Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [104]
It may seem that we have given rather short shrift to a king who merited the appelation “Magnificent.” Yet despite his accomplishments Amenhotep III is less well known (and, to me, less interesting) than his immediate successors. The great royal wife, Tiye, had presented her husband with several daughters and at least two sons. One of the sons, a prince named Thutmose, died before his father, which made his younger brother the heir. Tiye’s second son came to the throne bearing one of the traditional names of his house, Amenhotep, which honored the great god of his city. He didn’t keep it long. As Akhenaton, the name by which he is known to history, he initiated changes in religion, art, and society that make him the most controversial and intriguing of Egyptian kings; and his successor, under the irreverent journalistic nickname of “King Tut,” is better known to the world at large than are any of the great rulers of ancient Egypt.
Eight
THE GREAT HERESY
Cartouche of Akhenaton
The Arabic name is “Biban el Moluk”—the Gates of the Kings. A narrow cleft deep in the western cliffs across the Nile from modern Luxor, it is one of the most desolate spots on earth. Nothing grows there—no tree, nor shrub, nor blade of grass. The sun beats down from an eternally cloudless sky whose brilliant blue is the only color contrast to the monotonous, unrelieved dark gold of rock and sand, hills and valley floor. Yet this wilderness merits its name, so redolent of magnificence. It is literally honeycombed with tombs which, over the millennia, contained some of the richest treasures ever deposited by men to the honor of their dead. From its barren stones Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon drew the fabulous funerary equipment of Tutankhamon.
Tutankhamon is sometimes on tour, but the most valuable objects don’t leave the Cairo Museum—for obvious reasons. Among the hundreds of objects from the tomb, my personal favorite is the canopic shrine with its four protective goddesses, which held the dead king’s en-trails. The four goddesses are distinguished only by the insignia on their heads; they stand with arms outstretched, embracing and guarding the precious contents of the shrine. They are fragile guardians; the small figures are childishly slender, and the delicate faces lack the awesome stamp of divinity. It has been suggested that the model for the figures was Tutankhamon’s young queen. The theory is plausible; the four statues are so much alike that each of the faces might be a copy of the others, and a portrait of the same individual. The faces are charming, and so are the little bodies, which are those of young girls.
Tutankhamon’s innermost coffin is three hundred pounds of solid gold. The portrait mask which covered the head of the mummy is also solid gold. There are bracelets and pectorals and rings, earrings, amulets, and collars, all of gold and precious stones. The Egyptians did not work with true gem stones. They did know and use what we call the semiprecious gems—turquoise, amethyst, carnelian, lapis lazuli, onyx, jasper, as well as glass, a comparatively recent invention—and they used them with consummate skill.
Any one of the objects from this single tomb would be the prize of an average museum collection, and there are thousands of such objects. Intrinsically, the contents of the tomb are worth millions of dollars; as examples of the cultural and artistic life of a bygone era, they are literally beyond price. Yet the tomb of Tutankhamon was a disappointment in one sense.
Tutankhamon himself was a minor king who died at eighteen after an uneventful reign of only nine years. Nevertheless, when the discovery of the tomb was first announced, there