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Chapter 1: What sparked the global fascination with Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922?
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Well, hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand.
And me, William de Rumpel. Now, in the last episode, we saw the end of Akhenaten's dynasty with the death of the boy king Tutankhamen, who had no heirs. Today, we bring you a special episode to wrap up the series we are discussing when everyone went crazy for Tut. in the aftermath of the incredible 1922 discovery.
We are joined once again by the brilliant and wonderful, my compatriot, Dr. Campbell Price. Hi, hi, hi. Nice to be back.
We're so delighted to have you back. We did a bonus episode for anybody who wants to go and listen where we talked in depth about the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. For those of you who want to listen to it, join our club, empirepoduk.com, empirepoduk.com. But it
You know, we talked about this man, Howard Carter, unlikely because he wasn't from one of the top notches of British education establishment, an Egyptologist who discovers the intact tomb of Tutankhamun. It's the best preserved pharaonic tomb in existence. And Howard Carter, after this 1922 discovery, Campbell, the world goes nuts for King Tut.
They do, Anita, they absolutely do. And it's worth saying 1922 also represented the centenary of the decipherment of hieroglyphs by Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion. So it was a double whammy of Egyptomania. And it's difficult to, I think, yeah, overemphasize just what Tutankhamen meant, how much he caught the zeitgeist of the moment in the 1920s.
And I suppose that's not a coincidence when so many people are thinking about, you know, the senseless loss of young lives, Tutankhamun, the boy king, and, you know, the world has just come out of World War I where so many young men died.
Well, going into the excavation, Carter and the team didn't know that Tutankhamun was a boy. That was information that came out from the discovery and ageing of his body. But when it became known that he died about the age of 18, of course, yeah, that resonated with...
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Chapter 2: How did the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb influence popular culture?
And so Tutankhamun arrives on the world scene at a very interesting and very sensitive time for Egyptian politics.
I mean, that must have a molding effect on Egypt's population as well, because there is a religion, it's Islam. And yet you've got now people becoming completely obsessed with something that entirely predates Islam or any Abrahamic religion.
Yeah, I think there was always interest. I mean, people often forget that a lot of scholarship before Europeans showed up was written in Arabic. Good point. Egyptian and other Arab-speaking, Arab-writing... scholars were describing ancient Egypt. But you're right, in 1922, there's the rise of what's called Farronism.
So this is the deliberate explicit pushing back against colonialism, British colonialism. and trying to connect to the pharaonic past. So it influences architecture, it influences discourse at the time in the 1920s into the 1930s. Ultimately, it kind of goes out of fashion after then, but it's quite hot around the time of of Tutankhamun's discovery.
How does it manifest? You don't have the speaker of the Egyptian parliament dressing up in an ancient Egyptian gown or anything?
No, no, no, no, you don't. But so you have the prime minister, Saad Zaghloul, who is, you know, proud of pharaonic history and of Egypt's independence. And I think there's something about Egypt being a self-contained united country at the time, a kingdom. Remember, there is a king of Egypt still in the 1920s. Farouk, at this point? Not yet Farouk. He's the 1930s, but King Fouad I, his father.
I mean, Egypt is always the kind of in-between place, as Egyptian friends might say. They're partly foot-to-foot in different camps. But there is a real need to assert ownership of the Tutankhamun find. Because remember, Howard Carter, his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, does a deal with the Times of London.
So the news exclusively of the find, when it's discovered, is channeled through a British newspaper. So if you're an Egyptian journalist or if you're an Egyptian consumer of news, that's quite an insult.
Do the Egyptian newspapers, do we know, do they respond in kind? Are there sort of ceremonies to say, you know what, it's ours, not theirs? We did know about this. This is our birthright, not a European one, not Howard Carter's.
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Chapter 3: What role did mass media play in the rise of Tut-mania?
under the more kind of headline-worthy news about the curse is a certain anxiety about the status of the tomb. And so Howard Carter describes these two black-painted gilded statues of the king as guardian statues. I've got a cardboard cutout of one of them in my office behind me.
And these are actually ritual representations of the king that may have been used during the king's lifetime, but which ended up in the tomb antechamber, so among the first things that Carter saw. And he describes them as sentinels because they hold weapons, they seem quite menacing. It almost kind of implies that Carter feels guilty for probing further into the tomb. So there is this...
in a way, a kind of colonial guilt about the entering and the emptying of a pharaoh's tomb. And that finds real expression in a narrative which is cooked up by people who feel kind of left out in the cold by the Times deal. So the Times of London reporting deal means that in order to generate, you know, copy for newspapers, journalists have to write about something.
And so this idea of, especially after Carnarvon's death, the supposition that it's a curse really kind of balloons.
And what's interesting is that Carter's having none of it. He sees it for what it is and describes it as Tommy Rot. Any mention of the curse is Tommy Rot, he says. But what is also interesting is the human condition because you have talk of the supernatural and talk of a curse. People are even more interested in seeing it with their own eyes and getting their hands on merch if they can.
I mean, I think there's always, there had always been an association between pharaonic Egypt and magic. So it appears in scripture, Egyptian magicians. And that persists because, you know, we're talking about pharaonic religion appears to an outsider quite mysterious, quite arcane, quite, in some ways, quite threatening. There's lots of things to do with the dead, focused on tombs and graves.
So all of this makes a really heady cocktail that speaks to the moment.
But it's also significant for the moment that all this stuff stays in Egypt. For the previous two centuries, most of the good stuff is being shipped out. You go to Italy and there's this enormous Egyptian museum in Turin associated with the early Italian royal family. The British Museum is obviously notoriously chock-a-block with Egyptian goodies. Now, Tutankhamen, which is the best stuff of all,
stays in Egypt. Now that would not have happened presumably 20 or 30 years earlier.
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Chapter 4: What was the significance of Egyptian-themed products in the 1920s?
So although, as we'll discuss, there are major tours of geopolitical importance in the 1970s, actually in the early 60s, some material of Tutankhamun's goes around several venues in the United States, seen by Jackie Kennedy. This is a big thing. It's already a diplomatic move. So it's ancient history.
objects ancient material being leveraged for modern fundraising so sadly from a british point of view the big moment of of wave two top mania if you like is 1972 when president sadat who's the guy uh who uh takes over after Nasser, the guy who we met most recently with the 1973 war, attacking over the Suez Canal, and then Camp David.
Those are all episodes which you can listen to on our backlist. He sends Tutankhamen to the British Museum in London. And I remember as a seven-year-old, some of my earliest memories, the excitement. I was already mad keen on Tutankhamen and I knew already the galleries in Edinburgh backwards. And I begged and I begged and I begged to go to London to see this thing.
And it was my first ever trip to London. And I went down. And I remember being amazed by everything, by the double-decker buses and the Hare Krishna people who were outside the British Museum playing on their drums. And then going in and this darkened museum space with this amazing lighting of this, you know, completely iconic death mask at the centre. And I remember...
you know as a literally a seven-year-old peering up at it because i was physically down below it you know you have certain memories from your childhood which are completely clear this for me is one of those it's my first big moment my first big trip the most exciting thing that ever happened to me and it was everything about that entire trip is uh is absolutely sharp in my memory
So, I mean, you know, that tour had a profound effect on a man who's then going to devote his life to history. Where else did the tour go and do we know what kind of impact it had on the people who saw it?
Yeah, well, that's a great story, William. Thank you for sharing. I would love to have been one of those people.
You're too young, Campbell. You're too young.
You're barely out of short trousers. But I know several noted Egyptologists who, like you, were children in the queue, and that inspired them to become Egyptologists. It's worth saying about that show, that really iconic 1972 show, there were 50 objects, including the famous gold mask, selected to mark 50 years since the find. So 1972, of course, was 50 years since 1922.
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Chapter 5: How did Cold War politics affect the perception of Ancient Egypt?
And he picks up a phone and says, are you mad? Just say yes.
You're going to take it.
Because we're going to take this. So as Campbell said, nearly 8 million visitors will go and have a look at the exhibition. the Tut exhibition. You'll have things like comedian Steve Martin performing that King Tut on SNL Saturday Night Live, which is just a jokey song. Go look it up. It's still on YouTube. Very funny. Breaks into the Billboard Top 100, sells a million copies.
And then it's merch, so much merch. And I think this is, I mean, I suppose the 1920s was merch-tastic. I don't know whether you've ever even done a survey of this. Who produced the most toot-tot? Tot-toot, tot-tat, however you want to put it. Tot-tat. Tot-tat, yes. Which was the era with the most tot-tat?
I suspect it probably was the 70s. And subsequent exhibitions haven't been able to replicate that sense of real excitement. Because we're quite used to it now. We're used to the blockbuster. We're used to the idea of a big show rolling into town. Photography and documentaries and films and books make this stuff quite accessible.
But in the 1970s, you know, the first big glossy colour books about Tutankhamun were coming out. So even if you didn't go to the exhibition, you might see a documentary film on television or you might buy a book.
And back in Egypt, of course, this is also being registered, and this whole business of Pharaoh being associated with Sadat, because in 1981, Sadat is assassinated by Khalid al-Istanbuli, and he says, I have killed Pharaoh. Yes. So all this is playing out at multiple levels.
Yeah, exactly. It's worth saying, you know, in the Quran, in the Muslim holy book, You know, the Pharaoh is not depicted well. He's not depicted well in the Bible, I guess, or the Torah, but to call someone a Pharaoh is an insult. It's, you know, the mark of a tyrant.
And then you get Solomon is the symbol in the Quran of justice, and Pharaoh is the symbol of injustice, ironically. Very interesting. Anyway, then it goes off around Germany. It's not the end of the tour.
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