In the Valley of the Kings

by Daniel Meyerson

  Arrangements were made with surprising speed. “In a week’s time I was to leave the expedition,” Carter wrote later. “In this way began another phase in my career…. I must admit that I had sad misgivings regarding this new undertaking [excavating with Petrie] for which I had not the least experience…. However, in spite of this, in the morning I arose earlier than usual and set myself to arrange my things and pack.” If, as Heraclitus says, character is fate, it was all there from the beginning: Carter’s courage, his stubbornness, his truculence, his dedication.

  To which list may be added his “demons.” For both he and the driven, obsessed Petrie were desperadoes and doubles. But with this difference: Petrie was saved by falling in love—and by being able to fall in love—and what’s more, with a woman willing to put up with his Spartan ways and join him in his life’s endeavor. Carter would have nothing to console him but his work.

  “I resolutely avoided any possible entanglement for it would, I always knew, be almost life and death to me to really care about anyone,” Petrie wrote to the young Hilda Urlin in an early, despairing letter. “I drowned my mind in work, and have kept my balance by filling every thought with fresh interests and endeavors, at a cost and a strain which I could hardly live under….”

  There was just as much dammed-up passion in Carter as there was in Petrie. But it found expression only in his dark rages. He could never write to another human being as Petrie wrote to Hilda.

  “Overwork is a necessity to me, as a narcotic to deaden the mind to the condition of a solitary life,” Petrie told her. He offered her no compliments, he made no mention of her long, light hair or her blue eyes (though she was so beautiful that she posed as Dante’s Beatrice for the Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Holiday). Instead, he wooed her with his desperation. “To me life seems such an unsatisfactory experiment in spite of the many advantages that I am blessed with having.”

  The girl’s first reaction was, naturally, to draw back in wonder. Up until these declarations, their relationship had been purely intellectual. First seeing her at a University College London exhibition of his finds, he followed her from room to room, finally managing to strike up a conversation amid his scarabs and pots (whether in their early, flourishing, or degraded stage is not recorded). He invited her to draw his antiquities; he lent her books and sent her tickets to his lectures.

  Their relationship deepened. Hopelessly in love, he gave her the key to his scarab cabinet (his idea of a romantic gift). She refused him. He wrote to tell her that he was leaving for the remotest deserts in Syria. She replied that this was rather rash. Her mother invited him to visit the family. He agreed—and the rest was history.

  Photos of Hilda and Petrie at the excavation sites reveal marital bliss. Petrie watches as Hilda, wearing her large floppy hat, smock, and daring new “bloomers” (knee length, resembling knickers), climbs into a burial pit or kneels among her husband’s pots and coffins.

  Weigall provides a more intimate picture of the lovers in a letter to Newberry: “Petrie is a very bad sleeper, and yet for the sake of his health, he finds it necessary to take ‘just a second or so’s rest’ from the hour of 1.30 until about 3.30 [p.m.]. Now during this time the rest of the happy family [his assistants, students, and so on] is making a horrible noise about the courtyard—fitting up pots, copying stelae and so forth…. Also the extraordinary sensations in his inside—due of course to tinned peas and salad oil—keep him painfully alive to the existence of a stomach not yet subordinated to the intellect. And moreover the glaring sun streaming into the hut, the heat, the millions of flies, all combine to annoy him…. Upon retiring to his hut after his ample meal of, let us say, stale peas, sardine oil, aged bread, and eleven oranges, he proceeds to remove all his garments except a coat and a pair of trousers….

  “Next he takes two lumps of plaster of Paris and thrusts them into his ears…. Then, seizing a large green tin from off an upper shelf, he anoints his hair, beard and coat with the famous green [insect] powder…. The insubordinated stomach alone remains to be dealt with; and so the Prince of Excavators throws himself upon his bed.

  “But, stop a moment, I have omitted to mention the system of dealing with excessive light. [He] has fashioned himself a black mask … and this he ties over his face…. Having now arranged himself upon his bed, his wife steps in to deal with her husband’s world-famed stomach … lying across the offending portion of his anatomy….

  “Going in one day to [his] hut … I was horrified to see lying upon the bed a terrible figure curled up, with another equally terrible one lying at right angles above. The face was pitch black, the hair bright green, the beard also green … one hand was flung out over the hinder portions of the blue lump lying on its face on the top; the other clasped a stray hand belonging to the said lump. The atmosphere was thick with powder. Half asphyxiated I coughed and horrors! the lumps began to move. It was Professor W. M. Flinders … himself!”

  In one of his most moving love letters, Petrie wrote to Hilda during their courtship, “I cannot again live as I did before I knew you.” But it was just that lonely existence Carter would lead among the desert ruins and tombs.

  Thirty years after the young Carter first came to Egypt, he’d finally announce to colleagues that he intended to bring back a companion from England. Which of course caused much speculation about the woman he’d fallen for. Had he, like Petrie, found an ardent beauty to join him on the sites?

  Carter returned from leave not with a woman, however, but with a canary—explaining to the astonished men that although Egypt had ornithological wonders aplenty—ibises and hawks and egrets and black-legged spoonbills—sadly, it had no songbirds of its own.

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  © FRANCIS FRITH, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE OF AMARNA, FORMERLY THE ANCIENT Akhetaten, is some three hundred miles south of Cairo, where the desert cliffs come right up against the Nile’s eastern bank for a stretch, plummeting straight down into the water. Then suddenly they recede in a semicircle or arch, only returning to the riverbank ten miles downstream.

  When Egypt was the mightiest power on earth, in the fourteenth century BC, this remote, desolate spot suddenly became the new capital. The pharaoh, Akhenaten, had chosen the place not for political or strategic reasons, but because it was in harmony with his speculations about the nature of the world. There was a break in the cliffs here where the sun could be seen rising at dawn; and this break exactly resembled the hieroglyph for “horizon”—the moment of the sun’s daily rebirth, when it returns from the land of death, chaos, and night. At pharaoh’s command, a city arose quickly under the “sign”—priests, architects, artists, soldiers, tradesmen, and courtiers suddenly appeared on the barren plain.

  The site was inhabited for only two decades: during Akhenaten’s seventeen-year reign and then for the three years his mysterious successor, Smenka’are, was on the throne. At the beginning of the following reign—Tutankhamun’s—Akhetaten was abandoned and the court returned to Wast (Thebes, Luxor).

  In 1892, Carter, mere copyist no longer, debuted as an excavator in Amarna under the direction of the terrible Flinders Petrie. Carter’s great “guess”—that Tut’s tomb still remained to be discovered—began here, as he immersed himself in this ancient moment in time, making it his own.

  The cast of characters at Akhetaten:

  Tutankhaten, Living Image of the Aten (later changed to Tutankhamun, Living Image of Amun). Son of Akhenaten by the snub-nosed, carefree-looking royal favorite nicknamed Kiya, or “Little Monkey.” Though Tutankhamun passed only his childhood at Akhetaten—he was a bit player here, waiting in the wings—its religious, political, and artistic milieu formed him and determined the main events of his reign. It was the world into which he was born. Without understanding Akhenaten’s revolution and the reaction against it that followed, one may be dazzled by the beauty and splendor of the objects in Tut’s tomb, but one will not understand the tale th
ey tell.

  Queen Tiye, mother of Pharaoh Akhenaten and great wife of his father, Amenhotep III. She came to live at Akhetaten during the reign of her son. Tiye was in the tradition of strong women going back to the beginning of her dynasty (the Eighteenth). She followed in the footsteps of Queen Aahmose, for example, who was awarded the golden flies, the medal for military valor; and Queen Hatshepsut, who usurped the throne and ruled alone for thirty years. Tiye was given extraordinary prominence in the records of the time and was a power to be reckoned with in her own right.

  During the thirty-eight years of the reign of her husband, Amenhotep, there was peace. No other kingdom dared challenge it. It was unnecessary for Amenhotep III to engage in long military campaigns or to cultivate the martial virtues of ancestors. Instead, he covered Egypt with magnificent temples—and devoted himself to the concubines of his huge harem (on one occasion alone, 316 Mitannian beauties were received into the harem).

  The pet names of his favorites, recorded on cosmetic palettes and perfume jars, show him to have been an old voluptuary. However, neither “Little Miss Whiplash” nor any of the other harem ladies presented a challenge to Queen Tiye—they were mere diversions for the debauched king, shown in a late portrait as obese and wearing a woman’s gown.

  In his perceptive article “Hair Styles and History,” Amarna expert Cyril Aldred took up the gender-bending aspect of life at Akhetaten. Describing two Amarna portraits (carved canopic vase stoppers), he remarked, “What may capture our interest in these two heads of royal sisters is the side light they throw upon the character of the age … in which members of the royal family exchange each other’s clothes, the kings wearing a type of woman’s gown and appearing with heavy hips and breasts; and the womenfolk wearing their hair cut in a brusque military crop.”

  Aldred might have added that the women’s hairstyle, “the Amarna look,” was created by chic court ladies who copied the wigs of the Nubian soldiers—and not even the officers’ wigs, but the coarse head coverings of the lowly infantry, who must have caught a princess’s eye.

  It was a sign of the times. At the beginning of the dynasty, some two hundred years earlier, the preoccupation was with creating a vast empire. For the first time, Egyptians looked beyond the Delta and the narrow Nile valley. Now, however, the players at pharaoh’s court—wealthy, secure, and sophisticated—developed a penchant for artistic, philosophical, and sexual experimentation (a situation similar to our own times, in fact, which is perhaps why the era has provided so much food for thought for modern figures ranging from Freud to Philip Glass, who used Amarna texts, verbatim, in his opera Akhnaten).

  But if Tiye’s husband had given himself up to sexual preoccupations, and if her son was now obsessed by God, the queen was interested in politics, remaining an important political influence during both reigns (in fact, we find the king of Mitanni writing to her on Akhenaten’s accession to assure continued good Mitannian-Egyptian relations, an unprecedented situation). Her establishment at Akhetaten was a large one—palace, gardens, stables—but her body did not remain there after death.

  When Akhetaten was abandoned, her grandson Tutankhamun took her for burial in Thebes, most probably in KV tomb #55. Although when it was discovered, the tomb, pillaged in antiquity, did not contain Tiye’s body, a shrine found there indicates that it once had been there. The queen was portrayed on the gilded wood worshipping the Sun Disk together with Akhenaten (luckily, the image was recorded right away, for it soon crumbled to golden dust).

  There was another burial in tomb #55 whose identity is much debated. A man in a gorgeously inlaid coffin with an intricate rishi, or feather design. He might be Smenka’are—or he might be Akhenaten, reburied here by his son. The names on the coffin were purposely destroyed in antiquity, and half of his face mask was torn off. But the style of the coffin and the canopic vases (for his viscera) were pure Amarna. And royal. The question of his identity became important to Carter when he started keeping a keen eye on which royals had been found and which had not. The idea that Tutankhamun would have brought both his grandmother Tiye and his father or brother to Thebes would suggest that his own tomb must be somewhere near theirs.

  However, through a series of exasperating ancient and modern mischances, everything relating to tomb #55 is problematic. Evidence has been destroyed, crucial pieces of jewelry stolen (by a laboratory assistant), the mummy damaged through rough handling. For a century, Egyptologists, anatomists, dentists, and DNA experts have all offered contrary theories about the royal mummy in the feathered coffin. The trouble began, in fact, from the moment the tomb was discovered. An American obstetrician who happened to be in Luxor was called in and, after examining the mummy, misidentified its sex (one has to be grateful that the young man, whoever he was, was not expecting).

  Most probably, Queen Tiye’s body was removed from #55 during the next dynasty (the Ramesside era) and hidden together with a cache of other royals in KV tomb #35. She is the mummy called the Elder Lady in this group (again, most probably). Her clutched right hand is raised across her breast in royal position, her expression incredibly striking even in death. After three thousand years, the Elder Lady’s face still emanates the strength and dignity of Tiye’s statue portraits—leading one Amarna expert to call it “striking, almost beautiful.” Her reddish (hennaed?) hair flows down to her shoulders and has been matched with a lock of hair in Tut’s tomb—a keepsake found in a miniature gold coffin.

  Pharaoh Akhenaten, Servant of the Aten, or Sun Disk. Revolutionary thinker or tyrannical fanatic—or both. Frequently portrayed with exaggeratedly feminine features, with heavy hips and breasts, and sometimes, like his father, in a woman’s gown.

  The pharaoh’s private life: devoted husband of the famous beauty Nefertiti; affectionate images of them with their six daughters are everywhere at Akhetaten. Also gay icon: On the Pase stela (now in Berlin), Akhenaten is seen in loverlike pose with Smenka’are, his son from a minor wife. Smenka’are became co-regent late in the reign, and on inscriptions his name was followed by the epithet “beloved of the king’s body.”

  After Nefertiti’s death (around year 12 of the reign), Akhenaten married their eldest daughter, Meritaten, making her great royal wife. Akhenaten’s reign lasted seventeen years and was followed by Smenka’are’s short reign. During his three years as pharaoh, Smenka’are married Meritaten, his half sister, formerly their father’s daughter-wife—making Smenka’are Akhenaten’s son, son-in-law, co-regent, and lover all in one, a real-life situation very much like one of the Marquis de Sade’s extravagant fantasies.

  It should be noted that father-daughter or sister-brother marriages were de rigueur for Egyptian pharaohs and their Greek successors, all the way down to Cleopatra, who was married to her younger brother early on in her career—being gods, they emulated the incestuous gods. However, Akhenaten’s relationship with Smenka’are was unique in Egyptian history. Attempts have been made to interpret the Smenka’are figure on the Pase stela as Nefertiti in drag—that is, to identify the co-regent, later Pharaoh Smenka’are, as actually being Nefertiti in male attire and with a new name. But as Amarna expert Cyril Aldred points out, the discovery of a Nefertiti shawabti, or magical funeral figure, in a context preceding Akhenaten’s death conclusively disproves such theories: Such shawabti figures were always created after their owner’s death. Put simply, Nefertiti could not have succeeded Akhenaten since she predeceased him.

  Akhenaten also married his third daughter, Ankhesenpaaten. After his death, she was married to her half brother Tutankhamun, and her name was changed to Ankhesenamun. Portraits of the beautiful young girl in Tut’s tomb are made all the more poignant by her spirited struggle to save herself after Tut’s death (an exchange of letters written on baked clay recorded the events). However, in the end she was unwillingly married to her maternal grandfather, Ay, and disappeared from sight, most probably murdered.

  The pharaoh’s spiritual life. Breaking with more than a thousand years of Egyptian bel
ief, Akhenaten’s all-consuming idea was that there was only one God. He writes “The Great Hymn to the Aten,” a paean of praise to the Sun Disk, the god who brings comfort and joy to all creatures. Its text is to be found on the huge boundary stelae of the new capital (there are some seventeen of them, many discovered by Petrie accompanied by Carter on long desert walks). The poem was suppressed during the reaction against Akhenaten. It was thus lost from the 1300s BC until the AD 1880 s, when it broke upon the modern world as a revelation, comparable to the later Hebrew Psalm 104 for its all-embracing religious feeling.

  In his wonderful study of Egyptian religious texts, Jan Assman defines the new faith with precision. For Akhenaten, “visible and invisible reality in its entirety is a product of light and time, hence the sun.” Assman goes on to “place” Akhenaten in the history of ideas, remarking that “as a thinker, Akhenaten stands at the head of a line of inquiry that was taken up seven hundred years later by the [pre-Socratic] Milesian philosophers of nature with their search for the one, all-informing principle, that ended with the universalist formulas of our own age as embodied in the physics of Einstein and Heisenberg.”

  Fittingly, the pharaoh took as his motto: To Live in Truth, Ankh em ma’at—a word carrying the connotation of cosmic equilibrium. To live in ma’at was to sustain the world in the face of ever encroaching chaos and darkness; it was to perform acts of justice, to be in sync with the eternal.