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- [00:01]
Anita Arnan
If you want access to bonus episodes Reading lists for every series of Empire a chat community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
- [00:20]
William Dalrymple
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- [02:25]
Anita Arnan
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.
- [02:45]
William Dalrymple
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 Arnan.
- [03:07]
Anita Arnan
And me, William Dalrymple. And our guest today is the curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum, author of Brief Ancient Egypt, of ancient Egypt and 50 discoveries, and of the magnificent golden mummies of Egypt, Dr. Campbell Price. Take a bow.
- [03:23]
Dr. Campbell Price
Hello again. Hi.
- [03:25]
William Dalrymple
Hello again. Hello again. Listen, so, 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 disc of King Tut's tomb. We're gonna 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 gonna talk about the boy king himself. So can we start right at the very beginning? Let's. I mean, it seems like a really basic question, but it isn't straightforward. It becomes quite contested. Who were his parents?
- [03:57]
Dr. Campbell Price
Oh, well, Tutankhamun, 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.
- [04:09]
Anita Arnan
We're just getting a flavour of that between you and Aidan.
- [04:12]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yes. There's. Yeah. Hotly contested in the pages of journals, the identity of Tutankhamun's parents. So as you said in your introduction, he is extremely famous. He's probably the most famous of Egyptian kings. But we assume, based on relatively few bits of evidence, that his father is a chap called Akhenaten, who we've been
- [04:37]
Anita Arnan
dwelling on at some length in this series.
- [04:40]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yes, but while that's. I would say that's fairly assured, the identity of his mother is not. And as we'll say, even doing DNA tests, because there are lots of bodies around actual bodies, not just historical inscriptions. Even with the bodies, we're not quite sure. So probably the. Of Akhenaten, a big religious reformer and an unknown woman.
- [05:03]
Anita Arnan
And he had. Akhenaten had, like all pharaohs, a number of wives. So it's not entirely surprising that this should be contested.
- [05:10]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yes, exactly. His chief wife, Nefertiti, who listeners will have heard of, no doubt. Her bust is in Berlin. She seems to be his favored wife. I mean, she appears in almost all the monuments. But as you say, the king of Egypt had multiple sexual partners.
- [05:27]
William Dalrymple
Okay, but there is a question, though, because, I mean, we're quite progressed since the days when we wrapped bodies in. In bandages. Could we. What? You mentioned DNA. Have there not been DNA studies? Could they not just definitively tell us, who's the mummy? Who? The mummy. You know, to put it that way.
- [05:44]
Dr. Campbell Price
Irresistible. Irresistible to say that short answer, no. Because DNA degrades with time. It is very easy to contaminate. And you've got to remember when these bodies were unwrapped, they were handled. I mean, the ones that were unwrapped and put in museums were, in a way, the lucky ones. They were ground down for medicine, for paint, to make paper. Imagine having your fish and chips from paper made of mummified ancient Egyptians. There's lots of contamination, so it's actually very difficult to be sure. And even if you do extract DNA positively, actually confirming the nature of the relationship, a genetic relationship is very difficult indeed.
- [06:26]
Anita Arnan
But most scholars today seem to opt, on balance, not definitively, but on balance, for Nefertiti as the mum.
- [06:35]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yes, you're looking very.
- [06:36]
Anita Arnan
You're looking not at all convinced by that.
- [06:38]
William Dalrymple
Same way he's seeing the face of a sceptical face. That's what he's doing, isn't he?
- [06:42]
Dr. Campbell Price
So often in Egyptology, it depends who you talk to. I mean, I'm a great believer in the work of Professor Aidan Dodson. And on balance, he opts for Nefertiti as the mother of Tutankhamun. But another name is a minor wife called Kia, and there are iconographic reasons where she does seem to play a role in the court of Akhenaten, but then disappears. So possibly she is the mother, but we cannot know. And surprisingly, people think, we've got the tomb, we've got all the stuff. Surely there are loads of writings about his parents. There are not. There's a shirt, a quite touching shirt, that enshrouds his jackal statue of the God Anubis, which has the name of Akhenaten, his father, on it. Otherwise.
- [07:24]
William Dalrymple
Otherwise we just don't know. Okay, so we'll take all the caveats. Let's take all the caveats. One thing we do know, and you know, it's one of those really dwelled on 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?
- [07:42]
Anita Arnan
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.
- [07:49]
William Dalrymple
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?
- [08:04]
Anita Arnan
So, I mean, maybe. Yeah, maybe.
- [08:07]
William Dalrymple
Oh, my goodness. What do we know here, Campbell? Okay, sort it all out for us.
- [08:11]
Dr. Campbell Price
Right, okay. So first off, we must acknowledge the dreadful state that Tutankhamun's body was in after Howard Carter and his team finished with it.
- [08:19]
Anita Arnan
They saw it up, didn't they?
- [08:20]
Dr. Campbell Price
Tutankhamun was found glued into his inner solid gold coffin, covered with wonderful artifacts which had to be extracted. And so Howard Carter and the team totally atomized him, decapitated him, tore him limb from limb to get him out of this black.
- [08:38]
Anita Arnan
That's literally what we're talking about. He's stuck in the thing and they have to just pull.
- [08:42]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yeah. So all of that contaminates and compromises the nature of what we would now want to analyze.
- [08:50]
Anita Arnan
And they weren't wearing rubber gloves and stuff.
- [08:52]
Dr. Campbell Price
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 Tutankhamun, he comes at the end of the line. 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
- [09:21]
Anita Arnan
contrast to other royal families.
- [09:23]
Dr. Campbell Price
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 artifacts 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.
- [10:34]
William Dalrymple
So I completely love this. It's, you know, basically give the guy a break. He might have been Fine, yeah.
- [10:40]
Anita Arnan
It sounds as if he had several breaks by the time her Carter had gone about.
- [10:43]
William Dalrymple
Well, quite well, Kamal. Let's talk about maybe things that we know a bit more about. So he's born into the most revolutionary moment in ancient Egyptian history. This time when his father rips up the pantheon of gods and says there is only one and that is the sun disk, the Aten. Just remind us or paint us a picture of first of all what his name tells us because, you know, we know him as Tutankhamun, but that's not how he started off, is it?
- [11:12]
Dr. Campbell Price
No, he's born Tutankh Aten or Tutankhuatn. So as you said, that is the sun disk, the God, the deity who his father favours. So his father is born Amenhotep. So a very traditional name, Amenhotep son of Amenhotep. And then at some point early on in his reign, as you said, he simply rips up the rule book, moves the court to a really desolate part of Middle Egypt which he says is not sacred to any God or any goddess, and sets up shop completely afresh. So Tutankhamun is born into this moment. He's given the name Tutankuaten, which means something like the living image of the sun disc, which is very appropriate for the time, which will change in a kind of counter revolutionary moment. But he must grow up at the site of what we today refer to as Tel el Amarna. This is the site in ancient times called Akhet Aten, not to be confused with Ak en Aten, that's the name of the king, that's Tut's dad. Achet Aten means horizon of the Aten. This is the capital city where Akhenaten basically says he's never going to leave. So Tutankhamun as a boy, as a prince will have had a very comfortable existence as it went. And presumably some hopes were pinned on him because he was the male child of the reigning king.
- [12:32]
Anita Arnan
Now Kamba, when we go to Berlin to see Nefertiti's bust in the room beside it, there's all these gorgeous pictures of his daughters.
- [12:40]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yes.
- [12:40]
Anita Arnan
And there's a whole beautiful set of cases with these very hard stone images of these unbelievably beautiful girls with slightly odd shaped, slightly alien. Alien shape, I love those. And what's the stone called? Quartzite. Is it quartzite?
- [12:58]
Dr. Campbell Price
Quartzite is favoured because it's this reddish, orangish color, as you've seen. Solar, it's got solar associations, but something to say about the Boomin sculpture of the royal family. It is unusual that the children of a monarch are so memorialized, so commemorated, so materialized in stone. Because, remember, Akhenaten closed all the temples. He said, right, there's only one God, essentially, the Aten, and we are only going to worship him. So all the other gods are totally obsolete. So all the temples are going to get closed. I'm moving to a new capital. So the sculptors who trained under his father, the traditional Amenhotep iii, who were producing statues, I've got nothing else to
- [13:41]
Anita Arnan
do but do lots of images of the royal family.
- [13:43]
Dr. Campbell Price
Well, previously there were lots of images of gods and people in ancient Egypt like statuary. So the sculptors are just told, right, in the absence of any gods, you can't sculpt a statue of the Aten, the sun disc. Really, he's the God in the sky. Just loads and loads and loads of images in relief and in sculpture. In the round of Akhenaten, his chief wife, Nefertiti, she seems to see off any other wives and a whole tribe of girls, but no Tut, six daughters who can only. All have been alive together briefly because there's at least one death pretty soon. As was probably not uncommon to an ancient Egyptian family, having six children was often accompanied by high infant mortality.
- [14:34]
William Dalrymple
What we haven't done, Campbell, is actually put a date on this happy family tableau minus Tut. So, I mean, can you just tell people what we are talking about here?
- [14:44]
Dr. Campbell Price
So we're talking about the 14th century BCE. So leading up to about 1350 is around the reign of Tutankhamun. 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 skeptical about the concept of empire, I should say on a podcast called Empire in Ancient Egypt, but there's definitely reading 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 Tutankhamun inherit this, and some would say Akhenaten kind of squanders it.
- [15:34]
Anita Arnan
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 Amarna. And at that point we assume that, what Tut is a child of eight or nine, and his world presumably goes into spin at this Point.
- [15:53]
Dr. Campbell Price
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 he'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 Smene Kare, 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.
- [16:52]
William Dalrymple
So he doesn't have his father anymore. He's just, you know, been living in an age of enormous tumult. Nobody's seen anything like this, where the gods themselves have been, you know, destroyed, if you like. He's just a boy. Two very powerful adults come into his life, the muscle and the brain. The political fixer and the military commander. So tell us about Ay and Horemheb. Who are they and what part do they play in his life?
- [17:22]
Dr. Campbell Price
So we probably know rather less about Ay. 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 skeptical about that myself. He takes on the slightly misunderstood, mysterious title of God's father. And if you're the God's father, you could say maybe, I don't know, you're the father in law of the king. You're kind of acting as a regent. But he appears in Tutankhamun's shadow pretty much at the same scale as the king, which is a great presumption. If you show yourself as the same scale visually as the pharaoh of Egypt, you must be someone quite important. So he's hanging around. And then there's Horemheb, who we know from his. His extensive and very beautifully decorated tomb at the site of Saqqara, which he was preparing before he eventually became king after Akhenaten's death. He is the general. He is in charge of the military, the Army.
- [18:23]
Anita Arnan
He's the Sisi of the day.
- [18:25]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yes, and Sisi has been compared to him for sure, the current president of Egypt. And he's interesting. I find Horemheb interesting because he makes great play, which might seem surprising for a military guy with being able to write. He's got the skills of writing and of organizing.
- [18:47]
Anita Arnan
Is that unusual for a general?
- [18:49]
Dr. Campbell Price
I think so, yeah. They don't put great emphasis on their penmanship, but he has statues showing him as a writer.
- [18:56]
William Dalrymple
There's a. Yeah, okay, so he's literary, which is unusual, but also the fact that he still maintains his position as a commander of the army because, let's face it, Tutankhamun's dad wasn't really, really that fussed about the army, was he? I mean, we know he neglected starvation around him with all those begging letters that we have from the Amarna tablets, which, by the way, we've done some really lovely episodes on, if you want to go back and hear in depth stuff about both Amarna and indeed Akhenaten. But tell us, I mean, how is it that he still remains this huge sort of muscular figure when the father wasn't really that bothered about armies?
- [19:35]
Dr. Campbell Price
Well, I think the key to Horemheb's success is that he's probably in charge of the army and if there's an issue, they would bump back. And that's been echoed in the more recent history of Egypt itself. But these two courtiers clearly are the ones that are advising, as you said, the small boy of 7, 8, 9. And when he comes to the throne, they must have their own interests. But it's worth emphasizing that Tutankhamun, even as a boy, is the son of a previous king, so he has the legitimacy of that position.
- [20:11]
Anita Arnan
So are we assuming that this little kid, in the aftermath of this catastrophic revolution that's gone wrong and everyone is peddling back frantically that he's a puppet which Horemheb is controlling, he's pulling the strings or.
- [20:25]
Dr. Campbell Price
Not necessarily, not necessarily. There is really the belief that this child, especially once he is the pharaoh, he's the king of Egypt, that he is divine. The advisors, Ay and Horemheb can claim whatever they want and may have this kind of command of the realpolitik, but they are not anointed living gods. So I think you've got to imagine there could be a petulant little nine year old saying, I want it this way and you've got to follow what the kid wants. But Jin Khamen is in a moment where he must know there is pressure for counter revolution. So it's about managing that transition back to tradition in some ways.
- [21:09]
William Dalrymple
Okay, so I'm interested on whose idea the Counter Reformation is the putting back of the gods on their pedestal. Because, I mean, at 9, can you really imagine that a little boy would say, you know, what we need? What we need in Egypt is our gods. I mean, could that possibly have come from a child?
- [21:27]
Dr. Campbell Price
I mean, it depends, you know, who has an influence on him personally. We know of a royal tutor who doesn't seem to come to much, a guy called Senefer. So if you have that role of being a teacher, a tutor in some way rearing the young future or current king, then you are in incredibly powerful because you could influence this child's thinking. But there must be an atmosphere in the aftermath of Akhenaten's death that the experiment has gone wrong. And so it's about managing, as I say, that transition back to orthodoxy.
- [22:05]
William Dalrymple
Now we kind of Willi, do you remember we talked about the fact that even though Akhenaten was busy smashing up any mention of any of the other gods, people still hid there little statues of little hippos in their homes. And I suppose in desperation, when times are hard and that man's gone, you can pretty much clamour for what you like. So maybe following the tide rather than having the idea himself.
- [22:28]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yeah, I think leaning into what must have been, I mean, a fairly common thought that the traditional gods of Egypt had existed for thousands of years. And Akhenaten's experiment seems to have pertained mainly to the elite, to the court surrounding the king. So when the king disappears, you know, the court think what is in our best interests. So yes, you're right. People in their homes, we know of amulets that show all the old traditional gods. And there are economic reasons that closing all the temples, which are huge hubs for agricultural administration, if you do that, you kind of complicate the whole system of taxation of, you know, governance of the country. So there are good reasons probably to revert those things that maybe a 9 year old wouldn't understand.
- [23:21]
Anita Arnan
Campbell, when we were talking about the fall of Amano, we dwelt briefly on the restoration. Stella? Yes. Does this date from this important document? Does this date from Tutankhamun's reign? Do we think that he might have put it out?
- [23:35]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yes, although it's later claimed, it's edited to suggest that it was later kings that did it. I mean, yeah, Tutankhamun in a way, was relatively insignificant. But one of the, if not the most significant thing he did was the Counter Reformation, the counter revolution, the restoration of the old gods. This is a very significant historical document, but it should be seen in the context of the fact that any new power, any new king, says that everything that went before wasn't quite right. And I've restored things back to the way they should be. So that is a literary trope. It is used hundreds of years before. So Tutankhamun, in a way, is following that. But the language that's used in that inscription, we know of at least two copies of it from Karnak, the home of the traditional God Amun, Amun Ra. The language in it is quite emotive and you could imagine people felt pretty disenfranchised. And so the king is doing probably what most people want.
- [24:38]
William Dalrymple
So, I mean, what we should say is the Restoration, Stella, that we're talking about, it's a deeply interesting political document, as Campbell says. And the kind of thing, Campbell, that you're talking about, the things that it says, it describes temples fallen into ruin, the gods shrines overgrown with weeds, a land in confusion, the divine world inaccessible. So, you know, as you say, I mean, could it be. I mean, because it is so hyperbolic, more propaganda than anything else. I mean, how do you rate it?
- [25:09]
Dr. Campbell Price
Right. Well, okay, so I don't like to use the term propaganda for ancient Egypt because it has a set of assumptions in the more modern world that probably aren't appropriate. Most people, you know, 95% people can't read. So any statement that's written is directed first and foremost to the gods themselves, a metaphysical audience we totally underestimate. And then the few elite people invested with any power to convince them that what the state, such as it is, is doing is the right thing. So I don't think it's propaganda necessarily for the populace.
- [25:50]
Anita Arnan
It's a fascinating thought just to dwell on it. So all the stuff that we're reading that we assume people can read and is going out there is actually a lot of it's directed at the gods. It's not directed at human beings at all.
- [26:01]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yes, exactly. So I think that's important to bear in mind in a pre modern setting. But you're right, the writing is emotional in a way, and it does break kind of formulaic customs, although the tropes are echoed from centuries before.
- [26:18]
Anita Arnan
And it's very like that Shakespeare sonnet, Bare Ruined Choirs talking about the fallen monasteries of the Reformation. And this is the same sort of.
- [26:26]
William Dalrymple
Yes, just sing the tune, Willi. Because you've got, you know, another extract from it. I'm sure people want to know what it says.
- [26:32]
Anita Arnan
My John Gielgud voice coming up.
- [26:34]
William Dalrymple
Here we go.
- [26:35]
Anita Arnan
His Majesty drove out disorder throughout the two lands and justice was established in its place. Now, when His Majesty appeared as king, the temples of the gods and goddesses, from Elephantine down to the marshes of the Delta, had fallen into ruin. Their shrines had become desolate. The gods turned their backs upon this land. If an army was sent to Jujahi, which is Palestine, to extend the frontiers of Egypt, no success came to them. If one beseeched any God, he would not come. Hearts were weak in bodies, for what had been made was destroyed.
- [27:20]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, I mean, it's poetry really, isn't it? It's got that lilting quality to it. So, I mean, again, I'm also obsessed with this idea that this is a message up rather than a message out. But in his life, you know, what he's actually surrounded by. I mean, does he marry? I mean, there's always such a pressure at a young age to marry, particularly if you have. So, I mean, that to me, fascinating. It's a message up rather than out, but in the out and about and around him. Tell me, you know, is he with somebody? Is he in love? I mean, how has that all worked out? Is he happy? What's going on, Campbell, in actual life?
- [27:58]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yeah, well, we. Surely this kind of historical detail is inaccessible. We do know he marries his sister or half sister, a lady called Ankhes en PA Aten, or a girl, really. She might be a bit older than him, but she changes her name to Ankhes en PA PA Amun, as he changes his name to Tutank Amun. So they drop the Aten and they move back to the capital, to Memphis, and they start building at Thebes. So this is expected that a young king will marry a relatively close female relative. Maybe it was for love or affection, more likely just for dynastic reasons. And she features in a number of items from his tomb. She's named, she's depicted in various ways. So from the get go, I think you don't just get a king on his own, you get a great royal wife, you get a queen as well.
- [28:58]
William Dalrymple
Let's take a break. Join us after the break where. I mean, it all sounds marvellous. A new way of doing things that is the old way of doing things. Everybody happy. They've got their gods back. A man married, young boy married to somebody who can build an empire with. Doesn't quite go to plan, though. Join us after the break.
- [29:21]
Anita Arnan
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- [30:32]
Dr. Campbell Price
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Anita Arnan
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Dr. Campbell Price
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- [32:03]
William Dalrymple
Welcome back Campbell. So you're somebody who thinks particularly carefully about objects and the physical things that survive from the ancient world. Tell us a little bit about the people who made these beautiful things that we now flock to museums to see. Who were they who used these objects?
- [32:19]
Dr. Campbell Price
Well, I think it's important to say that those craftsmen, those artisans, were specialists, not just in the sense of knowing how to work materials and specialists in certain techniques, but also religious specialists. So if you were crafting the statue of the king or a statue of a God, you had to be someone who was initiated into not just a kind of trade guild, but into the initiations and the mysteries of the gods. And we know around the time of the restoration, Tutankhamun, and a couple of reigns later, there are craftsmen who boast about being initiated and going around and restoring, putting back in order all the temples and all the stacks that had been smashed up by Akhenaten and his agents. So you've got to imagine there would be a lot of work going about for a specialist stonemason, craftsman to set right again what Akhenaten had cast asunder.
- [33:20]
Anita Arnan
And one of the things that appears in surprising number in that tomb, when you look behind all these lovely mummies and all the gold and everything, there's a lot of walking sticks. Now, what's going on there now?
- [33:34]
Dr. Campbell Price
Much has been made of this. So Tutankhamun's tomb, remember, is the only royal tomb of the New Kingdom period found intact. So everything seems exceptional because we've got it, it survives. And Howard Carter, as I said in another episode, was uniquely placed to know what might be in a tomb because he'd found lots of fragments of these kinds of objects. And it's really only been in the last 50 or so years, with more medicalized, some might say clinicized, treatments of Tutankhamun, that focus has been on his perceived disability. And so from this narrative springs the assumption, oh, he had lots of sticks and staves because he needed them.
- [34:21]
William Dalrymple
Let's spell it out, because, I mean, you know, I've read things about his club foot, his curved spine, his weak bones, his sort of rickety legs, you know, all of that kind of thing that actually these were walking sticks because this kid needed help to walk.
- [34:34]
Dr. Campbell Price
I'm skeptical of this.
- [34:36]
Anita Arnan
You're skeptical of quite a lot.
- [34:37]
Dr. Campbell Price
Calm.
- [34:37]
William Dalrymple
Yes, you are.
- [34:38]
Dr. Campbell Price
Well, that's the fun part, being an Egyptologist to pick apart your colleague's papers. So clearly, in ancient Egyptian iconography, holding a big stick means you can beat other less important people up. Having a staff is a sign of authority. So Tutankhamen is a king. One of my Favorite objects from the tomb is a stick with an inscription that's been added saying, cut by the king's own hand.
- [35:08]
Anita Arnan
Really?
- [35:09]
Dr. Campbell Price
So a flunkey has added this. You know, the king's gone out hunting or whatever in the marshes and cut this down himself. So these are signs of authority. The iconography shows Tutankhamun as the king of the time. There is no implication, really, that he needs to use a stick any more than any other king.
- [35:29]
William Dalrymple
Yeah.
- [35:29]
Anita Arnan
I mean, quite the contrary. We see him in his chariot using a bow. He's this sort of heroic, sort of young God in some of the pictures.
- [35:37]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yeah. There's no reason to suppose he didn't actually go off to active warfare in some kind of foray. The presence of the sticks has been mapped onto perceived evidence of decrepitude of the body. But this is highly subjective. Not everyone agrees on it. You know, it was suggested at some point Oi. May have had a club foot. Again, the jury is out on that.
- [36:00]
Anita Arnan
I thought that was settled. That's not settled at all.
- [36:02]
Dr. Campbell Price
No, no, I don't think it's settled.
- [36:04]
William Dalrymple
I also thought it went even further than that, Campbell, that, you know, Marfan syndrome, which is this, Scully. Oh, look at your face.
- [36:11]
Anita Arnan
Campbell's not buying this at all. No. Very skeptical.
- [36:14]
William Dalrymple
Let me just say what Marfan syndrome is. There's a very specific shape of their head that is produced by Marfan, which they thought his father might have had as well, which influenced the art aesthetic of the alien chic, as I like to call it.
- [36:27]
Dr. Campbell Price
The alien chic.
- [36:28]
William Dalrymple
Will. He finds it very beautiful.
- [36:29]
Anita Arnan
I find it very beautiful. You keep looking, thinking it's E.T.
- [36:31]
William Dalrymple
i don't like it at all. Yes. I think it's weird. But you're saying no.
- [36:35]
Dr. Campbell Price
I'm saying no. I'm saying the aesthetics. I agree, William. They are beautiful, and they're of the time. They're highly stylistic, and they emphasize the godliness and the separateness of royalty. You cannot diagnose someone based on their appearance on an Egyptian relief or a statue. That is just a fantasy. Fantasy.
- [36:57]
Anita Arnan
So
- [37:00]
Dr. Campbell Price
actually, the evidence is pretty equivocal.
- [37:03]
Anita Arnan
This is all complete revelation. I thought this was settled, and absolutely, they were all inbred, that they'd gone weird because they were too many cousins marrying each other for generation after generation, and he had curvature of the spine and fell off his chariot and all the rest of it. None of this. You don't buy it.
- [37:20]
William Dalrymple
This podcast is going to lead to a herd of Egyptologists armed with walking sticks coming for Campbell. I'M just, I'm pred. It is written in the sand. This may well happen. Can we talk about some of the other things that may be less controversial in this one? Because he had toys, he had, you know, sort of, you know, charming childhood things.
- [37:40]
Anita Arnan
But I know he's shaking his head. I'm afraid he needs a. No, no.
- [37:45]
Dr. Campbell Price
There are no toys, no boomerangs.
- [37:47]
William Dalrymple
Oh, my goodness.
- [37:49]
Dr. Campbell Price
This is a really, really important point and it's quite a sinister and quite pernicious and persistent idea of ancient Egypt that. But things that we don't understand and if they're small, they get labelled as toys. Ancient Egyptian experiences of childhood were different in construction. I think more interesting is the things that were in Tutankhamun's tomb, like heirlooms. There's a lock of his, probably grandmother's, maybe great grandmother's hair, Queen T. That's fascinating that he has that.
- [38:22]
Anita Arnan
The Victorians like carrying locks of their grandfather's and grandmother's hairs around with them in little bracelets. It's only a fashion that's gone out in the last hundred years.
- [38:32]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yeah. And there are ritual religious reasons you might want to have that material in your tomb. But more interesting than an interpretation of toys is the fact that there are objects which were used by a child. So child sized sandals or child sized furniture, which must be because if you believe the king is a living God, anything which comes into contact with his body is by association sacred, so it has to be kept.
- [39:03]
William Dalrymple
Okay, okay.
- [39:04]
Dr. Campbell Price
So if you imagine Ramesses II lived till his 90s, his tomb is massive, partly because he needed to have all of his wardrobe kept. And there's also another sense in which if a magician, we know this happened, if a magician, ill intentioned magician, got a hold of one of the king's personal possessions, they could essentially do black magic on him.
- [39:27]
Anita Arnan
That's still very much a thing in Africa today, isn't it? You've got to hide your toenails and stuff when you go to Kenya and hotels because people do all sorts of stuff on it. Yeah.
- [39:37]
Dr. Campbell Price
So keeping all of that material together in the tomb was a way of keeping the king safe for eternity. So I don't think there's any definitive evidence of there being toys. There are games that he used as a young man, there are musical instruments, there are weapons, there's a writing kit with one of his sister's names on, which is quite charming. Back to the idea of female literacy. Clearly that was something that was present in the royal family at least. There are little insights into Life. But most of the material in the tomb is about the transformation of Tutankhamun into a God. Rather than sentimental stuff about his life,
- [40:14]
William Dalrymple
I just wanted to make the observation, not since Peter Frankapin have we been
- [40:18]
Anita Arnan
beaten so much on the podcast.
- [40:22]
William Dalrymple
Not so much since the immortal words of the great Peter Frankopan. You lot don't know what you're talking about.
- [40:28]
Dr. Campbell Price
I wouldn't go that far.
- [40:29]
Anita Arnan
We gotta show this to Anita's mum because she always likes it when Anita's put down.
- [40:33]
William Dalrymple
She loves it when we get beaten up on a podcast. She absolutely loves it completely.
- [40:38]
Anita Arnan
So you don't like Anita's toys, but you presumably do go with the fact that there are rather sadly, even tragically, two fetuses.
- [40:49]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yes. This is a sad but probably not uncommon fact of life in the ancient world. Although those two stillborn children are not named, which is interesting in itself, they are given very careful treatment. Their bodies have been mummified and, like their father, buried in coffins.
- [41:10]
Anita Arnan
How many months old are they?
- [41:13]
Dr. Campbell Price
They are both. Yeah. Pre. Pre birth. Less than nine months in age. And they are presumably the children of Tutankhamun and Ankhes and Era Mun, because we don't know of another wife Tutankhamun had. I guess he didn't live very long. He only reigned for nine years, a fact we know principally from his wine cellar because the highest attested date on the wine is year nine. So that's how we know Tutankhamun was on the throne for nine years.
- [41:41]
Anita Arnan
Amazing how much the wine comes into the story of hdbj, whether we've had it when we were doing Gaza about all the wine being sent south from Gaza under seal. We come into it again on all these episodes in tomorrow night. It's a major form of evidence.
- [41:54]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yes, yeah, yeah. Because labeling the wine is pretty important. Labeling containers generally is a very useful thing the ancient Egyptians did for future historians. So, yes, the two fetuses seem to be the only known children of Tutankhamun and his wife. And then when he dies, his wife is left alone and there is good evidence of her appealing to foreign powers to help her out.
- [42:22]
Anita Arnan
Would that be regarded as traitorous? Because we've come across these letters before. She writes to the Hittites.
- [42:27]
William Dalrymple
Yeah.
- [42:28]
Dr. Campbell Price
The ancient Egyptians don't seem to have liked the idea of Egyptian royal women marrying non Egyptian royals.
- [42:34]
Anita Arnan
Yeah. We get lots of women sent to marry male pharaohs.
- [42:38]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yes.
- [42:39]
Anita Arnan
But we don't summon foreign princes to come and sleep with sacred Egyptian women.
- [42:45]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yeah. To supplant the sacred male line of Horus kings, Egyptian Horus kings, would. Yeah. Not have been viewed positively.
- [42:53]
William Dalrymple
Now, fully accepting the fact that you're going to beat me up, can we talk? Dare I bring up the fact that, you know, we've talked about the death of the children, can we talk about the death of Tutankhamun? Because there is a thesis around. Campbell didn't just make it up. Campbell. That he was murdered. Now make the move.
- [43:15]
Dr. Campbell Price
There's been a murder.
- [43:17]
William Dalrymple
Yes. Now. Now you're going to tell me. No, he died very happy, old man. How did he die?
- [43:25]
Dr. Campbell Price
He died a young man. I mean, that's all we can say, really. Lots of theories about this. Again, difficult to say because the evidence is compromised. Not only did Carter extract him so violently from the coffin, but subsequently, between the 1930s and the 1960s, some rummaging had gone on and basically the front of Tutankhamun's ribcage had been removed. So. So a theory that is based on major trauma to the chest is difficult to prove because the evidence isn't there. So lots of theories. Was he munched by a hippo or did he die in a chariot accident, which people tend to make much of as if he was a boy racer. In fact, we know from descriptions, from formal religious descriptions of previous tombs that the royal burial included a chariot hall. So a New Kingdom king would be buried with chariots. That's just a standard thing. It's not that Tutankhamun was particularly.
- [44:33]
Anita Arnan
You come with your garage into the new world.
- [44:36]
Dr. Campbell Price
No, exactly. It's not the royal mews transferred into the afterlife. So you've got to imagine. Also, specialists in chariotry have pointed out that you couldn't make an Egyptian chariot go very fast, so it would be a stately thing, as we see with Akhenaten and Nefertiti. They're snogging in the chariot at Amarna because there are no processions of gods, so you have to watch the king and queen necking instead. So I don't think he died in a chariot accident because it couldn't have gone fast enough. He doesn't seem to have had a club foot, so it's not that he just wobbled off.
- [45:10]
Anita Arnan
That was the theory, that he had a club foot and he fell backwards.
- [45:14]
Dr. Campbell Price
We'll never know for sure. It's fun to speculate. I remember being at a book festival and talking about Tutankhamun and I said, as a joke, maybe he'd been drinking before. And then the next day there was a tabloid newspaper Said Tutankhamun died from drink driving. It's just nonsense.
- [45:32]
William Dalrymple
And Willi, you were sort of, you know, scratching your head about the hippo. I've heard the hippo thing, but we should say. And those of you who have grown up in lands of hippos, they're bloody violent.
- [45:42]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yes. The most dangerous animal in Africa.
- [45:44]
William Dalrymple
Still, can we then talk about the woman who. Or the girl who is left a widow now because she's still very young and she hasn't got a living child that I'm assuming, is gonna make you pretty damn vulnerable.
- [45:56]
Anita Arnan
We have her image, don't we? There are pictures of him on the throne with her standing beside her.
- [46:01]
Dr. Campbell Price
That is the same girl, Ankessena Mun. So she's on various objects in the tomb, but no, there are no surviving children. So if she had had a son, of course, she could be the queen regent and that could work out. Well, we've got precedent for that. But there's this extraordinary text from the deeds of Supliliuma.
- [46:19]
Anita Arnan
We love that name. We might even ask you to say it again.
- [46:25]
Dr. Campbell Price
Very un. Egyptian sounding. So the queen of Egypt, which is. I mean, based on evidence, is likely to be, because of the reference to the king's name to be Ankhesinaman. His wife, his widow writes saying to a foreign king, please send a son. I don't want to marry a servant of mine. And so whether this was traitorous behaviour or not, she's desperate and it seems that a son is sent, but he's murdered on the way.
- [46:53]
Anita Arnan
Murdered en route.
- [46:54]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yeah.
- [46:55]
Anita Arnan
By who? This is death on the Nile all over again.
- [46:59]
Dr. Campbell Price
Well, a dash Vagatha Christie, for sure. I mean, you can, given what we said in this episode, there are people hanging around. There is Ay and Horemheb.
- [47:09]
William Dalrymple
There are suspects, the brain and the brawn, who, you know, it's not in their interest to have another king when they've been, you know, access to all the power.
- [47:19]
Dr. Campbell Price
No, no, exactly. To supplant people who may not be of royal blood, but who in some ways maybe think that they've earned the position. And it's interesting that I can only rule for a couple of years, two or three years doesn't last long. He may be the servant that Ankhesinamun's afraid of, because there is a ring, a basil of a ring, which names Ankhesenamun and AI together. So maybe there is a brief marriage of convenience between the two of them for ancient Egypt in general, in this period in particular, we've got so much interesting detail and fragmentary evidence. So there are little bits that, you know, nudge your interpretation in a certain way. I mean, undoubtedly, Horemheb comes along and rules for well over. Well, probably over 20 years. So he's a success. He kind of stabilizes the country.
- [48:12]
Anita Arnan
We haven't said that clearly. He becomes the next pharaoh.
- [48:15]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yes, Horemheb does, in time, become the next pharaoh.
- [48:20]
Anita Arnan
So Ay gets into the bedchamber and Horemheb gets into the throne. That's even more complicated.
- [48:26]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yes. I mean, Ay 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 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.
- [49:12]
Anita Arnan
Campbell. I've got an urgent question here, though, because we know from previous episodes that a lot of the old Amarna crew are wheeked out of their and shoved into a sort of holding chamber, and their nice tombs are taken over and they're not given the honor that you'd expect from a pharaoh. How come Tutankhamun is left when Atenaten and Nefertiti are bundled into a great sort of chamber together with everyone else from that era?
- [49:43]
Dr. Campbell Price
Well, you're right. They're huighed. I think that's exactly the right word. Great word.
- [49:47]
Anita Arnan
It's a Billy Connolly word.
- [49:48]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yes. 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 Tutankhamun 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. So if your tomb is in the bottom of the valley, as Tutankhamun's was. It was covered over. Other kings build higher up on the hills, and the chippings from the tomb cover Tutankhamun's sepulcher. And then Tutankhamun, perhaps a benefit of his having been officially forgotten was that he was struck off lists. So if people were going round trying to find tombs, they wouldn't find him.
- [50:54]
William Dalrymple
In the spirit of my learned friend here, I have an urgent question. Okay, so now that he's been erased, it's an imperative question here, Campbell.
- [51:04]
Anita Arnan
Go for it, Anita.
- [51:05]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, so now that all of that Aman revolution never happened, now that he's erased every member of the family, even those who try to reverse it in the shape of Tutankhamun, do the people of Egypt prosper under this new non royal blooded regime that follows?
- [51:22]
Anita Arnan
It's a military regime, it's an Egyptian military general.
- [51:24]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yet again, difficult to know exactly how prosperity trickled down the social pyramid. But as far as stability of government goes, if you judge the prosperity of a country by the stability of the royal house, things do markedly improve because Horemheb makes plans. Although he doesn't have children of his own that we know of to inherit, he makes plans for a military colleague, Paramesu, who changes his name a bit to become Ramesses I. And Ramesses I is a living son, Seti, and probably a living grandson who becomes Ramses ii. So Horemheb has the foresight after a fairly successful reign of his own, to set up the next dynasty, dynasty 19.
- [52:09]
Anita Arnan
And they again are military colleagues, aren't they? They're generals.
- [52:12]
Dr. Campbell Price
Yeah, they're in the military together. And the military and the administration at that period are pretty close, and the religious hierarchy are pretty close. So things are stable. Strong and stable, you could say.
- [52:24]
Anita Arnan
So at the end of this period of confusion, Campbell, the Ramesses, who we all know, you go to Cairo, it's Ramesses Square, you know, they're the big. Often regarded as the golden age of ancient Egypt. So we are leaving this story with a very happy ending in a sense, anyway. Well, that's good. That's great. After all these disasters. Very nice. And Ramesses II famously is the only the Egyptian pet pharaoh with a passport, isn't he? He needed a passport to go to America.
- [52:58]
William Dalrymple
Oh, don't, don't start him off again. He just went supposedly with that sort of. And they all lived happily ever after. We're going to end this episode, Campbell. We're going to have you back there
- [53:09]
Anita Arnan
to destroy more of our theories.
- [53:13]
William Dalrymple
But I think this is wonderful. I think this is so, so useful and interesting. So Campbell, do come back because we're going to talk about about Tutmania, where the whole world was gripped with Egypt fever. So do come back for that. Dr. Campbell Price Brief Histories Ancient Egypt. It's published by Seven Dials and Ancient Egypt and 50 Discoveries, co authored with Stephanie Boonstra, and it's published by the Egypt Exploration Society. It's also available now. If you have loved Campbell as much as we have, join our club because you'll hear much more of him. Anyway, till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnhem, and
- [53:51]
Anita Arnan
goodbye from me, William Durimple.
- [54:02]
William Dalrymple
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