In his book, "The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt," Toby Wilkinson remarks, "Ancient Egypt seems to have been a civilization obsessed with death." However, he adds, "if we look more closely, it was not death itself that lay at the heart of the Egyptians' preoccupations, but rather the means of overcoming it." The tombs of Ancient Egypt, the most famous of all, which are surely the pyramids at Giza, were designed for the pharaoh's afterlife and, as such, were what Wilkinson calls "resurrection machines."
The awe-inspiring pyramids, the oldest and only surviving monuments of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, belonged to the Ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom (c. 2575-c. 2130 B.C.). In contrast, tombs of the Middle Kingdom (1938-c.1630 B.C.) near Thebes were externally unprepossessing, as the tombs themselves were sealed up within the sandstone cliffs of the Valley of the Kings, which despite its grandiose name is dry and dusty. Yet, internally, these tombs dazzle with their artistic splendor; indeed, the fact that the exquisite artwork on the walls of these tombs was never meant to see the light but to be interred for eternity seems almost a crime against creativity. Intertwined with these scenes are the hieroglyphic writings, this form being, alongside Arabic and Chinese calligraphy, surely one of the most artistic modes of expression ever created. Of all the many royal tombs in the valley, however, only one has held most of its precious grave goods intact into modern times, and that is the tomb of Tutankhamun.
At the beginning of October last year, I set out to visit a funerary monument connected to the Ancient Egyptian tomb of Tutankhamun. I did this not by traveling on a pleasure boat up the Nile but by taking the number 85 double-decker bus south of the Thames in the British capital, London. I had come to find Putney Vale Cemetery and the grave of the British Egyptologist Howard Carter, the discoverer of Tutankhamun's tomb.
Howard Carter (1874-1939) is a man whose achievements are so well-known that he requires no more than an overview here. Carter was already an established Egyptologist when he was taken on in 1909 by the British aristocrat Lord Carnarvon to excavate for him in Thebes. In their initial work together, Joyce Tyldesley relates that "their enthusiasm" remained "undaunted by a steady stream of unspectacular, but archaeologically satisfying, results." However, Carter was adamant in his belief that another royal tomb lay undiscovered in the valley, and the search for it began in earnest in 1917. It was, as Tyldesley notes, "a slow and expensive business" which Carnarvon decided to give up on in 1922. However, he fortunately financed one last short excavation season that year, for it was then that Carter discovered the site of the tomb of Tutankhamun (c.1341-1323 B.C., reign: 1333-1323 B.C.). Then, having uncovered the sealed door to the antechamber of the burial chamber, at what the Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley calls "the most exciting point in Egyptology," Carter broke a small hole through it and thrust a candle inside.
Upon seeing the grave goods it contained for the first time in thousands of years, Carter confesses to being "struck dumb with amazement." Carnarvon, worried by Carter's silence, asked if he could see anything, to which Carter famously replied, "Yes, wonderful things." The following day, this door was removed and Tyldesley reveals that Carter had on his hands "the most important collection of royal artifacts ever to be recovered from Egypt." Nearly three months passed before the burial chamber itself was entered, and a further year passed before Tutankhamun's iconic facemask in its golden glory was finally revealed. During this time, as John Romer notes, "by the sheer blaze of its gold, Tutankhamun's tomb turned the Valley into a bedlam" with crowds of eager visitors from around the world flocking to see it, and those who could not, keen to put the recent horrors of World War I behind them, showing excited interest in these "wonderful things." As such, Carter had sparked off a new bout of Egyptomania.
This brief synopsis explains why Howard Carter is a historically important figure. It does not, though, explain why, out of a great many famous people buried in London, it was his grave that I was drawn to last autumn. Here, therefore, I want to explain my personal interest in Carter. It is a mixture of great admiration and an interest I have in historical twists of fate.
For the man himself, Carter is, for me, an admirable figure of great will and drive who charted his own course in life. He had no formal education, but having been taught to draw by his artist father, Carter manifested such skill in this field that he was asked to go to Egypt at the still tender age of 17 to copy the inscriptions in a tomb. The fact that he accepted with alacrity speaks to his resolute nature.
It was as he lived and worked on the ground in the trying conditions of Egypt itself that Carter learned about the fascinating civilization of its ancient times, and the youth became a man. Carter's concern for accuracy and protecting the remains of Ancient Egypt is also evident even early in his career, and later in the long years in which his goal seemed to evade him; his unwillingness to give up speaks to his laudable perseverance.
Another factor to Carter interests me, as a long-term foreign resident of an Eastern Mediterranean country. There can be a perception of archaeologists that they are so obsessed with the past that they have little interest in the present. But, as I have hopefully demonstrated in my Famous Travellers to Türkiye series, archaeologists, especially when they are unassisted by people from their own countries, have to have a deep understanding of the countries in which they live and work, as an engagement with the local culture and language are absolute necessities to get their jobs done. Thus, as part of his autodidactic education, in addition to having learned how to read hieroglyphs, Carter also became a fluent Arabic speaker.
The historical twist of fate connected to Carter is now being examined. To understand it, though, first, it is necessary to examine the occupant of the tomb – Tutankhamun himself. In terms of the history of Ancient Egypt, as the Ancient Egyptians knew it, Tutankhamun would have cut very little of a figure, if anything at all. In extensive king lists, some monarchs always stand out while others do not. I want to be allowed to make a contextual comparison for my Turkish readers concerning the five Ottoman Sultans named Murad. In making this contextualization, I would like to stress that I am not a historian of the Ottoman Empire, although I am fairly well-read on it.
The first Murad (reign: 1360-1389) is the key figure in establishing the heartland of the empire in the Balkans and western Anatolia. The second Murad (reign: 1421-44, 1446-51) played an essential role in restoring that heartland to its former glory in the wake of the chaos caused by the temporary incursion of Timur into Anatolia. The fourth Murad (reign: 1623-1640) is known for his epithet "Conqueror of Baghdad" as he wrested this historically significant city from the Persian Safavids and joined it to the empire. However, I know next to nothing about the third Murad (reign: 1574-1595) or the fifth Murad (reign: 1876) – even the period of their reigns I had no idea about prior to looking them up for this piece – so I assume they left less of an impact on history than their namesakes.
In the annals of Egyptian history, whose king list covers a period of almost more than four times that of the Ottomans, the reputation of Tutankhamun was similar. The reason owes much to his early death. Inheriting rule over Ancient Egypt while still only a child, Tutankhamun had the ambitious general Horemheb as a regent. It is notable that in The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, Jacobus van Dijk attributes all that happened in the reign of Tutankhamun, such as the increased conflict in Syria with the Anatolian Hittites, to other figures in the state, such as Horemheb. The idea that Tutankhamun was, considering his age, understandably at the mercy of, rather than directing, events is most symbolically reflected in his name. This will become clear when it is realized that Tutankhamun's father, Akhenaten, was a unique king in ancient Egyptian history for attempting to change the polytheistic country to a monotheistic faith based on the sun disk or Aten.
This policy was reversed abruptly in the reign of Tutankhamun, who was also prevailed upon to reflect this by changing his name from Tutankhaten, containing the name of Aten, to Tutankhamun, containing a traditional god's name of Amun. As for Tutankhamun's untimely death, not enough is known about it to be certain, but Wilkinson speculates that it could have been a regicide caused by those who feared Tutankhamun had not turned from his father's religious revolution.
Whatever the case, as the darkness gradually sank over the late teen king's eyes, he could not have thought, in his wildest last imaginings, that over three thousand years in the future, he would become one of the most famous pharaohs of all time.
Moreover, not long after his death, Tutankhamun's slender fame was cast further into obscurity. Horemheb made himself a pharaoh and, to provide himself with legitimacy that his questionable accession and common birth could not promote himself as the religiously righteous pharaoh and, as such, the nemesis of Akhenaten. In addition to destroying the statues of Akhenaten and taking the pharaoh's temples apart, the focus of this fundamentalist also took on Akhenaten's son. As Wilkinson notes, Tutankhamun's "inscriptions and monuments were recarved with Horemheb's names and titles, so that he could take sole credit for the return to orthodoxy." Following all of this, it would have seemed inconceivable that one day, Tutankhamun himself would stand as a symbol for the whole history of Ancient Egypt itself.
The great irony, though, is that it is precisely because of the sudden early end of Tutankhamun's unimpressive reign that his reputation was able to be revealed so spectacularly in the 20th century of our time. Unlike the greater pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom, Tutankhamun was not buried properly. That is not to say that he was not buried as a pharaoh. Yet, there was no time to build him a proper pharaonic burial chamber, so he was interred, as Romer notes, "in a hastily adapted courtier's tomb." Its lack of prominence ironically protected this particular tomb from a complete tomb robbery. Moreover, right before it, huts for workmen in the valley were built soon after, concealing it completely.
In the singular action of discovering the tomb of Tutankhamun, Carter completely inverted Tutankhamun's posthumous reputation from deep obscurity to worldwide superstardom. Tutankhamun suddenly became the symbol of the whole Ancient Egyptian civilization. I find this twist of history most intriguing. That it would be a man from a country, people and time the ancient Egyptians could not even have imagined, who caused Tutankhamun's newfound fame calls to mind a similar idea in one of my favorite pieces of poetry, by the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges. As part of a poem entitled "Fifteen Coins," Borges has the following stanza entitled "Macbeth," in which the 11th-century Scottish usurper king speaks for himself. He declares:
"Our acts continue on their destined way
which does not know an end.
I slew my sovereign so that Shakespeare
might plot his tragedy."
Of course, Borges is toying with our notion of cause and effect, yet it is a striking piece of poetry, for it highlights the truth of how Macbeth's posthumous fame depends upon someone entirely alien to himself in terms of time and place. Because, for the much later English playwright William Shakespeare, it is almost certain that even the most basic awareness of Macbeth today would be minimal. In the case of Carter and Tutankhamun, the change in posthumous reputation is even greater.
However, after the revelation of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1923, history gave yet another twist. For having rescued a pharaoh buried from deep obscurity, Carter himself later declined into a fairly obscure death, followed by a low-key burial of his own in 1939. Part of the reason may have been that in that year, as Great Britain reluctantly girded itself up for another war, the time of "wonderful things" had also died. It resulted in one of the greatest archaeologists of all time being laid to rest as if he were less than the extraordinary man that he had been.
Yet, as in the case of Tutankhamun, the twists of history have not stopped with Carter's death either. Clearly, the grave of Carter has attracted numerous visitors other than myself since that time. This is evident not simply in that on the helpful map to Putney Vale Cemetery provided by Wandsworth Council to show its notable graves, Carter's has a pride of place, but it is also evident, and more movingly, from Carter's grave itself.
There, on the top of the flat gravestone, there is a small assortment of objects that can only have been left by admirers. In addition to a clearly Christian item, there are a handful of objects that speak to Carter's career in Egypt. One is a miniature Sphinx, replete with hieroglyphics on its base, and then there are turquoise objects – a hippopotamus and a scarab. These are apt as the expert on Egyptian art, Eleni Vassilika, points out that "a miniature menagerie of animals in the forms of figurines appear in some Middle Kingdom tombs." These two objects are even more apt memorial objects for Carter in that they are made of faience, which, as Vassilika also notes, was a material that "was much more finely developed in the Middle Kingdom." As these objects were placed in tombs without wall decoration, they suit the simple grave of Carter and are fitting tributes to the man who, above all others, literally revealed to the world that long period of Egyptian history in its greatest beauty and splendor, and blazoned the name of a long-dead and pretty much-forgotten pharaoh to the world.
