More than 3,000 years after his death, King Tutankhamun went on display to the public yesterday in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings, a slightly bucktoothed boy who died aged 19.
King Tut’s mummified face – which has been seen only by about 50 people since the British archaeologist Howard Carter opened the tomb exactly 85 years ago – was revealed to the world in a climate-controlled glass display case in an antechamber of his own tomb in the valley near Luxor, where generations of Egyptian pharaohs were buried.
“Everyone is dreaming of what he looks like. The face of Tutankhamun is different from any king in the Cairo museum. With his beautiful buck teeth, the tourists will see a little bit of the smile from the face of the golden boy,” said Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s leading expert on the famous boy King.
Dr Hawass expects a huge influx of tourists to see the mummy, to be displayed in the tomb indefinitely. Only the face can be seen, with the body wrapped in linen. It was badly damaged when Carter tried to pull off the golden mask after discovering the tomb – almost entirely intact with all its treasures – on November 4, 1922.
The discovery set off a craze for King Tut and Ancient Egypt that has endured to this day. The circumstances of the pharaoh’s death at such an early age remain unclear. A bone chip found inside the skull led some archaeologists to speculate that he was murdered, ten years after ascending to the throne.
Egypt’s 18th dynasty was enduring “ turbulent times after Tutankhamun’s predecessor Akhenaten – husband of the famously beautiful Nefertiti – abandoned the country’s pantheon of gods and chose to worship just one, the sun-disk Aten.
After Akhenaten’s death, his vizier, Ay, restored the worship of the gods; and some have speculated that Tutankhamun may have been murdered, in 1323BC, for trying to return Egypt to monotheism.
The murder theory has largely been dismissed, however, since scientists carried out a CT scan two years ago which revealed no trauma to the skull. Experts said that the bone chip could have been the result of the embalming process, when morticians removed all the internal organs and placed them in jars in preparation for the afterlife.
Dr Hawass now believes that the King may have died after he broke his leg and the wound became infected. Until then, the young King had been in good health, with the tests showing that he was a well-fed youth, slightly built and standing at 5ft 6in (1.67m). A recent reconstruction of his face shows a striking looking young man with almond eyes, an aquiline nose and full lips, with his head shaved. He had the pronounced overbite typical of his Royal Family line, and his lower teeth were slightly misaligned.
When the mummy was unwrapped in 1925 it was found to have a wound on the left cheek in the same position as the insect bite that had supposedly killed the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, sponsor of Carter’s excavations, which fuelled speculation that the discovery had unleashed a curse. “Death Shall Come on Swift Wings To Him Who Disturbs the Peace of the King” was the inscription that was claimed to be engraved on the tomb’s exterior.
Over the years the mummy has broken into 18 parts. Dr Hawass was worried that the crush of tourists would have caused irreparable damage had the body been left in the golden sarcophagus. “The humidity and heat caused by . . . people entering the tomb and their breathing will change the mummy to a powder. The only good thing [left] in this mummy is the face. We need to preserve the face,” he said.
The 2005 scan also resolved another mystery: that of the Pharaoh’s missing penis. It had long been thought to have been stolen in 1942, but the scan revealed it to be hidden in sand inside the mummified wrappings.
The public’s unflagging mania for King Tut has been fed by an exhibition that has toured the US and will be opening in the O2 Gallery in Greenwich, London, on November 15. Tutankhamun and the Golden Age, which is partnered by The Times, shows some of the stunning golden artefacts from the tomb that defied looters and the effects of time. It also features the latex reconstruction of the young King’s head based on the scan.
The tale of Tut
- Howard Carter and the 5th Earl Carnarvon, his chief backer, spent six seasons excavating in the Valley of the Kings but found nothing
- Worried about his investment, Lord Carnarvon gave them one final season to dig
- In November 1922 initial reports appeared in The Times, above, announcing that the team had found the tomb of Tutankhamun
- Lord Carnarvon died seven weeks after the tomb was found, probably because of blood poisoning caused by a mosquito bite. Others blamed his death on the “curse of Tutankhamun”
James Hider and Michael Theodoulou
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