The gold mask which covered the head of King Tutankhamun is one of the
most familiar of Egyptian icons. The most moving reproduction of the mask is
this photograph, less familiar than those which show it after it was cleaned.
This was the first record of the mask, taken when it was uncovered by Howard
Carter in the king's tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The dust and the remains
of the garlands which were placed in the king's coffin give this image a
living, deeply moving quality.
But the noblest of all the representations of Tutankhamun,
which emphasises his divinity and the majesty of his office, is the immense
gold mask which was placed over the head of his mummy, in the innermost of the
coffins; after the Pyramids it is perhaps the most universally reproduced of
all Egyptian artifacts. This is not the portrait of a slender boy but of a
god-king, living for ever and ever. Few photographs do the mask justice: gold
is a difficult material to photograph without it assuming the consistency of
brass. The most successful is perhaps the first to be taken, by Harry Burton, the
American photographer who was present in the tomb from the time of its opening.
In Burton's photograph the mask appears still wreathed with
the garlands which were laid around it more than three thousand years before.
The presence of the flowers and the little smudges of dust which Burton and
Carter did not remove, to avoid destroying the garlands, give the mask an
extraordinary living presence.
When cleaned and cleared of the scattering of flowers the
mask is magnificent, a triumph, if not of high art, then certainly of the
highest craftsmanship. But it is clearly an artifact whereas, in Burton's
photograph, the king lives.
The impact of the discovery of Tutankhamun can perhaps best
be appreciated by comparing the finding of his tomb with the near-contemporary
excavation of the Royal Tombs at the Sumerian city of Ur by Sir Leonard
Woolley. For barbaric splendour combined with grand guignol, the great death
pits at Ur should totally have eclipsed Tutankhamun, yet they did not do so.
Woolley found a number of burials, sunk deep in what was
evidently a royal or sacred burial site, on the outskirts of Ur, one of the
most important of Sumer's city-states. The burials were much earlier than
Tutankhamun's, c. 2600 BC, and thus earlier even than the Giza Pyramids.
Altogether Woolley found sixteen burials which he believed were of royal
personages. In the stone-lined vaults, deep in the earth, were found the
remains of highstatus burials, attended by the most elaborate panoply of death.
The principal occupants of the tomb were attended by ranks of courtiers,
musicians, soldiers, wagoners (with their wagons and the oxen which drew them)
all neatly laid out, for a carefully organised ceremony of death.
The artifacts which were buried with them were of the most
superb craftsmanship, elegant, austere but at the same time extremely rich in
material and adornment. They are, it must be said, very un-Sumerian in design
and craftsmanship.
Unlike the excavation of Tutankhamun's tomb, which has never
been professionally published, Woolley unleashed a stream of sumptuous and
detailed reports on his excavations, supported by many popular publications. 7
Yet for every thousand people who know the name Tutankhamun there may be one
who recognises Ur and its royal burials, even when it carries its biblical
ascription `of the Chaldees' with its putative connection with Abraham, the
Friend of God.
The reason for the lesser impact of the Royal Tombs of Ur is
that they were not redolent of the archetypes in the way in which the tomb of
Tutankhamun was so liberally provided. Sumer, despite the fact that it is
probably the culture in which writing evolved into something more than a simple
device for the convenience of accountants, has never caught the world's
imagination in the way in which Egypt has done. Waiting in his tomb for three
thousand two hundred years, Tutankhamun was the heir to all the immense
accumulation of wonder and respect which Egypt had engendered and, in his own
person, was to be identified as an archetypal figure such as only Egypt could
apparently produce.
Tutankhamun was the last lineal descendant of Ahmose, who
had founded the Eighteenth Dynasty more than two hundred years earlier. What
has been interpreted as the marks of a blow behind his ear and a displaced
piece of bone, possibly dislodged from the interior of his skull, have prompted
suggestions that he was murdered. He left no heir though two female foetuses
were found in his tomb, perhaps his children who had been born prematurely. He
had married a daughter of Akhenaten, Ankhesena'amun, whose name had been
changed from Ankhesenpa'aten. She brings her own small element of tragedy to
the decline of the Thutmosid house. Evidently bereft at the death of
Tutankhamun, for they are often depicted, like two flower children, charmingly
engaged in simple pleasures (and she it was who scattered flowers in his tomb),
she appealed to the great King of the Hittites, Suppiluliumas, to send her one
of his sons, that he might become King of Egypt. That such a message was sent
at all is a measure both of the desperation of Ankhesena'amun and those around
her and of the state of Egypt. Suppiluliumas agreed and despatched his son
Zennanza with a suitable escort south to Egypt. He never reached Ankhesena'amun
for he was murdered on the way. Of Ankhesena'amun, nothing more is ever heard.
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