Wet-nurse Wealth
French archæologists working in the Saqqara necropolis have just announced the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun‘s wet-nurse, a woman called Maya. The team which has uncovered this latest tomb has made a number of other significant finds in their area of the necropolis, which adds credence to the announcement.
The discovery raises a number of interesting questions about the life and times of the boy-king who is probably the best-known of all the Egyptian pharaohs thanks to the discovery of his intact tomb by Howard Carter, in one of archaeology's most romantic stories.Tutankhamun‘s body was in very poor condition when Howard Carter finally opened his solid gold coffin and although it has been examined pathologically on a number of occasions, the evidence is still equivocal. We cannot be sure, for example, how the young man died, nor how old he was at the time of his death.
It is usually assumed that he was about 18 years of age and that he died of natural causes, but he could have been older and a mark on the back of his head may point to a violent death, though whether that was through accident or assassination no-one knows. It is also assumed that he is the son of Akhenaton, the heretic king who established his capital at Akhetataon, now known as Tel el-Amarna. It is less certain who his mother was: it is thought now that she was a secondary wife by the name of Tiya.
Whoever she was, however, she did not undertake the menial task of feeding her own child. Even in modern times, this was a duty often avoided by upper-class women who resented the demands upon their time and — possibly — the physical effects of breast-feeding upon their figures. To escape these "problems" wealthy women employed wet-nurses, a woman who had recently given birth and who had plenty of milk. Archaeologists have discovered contracts drawn up with wet-nurses, specifying which breast was given to which child or in what order the babies were to be fed. Of course, the poorer classes also used wet-nurses, though this was in the case where the natural mother died in child-birth or, through malnutrition or some other problem was unable to feed her baby herself. Which of these reasons applied in the case of Tiya and Tutankhamun we do not know, but social reasons are the most likely.
One thing is certain, and that is that very few wet-nurses could afford a fine, private tomb in so desirable a location as Saqqara, close to the Step Pyramid of Djoser and the magical tomb of his architect, Imhotep. Of course, it is possible that Maya was a wealthy or noble woman who regarded it as a privilege to be allowed to suckle a royal infant, just as French nobles once vied for the privilege of handing Louis XIV his socks or emptying his washbasin. More likely Maya was honorary wet-nurse, the woman in charge of the royal nursery. The actual physical wet-nurse was probably one or more well-endowed slave girls.
In either case it is the origin of Maya that is of interest. For reasons of piety or patriotism, most people choose to be buried near their ancestral homes, so unless religious factors predominated in her choice of Saqqara, Maya probably came from the north of Egypt. The 18th Dynasty, however, came from Luxor in the south of the country. Tutankhamun‘s genetic origins, therefore, were from Upper Egypt. It was commonly believed, however, that the woman who fed a child had a great inŸuence upon it and that a baby imbibed customs, habits and affiliations along with the milk. Was a woman from Lower Egypt deliberately chosen for this important post in order to emphasise the unity of the Two Lands?
Of course, it would help us assess these speculations if only we knew more details about other royal infants: were wet-nurses common? Were they usually from the other end of the country? We would love to know. Thanks to the Amarna Letters, it has usually been assumed that Akhenaton was too taken up with his religious reforms to concern himself with issues outside Egypt — or even outside the narrow horizons of his new capital city. If Maya was indeed the wet-nurse for one of Akhenaton‘s sons, and if she really did come from the north of Egypt, it may betray a sharper political awareness than is usually credited to the unwordly Heretic King.
