Tut's Father Found
One of the popular lectures in my repertoire is the one on the treasures of Tutankhamun. I have sat through a number of such lectures by others and in every case they seem to consist simply of an inventory of the wonderful things found in the boy-king's tomb - alabaster vases, ebony statues, golden ushabti, weapons, tools, exotic furnishings and, of course, the coffins and the death mask.
One of two of the lecturers have talked about the discovery of the tomb - the years of searching, the few clues that were unearthed, the decision by Lord Carnarvon to abandon his concession, Carter's dramatic dash back to England to plead for one more season, and then the dramatic discovery and Carter's breathless words, "I see wonderful things!"
In an effort to be different and, I hope, more interesting, I start with the birth of Akenaton and tell the story of these last rulers of the Eighteenth Dynasty - the religious changes, the move to Akhetaton, the Tel el-Amarna tablets, the artistic revolution which includes the magnificent head of Nefertiti, the mystery of Akhenaton's appearance, the estrangement with his wife and the relationship with Smenkare, his death and then the few facts that are known about Tutankhamun himself.
I say "few" because we know precious little about the boy-king. As I tell my audiences, we don't know who his parents were and so we are not sure how he came to be in line for the throne. Speculation has ranged from the shadowy Smenkare being his father, to his being a nephew of Akhenaton by some younger branch of the royal family.
Just recently I have had to make a few changes to my lecture. Two years ago I had to stop talking about poor Tut shut up alone in his hot, uncomfortable tomb while all his relatives lie in air-conditioned luxury in the Cairo Museum, for Tut is now in an air-conditioned glass case near the entrance to his tomb so that tourists can gawp at him, an undignified fate for which Zahi Hawass should be thoroughly ashamed of himself.
Until last year I used to comment on the mystery of how Nefertiti's wonderful bust ended up in Berlin. According to the protocol in force at that time, the excavator's of Tel el-Amarna had to make two piles of their finds, each containing objects of equal value and artistic or archaeological worth. The Egyptian authorities then made their choice of one pile (though they could swap objects around if they saw fit) and the excavators had the other - yet somehow the Egyptian assessor managed to miss the bust. It now appears that the Germans hid the bust, deliberately breaking their agreement with the Egyptians, and smuggled it back to Berlin. Unfortunately - but understandably - Zahi is now demanding the bust back again.
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| A bust in the Brooklyn Museum, believed to depict Kiya, thought to be the mother of Tutankhamun. |
When talking about Tutankhamun's unknown parentage I show a photograph of the secondary wife, Kiya, who is believed by some experts to be Tut's mother, but I emphasise that his father is unknown, even though it may be assumed that Akhenaton was responsible. A new discovery at Ashmunein means that I will have to make yet another change in my lecture.
When Akhenaton died and Tutnankhamun's counsellors decided to abandon the religious changes enforced by the "Heretic Pharaoh", there was an immediate reaction. Akhenaton's tomb was vandalised and his name and image hacked out of all the inscriptions and reliefs. The temples he had erected to the Aten were demolished, but the practical Egyptians were not about to throw all that good stone into the nearest river or use it for landfill. Instead the stone blocks were used to build temples to other gods and archaeologists have been able to identify many of these blocks and attempt to reconstruct the temples from which they came.
For example, one of the pylons at the great Temple of Karnak has been found to be made largely of stones from one of Akhenaton's temples. Of course, this raises all sorts of ethical and historical issues: if we reconstruct the vanished temple, it means that the visible pylon disappears and why should we favour the building of a heretic, rejected by his own contemporaries, over the building of a respected pharaoh constructed with the approval of his contemporaries?
In any case, talk of reconstructing a temple is rather ambitious. All we can do is reconstruct some of the walls of the temple based on the reliefs that decorated that wall. If we find a block of stone depicting a head with no body and another block of stone showing a body but no head, we can assume - size, colouration and attributes being equal - that the two stones belong together. By gradually working outwards we can reconstruct most of the jigsaw but even if we could do it perfectly, it might still be impossible to be sure whether the wall we have put together was on the left or right of the temple, the first courtyard or the second, and so on.
However the task is worth doing because the inscriptions that go with the reliefs may contain interesting or important information. Of course most of the inscriptions will merely be conventional lists of divine or human titles, boasting about the accomplishments of the king who erected the temple, or yet more lists of the offerings of food and drink presented to the god by the king.
Every so often, however, there will be a snippet of information - a title, a regnal year, or the name of a place - that can be linked with other snippets to give us a slightly better understanding of the period from which the temple came. This is what has happened in the case of the excavations at Ashmunein.
Here the archaeologists have been investigating a temple which was made up almost completely of blocks of stone reused from a demolished temple of Akhenaton. The excavators have been working to put these blocks back in their original order to reconstruct the reliefs that decorated Akhenaton's temple and have found that some of the offerings were made in the names of Akhenaton's children - among whom are listed "Ankhesen-pa-aton, daughter of his body" and "Tut-ankh-aton, son of his body". Better known to us as "Tutankhamun" and "Ankhesenamun", the boy-king and his wife, the inscription states in so many words that they are both natural children of Akhenaton.
Of course we might have expected that Tutankhamun would have married his sister, for this was standard procedure in Egypt, where royalty was believed to inhere in the female line. (Of course, the mere fact of marriage to a royal daughter did not mean that the husband was a brother; he could have been a half-brother or even a more distant relation marrying the princess in order to give his reign legitimacy.) However the new find makes it definite that Tutankhamun was a natural son of Akhenaton.
We are still uncertain about his mother: almost certainly it was not the beautiful Nefertiti, because the many relief depicting Akhenaton, Nefertiti and their children only depict daughters. It is quite likely that Kiya, as previously identified, was indeed Tutankhamun's mother. If so, it may clear up another mystery.
Late in his reign Akhenaton appears to have become estranged from Nefertiti, who was banished to live in the Northern Palace at Akhetaton. We do not know why this apparently loving couple broke up in this way and speculation has been rife. Some have even suggested that the damage to the left eye in the famous bust of Nefertiti reflects an eye disorder which the beauty-loving Akhenaton could not stomach and he got rid of his wife for aesthetic reasons!
If, however, Akhenaton finally came to the conclusion that Nefertiti, for all her beauty, was not going to give him a male heir, but he was able to produce male children through Kiya, it may be that she was banished simply in order to give a greater role to Kiya, the mother of the heir apparent. We don't know this, of course, and there are no inscriptions that would support such a suggestion - but who can tell what may turn up when the next demolished temple is reconstructed?
© Kendall K. Down 2009
