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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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So that's beer52.com slash football to claim your free case of beers. He is the most famous pharaoh who ever lived. His face, that serene golden mask with its striped headdress, is one of the supreme images of the ancient world, recognized on every continent. Millions of people have cooed for hours to stand before the original in Cairo.
And yet, in the Egypt of his own time, this man was a nobody. Not even a man, a child when he came to the throne and dying in his teens. He won no great battles, built no great monuments, left no great inscriptions. So, who exactly was Tutankhamun? Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William.
And our guest today is the curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum, author of Brief Histories, Ancient Egypt, of Ancient Egypt, 50 Discoveries, and of the magnificent Golden Mummies of Egypt. Dr. Campbell Price, take a bow. Hello again. Hello again. Hello again. Listen, so great to have you back. Oh, thank you.
A lot of people listening or watching, they're going to know the story of the discovery of King Tut's tomb. We're going to have a glorious episode with you about Howard Carter and the Valley of the Kings in 1922. So if you want to hear that, you know what you need to do, become a member of the club. But today we're going to talk about the boy king himself.
So can we start right at the very beginning? I mean, it seems like a really basic question, but it isn't straightforward. It becomes quite contested. Who were his parents?
Oh, well, Tutankhamen in a way, as we'll discuss, is kind of the end of the line. He's the end of a dynasty, quite literally. And there is a lot of debate, as there often is in Egyptology. We're just getting a flavour of that between you and Aidan. Yeah. hotly contested in the pages of journals the identity of Tutankhamen's parents. So as you said in your introduction, he is extremely famous.
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Chapter 2: Who was Tutankhamun and why is he significant?
Okay, so we'll take all the caveats. Let's take all the caveats. One thing we do know, and it's one of those really dwelled on and a really glitzy schmitzy documentary about sort of doing the CT scan of Tut himself. We do know a little bit about the state he was in, don't we? I go, that's also contested, isn't it?
Because he's got a knock on his head, but no one knows whether it was the unwrapper or an assassination. So there's a knock on the head, but there's also the shape of the body, which I thought sort of might have told us if he had come from disease or, you know, sort of too close genetic material. I mean, because after all, Nefertiti and Akhenaten were cousins, right? So, I mean... Maybe.
Oh my goodness, what do we do? We know here, Campbell. Okay, sort it all out for us.
Right. Okay. So first off, we must acknowledge the dreadful state that Tutankhamen's body was in after Howard Carter and his team finished with it. And they saw it up, didn't they? Tutankhamen was found glued into his inner solid gold coffin, covered with wonderful artefacts, which had to be extracted.
And so Howard Carter and the team totally atomised him, decapitated him, tore him limb from limb to get him out of this black... And that's literally what we're talking about. He's stuck in the thing and they have to just pull. Yeah. So all of that contaminates and compromises the nature of what we would now want to analyze. And they weren't wearing rubber gloves and stuff. They were not.
William, no, they were not. They're breathing, smoking, touching, things that we might not do today. So the evidence is, I think, to my mind, fatally compromised in that way. But you're right that Tutankhamen, he comes at the end of the line and even if his parents were not directly related, his father definitely came from what we would call an inbred royal family to keep the royal blood pure.
In contrast to other royal families. Well, yeah, it's a common thing to not... And for reasons of inheritance, generally, not just royalty, that you want to know who the next generation are and what they're going to inherit. So Tutankhamun, Maybe one of the reasons he doesn't have children of his own is because of a genetic issue.
But as far as disease goes, and I've been in hospitals where we've done the CT scans of mummified bodies, often in that scanning room, you're with an archaeologist, an Egyptologist, a radiologist, a bioarchaeologist, and no one can agree when the scan comes up what they're seeing on the screen. So things which to us or which to a specialist might look like
paleopathology so diseases endured or not endured in life or the cause of death these in fact are artefacts of mummification the fact that the body has been changed by being completely dehydrated covered in resins oils and been left for 3000 years so actually CT scans are very difficult to interpret so I completely love this it's you know basically give the guy a break he might have been fine
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Chapter 3: What do we know about Tutankhamun's parents?
So this is, you know, a high point in Egyptian history, what Egyptologists call the New Kingdom, the 18th dynasty. Lots of battles have been waged, lots of foreign territory has been, if not included in an empire, I'm sceptical about the concept of empire, I should say on a podcast called Empire in ancient Egypt, but there's definitely raiding and acquisition of materials. So Akhenaten
his father is really pretty magnificent ruler who builds lots and has lots of statuary and rules well over 30 years and Akhenaten and Tutankhamen inherit this and some would say Akhenaten kind of squanders it
So that world collapses when Akhenaten dies, doesn't it? And we've had the description of his death in the episode that we talked about the fall of Amana. And at that point, we assume that, what, Tut is a child of eight or nine? Yeah. And his world presumably goes into spin at this point.
Yeah, I mean, because Akhenaten, whichever way you cut it, I mean, Akhenaten is a very singular individual. He was once described as the first individual in history. He must... be quite a commanding guy because she's instituted all these reforms. So then when he disappears, maybe before he disappears, he takes, as is not uncommon, a co-ruler.
So we have the name Smenychkare, who seems to be a co-ruler of Akhenaten's and who may die, disappear before Akhenaten's death. And then for some people, my colleague, Professor Aidan Dodson included, Nefertiti, the wife of Akhenaten, takes on the role of king.
So there's a period, there's a kind of interregnum, you could say, between the death of Akhenaten and Tutankhaten becoming king, before he changes his name, where there's various, yeah, kind of horse trading for power.
So he doesn't have his father anymore. He's just been living in an age of enormous tumult. Nobody's seen anything like this, where the gods themselves have been destroyed, if you like. He's just a boy. Two very powerful adults come into his life, the muscle and the brain and the political fixer and the military commander. So tell us about Ai and Horemheb.
Who are they and what parts do they play in his life?
So we probably know rather less about Ai. He seems to be an elder statesman already in the reign of Akhenaten from a powerful family in some way connected to the royal family. We're not quite sure how. For some people, for some Egyptologists, he's the father of Nefertiti. I'm a little sceptical about that myself. He takes on the slightly mysterious title of God's father.
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Chapter 4: How did Tutankhamun's upbringing influence his reign?
That's even more complicated.
Yes. I mean, Ai is an old man, for sure, by the time he gets to the throne. So he's only around briefly. And then Horemheb secures and consolidates the reformation position. And he actually writes out Tutankhamun from the story. So he lumps everyone previous together in the Amarna period with negative thoughts, writes them out of history.
Horemheb connects himself with Tutankhamun's grandfather, Amenhotep III. So there's an elision between the two of them, and that's what history remembers. The great kings lists of Ramesses II, a few generations later, go from Amenhotep III to Horemheb, and everyone else is forgotten.
Campbell, I've got an urgent question here, though, because we know from previous episodes that a lot of the old Amarna crew are weaked out of their tombs and shoved into a sort of holding chamber. And their nice tombs are taken over and they're not given the honor that we'd expect from a pharaoh.
How come Tutankhamun is left when Akhenaten and Nefertiti are bundled into a great sort of chamber together with everyone else from that era?
Well, you're right. They're huicht. I think that's exactly the right word. It's a great word.
It's a Billy Connolly word.
You know the sketch? So, again, there's lots of uncertainty about this, about the identity of the people involved. There's kind of musical chairs, musical mummies, both from tombs at Atamarna, where people are maybe initially buried and then brought back to Thebes and then movement at Thebes.
So the reason Tutankhamen is left alone is basically because of the situation, the actually very lucky situation of his tomb being at the base, really the bottom of the Valley of the Kings. So the Valley of the Kings, although it may not seem it if you visited, can occasionally have flash floods that bring in dust and mud and sand. And when that dries, it's like cement.
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