The Controversial Afterlife Of King Tut

“A frenzy of conflicting scientific analyses have made the famous pharaoh more mysterious than ever” – M Shaer

A new computer reconstruction depicts Tut with a club foot and a “feminizing” hormone disorder. (VVC / Smithsonian Channel)
A new computer reconstruction depicts Tut with a club foot and a “feminizing” hormone disorder. (VVC / Smithsonian Channel)

The Valley of the Kings lies on a bend in the Nile River, a short ferry ride from Luxor. The valley proper is rocky and wildly steep, but a little farther north, the landscape gives way to gently rolling hills, and even the occasional copse of markh trees. It was here, in a humble mud-brick house, that the British Egyptologist Howard Carter was living in 1922, the year he unearthed the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun, forever enshrining both the boy king and himself in the annals of history.   \

These days, the house serves as a museum, restored to its nearly original state and piled high with Carter’s belongings—a typewriter, a camera, a record player, a few maps, a handful of sun hats. Toward the back of the museum is a darkroom, and out front, facing the road, is a shaded veranda.

On the September day I visited, the place was empty, except for a pair of caretakers, Eman Hagag and Mahmoud Mahmoud, and an orange kitten that was chasing its own shadow across the tiled floor.

Most of the lights had been turned off to conserve electricity, and the holographic presentation about Carter’s discovery was broken. I asked Hagag how many visitors she saw in a day. She shrugged, and studied her hands. “Sometimes four,” she said. “Sometimes two. Sometimes none.”

Mahmoud led me outside, through a lush garden overhung with a trellis of tangled vines, and toward the entrance of what appeared to be a nuclear fallout shelter. An exact replica of Tutankhamun’s tomb, it had opened just a few months earlier, and Mahmoud was keen to show it off.

“We knew that tourism in the real tomb was having a disastrous effect—all that foot traffic, all that breath, all those hands,” Adam Lowe, the British artist whose company, Factum Arte, created the facsimile, told me. “We wanted to encourage a more responsible tourism before the decay progressed.”

The first step in creating the replica was closely studying the surfaces of the original tomb and then scanning every inch with laser and light devices as well as high-resolution photography—a process that took five weeks. The resulting data was taken to Madrid, where it was processed and used to precisely carve the surface of the tomb and other structures, which were covered by slightly elastic printed acrylic skins; artists fashioned the sarcophagus facsimile of hand-painted resin.

Lowe had originally hoped to open the exhibit in 2011, but the Egyptian revolution threw everything into chaos, and it wasn’t until 2013 that the pieces made their way to Luxor. Meanwhile, the number of visitors entering the Valley of the Kings dwindled significantly because of the threat of terrorism and political unrest.

Mahmoud predicted that soon there would be an upswing in tourism. “And then,” he said, hopefully, “the original tomb will close, and lots of people will come to us.” For now I was the only visitor. Mahmoud pointed at his favorite painting: a mural of 12 seated baboons, each representing a different hour of the night. Above the baboons, a scarab, here representing the coming dawn, sailed on a solar barque.

The detail was astonishing to behold. Not only had the murals been perfectly reproduced, so had the mottled spores of mold that grew on them. I ran my fingers through the grooved hieroglyphs on the sarcophagus and across a painting depicting Tut—his skin Frankenstein green—being welcomed into the afterlife.

Standing there, it was possible to feel one step closer to history, and to the young king whose life and apparently untimely death around 1323 B.C. continue to bedevil Egyptologists of all stripes. In that sense, advances in technology have brought us closer than ever to understanding who King Tut was. But in another, profound sense, three millennia after his death—and with a spate of philosophical and scientific arguments still roiling the field of Tut studies—we’ve never seemed further away. 

“Tutankhamun has been a projection screen for theories for almost a hundred years,” the Egyptologist Salima Ikram, co-author of a key 2013 paper that sizes up a long century of Tut theorizing, told me over coffee in Cairo. “Some of that, frankly, is researchers’ egos. And some of it is our desire to explain the past. Look, we’re all storytellers at heart. And we’ve gotten very much addicted to telling stories about this poor boy, who has become public property.”

***

Egyptology has always been a game of conjecture—some of it well-rooted, and some of it decidedly not. As the protagonist of Arthur Phillips’ 2004 novel The Egyptologist writes of the bygone pharaohs, “these once-great men and women now cling to their hard-won immortality by the thinnest of filaments…while, across that chasm of time from them, historians and excavators struggle to build a rickety bridge of educated guesses for those nearly vanished heroes to cross.” Continue reading . . .

SF Source Smithsonian  December 2014

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