10 tips for King Tut

It’s still a few days till the Tutankhamun spectacular opens at the Dome – so obviously I haven’t seen it yet. I’m not even one of the quarter of a million who have booked an advance ticket, so I imagine it’ll be a long time before I get in there. But I did catch the -- very similar -- version of the show that has been in the States (that's Chicago on the left). So I think I’m qualified to offer some tips. Or to be precise 5 tips for seeing the show, and 5 things to follow up with afterwards.

First . . . for seeing it:

One: Make a bee-line for the glorious alabaster cup carved in the shape of a lotus flower. Everyone goes  weak at the knees about Tutankhamun’s  gold. But for me this exquisite piece of stone wins every time. It’s got his name written on it, and it was found just at the entrance to the tomb, probably left there by robbers.

Two: Do some prep before you go. There’s more to this show than treasure, so get into Egyptian history and culture. It’ll help you get your money’s worth. As well as the exhibition’s own glossy guides, my favourites for quickly telling you what’s what are Ian Shaw’s, Ancient Egypt: a very short introduction or John Baines’s, Cultural Atlas of Ancient Egypt.

Three: Don’t forget Akhenaten. This show goes beyond King Tut (in fact, only a third or so of the objects are his). It has a lot to say about Akhenaten, his predecessor, and possibly father. Apart from the Tut treasure factor, “dad” was a much more interesting type, reigning in the middle of the fourteenth century BC and known for his commitment to monotheism. The art of his reign is really distinctive, eerily naturalistic, as you’ll see in the wonderful head in Gallery 5. Knocks on the head the idea that Egyptian art simply when on being the same for millennia.

Four: Don’t expect to see the big gold mask. The exhibition organisers are quite up front in saying that it was too fragile to travel, but people still come expecting to see it. Partly  because the publicity material for the show (as you can see above) uses an image of something striking similar. Actually it’s a vastly blown up version of a small “coffinette”, about 16 inches long in all, which IS in the show – and which originally held the pharaoh’s liver.

Five: Be prepared to come face to face, in a way, with Tut. His mummy has just been unveiled in Egypt and isn’t here. But the last gallery contains his CT scans – and from these they’ve reconstructed his head in latex. It was controversial exhibit in the US. What colour should Tut have been? Many people were convinced that he should have been darker.

But now for some surprising places where you can follow the show up – all in the UK . . .

One: If you want the best view of Tut’s tomb this side of Egypt, then go to Dorchester (honest). This Tutankhamun Exhibition is a complete replica of most of it, launched after the British Museum show in 1972 – to carry on the flame of interest in all things Egyptian. Great place to take kids.

Two: For the real stuff. The British Museum is the obvious place, which is probably the best collection of Egyptian archaeology outside Egypt (don’t ask why). Amongst its other treasures, the BM has a great statue of Tutankhamun making traditional religious offerings to the traditional gods. Up yours to the monotheism of Akhenaten.

Three: The best really old-fashioned Egyptology Museum in the country is the Petrie Museum in University College London (right), started in 1892 by the redoubtable Amelia Edwards – who was behind so much of the beginning of professional Egyptology in this country. It’s due to move into new premises in 2008, so get to see it in its old setting soon.

Four: Another great collection is the University of Manchester Museum. And they have an inscribed stela (or slab) which probably shows Tutankhamun.

Five: A bit of a mystery here. It’s the Myers Museum at Eton College, which has an Egyptian faience plaque showing Tut himself drinking from a lotus cup just like the one in the show. I saw this some time ago at Eton, but their website now says that the museum is permanently closed. If anyone knows what has happened to it, do let us know. Maybe it’s  now on display elsewhere? Or is it time to be reminding Eton of their charitable status?

Comments

[Charles Bebrowsky]

I suffered Mr Cook's disappointment in viewing the exhibition in Chicago a few years ago. My reaction to this rip-off is exactly the same as his. The public should be explicitly informed by all promotional literature that the pictures shown in the literature do not represent what will be viewed at the exhibition. I drove 350 miles to see it.

[Russell Cook]

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am absolutely disgusted. I visited the exhibition yesterday. It is a con, rip off and as far as I can see breaks the trade descriptions act. My parents travelled from Devon to visit this exhibition with myself and my two children. We travelled in by train and tube which cost £30, had lunch which cost £50 and then the exhibition cost us £72. I cannot express our disappointment. Where is the mask the casket and sarcophagus, all in Egypt I know. However the if’s, but’s and maybe’s in the descriptions of the artefacts were diabolical. Most of them were nothing to do with Tut and then when you get to the end of the exhibition, bang……nothing a complete anti climax. I understand that possibly the value of the artefacts is too high to bring them to the UK. However if in the last room a full size copy was made available to view with an explanation of why the real thing could not be viewed I think most people who have complained would be happy to understand that. But no not even that is made available. The shop at the end is the most overt insult in marketing too, what a load of TUT TAT, and at ridiculous rip off prices. My wife was on holiday in Egypt at the same time we were visiting this exhibition. I could have given her the money we spent on this exhibition and she could have gone to visit the real thing in Egypt. I am extremely angry about this. My mother suffers with her health and was unable to visit the last time the exhibits were available in the UK. Now she has travelled and suffered all along with my father who has one leg and walked around this too come to a conclusion that this is a complete and utter rip off. My children who are 14 and 16 were really excited to be visiting this, only to feel like the golden dagger was placed firmly in our backs as we entered what was the shop with a curse.

I expect a full refund. My next communication is with Credit Suisse and BBC Watchdog

Yours sincerely Russell Cook

[Tony Francis]

the site
http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/tutchildren.htm
indicates the older still born child of Tut also had a spina bifida and scoliosis. The scoliosis is apparent from the x-ray, but I can't see the spina bifida.
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spina_bifida
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoliosis
Spina bifida, scoliosis and hip dysplasia or congenital hip dislocation are interrelated conditions.

[SW Foska]

Thanks, xjy. Apparently there are several rounds of correspondence between Flaubert and his publisher about the precise angle of the circumflex on the final 'ô' in Salammbô.
Do you know Geza Gardonyi's Slave of the Huns? About a Roman who winds up in the eponymous condition; a novel spelling out allegorically who should be whose boss in Europe.
A good course could be taught comparing these fictions.

[Tony Francis]

Two premature children were found in Tut's tomb. These were both girls. The older one, aged 7-8 months gestation, appears to have had several genetic conditions:
http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/tutchildren.htm
The x-ray is a little difficult to interpret. The story reports the right shoulder to be elevated. This would be a right sided Sprengel's Deformity. Other sites report Klippel-Feil syndrome, which is a fusion of one or more cervical vertebra. It can be associated with Sprengel's Deformity.
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprengel's_deformity
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klippel_Feil

This means the x-ray would be taken from a posterior-anterior position. If that is the case, the liver appears to be on the left side. If it is an anterior-posterior projection, which seems more likely, the heart appears to be in dextro-rotation. This can be associated with Klippel-Feil Syndome:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dextrocardia
However, Kartagener's Syndrome is not likely:
http://www.whonamedit.com/synd.cfm/880.html
There also appears to be a left sided hip dysplasia (on the same side as the Sprengel's Deformity). There is a hip crease on the left side of the body, and the x-ray looks like dysplasia.
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip_dysplasia
The Wiki Klippel-Feil article indicates Tut had Klippel-Feil Syndrome. This brings up the question of incest. As mentioned by Anthony Alcock, Ankhesenpaaten was probably Ankhenaton's daughter, then his wife, and possibly Smenkhkare's wife (assuming Smenkhkare was a man, and not Nefertiti), then Tut's wife, and finally Ay's wife (who may have been her grandfather):
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0506/feature1/learn.html
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankhesenpaaten
She sent a letter (Amarna Letter) to the Hittites requesting a husband. That poor dupe was murdered on the way to Egypt.

[Tony Francis]

The reconstruction of Tut's face is French. For a British, New Zealand rendering:
http://www.crystalinks.com/tut.html
To be honset, the B/NZ version looks a little like "monkey boy". The French version is better looking. That's just my opinion.

[Xjy]

Nice tip of the hat to Mailer, there, SW! A "small" culture all by himself :-b I'd rope in Flaubert, too, if I could, only Salammbô is 1000 years too late... Wikipedia's blurb gushes "lurid tale of blood-and-thunder" and "an exercise in sensuous and violent exoticism".

On a personal note, it happens that Mme Bovary was the first book I ever read in a foreign language, so I retain a fondness for the uptight masochistic hallucinating pedant, despite him being to Balzac as Napoleon the Petty was to his uncle Ozymandias...

[Tony Francis]

The feed to the Seti I tomb seems to have croaked. (it was working before.) More are available at:
http://lexicorient.com/egypt/luxor38.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2153329.stm
http://www.factum-arte.com/eng/conservacion/seti/seti_en.asp
Foska's site has a lot of pictures from Seti's Temple. But I didn't find any from Seti's tomb. Maybe they are there, and I didn't find them.

[paul potts]

Dear Mary,

thanks for the picture, ot shoule I say mock-up of Tut whcih I shall treasure always.

Two things interest me - the lips: they are certainly not chimpanziond Caucasian. They are more like what a female actress needs for a role in a film.

Then the hair. I mean, is it straight or curly or frizzy or thick of thin or light or dark? Surely the forensics could have more to say on that

Paulo

[Tony Francis]

There was an attempt to do DNA testing on the various mummies from the 18th dynasty to determine lineage. But this was stopped at the last minute, because it was believed that this would do more damage than it was worth. Zahi Hawass said it only held about a 40% chance of yielding any useful information. He is on the History Channel all the time:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zahi_Hawass
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/pharaohs/secrets3.html
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/meast/11/08/egypt.tutankhamun.ap/
http://www.egyptologyonline.com/using_dna.htm
Some years ago, I heard that many of the mummies had been irradiated with x-rays to stop bacterial/fungal infections. This helped to preserve them, but also served to inadvertantly destroy DNA. I can't find anything about this on the 'net. Apparently, this happened to Ramses II, who had a resistant fungus. I was unaware that the mummy of Akhenaton had been found. The "young lady" from KV 35 looks a lot like Nefertiti:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Crete/3102/do_we_have_.htm
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nefertiti
Or is this the "older lady"?
The lineage of the 18th dynasty is:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighteenth_dynasty_of_Egypt
The nineteenth dynasty boasts the best tomb of all, Seti I:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth_dynasty_of_Egypt
http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/seti1t.htm
DNA has been identified in these cases:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_DNA_tested_mummies
The list is paltry. The only one of interest as far as Tut is concerned would be Amenhotep I, who left no off-spring. His testing was inconclusive.
Smenkhkare remains an enigma:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smenkhare

[anthony alcock]

Clarity has almost nothing to do with the Amarna Period. One strand of thought is that Tutankhamun was the son of Akhenaten and Maketaten (one of the 6 daughters of A. and Nefertiti). It does seem reasonably well attested that he was married to Ankhesenpaaten, who fairly clearly seems to be one of the 6 children of of A. and N.
My tutor at Oxford, who should remain nameless (equivalent to a status of non-person for ancient Egyptians), wrote a note once that Smenkhkare was actually another name for Nefertiti. And so on and and so on.
Mary, there is a pretty good volume of decent text and nice pictures produced for the occasion of the exhibition held in the Berlin Museum (the one in Charlottenburg) between Feb. and May 1980. If you are at all interested in the religious movements of the period, you might have a look at Jan Assmann "Egyptian Solar Religion in the New Kingdom" (Kegan Paul,1995). Bit technical, but worth a bit of effort. Assmann is the only Egyptologist ever to have made a name outside the narrow confines of the subject. A few years ago he was relatively high up in a newspaper list of the leading intellectuals in Germany, no mean achievement when you consider that it is difficult to throw a stone almost anywhere in this country without hitting one of them. Which is what I often feel like doing, but ,in the interest of keeping my little job here, don't.

[Tony Francis]

I was on Foska's site, when the question occurred to me: how did they get all those stones up in those pyramids? Do the math:
http://www.crystalinks.com/gpstats.html
http://www.egyptorigins.org/numberofstones.htm
2.3 million stones. 20 years x 365 days in a year x 24 hours in a day x 60 minutes in an hour x 60 seconds in an hour = 630720000 seconds/ 3.2 million stones = 197.1 seconds for each stone. This assumes every one worked around the clock, 24/7 for twenty years. A stone every 3 minutes! If it was 40 years, then it was one stone every 6 minutes. I have worried about this for more than a decade. Any thoughts? The stones were also cut to precisely fit.

Google Earth has some good pictures of Egypt. There is a big fire burning south of Cairo on Google Earth. It is just north of Arab al Itwah. Any thoughts on what this fire might be?

[Tony Francis]

To clarify, if Tiye or Ti was the mother of Akhenaton, and he was Tut's father, then Tut would be at least 1/4 Nubian. Therefore, he might have been darkly complected. Ti or Tiye's mummy has been identified, along with a new statue at Luxor. The mummy:
http://ib205.tripod.com/tiye.html
The new statue:
http://www.guardians.net/hawass/articles/discovering_queen_tiye.htm
African queens:
http://www.swagga.com/queen.htm
And speculation that Amenhotep and Tiye were the parents of Tut and Akhenaton:
http://www.freemaninstitute.com/tut.htm
Assuming Ti was really Nubian, both Tut and Akhenaten would have been of fairly dark complexion. It has been speculated that Akhenaten had either Froehlich's Syndrome or Marfan's Syndrome:
http://arksanctum.org/content/view/262/61/
http://www.heptune.com/Marfans.html
It has been speculated that Froehlich's is unlikely, because of impotency. If that is the case, then Akhenaten was not the father of anyone:
http://www.whonamedit.com/synd.cfm/1499.html
A similar syndrome called Babinski-Froehlich's Syndrome is also a possibility, and to my mind, more closely fit the images. Babinski described the syndrome in French, as a tumor of the pituitary.
http://www.whonamedit.com/synd.cfm/1792.html
Marfan's:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfan_syndrome

[Tony Francis]

Recent thinking has placed a minor wife of Akhenaten, Kiya as the probable mother of Tutankhamun:
http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/whowastut.htm
http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/tut.htm
Queen Ti or Tiya was the wife of Amenhotep III. In the past, it had been speculated that Ti or Tiya was the mother of Tut, and Amenhotep his father. In the newer, alternative theory, it is thought Akhenaten was his father, and Kiya his mother. Ti or Tiya was a Nubian, meaning she would most likely have been black.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/discoveries/2006-01-23-queen-ti-statue_x.htm
If Kiya is the mother, then Ti or Tiya is the grandmother. Amenhotep would have been the grandfather. Yuyu and Tuyu would have been the great-grandparents.
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankamen
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiye
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiya
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amenhotep_III
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhenaten
If this is true, Tut would have been either 1/2 or 1/4 Nubian.
Apparently Kiya and Nefertiti were at daggers with each other.
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nefertiti
Debate still rages over KV35 and the so-called "younger lady" and "elder lady" - were they Kiya and Nefertiti?
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KV35
Another theory holds that Kiya was a Mitannian princess named Tadukhipa:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadukhipa
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitanni
If this is true, then Tut would have likely had no Nubian ancestors, and there would be no relation between Tiya and Kiya. Tadukhipa is named in several of the Armana letters:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarna_letters

[SW Foska]

Egyptian and also Roman is big among 'small' cultures' fictions. Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis; Ismail Kadare; Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings; Vintila Horia's Dieu est ne en exil, an influence on Amin Maalouf's Leon l'africain: autobiographie imaginaire.
'Big' cultures staging Egyptian shows, on the other hand, is always a sign of crisis, of cultural anxiety. There have been many such moments from Byzantium to Ceausescu, via 20s Britain.
But dedicated egyptopographers can save themselves the queue and the pricey entrance fee, and drool at http://www.desheret.org - what a site! Merseyside is amply and justly attended to.

[Mary]

Anthony...I get the feeling that you would have other favourite books for a first step into ancient Egypt. I have a soft spot for that whole '(cultural) atlas' series, but is there something better for beginners?

[anthony alcock]

The Egyptian: I suppose Waltari used the name Sinuhe because of its Middle Kingdom resonance. He could have used something a bit more imaginative and in keeping with the times. Akhenaten's mother was called Tiye and his grandparents Yuya and Tuya, so he could have called his doctor something like Toyota, and it would have sounded plebeian enough (presumably what the blurb writer meant by "degradation").
Since the tomb robbers were after more or less instantly reusable stuff, the beautiful alabaster drinking cup wouldn't have been much use to them.
Tutankhamun should have been relatively pale. In paintings the outside workers are distinguished from the inside workers and idle rich by the colour of their skin. This may be just an artistic device, but it may also be connected with something that has its origin in reality.
The co-author of the Cultural Atlas is Jaromir Malek, whose contributions (maps) are arguably the most useful thing in the book.

[abc]

I guess a point is that if Sinuhe had the inner ability to become personal physician then inherently he was never a degraded figure in the first place.

[bingley]

I'm told that a lot has been cut out of the English translation. I read it in French translation and was absolutely bowled over despite having to read it with the book in one hand and a dictionary in the other.

[Xjy]

Another way of preparing might be to (re)read The Egyptian by Mika Waltari, the Finnish novelist. First published in 1945, it was a smash hit in the postwar world. Here's an American blurb for it:

"First published in the United States in 1949 and widely condemned as obscene, The Egyptian outsold every other novel published that year, and remains a classic; readers worldwide have testified to its life-changing power. It is a full-bodied re-creation of a largely forgotten era in the world's history: the Egypt of the 14th century B.C.E., when pharaohs and gods contended with the near-collapse of history's greatest empire. This epic tale encompasses the whole of the then-known world, from Babylon to Crete, from Thebes to Jerusalem, while centering around one unforgettable figure: Sinuhe, a man of mysterious origins who rises from the depths of degradation to become personal physician to Pharaoh Akhnaton."

I'm reading it in Finnish, so I've got no idea if the translation does justice to Waltari's immensely graceful style. But it's an atmospheric recreation of the period of Akhenaten that might provide some imaginative context for the exhibition and its artefacts.