Tutankhamun

Egypt's most famous Pharaoh

Bill Price

• Publisher: Pocket Essentials
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781842439043
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Archäologie

In 1922 Howard Carter uncovered what is still regarded as the most spectacular archaeological discovery ever made. Tutankhamun's tomb had remained hidden in the Valley of the Kings for more than 3000 years and its discovery caused a media sensation, elevating the previously little-known Egyptian Pharaoh into the position of an international celebrity. The contents of the tomb were found almost entirely intact, including the Pharaoh's mummified body, still wearing its solid gold funeral mask.

Tutankhamun lived in an era when the Egyptian Empire, centred on the royal city of Thebes, was at its pinnacle and when the wealth and power of its Pharaoh was at its greatest. This was also a period of enormous religious upheaval. Akenaten, the heretical Pharaoh and, more than likely, Tutanhkamun's father, had introduced a new religion, exclusively worshipping the sun god Aten. Under Tutanhkamun, the old religion, with its many gods and goddesses, was restored, putting an end to the heresy.

In recent years research has shed new light on Tutankhamun's life and, in particular, on his death. Public interest in the boy king is as strong as ever and our knowledge of the sophisticated and complex society over which he reigned continues to grow.

Egypt and the Pharaohs

The Gift of the Nile

Herodotus famously described Egypt as being the gift of the Nile. The annual flood, beginning in July, deposited layers of silt over the inundated land along the banks of the river, building up a thick black alluvial soil. The Egyptians didn’t need Herodotus to tell them about it. They called their country Kennet,‘the Black Land’. The Nile, rising as it does in the equatorial regions of Africa, flows all year round through the otherwise almost entirely arid region of Nubia and Egypt, on its 4,000-mile journey to the Mediterranean Sea. As well as laying down a rich and fertile soil, it was also a source of water for the irrigation of crops and the watering of animals and it provided a means of transport from one end of Egypt to the other. Boats could float down the Nile with the current and sail back up it on the prevailing southerly winds.

Agriculture was the foundation on which the wealth of Egypt developed. The first evidence of settled farming communities appears in the archaeological record much later than it does in the Fertile Crescent of what is now southern Turkey, Iraq, Syria and the Levant. In this area there is evidence of sedentism going back to the early Neolithic period, around 10,000 BC. During the same period, Egypt was sparsely populated with hunter-gatherers and, although they leave little evidence behind them, it is thought that nomadic pastoralists would also have passed through the area. The climate of North Africa as a whole was much wetter at that time and the Nile Valley was mostly made up of marshland, which was unsuitable for a settled way of life. By about 7000 BC, the climate in the region had dried out. Desert encroached over an enormous area that had previously been savannah, giving rise to the vast Sahara Desert. The marshes of the Nile Valley also dried out, leaving behind the thick soil of Egypt, perfect conditions for farming.

The first evidence of agriculture in Egypt comes from about 5000 BC around the Fayum Oasis to the west of the Nile. In the absence of any definite evidence, it is generally assumed that farming techniques spread into Egypt from the Levant, although it is difficult to say whether this was due to the movement of people or to the adoption of new technologies by people already living in the region. This is borne out by the type of agricultural practices found; crops included barley, emmer wheat (an early variety of wheat first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent) and flax and there is evidence of the presence of sheep, goats, cattle and pigs. Farming began in Upper Egypt at a later date, where the archaeological evidence suggests it spread from the south, from what is now Sudan, and from the Western Desert, rather than north along the Nile Valley.

Egyptian farmers may have made a slow start but, in such ideal conditions and once they began to make use of the annual flood and the irrigation potential of the Nile, the civilisation developed quickly. Within a thousand years the society that would go on to create the dynasties of Egypt had emerged. Small communities banded together to form kingdoms and, either by agreement or conquest, a single united kingdom emerged to dominate the whole of Egypt.

The Dynasties of Egypt

In the third Century BC, about 200 years after Herodotus, the Greek-Egyptian priest Manetho wrote a history of Egypt going back to the beginning of the pharaonic period. Although his original work has not survived (in all likelihood, it was destroyed when the Library of Alexandria burnt down in 49 BC), it has been pieced together from extensive extracts quoted in works by later historians. In the Aegptiaca, as it was called, he set out a chronology of Ancient Egypt based on dividing the pharaohs into dynasties. Manetho almost certainly based his chronology on surviving pharaonic king lists, which were inscribed in stone and painted on the walls of tombs or, in some cases, written on papyrus. These formed part of the cult of the royal ancestors practised by the pharaohs. They could also have been used to legitimise the rule of a pharaoh by showing his relationship to previous pharaohs, thereby demonstrating his divine right to reign.

Although modifications have been made to Manetho’s chronology many times, it remains the basis of the dating of Ancient Egypt still in use today. Deficiencies in the system have long been recognised and, as more information has come to light, it has become apparent that Egypt has not always consisted of a single unified society, ruled by one king who has then been succeeded by another in an orderly fashion. Dividing the dynasties into three kingdoms, the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms respectively, has partially overcome this problem. During the dynasties designated as belonging to one of these kingdoms, Egypt can be viewed as a single country comprising the Two Lands of Upper Egypt (the Nile Valley) and Lower Egypt (the Nile Delta). Between the kingdoms come the intermediate periods, during which the central power of a single king no longer existed and the region fractured into a number of smaller chiefdoms, each governed by its own local ruler. In a pattern repeated a number of times, one of these smaller powers grew in strength and overcame the others, reuniting Egypt and creating a single kingdom again.

Advances in archaeological dating techniques have allowed the chronologies to be refined further. Stratification, in which the descending layers of an archaeological dig are identified and the finds from the different layers compared with those from sites of known age, has been used for more than 100 years to give approximate datings. More recently techniques such as carbon dating, thermoluminescence and dendrochronology have further refined the chronology. As is the way of such things, the dates obtained by different methods don’t always agree, leading to a certain amount of disagreement between dates in different accounts.

From Farmers to Pharaohs

Manetho gave the name of the first pharaoh as King Menes. No reference to this name has yet been found in the archaeological record and it has been suggested that Menes could be a mythological figure. Alternatively the name has been linked with Narmer, a predynastic ruler from about 3100 BC, or with Aha, the first pharaoh of the Early Dynasty Period, who ruled c3000 BC. What becomes apparent from the record is that the transition from an agricultural society based on individual settlements to a unified state governed by a single king was not a clear cut process and this means it is all but impossible to pinpoint the exact moment the pharaonic period in Egypt emerged.

The great Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) considered that the complex society of Ancient Egypt could not have arisen from the indigenous peoples of the area and the society they inhabited prior to 3000 BC. Based on the evidence available at the beginning of the twentieth century, which suggested Egyptian society arose very rapidly, this was not an unreasonable conclusion to reach. Petrie thought complex society was introduced by the conquest of the lands of Egypt by a force from the south or, possibly, from the Levant and that the invasion resulted in the rise of a single ruler of all Egypt. More recent archaeological excavations have unquestionably shown that this was not the case and that the dynastic pharaohs were an indigenous phenomenon.

During the Naqata period, from 4000 BC to 3200 BC, the farming culture along the length of the Egyptian Nile began to become much more regular. Towards the end of this period the style of artefacts, such as pottery, found in archaeological excavations of sites throughout Egypt are much the same, suggesting the emergence of a single uniform culture at this time. This process began in Upper Egypt, where towns first began to develop out of scattered agricultural settlements and specialist trades began to be practised, and then spread down the Nile into Lower Egypt. The reason this occurred first in Upper Egypt is thought to have been that the greater availability of resources in this region allowed individual communities the opportunity to specialise in a particular trade or craft. The increasing wealth of particular towns, gained through trade links along the length of the Nile and south into Nubia, gave rise to a ruling elite. With increasing wealth came greater power and, as one local ruler became more powerful than his neighbouring rulers, the region began to become unified. There are two possible processes by which this can happen; it could have been a development of increasing trade links, with traders being followed by colonists, or it could have been accomplished by warfare and conquest. The most likely scenario is that Egypt was gradually united by a combination of both these processes, with those regions not submitting to the most powerful ruler voluntarily being overcome by force.

One of the main reasons why rulers from Upper Egypt wanted to extend their territory into Lower Egypt was so that they could gain complete control of the lucrative trade routes along the entire length of the Nile and further on across the Mediterranean into the Levant and Syria. One example, that of the timber trade between Egypt and what is now the Lebanon, serves to illustrate why this was the case. At that time the best wood to build large river-going boats and ships to sail the Mediterranean came from the cedars of Lebanon, tall straight-grained trees which do not grow in Egypt. The ruler of Upper Egypt had the natural resources and craft centres in towns to supply the wealth so that he could trade with the city states of the Lebanon, but he could only do so through the ports on the lower Nile and the Mediterranean coast of Egypt. There was an obvious advantage to be gained by developing direct links with the states in the Lebanon rather than having to go through any number of middle men in Lower Egypt or having to pay tariffs to local rulers for passage through...