Pharaoh Tutankhamun is undoubtedly the most famous of all ancient Egyptian pharaohs. He is one of the very few Egyptian pharaohs that most ordinary people are able to name. Most people have never heard of Hatshepsut and even fewer have heard of her nephew and successor Thutmose III, but everyone has heard of Tutankhamun. He even has a Batman villain named after him!
Things were not always the way they are today, though; up until the discovery of his tomb in 1922, Tutankhamun was utterly obscure. If you asked someone on the street in 1921 who Tutankhamun was, no one would have been able to tell you. Even if you asked an Egyptologist about him, many of them probably would not have known who he was. Ironically, it is precisely because of his former obscurity that Tutankhamun is so famous today.
An eccentric pharaoh
Before we can talk about Tutankhamun himself, we need to talk about Tutankhamun’s father: Amenhotep IV. Amenhotep IV ascended to the throne of Egypt sometime around 1351 BC or thereabouts. In the fifth year of his reign, Amenhotep IV instigated a series of radical reforms. He banned the worship of the traditional Egyptian deities and declared that, from then on, people were only to worship Aten, the sun-disk. He also changed his name to Akhenaten and moved the capital of his kingdom to the site known today as Amarna, which he called “Akhetaten.”
Akhenaten’s queen was the famous Nefertiti. Tutankhamen, however, was the son of Akhenaten and one of his other consorts, a woman known to archaeologists as “The Younger Lady.” Akhenaten died in around 1334 BC or thereabouts. He was succeeded by a pharaoh named Smenkhkare, who is believed to have been the husband of Tutankhamun’s older half-sister Meritaten, the daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti.
Smenkhkare ruled for only about a year. He was succeeded by a female pharaoh by the name of Neferneferuaten, who is generally though to have been Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s primary queen. Neferneferuaten ruled in her own right until she died in around 1332 BC. Upon her death, Tutankhamun ascended to the throne.
ABOVE: Colossal sculpture of Tutankhamun’s father Akhenaten, who ruled c. 1351 – c. 1334 BC
An insignificant pharaoh
Tutankhamun ascended to the throne of Egypt in around 1332 BC or thereabouts. He was only about eight or nine years old at the time. As the son of one of Akhenaten’s minor consorts rather than Akhenaten’s main wife, Tutankhamun had not been raised with the expectation that he would rule. As a result of this, he would not have been given any training or preparation for ruling.
In addition to being extremely young and unprepared, Tutankhamun was also severely deformed and handicapped. The pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty had a long history of inbreeding and Tutankhamun came at the very end of that history. Probably as a direct result of the generations of incest that produced him, Tutankhamun had a partially cleft palate, minor scoliosis, a clubbed left foot with severe bone necrosis, and a right foot with multiple phalanges congenitally missing. He could probably only walk with a cane. Several of his canes were discovered in his tomb.
Tutankhamun nominally ruled for about nine years until his death in around 1323 BC at the age of about eighteen or nineteen years old. For basically his entire reign, the feeble boy king Tutankhamun held virtually no real power. Instead, he was utterly dominated by his granduncle Ay and his general Horemheb, who are believed by Egyptologists to have been the real ones calling all the shots. All of Tutankhamun’s decrees are believed to have, in fact, been written by his advisors. In other words, Tutankhamun was nothing more than a minor puppet king.
Erased from history
After his death, Tutankhamun was succeeded by his granduncle Ay, who reigned for four years from around 1323 BC until his own death in around 1319 BC or thereabouts. After the death of Ay, the general Horemheb, a commoner completely unrelated to the preceding pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty, ascended to the throne. Horemheb ordered for Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, and Ay to be completely erased from existence.
The temples Akhenaten had built at Gempaaten were torn down and their blocks reused for the building of Horemheb’s own temples. All statues of Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, and Ay that could be found were torn down, smashed, and deposited in a rubbish heap. Tutankhamun’s name was erased from all of his inscriptions and replaced with Horemheb’s own name. Ay’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings was desecrated, along with all the temples and other public buildings Ay had constructed.
The names of Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, and Ay were removed from nearly all official lists of the names of the pharaohs. The damnatio memoriae was sweeping and remarkably effective. Tutankhamun and his entire family were effectively erased from history. The later pharaohs continued the policy of omitting Akhenaten and his family from all the official lists of pharaohs.
ABOVE: Limestone sculpture of Tutankhamun’s father Akhenaten with his queen Nefertiti. You may notice that both their heads have been removed. As I discuss in this article from July 2019, not all damage to ancient sculptures is deliberate, since sculptures have often suffered natural damage over time. Nonetheless, in this particular case, the specific removal of both Nefertiti and Akhenaten’s heads is probably deliberate.
Tutankhamun’s sucky tomb
Tutankhamun’s tomb is absolutely stunning to contemporary visitors. Despite this, it is actually significantly smaller than most of the other royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings and it is less elaborately decorated, indicating it may not have been originally intended for a pharaoh, but rather originally for a pharaoh’s relative. There is also evidence that the tomb was filled rather hastily, with many of the various grave goods simply being dumped in the tomb without much care or thought as to where they were placed.
In fact, somewhere around 80% of the pieces of funeral equipment placed in Tutankhamun’s tomb seem to have actually not even been originally intended for Tutankhamun, but rather for the previous pharaoh, Neferneferuaten. Even Tutankhamun’s famous gold funerary mask originally had Neferneferuaten’s name on it. One of the statuettes in Tutankhamun’s tomb distinctly represents the pharaoh as a woman. Presumably, this statuette was originally supposed to represent Neferneferuaten and just got reused to represent Tutankhamun because they didn’t feel like making another statue and just hoped the gods wouldn’t notice it was the wrong gender.
Basically, Tutankhamun got hastily dumped in a tiny tomb that was probably originally meant for someone else, filled mostly with funerary equipment originally intended for the previous pharaoh. This is not to say his tomb was not impressive, but, as a pharaoh, he certainly could have hoped for better.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of some of the grave goods from Tutankhamun’s tomb. On the right is a gilded statuette of a distinctly female pharaoh. This was probably originally supposed to be a statuette of Neferneferuaten, but it got placed in Tutankhamun’s tomb by people apparently hoping the gods wouldn’t notice the pharaoh was a woman.
Everyone else gets robbed!
The funny thing about hiding a bunch of priceless treasures in a tomb out in a valley in the middle of the Egyptian desert is that, once people know that treasure exists, they tend to go out looking for it, wanting to steal it. Over time, all the other tombs in the Valley of the Kings except Tutankhamun’s were plundered and looted. In most cases, the robbers literally took everything that wasn’t nailed down. In some cases, they even stole the pharaohs’ mummies.
The earliest robberies of royal tombs took place during the time when the pharaohs still ruled in Egypt. During periods of stability, there were usually official guards stationed in the Valley of the Kings to protect the royal tombs from robbers, but these guards were not always reliable. At night, it was extremely dark and visibility was poor. Since the Valley of the Kings is quite expansive, the guards could not always see the robbers in the darkness. Meanwhile, sometimes, robbers would bribe corrupt guards to let them break into the tombs. Sometimes they would even bribe the guards to tell them where they could find the entrances to the tombs so they could break in and steal everything.
Whenever there was a period of instability when tombs were not being guarded as well as they should have been, thieves and looters would go and rob all the royal tombs they could find so they could sell all the grave goods for profit. By the end of the Pharaonic Era, many of the important royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings had already been basically picked clean. The robbing of royal Egyptian tombs, however, continued into later periods and even into modernity as well.
After the Pharaonic Era came to an end, the tombs in the Valley of the Kings were left completely unguarded and anyone who could find the tombs could easily break in and steal everything inside. We know that people were visiting the royal tombs during the Roman and Byzantine Periods because the interiors of several of the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings are absolutely full of examples of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine graffiti.
Of all the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, the ones with the most graffiti are the tomb of Pharaoh Ramesses V (KV9) and the tomb of Pharaoh Ramesses IV (KV2). A notable graffito dating to the Byzantine Period written in Greek on the wall in the Tomb of Ramesses IV (KV2) by a frustrated visitor reads: “I cannot read the writing on the wall!”
ABOVE: Photograph from the late nineteenth century of the entrance to the tomb of Ramesses IV, which has been open since ancient times and is full of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine graffiti
In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte began his invasion of Egypt. He brought along dozens of scholars, who eventually went back to Europe with many Egyptian artifacts and a profound fascination with the ancient culture. This launched a wave of obsession with ancient Egypt that swept across Europe and North America. Wealthy Europeans bought artifacts plundered from Egyptian tombs and displayed them in their private homes. The tombs that had not already been raided in antiquity were raided and the treasures from them sold on the art market.
As a direct result of the fact that Tutankhamun was an obscure boy king who only ruled for about a decade, whose reign was removed from all the official histories, and who was buried in an unusually small tomb, his tomb went remarkably undisturbed. The tomb was broken into twice shortly after it was first sealed, but, both times, the thieves were apparently afraid of getting caught, so they seem to have only made off with a few objects from the outer chambers and left the rest of the tomb intact. The tomb was resealed both times.
By the time Egyptologists began systematically excavating tombs in the late nineteenth century, all the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings except Tutankhamun’s had been thoroughly looted. Egyptologists excavated tomb after tomb, but, in every case, they found that looters had discovered the tombs before them; every single one of them had been robbed, most of them in ancient times.
ABOVE: Napoleon Before the Sphinx, painted in 1968 by the French Academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme
ABOVE: The Battle of the Pyramids, painted in 1810 by the French Neoclassical painter Antoine-Jean Gros
The discovery of a lifetime
By the early twentieth century, many Egyptologists believed that there was nothing left to find in the Valley of the Kings. In 1912, the Egyptologist Theodore M. Davis (lived 1838 – 1915) concluded in his work The Tombs of Harmhabi and Touatânkhamanou, “I fear that the Valley of the Kings is now exhausted.”
Then, in November 1922, a team led by the British archaeologist Sir Howard Carter (lived 1874 – 1939) discovered the nearly fully intact tomb of Tutankhamun. The tomb was filled with stunning treasures on a scale unlike any other royal tomb that had ever been found in Egypt. Over 5,000 individual items were found in the tomb. The tomb was so full that it took Howard Carter until 1932 to finish cataloguing everything that he found inside the tomb.
To this day, Tutankhamun’s tomb remains the only royal tomb from the time when Egypt was at the height of its power that has ever been discovered nearly fully intact. It is truly a remarkable, stunning discovery. The sheer significance of this discovery was not lost on the press or on the general public. The discovery of the tomb was all over international headlines. It created an absolute media sensation.
When Howard Carter’s sponsor George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, died on 5 April 1923 of pneumonia resulting from an infected mosquito bite, journalists such as Arthur Weigall (lived 1880 – 1934) and popular writers such as Sir Arthur Conon Doyle (lived 1859 – 1930), the inventor of the character Sherlock Holmes, fueled popular speculations that Lord Carnarvon had died as the result of some kind of curse on Tutankhamun’s tomb. These stories about the so-called “curse of the pharaohs” only brought Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb to even greater media attention.
ABOVE: Photograph dated to c. 1925 of Howard Carter examining Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus
The modern obsession with Tutankhamun’s tomb was perpetuated by a whole series of popular traveling museum exhibitions displaying artifacts from the tomb of Tutankhamun throughout the latter part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. From 1961 to 1964, the TutTreasures exhibit, which included a large portion of the treasures found by Howard Carter in the tomb of Tutankhamun, was shown all across the United States and Canada. The exhibit was shown in eighteen cities in the United States and in an additional six cities in Canada. (It was right after this tour that the Batman villain King Tut was created.)
From 1972 to 1981, a massive travelling exhibition of a collection of fifty different artifacts from the tomb of Tutankhamun titled The Treasures of Tutankhamun was shown in the United Kingdom, in the Soviet Union, in the United States, in Canada, and in Berlin. The exhibit was shown in seven different museums all across the United States and attracted over eight million visitors in the United States alone, spreading the fame of Pharaoh Tutankhamun far and wide.
In 1978, when the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibit was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, an unnamed executive of the Metropolitan Museum told the Associated Press, “Seeing Tut is the status symbol right now in this city. It’s even superseded sex.” Obviously, the man who said this (and I’m quite sure it was a man) was an executive for the museum and he was exaggerating because he wanted to get more people to come see the exhibit. Nonetheless, he wasn’t entirely making stuff up; “Tut Mania” really was sweeping the country.
Since then there have been two more travelling exhibitions of artifacts from the tomb of Tutankhamun that have visited the United States, Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs (lasted 2004 – 2011) and Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs (2008 – 2013). A third travelling exhibition of artifacts from Tutankhamun’s tomb, titled Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh, featuring over 150 artifacts, began in 2018 and will end in 2020.
ABOVE: Photograph from 1972 of visitors seeing the golden mask of Tutankhamun at the British Museum, where it was shown as part of the exhibit The Treasures of Tutankhamun, from this article in The Times
Timing and framing
It was not just the remarkably intact state of Tutankhamun’s tomb, however, that made him so famous. It was also the fact that Tutankhamun’s tomb happened to be discovered at just the right time when the western public was interested in ancient Egypt and there were no major wars or economic crises going on to distract from the news of the discovery. Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 near the beginning of the so-called “Roaring Twenties.” If he had discovered the tomb in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism instead, though, the public might not have gone quite so wild over its discovery.
The fact that Tutankhamun was specifically an Egyptian pharaoh was also absolutely vital to making the discovery of his tomb seem important. If Tutankhamun had been, say, a Babylonian king, a Sumerian king, or an Assyrian king instead of an Egyptian one, the public might not have paid so much attention to the discovery of his tomb. The general public at that time was far more interested in ancient Egypt than in other ancient civilizations of the Near East.
How do I know this? Well, because it just so happens that, in 1922—the exact same year when Tutankhamun’s tomb was first discovered in Egypt by Howard Carter—another British archaeologist, Sir Leonard Woolley (lived 1880 – 1960), began excavating the Royal Cemetery at Ur in southern Iraq, which contained just over 2,000 royal burials of mainly Sumerian rulers and their families. Along with the burials, Sir Leonard Woolley excavated thousands of stunning artifacts, many of which were spectacular enough to rival even the treasures of Tutankhamun. Woolley’s excavations of the Royal Cemetery at Ur continued until 1934.
Despite all the amazing treasures Sir Leonard Woolley and his team uncovered, the general public paid little attention to his discoveries. No one was interested in the Sumerians; they only cared about the Egyptians. Many of the artifacts Woolley excavated at Ur are now on display in various museums around the world, such as the British Museum in London, the Baghdad Museum, and the Iraq Museum.
Meanwhile, the actual site of the Royal Cemetery at Ur has suffered severe neglect in recent years. The site was damaged by bombs and looting during the Iraq War. The walls of some of the tombs are beginning to collapse. Conservation is desperately needed.
ABOVE: Replica of the golden helmet of Meskalamdug, dating to the twenty-sixth century BC, discovered in the Royal Cemetery at Ur
ABOVE: Photograph of a gold figure of a ram in thicket, dating to between c. 2600 and c. 2400 BC, discovered in the Royal Cemetery at Ur
ABOVE: Photograph of the “war panel” from the Standard of Ur, a large wooden box dating to c. 2600 BC, discovered in the Royal Cemetery at Ur
ABOVE: Photograph of an ornate lyre decorated with a bull’s head, dating to c. 2500 BC, discovered in the Royal Cemetery at Ur
Conclusion
Tutankhamun was a minor puppet king who was hastily buried in a relatively small tomb. His successors tried to erase him from all the historical records because he was the son of Akhenaten. As a result of his insignificance and his removal from the official records, his tomb was overlooked by tomb robbers and survived to the present day mostly undisturbed. When his tomb was excavated in 1922, it was the first and only royal Egyptian tomb ever found by professional Egyptologists in the Valley of the Kings in a mostly intact state.
Thus, Tutankhamun became a popular sensation. As a result of all the widespread press coverage of the discovery of his tomb as well as the subsequent tours of artifacts from his tomb all over the world, Tutankhamun has become more famous than any other Egyptian pharaoh. In other words, he is famous now because he used to be totally obscure. The fame of the most obscure, insignificant pharaoh has eclipsed the fame of all the greatest pharaohs combined. Truly, the last has been made first and the first has been made last.
