Tutankhamun was first autopsied in November 1925, three years after the sensational discovery of his tomb in the Valley of the Kings. It proved impossible to remove him whole from his coffin. Resin-based unguents, in which the linen bandages wrapping his body had been steeped during mummification 3,000 years previously, now glued the mummy to the coffin. The gorgeous funerary mask was stuck to the pharaoh’s bandaged face.
To conduct the autopsy, then, Tutankhamun’s body — still in some ways that of the late-teenage boy he was when he died — was dismembered. His arms were separated at shoulder, elbow and hand, his legs at hip, knee and ankle. His head was cut from his neck. The mask was prised away using hot knives. When the autopsy was complete, his remains were placed back into the coffin on a tray of sand; some sections were secretly glued together to suggest that the body was intact.
If all this wasn’t indignity enough, his penis was then mislaid. When Douglas Derry, a professor of anatomy at Cairo University, undertook the autopsy, he discovered that Tutankhamun’s penis had been bound and glued with resin by his embalmers and set at a near 90-degree angle, giving him a permanent, indeed eternal 5cm erection. As Joyce Tyldesley notes in her thoughtful new account of Tutankhamun’s life and afterlife, neither sex nor fertility were expected to cease in the Egyptian afterlife.
The penis was present when Tutankhamun was returned to his coffin, but it then vanished. For a large chunk of the 20th century it was missing presumed stolen. It was rediscovered, lurking beneath the sand tray, in a second examination of the body in 1968. Unaccountably it was placed back in the sand and thought lost again, only being finally located during his body’s most recent examination in 2005.
This sad story of disrespect, loss and partial reconstruction seems particularly apt for Tutankhamun. Just 50 years after his death in about 1327BC, a copy of the King List — a roll-call of Egyptian royalty — was carved onto the temple wall at Abydos by the pharaoh Seti I. But Seti regarded Tutankhamun’s family as heretics and excluded them. Within living memory of Tutankhamun’s reign, it was already as if he had never existed.
Yet when he died, Tyldesley writes, Tutankhamun had been “the most influential man in the Bronze Age Mediterranean world”. It is this man that she aims to return to the spotlight, a king as he would have wanted to be remembered, “a traditional pharaoh born in difficult times”.
And difficult they were. Tutankhamun came to the throne aged eight or so. His recent predecessor Akhenaten had spent most of his 17-year reign attacking centuries of Egyptian tradition. He had reconfigured religion in Egypt around a single, little-known god, the sun-disc known as “the Aten”, and moved the capital to Amarna, a new city situated between Thebes in the south and Memphis in the north. The temples of other gods were left to decay. Akhenaten neglected other duties too: requests for military aid from vassal states went unanswered; the rival Hittite empire grew ever stronger.
Tutankhamun wouldn’t be the last ruler to begin his reign by raising taxes to pay for the mistakes of his predecessor. He abandoned Amarna and returned to Thebes. Armies were dispatched to reclaim lost territory, although it is unlikely that Tutankhamun accompanied any of them. Still a child, he was guided in these early decisions by a close circle of loyal advisers and family members, including his older sister-queen Ankhesenpaaten.
The primary goal in all this was stability. To re-establish the old order. To make Egypt great again, if you will. A red-granite stela in the temple of Amun-Re at Karnak loudly proclaims his success: “He has restored what was ruined, as monuments of eternity,” it runs in part. “The land was in confusion and the gods abandoned this land.”
Then suddenly he was dead. Tyldesley questions claims that he was ill or otherwise infirm, or indeed that he was murdered. A hunting accident somewhere distant from Thebes, perhaps in the northern desert, is her conjectured cause of death. His left thigh was shattered, and decomposition had started long before the body was embalmed. Is a golden ostrich-feather fan embossed with scenes of Tutankhamun on an ostrich hunt, placed close to his body in the tomb, a hint as to his fate? Perhaps. As everywhere here, there is room for honest disagreement. Everything is fragmentary, incomplete.
Tutankhamun: Pharaoh. Icon. Enigma echoes that sense of fragmentation and divergent opinion in its structure. It is divided into two sections: the first is an exploration of Tutankhamun’s life and times; the second considers the growth of Egyptology, the discovery of the tomb and its aftermath. Each chapter is presented from a different perspective: Tutankhamun himself, his undertakers, tomb robbers, archaeologists, and so on. The chapter on Ankhesenpaaten is a particularly valuable corrective to pharaoh-centrism. But the approach does have drawbacks, sometimes working to diffuse evidence rather than consolidate it. A chapter from a contemporary Egyptian perspective would also have been welcome.
Tyldesley, a professor of Egyptology at the University of Manchester, has written about Tutankhamun before, most notably in her 2012 work Tutankhamun’s Curse: The Developing History of an Egyptian King, which focuses more on the discovery of his tomb and its cultural impact. Inevitably, some material is revisited; but enough is fresh here to justify the return journey.
As for Tutankhamun himself, the young king with great ambitions unfulfilled, his expectations of a life after death depended on public memory. “In order to achieve any afterlife, Tutankhamun had to be remembered,” Tyldesley writes. “If he were to be forgotten . . . he would die the second death from which there could be no return.”
Questions of death and memory, life and afterlife, haunt the book as they haunt his story. The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb has metastasised his story and turned him into a global icon of the ancient world. But at what cost?
This review was first published in The Times on 5 November 2022.
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Mathew Lyons 