whole place was a revelation and, whereas Cairo had been a wonderfully chaotic assault on the senses, Luxor’s easy-going atmosphere affected the mind in far subtler ways.
Having been in the business of showing off their ruins for the last two thousand years, the locals had developed their ability to deal with tourists into a finely honed art. First stop Karnak Temple, where we were once again bombarded with facts and figures, kingdoms and dynasties while trying to keep up with our guide. Known in ancient times as ‘The Most Select of Places’, Karnak has always been tremendously impressive. Approached by a sphinx-lined avenue which once led from the Nile to a great pylon gateway, its 245 acres were home to the great state god Amen, ‘The Hidden One’. He was worshipped here for over two thousand years, his mysterious rites performed in the darkness of his inner sanctuary by priests whose authority reached way beyond the temple walls. Indeed, their influence was felt the length and breadth of Egypt, and as each successive pharaoh tried to outdo his – or her – predecessor in the wealth presented to their ‘divine father’, Amen’s priests grew ever more powerful. They had ruled in splendour behind doors through which mere mortals could not pass, yet it was now possible for anyone who bought a ticket to wander through the temple’s sacred precincts and pylons and gape open-mouthed at its sheer size.
Although to modern visitors Karnak was the same dusty beige colour as just about every other temple we’d seen, ancient descriptions painted a very different picture of surfaces covered in all manner of precious stones and dazzling walls reflected in floors of beaten silver. Choosing colours and materials for their dramatic as well as symbolic effect, the ancient Egyptians were masters in the art of interior design and knew exactly how to decorate the homes of their gods. They believed that beautiful surroundings encouraged the divine to take up residence, and, with their powers harnessed through ritual and redirected for the benefit of Egypt, it was a reciprocal arrangement which kept things ticking over nicely for millennia.
Designed to be seen from as far away as possible, each temple entrance was flanked by massive flagpoles whose shape formed the hieroglyphic sign ‘netcher’, meaning ‘god’. Fluttering pennants showed the world that the gods were at home, and as we stood in front of the first pylon gateway we could clearly see the massive grooves where the flagpoles once stood, made of the same Lebanese cedar as the immense double doors of the pylon entrance.
Stepping through into the sacred precincts and vast courtyard beyond, our guide pointed out a small alabaster sphinx with the face of Tutankhamen which crouched to the right of us, and up ahead on the left a huge statue of Ramses II, with one of his many wives standing at his feet on mere human scale. Then just beyond lay the most famous part of the temple, the Hypostyle Hall with its 134 massive stone columns representing the primeval swamp of creation. With rising flecks of dust caught in shafts of sunlight, it had all the air of a medieval cathedral. Yet, in spite of the symbolic grandeur, I also remembered it as the place where a great stone block was pushed from the top of one of the columns in an attempt to crush the person standing below in the film version of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile. Special effects or not, it still makes you look up and think.
Towards the end of the forest of columns stood a pair of pink granite obelisks, the largest one of four set up by the female pharaoh Hatshepsut in honour of ‘her father’ Amen. Functioning as a kind of esoteric lightning conductor, the obelisks had once been covered in polished electrum to reflect the sun’s life-giving rays around the temple, and as she said herself in true pharaonic fashion on the obelisk’s inscription, ‘Never was the like made since the beginning of time.’
The more intimate surroundings of the temple’s inner precincts led to the ‘holy of holies’ which had once housed Amen’s golden statue, close to which were statues of Tutankhamen and his wife Ankhesenamen. Since they were children of the god their faces were sculpted in his image and his name was included in theirs, Tutankhamen meaning ‘The living image of Amen’ and Ankhesenamen ‘She lives in Amen’. Not far away sat their great-great-grandfather, the warrior pharaoh Amenhotep II. His statue had once incorporated two figures until the second had at some time obligingly disappeared, leaving the royal arm still stretched out as if inviting the curious to sit down.
Our tour ended by the Sacred Lake in which the ancient clergy had once come to bathe, beyond which was what appeared to be a building site. This turned out to be one of the pylon gateways which had been dismantled to remove the thousands of small blocks making up the internal filling. The blocks had originally come from buildings erected by the so-called heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, Tutankhamen’s father, which had been demolished soon after his death and their stone reused by later pharaohs. Each block was carved with tantalising fragments of scenes and inscriptions from the original temple buildings, and archaeologists had spent years trying to fit them back together – rather like trying to do a massive jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the picture was. As their work progressed, amazing scenes had started to appear, showing Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti worshipping the sun god Aten, and done in a style so different from anything else at Karnak that it was perhaps no surprise they’d ended up as the next generation’s building rubble.
Just past the dismantled pylon and associated building site another huge gateway led to a second sphinx-lined avenue, this one running for just over a mile and connecting up with the smaller Temple of Luxor. Its use as a fort in Roman times had earned it the Arabic name el-Aksur, ‘The Castles’, from which the modern town derived its name. Once again dedicated to Amen, Luxor Temple had been built by Akhenaten’s father Amenhotep III who proudly described it as ‘wide, very great, and exceedingly beautiful’. With sandstone walls covered in gold, its pavements in silver, and surrounded by gardens, it was certainly a suitable place to celebrate the annual Opet festival when Amen’s golden statue was brought from Karnak to recharge the powers of the king. In secret rites within the darkness of the innermost sanctuary pharaoh’s soul would merge with that of the god, and then, brimming with divine power, he would re-emerge into the daylight to the acclamation of the crowds.
And there in Amenhotep’s colonnade hall we were shown the assembled masses portrayed on the walls, singing, dancing and literally turning back-flips. One man stepped forward to play a trumpet fanfare while the priestesses provided a lively accompaniment on their sistrum rattles – all so different from the gloom-laden way Egyptian religion was usually perceived. These people were really having a good time.
The temple remained unfinished at Amenhotep III’s death, and since his son Akhenaten was apparently preoccupied with his own projects these scenes were eventually completed by Tutankhamen. He had obviously wanted to be seen as the heir and successor of his illustrious grandfather, and by skipping a generation he was able to leave out all reference to his father Akhenaten. With their creator erased from history almost as soon as his reign had ended, Akhenaten’s own buildings were systematically demolished and his statues broken up. Yet if his only crime was a somewhat eccentric desire to do his own thing, as everything I’d read seemed to suggest, complete obliteration seemed a bit steep. There’d surely been more to it than that – and we soon saw that there had been.
Beyond the colonnade in Amenhotep III’s open-air sun courts, its perfectly proportioned lotus columns held evidence of someone else trying to rewrite history. The name ‘Amen’ had been hammered out wherever it occurred, even from the king’s own name, Amenhotep, which ironically meant ‘Amen is satisfied’. Not with that, I wouldn’t have thought. It was well known that the Egyptians considered an individual’s name vital for the survival of the soul, so I was amazed to discover that the damage had been inflicted by none other than Akhenaten. Having failed to carry out the expected duties of son and heir by finishing his father’s temple, he had then defaced what had already been achieved, even to the extent of erasing his own father’s name. So much for the benign, misunderstood dreamer whose memory had been cruelly treated by his successors. Looking up at the evidence in front of me, it seemed he’d received exactly what he’d deserved.
As we passed through into the rear section of the temple, raised floors and lowered ceilings increased the feeling of sanctity. This part of the building had been turned into a church by the Romans when they converted to Christianity in ad 395, then Islam arrived with the Arab Conquest of ad 640 and the mosque of Abu el-Haggag was built at the front of the temple. In an astonishing piece of religious continuity, Luxor Temple has been a place of constant daily worship for the last three and a half thousand years.
Trying to comprehend such a vast timescale, I found it helped to write everything down, although at times I still found it all quite overwhelming. Just when I thought I had something figured out, something else would come along to contradict it. As well as all those dynasties and kingdoms, the names were endlessly confusing – was it Amenophis or Amenhotep, Tuthmosis or Tuthmose? Then there were all the gods and goddesses – was it Amen, Amun or Amon? And why did Isis wear Hathor’s head-dress? And why did Ra and Horus look the same? In fact, why did so many things conflict with what the books had told me?
Up at six the following day, we crossed the Nile by ferry to the West Bank, the traditional land of the dead where the royal tombs and funerary temples were spread out in a kind of ancient theme park. In contrast to the temples at Karnak and Luxor built on the East Bank to house the gods, those on the West Bank, known poetically as ‘Mansions of Millions of Years’, were funerary temples, commemorating and sustaining the soul of each pharaoh. We were going to start with the greatest of them all, at Kom el-Hetan.
When the bus pulled up at the side of the road, all I could see were a pair of enormous stone statues sitting alone in the middle of a farmer’s field. But at almost sixty feet high, they were a pretty impressive pair none the less. Two of Egypt’s oldest tourist attractions, the so-called Colossi of Memnon were named by the Greeks after one of their own heroes, and their huge feet were covered in the Greek and Latin graffiti of visitors who’d gathered to hear Memnon ‘sing’ each dawn. This curious sound effect is thought to have been caused by the breeze whistling through the cracks in the northernmost statue. However, all performances were unintentionally cut short by repairs carried out by the Roman emperor Septimius Severus (193–211 ad).
Yet for all their later fame in the classical world, the two figures had nothing at all to do with Memnon, and after an earthquake in 27 BC were pretty much all that remained of the vast funerary temple of Amenhotep III. With his usual flair for interior decor, his greatest temple had once featured his favoured combination of golden walls and silver pavements together with hundreds of statues, carted away by later kings too lazy to carve their own. Many, including large numbers of the seven hundred and more black granite statues of the lioness goddess Sekhmet, were eventually taken abroad to various museums. One even ended up over the entrance of Sotheby’s auction house in Bond Street, where the ferocious Egyptian goddess and bringer of plague today stares down on London’s busy traffic.
The huge figure of the king and queen we’d seen in the Cairo Museum had also once stood here, and I now stood looking up at the two remaining figures of the king, his mother Mutemwia on his left and chief wife Tiy on his right, their long, wavy hair topped by diadems. Once they had flanked the temple entrance, whose original design featured the same type of sun-filled courtyard we’d seen at Luxor Temple. The odd column base sticking out of the grass was also inscribed with lists of the places Egypt had once laid claim to, with sites from as far afield as the Aegean revealing the increasingly cosmopolitan nature of the royal court during Amenhotep III’s reign.
In the Theban Hills beyond, tombs riddled the landscape, their black rectangular entrances stark against the sun-bleached limestone. They had been built to face the eastern horizon so that the rising sun could rouse the dead from slumber. Yet their original mummified inhabitants were long gone, destroyed in the search for any wealth they might possess not only by locals, who then at least took over the vacant tombs to house their families and livestock, but by an endless stream of foreign explorers and collectors who had simply desecrated the graves for financial gain or personal acquisition.
We drove along parallel to the hills, where great mounds of loose chippings represented centuries of illicit digging, through a landscape that had been reshaped by ancient funerary beliefs. Then as the bus swung left I caught sight of the building up ahead, its multiple layers built into the base of limestone cliffs which curved round in a great sweep. A centre of religious life for over three thousand years, Deir el-Bahari was the place where the goddess Hathor as Lady of the West took dead souls into her care. By building her funerary temple here, the female pharaoh Hatshepsut had taken full advantage of this prime location with its fast track to the Afterlife. She had planned the temple, built directly opposite Karnak, as ‘a garden for my father Amen’, and when the site was excavated in the early twentieth century the archaeologists discovered tree roots from the original acacia and sycamore planted here. Sacred to Hathor, these trees formed a shady oasis to encourage her spirit to dwell in her special grove.
The original tree-lined causeway led up to a vast structure built on four levels, with lively interior wall scenes recording the key events in Hatshepsut’s life. Her great stone obelisks at Karnak were shown being brought by barge from the quarries in the south, and trading expeditions sent down to the mysterious land of Punt obtained the tons of fragrant incense needed for Amen’s rituals. There were even scenes of her divine conception and birth, clearly demonstrating that Amen was her true father and that she had ruled Egypt as his child.
Yet for all her efforts, later pharaohs refused to admit her into their Old Boys’ Club, smashing up her temple statues and erasing her name from the records just as they’d done with Akhenaten. So it seemed doubly unfair that all reference to Hatshepsut’s divine paternity had also been attacked by Akhenaten when he had ordered Amen’s names and images erased.
Originally Amen, Hathor and Anubis were represented within the temple to guard Hatshepsut’s tomb. Located directly behind her temple over the cliffs in the Valley of the Kings, the royal tombs were hidden away, spiritually attached but physically separate from the highly visible funerary temples associated with them. After pyramids had eventually been rejected as useless from a security point of view, later Egyptian royals built their tombs in this remote site dominated by a huge pyramid-shaped mountain now known as ‘the Qurn’, an instant connection with their past without the drawbacks or indeed the cost. Beneath its peak, guarded by the great serpent goddess Meretseger, ‘She Who Loves Silence’, a whole network of secret tombs lay where the sun sank each evening, taking with it the souls of the dead and preparing them for a glorious, shining rebirth in the east each morning.
The Valley was first chosen as a royal cemetery around 1500 BC by the kings of the 18th dynasty, but the identity of the first pharaoh to be buried there was, we were told, a mystery. A village for the royal tomb builders had certainly been founded by King Amenhotep I and his formidable mother AhmoseNefertari, and they had presumably needed tomb builders to build a tomb for them, although where exactly was still not known. The earliest datable tomb in the Valley had certainly been completed by a woman when Hatshepsut ordered a large double burial chamber for herself and her earthly father Tuthmosis I. Via a complicated series of dynastic marriages, Hatshepsut was succeeded by her stepson and nephew Tuthmosis III, an innovator in many fields, whose military exploits and stature earned him the modern title ‘The Napoleon of ancient Egypt’. His tomb was the first in the Valley to feature painted wall scenes, and these were closely copied by his son, Amenhotep II, whom I remembered from his accommodating statue at Karnak; it was his tomb which was to be our first port of call.
As we went through the entrance, the passage immediately sank down into the rock, then passed across a deep well shaft and through a small chamber, and after that down another corridor, before emerging into a great burial chamber. Surrounded by hundreds of little black stick figures running around the walls, we were told this was the Underworld through which the sun god travelled each night – a scary place inhabited by two-headed creatures, snakes impaled on blades and the headless bodies of bound captives. In contrast to this Lowry-meets-Hieronymus Bosch version of the Afterlife was Amenhotep II himself, welcomed into the Beyond by friendly-looking figures of the gods. Hathor was the most prominent, easily recognisable in her great crown of cows’ horns and blazing red sun disc, and she’d certainly done a good job protecting the king, for when the tomb was first discovered in 1898 his mummy still lay there.
As we looked down into his now empty sarcophagus, our guide pointed out a small chamber to the right where a further nine kings had been found. According to the guide book, the mummies had included Tuthmosis IV, Amenhotep III (him again), Seti II and Ramses IV, V and VI, all placed there for safety by the priests after their own tombs had been robbed. It is also said that they had all been removed to the Cairo Museum, where we had just missed our chance to see them following the closure of the Mummy Room.
Momentarily alone, I looked around at the other small chambers I could see. Two of them were wide open, but the nearest was still sealed up.
After taking a few more photographs I headed back up into what was now blazing daylight, catching up with my aunt and the rest of our group in a shady corner of a tomb doorway so enormous it was difficult to imagine how it could ever have been hidden. It couldn’t have been more obvious if they’d rigged up a set of neon lights. Built for Ramses VI, whose mummified body had ended up in the side chamber of the tomb we’d just visited, it had been finished around 1136 BC. The tons of rock chippings removed during its construction had been dumped outside, completely concealing an earlier tomb only rediscovered three thousand years later by Howard Carter. The small area where we now stood was the very last part of the Valley he had cleared in his search for Tutankhamen’s tomb, and soon after work began on 1 November 1922 he made the discovery of a lifetime. It affected far more people than he could ever have imagined, and was responsible for bringing countless thousands of people like us to Egypt to see the tomb for themselves.
After taking photographs by the famous tomb entrance, we went down the sixteen steps Carter had cleared to reach the sealed doorway at the bottom, where seal impressions of Tutankhamen told him he was on the edge of something potentially momentous. Passing through into the descending corridor beyond, we came to the second doorway, which Carter had reached on 26 November, his ‘day of days’. It was here, in the company of Lord Carnarvon and his daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert, and his friend Arthur Callendar, that Carter made a small opening in the plaster and held out a candle into the blackness beyond. ‘At first I could see nothing,’ he wrote, ‘the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold – everywhere the glint of gold.’
I tried to imagine how this empty room must have looked filled with all the wonderful treasures we’d seen in the Cairo Museum, originally stacked up in here with all the care and attention of a teenager’s bedroom. Yet the chaotic state was the result of the attentions of ancient Egyptian tomb robbers who’d broken in on two separate occasions, and although they’d only taken a relatively small amount they’d still had time for a good rummage around. But while they were emptying boxes of linens, scooping out expensive perfumes and scattering the contents of jewel boxes across the floor, something seems to have disturbed them, and in their hurry to leave they dropped some of their stolen treasures. Carter found a set of gold rings still threaded on to a knotted handkerchief, and the robbers’ fingerprints were still visible inside alabaster perfume jars.
In their attempts to tidy up the tomb, the authorities had then rushed about hastily repacking boxes and chests with whatever lay closest to hand, apparently in as much of a hurry as the robbers had been, in their attempts to keep the tomb’s location secret. Yet this was only unknowingly achieved when Ramses VI’s tomb was built close by, just in time to save Tut’s tomb from the wholesale looting which accompanied the breakdown of royal authority soon after Ramses’ death. Oblivious to such comings and goings above him, Tutankhamen slept on, safe within a golden cocoon of coffins and ‘the only royal mummy who remained in the Valley of the Kings’, or so it was said.
We had already seen two of his gold coffins in Cairo and now his mummy lay before us inside a third, its toes still covered with the perfumes used at his funeral, now blackened with age. Within a stone sarcophagus covered with a protective sheet of rather dusty glass, he lay in the centre of a burial chamber which, just like the much larger tomb of Amenhotep II, was adorned with amazing wall scenes. Although often dismissed as hastily painted, the figures were overwhelmingly beautiful, and whilst they might be the most powerful gods of the Afterlife they looked friendly enough to me. There was Hathor again, holding up her ankh to allow the king to breathe in the breath of life as jackal-headed Anubis gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder. On the opposite wall the sky goddess Nut had come down from her usual heavenly perch to welcome him into the realm of the gods, and at the far end Osiris, dread lord of the Underworld, stretched out his arms to embrace his newly arrived son.
There was also the king’s funeral cortège, the courtiers wearing white headbands – the ancient version of black armbands – followed by the royal mummy. As his upright mummy received the final rites to revive his soul, the figure in leopardskin robes performing these rites was Ay, Tutankhamen’s elderly vizier, who succeeded him. In the familiar tale of the ‘tragic boy-king’ I’d always read and accepted as fact that Ay had also killed him, his sudden death and apparently hasty burial explaining why the tomb was so small and unfinished.
But hang on a minute! We’d just been into two other tombs which clearly contradicted all this. With only the burial chamber decorated, Amenhotep II’s tomb too was described as ‘unfinished’ – and he’d ruled for twenty-seven years. And we’d also been into the enormous, fully decorated tomb of Ramses VI, who my guide book said had reigned from 1143 to 1136 BC – only seven years as opposed to Tutankhamen’s ten. It just didn’t seem to add up.
After a last look round the tomb of someone whom I, like many others, had long regarded as a familiar figure, I realised he was perhaps not quite as familiar as I’d thought. Fantastic as it had been finally to see all these things for myself, I concluded in my diary that evening that ‘this has all been a very strange experience, after reading about the subject so many times’. It also began to dawn on me that, just because I’d read things in a book, it didn’t make them true, and I’d have to try and find some things out for myself.
On our last day in Egypt my aunt and I went back to the museum in Cairo, this time taking things at our own pace. Little by little, my brain started to make its own connections between the objects and the places we’d just seen, as things gradually pulled together into some kind of focus. Revisiting Tutankhamen’s treasures, we found some of the lesser-known pieces, such as the sandals with images of Egypt’s enemies painted on the soles so he could trample upon them, their figures carved on the base of ceremonial staves so that he could grind them into the dust. There were also six chariots, and representations of the king firing arrows into everything from ostriches to Asiatics. Amongst a fearsome array of the weapons themselves were at least nineteen bows, arrows, scimitars, daggers, clubs and two large shields adorned with images of Tutankhamen attacking lions and trampling his enemies. These adult possessions were a far cry from the tragic, helpless little boy of legend, and I began to see a very different Tutankhamen in my mind. But if my cherished image of the ‘boy-king’ had been so misleading, what about others? This was a question which soon resurfaced when we reached the Amarna Room.
Like many other people I was familiar with the famous bust of Nefertiti in Berlin, and whilst there were several other similarly attractive images of the queen’s face here in the museum, other portrayals of the fabled beauty revealed a big chin and scrawny neck. In some examples she looked so much like her husband Akhenaten that it was difficult to work out who was who. As the museum’s own guide book said, ‘their bodies seem deformed: long face, narrow neck, rounded breast, delicate, high waist, enormous buttocks, and bulging thighs’. Although one of the smaller statues of the king showed an average-looking king, four larger figures flanking the wall displayed elongated features and distorted body shapes which are routinely described as ‘grotesque’. The guide book said these statues had been found in Akhenaten’s short-lived temples at Karnak, built before he moved to a new capital, Amarna. Its remote location generally excluded Amarna from the standard itinerary, but I now very much wanted to see the place for myself. Even with the limited knowledge of a fifteen-year-old, I knew there were things that didn’t add up and I wanted to know why. But for now the longed-for visit to Amarna would have to wait.
Back in England preparing for O-level exams, I found the careers advice I was offered unimaginative at best. ‘Egyptologist’ was certainly on no one’s list, and although I took matters into my own hands and wrote to all sorts of museums and institutions, they either didn’t reply or told me in their roundabout way to forget it, assuming this was yet another query from a teenager who’d ‘grow out of it’. So I left school and went on to sixth form college, where I made my choice of A-level subjects on the basis of what seemed the most appropriate preparation for Egyptology: history, classical studies and geography, with general studies and archaeology thrown in for good measure. My eventual aim was to study for an Egyptology degree close to the British Museum at University College London, whose world-famous Egyptology Department, the first in the country, had been set up in 1892 as a result of the efforts of Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards.
Something of a rarity in Victorian times, this independent single woman made her living as a writer. When bad weather on a sketching holiday in France sent her on to sunnier climes she ended up in Egypt, which changed her life and the entire future of Egyptology. Chartering a sailing boat in Cairo, the intrepid forty-one-year-old set out on a three-month river journey which she described in her classic work A Thousand Miles up the Nile, first published in 1877 and still in print.
Edwards’s sense of adventure and evocative descriptions are refreshingly unspoilt by self-conscious academic niceties. In many ways a mistress of understatement, she describes through words and her own sketches the key sites from Cairo, Giza and Dendera down to Luxor, the Valley of the Kings and on to Philae, her text interspersed with unexpected and often unintentional humour. Sitting down to lunch with assorted travelling companions at Abu Simbel, she records the arrival of a hastily scribbled note from another member of their party: ‘Pray come immediately – I have found the entrance to a tomb. Please send some sandwiches!’ With a genuine respect for the people she met, she compares her own appearance with that of the Egyptians, declaring that ‘one cannot but feel . . . that we cut a sorry figure with our hideous palm leaf hats, green veil and white umbrellas!’
Edwards also had very clear ideas on women’s rights, and was indignant at the reluctance of male scholars to recognise the achievements of Hatshepsut; she herself praised the ‘genius and energy of this extraordinary woman’. She was vice-president of the Society for Promoting Women’s Suffrage, an event still forty years in the future, and so the notion of an omnipotent female pharaoh was no doubt an attractive one.
Yet it is Edwards’s reaction to the ancient gods which is most surprising, and at the risk of offending her God-fearing Victorian readers she revealed that there were times when she felt she believed in them. She was also deeply upset by Christian vandalism of the monuments, and, seeing the damage still being done by both foreigners and locals, she realised that ‘There is no one to prevent it; there is no one to discourage it. Every day, more inscriptions are mutilated – more tombs are rifled – more painting and sculptures are defaced.’ The situation so affected her that, once back in England, she gave up all her other work and began a single-handled crusade to save Egypt’s heritage by tapping into the widespread interest in finding historical verification for the Bible. To this end she set up the Egypt Exploration Fund, later Society, in 1882, and spent the rest of her life doing all she could to promote the study and preservation of Egypt’s ancient monuments.
Her diplomatic skills were particularly required in defending the Society’s archaeologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie. On his first visit to Egypt in 1880 to survey the pyramids of Giza, Petrie’s careful excavation methods put him light years ahead of his treasure-hunting contemporaries and, recognising his potential, Edwards took him on. Yet Petrie’s disagreements with the gentlemen of the Society’s committee led to his dramatic resignation in 1886. So Edwards found him financial support from a wealthy Bolton businessman, inspired to visit Egypt after reading Edwards’s book and one of her biggest fans. Although there were no strings attached to the funding, Edwards told Petrie that his financier was quite a religious man ‘and if you could throw any light on the Bible . . . he would be gratified’.
Able to resume his work at numerous sites, Petrie had started to make tremendously important discoveries at Amarna when Edwards, aged only sixty-one, died from a combination of exhaustion and influenza. The Egyptian-inspired ankh and obelisk adorning her grave caused quite a scandal at the time. In her will she left £5000 worth of railway shares with instructions that these be used to establish Britain’s first chair in Egyptology. It gave Petrie a job for life as the Edwards Professor of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology, with an income of £140 a year.
It seems that Edwards chose University College as the home of her bequest rather than Oxford or Cambridge because it was the only university to admit men and women on equal terms regardless of religious belief. It had been founded in 1827 as an alternative to these other two universities, and, since it admitted students ‘without distinction of colour, caste, creed or sex’, became known as ‘the godless and infidel establishment of Gower Street’. With the head and stuffed body of its founder, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, still watching over the seat of learning he had created, it really was the perfect choice for me.
Ignoring much well-intentioned advice, I applied to study for a degree in ancient history and Egyptology at UCL. I knew they only took a very few students each year, but to my amazement they gave me a place. At just eighteen, I found the move south incredibly tough, with London the most unfriendly place in the world. Crippled as I was by a shyness misinterpreted as disinterest, from the personal standpoint my first year was truly hideous. Yet everything about the course was fantastic, despite the terrifying convolutions of hieroglyphic grammar. There were only three of us on the course that year, so classes were far less intimidating than they might have been. We also had access to an excellent library built around Edwards’s own books, and the department as a whole was an amazing place. Some of the research fellows had actually studied with Petrie and his equally extraordinary colleague Margaret Murray, the first professional female Egyptologist in Britain.
Murray was born in Calcutta to a Northumbrian family and first came to UCL as a hieroglyphs student in 1894, only two years after Amelia Edwards’s bequest had created the department. She later remembered that
there was still that splendid spirit which in 1827 had dared to start an English University on modern lines. It was revolutionary! Not only was there no religion but women were admitted! Everyone knew that women were anathema in a university, not only because of their inferior intellect but also on account of their innate wickedness they would be a terrible danger to the young men. I am not sure if the old universities believed the Almighty had created women for the sole use of the male sex, but they certainly acted as if they did!
Unsurprisingly, Murray was also an active supporter of women’s suffrage, just like Edwards before her. Soon teaching hieroglyphs herself, Murray ended up running the department during Petrie’s long absences making his name as an excavator. She also set up a proper curriculum which included ancient Egyptian history together with the basic principles of archaeology, mineralogy, anthropology and pathology, the latter with the help of a skeleton that she bought and christened George.
Murray also directed one of the earliest mummy examinations in 1906, made important discoveries while excavating in Egypt, Malta, Minorca and Syria, and published regularly on a wide range of subjects. Her lifelong interest in anthropology did cause problems, however, and she was told on more than one occasion that ‘Anthropology is not a subject for women.’ When established Egyptology journals refused to publish her articles about anything they considered ‘indelicate’ although they accepted the same type of material from male scholars, she was justifiably angry, since ‘it showed that a man might write on such subjects and be praised for his knowledge and insight, but not a woman’.
Nevertheless she persevered and, pursuing her interest in folklore, began to study Egyptian customs. Particularly fascinated with those of women, she observed the various methods used to induce pregnancy, from swallowing scrapings taken from temple walls to visiting the mummies of the Cairo Museum. She was finally made Assistant Professor in 1924, and retired in 1935. After Petrie’s death seven years later she kept his memory very much alive, and dedicated her best-selling book The Splendour That Was Egypt to him. She also used the new medium of television to pay him further tribute in a 1953 BBC programme marking the centenary of his birth. In a second BBC interview, describing her own career, she declared in the true spirit of the elderly, ‘I’m a piece of archaeology myself, being ninety-six.’ Having completed her output of 150 publications with her defiantly lively autobiography, My First Hundred Years, she died four months later. Despite a very long life dedicated to teaching, her tremendous contribution has tended to be obscured by the legendary Petrie. But whilst he was in many ways a genius who achieved incredible things, the ‘Father of Egyptology’ was only able to do much of this with the constant support of Murray, and of Edwards before her.
UCL’s Petrie Museum had been formed around Edwards’s personal collection of artefacts, since she had wanted to initiate ‘the study of ancient Egypt by means of the objects found’ rather than simply by the hieroglyphic language, as it was then taught. Much of her collection had come from Petrie’s own excavations, and over the next forty years he continued to increase it through what he described as ‘unconsidered trifles’. Of far more value to an Egyptologist than any amount of golden treasure, such relatively mundane objects as pots, beads, scarab-shaped seal stones and rings enabled him to establish a reliable means of dating Egyptian culture. Photographs from the late 1880s and 1890s also show him using a favourite seal ring as an innovative form of tie fastener.
Although he admitted that the rapidly expanding collection was almost getting beyond his control, it was finally displayed in 1915 in long galleries containing material from just about every period in Egyptian history. Alongside cases full of pottery and funerary figurines, beads, flints and scarabs, the museum housed objects that I found fascinating – the world’s oldest dress, a set of tattoo needles, small bronze hair curlers, hair pins and combs, in fact all the things Egyptian men and women would have handled and used on a daily basis to create the well-groomed figures portrayed in their art.
Although Petrie seems to have discouraged anyone from touching the artefacts while he was in charge, for fear of them breaking, the department’s second professor, Stephen Glanville, encouraged his students to handle what has been described in Egyptological terms as ‘the greatest teaching collection in the world’. In museum classes we were presented with drawers full of items thousands of years old and taught to understand the basic features of each type of object, even being allowed to choose pieces we particularly liked for further study. I was already fascinated with dress and adornment, and there was a particularly attractive carving of a nobleman, with golden bangles around hands raised in prayer, gold necklaces tied on with tassels and a wonderful hairstyle carved with incredible precision. I’d made a decision to study hairstyles as part of my degree, and as I took notes on its date and find spot I discovered that my praying nobleman came from Amarna.
Most of the museum’s Amarna objects had come either from Petrie’s excavations or from those undertaken later by the Egypt Exploration Society. There were sculptures and carvings of Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their daughters; brightly coloured glazed tiles and inlays from the palaces in which they had lived; hundreds of scarab seals, amulets and rings; delicate glass and faience vessels; and pottery from as far afield as the Aegean. Everything painted a picture of a sophisticated and cosmopolitan city, and although I had not yet visited Amarna I was at least able to touch, feel and hold things once used by its ancient inhabitants.
During my time at UCL I met Julia Samson, who had first arrived in the department some fifty years earlier. In 1934, as Julia Lazarus, she had begun to study with Petrie’s successor, Stephen Glanville. When she commented that there was a lot of work to be done in sorting through the thousands of objects, some still in the packing cases in which they’d arrived from Egypt, she was offered the job of registering everything from Amarna. In 1936 she was invited to join the Egypt Exploration Society’s excavations there. The excavation director, John Pendlebury, was keen to include the material Petrie had found but never had time to publish, so he asked Lazarus to write part of the excavation report, The City of Akhenaten, and bring the material together. Back in London, she continued to work on the material in the Petrie Museum until her plans to become a museum assistant were put on hold at the outbreak of the war in 1939.
After her marriage she finally returned to the museum in 1966 as Julia Samson, and published her catalogue Amarna: City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, followed by a series of articles based on her meticulous examination of material she knew better than anyone else. This included the well-dressed nobleman figure who’d caught my eye, the hieroglyphs in the top corner spelling out part of the name of the sun god the Aten. When I checked Samson’s descriptions of it, she explained that this was only part of a much larger limestone slab or stela, pieces of which had been recovered by both Petrie and Pendlebury and were now divided between the Petrie Museum and Cairo. She also described it as important for the information it revealed about the ‘uncertain history’ of Smenkhkara, a mysterious character confusingly described in the books I’d read as Akhenaten’s son, son-in-law, brother or even lover! And because I’d never seen a picture of a man named Smenkhkara, he intrigued me even more.
My nobleman was carved on the reverse of the stela, its front inscribed with two pairs of cartouches – the ovals drawn around royal names. Although tradition dictated that each king had five names, only two were ever written in cartouches. So the two pairs of cartouches positioned here must contain the names of two kings, ruling together as equals. Since royal names are some of the first things a hieroglyph student learns, even I could read them. The first two named Neferkheperura-Waenra Akhenaten, better known as Akhenaten, whilst the second, less familiar, pair read ‘Ankhkheperura Neferneferuaten’, Akhenaten’s co-regent, who was also described as his ‘beloved’.
Samson had realised that Nefertiti was often described as being ‘beloved of’ her husband Akhenaten, and she also knew that Neferneferuaten was one of Nefertiti’s names. And from her long studies of Amarna material she’d discovered the name Ankhkheperura written in a feminine form. Although the figures below the cartouches had been partly destroyed, the lower halves of the two individuals remained. And they clearly showed that the second figure was female. For Samson, this unassuming little stela was ‘ultimate proof of Akhenaten’s co-regency with a woman’, whom she identified as Nefertiti, and who, after Akhenaten’s death, had ruled as sole monarch with the throne name Smenkhkara. Indeed, Samson’s catalogue of the Amarna collection was republished in 1978 with the provocative subtitle Nefertiti as Pharaoh.
Since her work completely contradicted most established views of the Amarna period, they were controversial to say the least. Yet they seemed to clarify so much of what had been confusing and difficult to explain. When I felt confident enough, I approached her after one of her lectures to talk about her work. She was incredibly kind, suggesting books and articles I should read, and even wrote to me with further information and a copy of one of her own publications.
And the more I read about this fascinating period, the more I was able to piece together just how exactly the accepted version of events had come about.