In the Valley of the Kings

by Daniel Meyerson

  But perhaps to be in sync with the eternal also means to be out of sync with one’s contemporaries. For during Akhenaten’s seventeen-year reign (1379-1362 BC), Egypt was suddenly turned inside out by royal decrees.

  The old gods were no more. Fashioning their statues became not only foolish, but a crime. Their images were chiseled off temple walls and pillars by pharaoh’s “enforcers,” and we even find them fearfully erased from amulets found in private houses. What need was there to portray divinity? God was in the sky for all to see—the Sun Disk became the sole symbol of the new faith. Its rays ended in hands reaching down to the royal family, offering them the ankh, or life sign—an image that not only is omnipresent at Amarna, but also finds its way into Tut’s tomb despite his restoration of the old faith.

  It was a remote, abstract symbol compared with the gods the Egyptians had always turned to—the grotesque squat Bes, who helped women through childbirth; or the ram’s-headed Amun, who led the country in war; or the cow-eared Hathor, goddess of love. How can the woman in labor, the soldier in battle, the unrequited lover, cry out to an idea?

  However, Akhenaten decreed that they must, and the old temples were closed. The images of the gods were no longer carried forth on festival days amid feasting and song. The oracles that explained the inexplicable were likewise silenced. A feeling of foreboding and a sense of apocalypse spread throughout the land. “O Amun,” reads a graffito scratched on the cliffs, “how I long to see you once more….”

  To fully appreciate the shock all of this caused, one must keep in mind that the function of these temples was different from that of modern houses of worship. They were not meant to serve the populace (who were forbidden access beyond the outer courtyards). Rather, they had been built to honor the gods upon whom existence itself depended.

  The Apis or Mnevis or Buchis bulls had always dwelled in their sacred precincts. Divine incarnations, the god-beasts (chosen for their markings) were pampered until death—when they were given elaborate state funerals in many-ton sarcophagi (together with their mothers). Their vast tombs contained generations of the holy animals. In Sobek’s shrines, the pools were filled with divine crocodiles glittering with jewels sewn into their tough hides. By night, temple recluses slept by the pools, hoping for prophetic dreams. By day, priests and priestesses danced and sang as the creatures fed on the choicest meats—paid for by pious donations, by state support, and by the fees of temple prostitutes.

  In Amun’s dark holy of holies, priests washed, anointed, dressed, and “fed” the images with sacrificial food. Chanting spells and burning incense, they then resealed the chamber, having assured the renewal of creation—more, having participated in it with their service.

  As a perceptive contemporary Egyptologist (James Peter Allen) puts it, for the ancient Egyptians the cosmos was “marvelous but vulnerable … a bubble of air and light within an otherwise unbroken infinity of dark waters.” The sunrises and sunsets, the yearly overflow of the Nile, the growth of the crops, all depended on the temple service performed since time immemorial. Without it, the dispossessed priests of the old order predicted, disaster would follow. And it did, in fact, follow—though perhaps more from human error than divine displeasure.

  For while Akhenaten wrote his lyrical poem to the Sun Disk, his Asian provinces fell to the enemy one by one. His vassals sent desperate letters, begging for soldiers:

  “Rib Hadda says to his lord, King of all lands: I fall at the feet of my Lord, my Sun, seven times and seven times! Why does the King, my Lord, write to me: Guard! Be on your Guard! With what shall I guard? Who would guard me? …”

  “Gulba is in danger. The children and wood are all sold to Yarmiata for food. The Khabiri killed Adma, King of Irgate….”

  “If this year there are no archers, then all lands will be joined to the ’piru.”

  “Rib Hadda says: whenever the king of Mittani was at war with your fathers, your fathers did not desert my fathers. Now the sons of ‘Abdi-Ashirta, the dog, have taken the cities….”

  But the pharaoh had put his army to a better purpose—quarrying stone and raising temples to his great new idea. The empire was crumbling, the irrigation canals were neglected, the old temple bureaucracy upon whom so much depended no longer functioned.

  Even if they could somehow know it, Akhenaten’s suffering subjects would not have been consoled by their ruler being first in a line of thought that ends with Einstein! They would have infinitely preferred his “normal” older brother (who died young)—even if his only accomplishment had been to leave behind him, as he did, a tomb for his cat inscribed “MIEU,” meaning “Kitty.”

  When the boy Tutankhamun became pharaoh, the powers behind the throne (the priest Ay and the general Horemheb) presented him as Egypt’s savior. A stela (the restoration stela) proclaimed that he had come to redeem the ruined land—which in a pragmatic sense was certainly true. A new era began as Tutankhamun sailed away from his father’s phantasmagorical city. The populace followed, taking everything that could be carried and leaving the city to the vultures, jackals, and white ants that devour whatever is made of wood (thresholds, window grilles, doorjambs, lintels, tables, roofing materials—Petrie was severely disappointed by the total lack of everyday implements in the ancient houses).

  Once the “great criminal” Akhenaten died, his magnificent city died with him. The enormous palaces that had arisen here overnight were stripped of their fine stone facings. The colossal gilded pillars sparkling with colored glass and faience inlays were carted away. The pavements covered with brilliant mosaics and painted with trompe l’oeil scenes slowly sank beneath the encroaching desert sands. The aviaries, gardens, and zoos were destroyed. The thousands of small stones (talatas) on which intimate royal family scenes were painted were taken downriver to be used as fill in the thick gates (pylons) at Karnak and Hermopolis. The royal statues were shattered. The barracks were deserted, as were the artists’ studios, the officials’ offices, the royal stables, and the immense open-air temples dedicated to Akhenaten’s new god.

  All memory of the pharaoh was suppressed. If he was remembered at all, it was in the form of a strange myth passed down to later generations. Like a troubling nightmare, the tale was told of a city of lepers gathered together by a king who sought to see God. And how this king brought years of suffering and desolation to Egypt (a story later writers such as Manetho and Josephus will conflate with that of Moses). Three millennia would pass before the archaeologists arrived to piece together broken jars and fragments of friezes and an equally fragmentary understanding of the truth.

  Last, but not least: Amarna’s artists and architects.

  At Amarna, the hitherto unbreakable rules of Egyptian art and architecture were broken—splendidly. A naturalistic spirit suddenly breathed into the friezes, wall paintings, and portrait sculptures.

  The creative spirit was freed, and great works were produced. The famous bust of Nefertiti was only one of fifty works of art, many unsurpassed for beauty, found in the atelier of the artist Thutmose—who was well rewarded, if the luxury chariot he drove was any indication. (His name was inscribed on an ivory horse blinder: “praised together with the perfect god, the Chief of Works, the Sculptor Thutmose.”)

  In a letter from Amarna, Carter described a carved tablet he had just unearthed (now in the Louvre). On one side was a vase filled with fruit and flowers, next to which “Khuenaten [Akhenaten] is seated upon a throne dancing the Queen upon his knee with the two Princesses upon her lap…. Petrie says he does not know of anything like it in Egypt….”

  And there was nothing like it, or like the other exuberant, sensitive Amarna portraits, especially the king and queen, who in previous reigns had always been depicted in one or another of the traditional poses (smiting the enemies or standing before the gods). At Amarna, however, we see Akhenaten relaxing en famille—the queen dines, holding a duck in her hands; the king embraces his daughters or holds hands with his wife. The young princesses play with pet ga
zelles or make music or, adorned with jewelry and wearing red nail polish, sit naked by the riverside.

  Of course, none of this would have been possible without the pharaoh’s sanction. And, in fact, we are told that it is Akhenaten himself who showed the way: “I was one who was instructed by pharaoh,” the architect Bek declared in a biographical inscription from a stela, under which he had carved an unsparing, realistic image of himself. Potbellied, flabby breasted, bald, middle-aged, with sunken cheeks, spindly legs, and a worried expression, Bek is no beauty—but his work was marvelously beautiful and new.

  Garis Davies, who spent six years recording the Amarna tombs in the early 1900s, wrote in his monumental survey, “The rows of complex columns [papyrus shaped with bud capitals] finishing at the wall in pilasters with cavetto-cornice, and carrying either a simple or a corniced architrave, is an architectural element which, by its harmonious blending of straight lines with curves and of the plain with the broken surface, may bear comparison with features of classical architecture that have become imperishable models”—a judgment that would have gratified Bek.

  Finally, there was the huge crowd of extras at Amarna, some fifty thousand of them:

  Scribes writing in the new manner Akhenaten decreed to bring the written language closer to the spoken one.

  Large numbers of soldiers bivouacked in the center of the city to crush any opposition to the unpopular regime. They could be seen accompanying Akhenaten on the friezes: When the pharaoh rode out, he was always surrounded by his bodyguards. Their outlook posts and patrol paths surrounded the city.

  Courtiers raised up from obscurity to ensure their loyalty to the pharaoh who made them.

  These, then, were the players at Akhetaten/Amarna. It was a daunting place for the eighteen-year-old Carter to begin his career: rich in disturbing images, inversions, ironies, beauty, and drama—that is, rich in history.

  Not to mention a certain tomb that lay hidden in a wild ravine in the eastern desert—empty except for mud and rubble. Given the number 27, it is the tomb of Tutankhamun—his first tomb, that is.

  1893

  Amarna

  WHO WAS THAT YOUNG JUNKY ROLLING A CIGARETTE NEXT to the Great Aten Temple? He looked so pale and exhausted, in another world as he stood there next to the excavation pit. The abysslike ditch got deeper every minute as the sweating, singing workers threw up more and more earth—looking for the past, which, like the truth, was at the bottom of a bottomless well. And the junky became more and more nervous, from time to time shouting out commands in halting Arabic and then stopping to go through the spoil that had already been gone through. First by the reis, the chief of the workers and guards; then by the under-reis, the one-eyed, split-nosed Mohammad; and then by the under-under-reis, Ali Es Suefi Hussein.

  But the junky must have been too high to notice this. He pushed aside a basket boy, got on his knees, and went through the upturned earth with his hands, hoping for something more than the rubble and sand that ran through his fingers.

  What was wrong with him? He was probably high as a kite, having stumbled on a stash in one or another of the tombs (as sometimes happened). For sure he’d found some high-quality Balanites aegyptiaca sycamore seeds among the grave goods of some brother-junky (who’d planned on staying stoned for eternity).

  But no, the young guy was not a junky: It was Carter—and so changed after a month with the slave-driving Petrie that it was hard to recognize him (his first patrons, whose lapdogs he had sketched at Didlington Hall, showed up at Amarna on their luxurious dahabiyya; and as Alicia Tyssen-Amherst noted, they were shocked by his appearance). And though some Balanites aegyptiaca sycamore seeds would probably do him good, it was only Turkish tobacco he’d indulged in, the one luxury available to him here. What was more, he’d indulged in it furtively—ready to toss away his cigarette should his boss show up.

  For though Carter had now climbed a rung on the ladder of success from “assistant archaeological artist” to excavator; and though he now received a meager salary for the first time since coming to Egypt (fifty English pounds a year)—he realized that his future depended on acquitting himself well at Amarna.

  Forget the terrible extravagance of Turkish tobacco, Petrie did not approve even of using a donkey on their long desert treks. Carter had rashly suggested it, as he recorded in his unpublished memoirs (still remembering the awkward moment some thirty years later): “I had to run almost to keep up with Petrie’s long quick strides. Once I murmured that a donkey would be useful. My request was received by a dead silence. It temporarily upset the mutual equanimity. But no man is wise at all times, perhaps least of all when he is tired.” And the fledgling excavator was very tired! “Excuse my shaky handwriting,” he wrote to his Beni Hasan colleague Percy Newberry, “but I have just been out on a walk with Petrie that lasted from 8am to 8pm.”

  The two formed a curious pair as they roamed the Amarna desert—the older man sparse, athletic, and so ragged and unkempt that the Bedu children taunted him with cries of “Beggar!;” the younger man meticulously dressed and struggling for breath as he tried to spot Akhenaten’s boundary stelae amid the barren cliffs. Which was how Carter spent his day off—sometimes. Other Sundays, he scoured the desert alone, at Petrie’s request mapping the ancient roads, paths, and tracks where Akhenaten’s soldiers had once circled.

  The daily grind of excavation, however, was even more strenuous. Standing under a burning sun, he watched through a haze of dust and blinding light as his crew, twenty-two Egyptian men, dug up—nothing. That is, so far. But his luck was bound to change, he was sure of that.

  The job required all of Carter’s concentration; he couldn’t look away for an instant. Because in that instant, Petrie had impressed upon him, it would be easy for a workman, shoveling for hours, to miss a mud seal or to pocket a ring suddenly turned up in the sand—irreplaceable finds. Take a ring offered for sale by a Cairo dealer in the 1920s—stolen during an excavation? forged? The names of Tutankhamun’s young widow, Ankhesenamun, and her grandfather Ay were entwined on its bezel, giving us an idea of her fate when Ay seized the throne—if only we could trust it! If only we knew the ring’s provenance, the place and manner of its discovery.

  Or take a mud seal. In and of itself worthless, it provides an even better example of the way Carter would learn to conjecture, leaping over wide gaps of knowledge on the strength of a guess. It was not only a question of knowing who was buried where and by whom—although as we shall see in a moment, that certainly was very important (if only because the process of elimination would turn Carter’s attention to Tut, among those pharaohs not accounted for).

  However, the real challenge was for Carter to develop intuition—he defined it in his memoir as “a subtle recognition of the facts.” But in archaeology, “the facts” can be understood only together with the desires, fears, and beliefs of an epoch, in this case the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty (Tut was the last in this line). Only a deep understanding of Tut’s time, call it “intuition,” would have enabled Carter to believe in his quest through seven long years of fruitless digging.

  But to return to the nervous young excavator watching over his excavation pit for statues, jewelry—and the above-mentioned clump of mud—that is, the seal of a jar of preserved meat, perhaps; or bee honey, “sweet and of the first class;” or best of all, wine, nehimaa, twice excellent.

  Its importance was inestimable, whether once or twice excellent. For wine jars almost always were dated (as mentioned, the years numbered from “1” at the time of the pharaoh’s accession and continued in sequence until his death). Thirty-eight vintages were attested to for Amenhotep III, Akhenaten’s father, while Akhenaten’s wine jars ended at year 17.

  Let us enter Carter’s mind. “In the course of my work [at Amarna], I often perplexed myself with many conjectures,” he remembered later—and there will be no better way to understand the young excavator than by “perplexing ourselves” with one of these conjectures, too.

 
; This was the real change that Carter went through here. It was not just that he was digging instead of drawing; what was crucial was that he was beginning to “play” with the evidence he encountered, to imagine and speculate and “perplex himself” with the many possibilities of the finds.

  So, let us follow a train of thought that takes as its starting point the figure just given us by the wine jars: Akhenaten’s seventeen-year reign. First, we must take these seventeen years together with other evidence (such as the dates at which Akhenaten’s six daughters begin to appear on monuments, in the beginning as children and later with sunshade kiosks of their own in which they worship the Aten). The wine jars and the children allow us to arrive at a life span for the pharaoh: Most probably, Akhenaten died in his early thirties.

  So far, so good—but typically for archaeology, there is a delay. The next step takes place fifteen years later (the blink of an eye by Egyptian time)—which is when KV tomb #55 is discovered.1* Keeping in mind the life span established for Akhenaten (that is, having kept it in mind for fifteen years), we can then rule him out as the unidentified royal mummy in #55. For when tomb #55’s young man in the gorgeously inlaid and gilded coffin is examined by the professor of anatomy at the Cairo School of Medicine, Dr. Grafton Elliot Smith, it is found that his epiphyses (or long bones) had not yet fused: one of several anatomical indications that he was in his late teens or early twenties at the time of death.

  But can Carter rely on the anatomist’s report? Was Smith correct? From the moment Smith performed his autopsy on KV #55’s mummy, his pronouncements were questioned; in fact, Smith’s successor in Cairo, Dr. Douglas Derry—specialist in mummies, whales, and hermaphrodites—would come up with contrary proofs of his own some forty-two years later. Again typical of the way archaeological deductions proceed, feeling their way forward, step by uncertain step.