In the Valley of the Kings (10 page)

“Next he takes two lumps of plaster of Paris and thrusts them into his ears…. Then, seizing a large green tin from off an upper shelf, he anoints his hair, beard and coat with the famous green [insect] powder…. The insubordinated stomach alone remains to be dealt with; and so the Prince of Excavators throws himself upon his bed.

“But, stop a moment, I have omitted to mention the system of dealing with excessive light. [He] has fashioned himself a black mask … and this he ties over his face…. Having now arranged himself upon his bed, his wife steps in to deal with her husband’s world-famed stomach … lying across the offending portion of his anatomy….

“Going in one day to [his] hut … I was horrified to see lying upon the bed a terrible figure curled up, with another equally terrible one lying at right angles above. The face was pitch black, the hair bright green, the beard also green … one hand was flung out over the hinder portions of the blue lump lying on its face on the top; the other clasped a stray hand belonging to the said lump. The atmosphere was thick with powder. Half asphyxiated I coughed and horrors! the lumps began to move. It was Professor W. M. Flinders … himself!”

In one of his most moving love letters, Petrie wrote to Hilda during their courtship, “I cannot again live as I did before I knew
you.” But it was just that lonely existence Carter would lead among the desert ruins and tombs.

Thirty years after the young Carter first came to Egypt, he’d finally announce to colleagues that he intended to bring back a companion from England. Which of course caused much speculation about the woman he’d fallen for. Had he, like Petrie, found an ardent beauty to join him on the sites?

Carter returned from leave not with a woman, however, but with a canary—explaining to the astonished men that although Egypt had ornithological wonders aplenty—ibises and hawks and egrets and black-legged spoonbills—sadly, it had no songbirds of its own.

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© FRANCIS FRITH, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE OF AMARNA, FORMERLY THE ANCIENT
Akhetaten, is some three hundred miles south of Cairo, where the desert cliffs come right up against the Nile’s eastern bank for a stretch, plummeting straight down into the water. Then suddenly they recede in a semicircle or arch, only returning to the riverbank ten miles downstream.

When Egypt was the mightiest power on earth, in the fourteenth century
BC
, this remote, desolate spot suddenly became the new capital. The pharaoh, Akhenaten, had chosen the place not for political or strategic reasons, but because it was in harmony with his speculations about the nature of the world. There was a break in the cliffs here where the sun could be seen rising at dawn; and this break exactly resembled the hieroglyph for “horizon”—the moment of the sun’s daily rebirth, when it returns from the land of death, chaos, and night. At pharaoh’s command, a city arose quickly under the “sign”—priests, architects, artists, soldiers, tradesmen, and courtiers suddenly appeared on the barren plain.

The site was inhabited for only two decades: during Akhenaten’s seventeen-year reign and then for the three years his mysterious successor, Smenka’are, was on the throne. At the beginning of the following reign—Tutankhamun’s—Akhetaten was abandoned and the court returned to Wast (Thebes, Luxor).

In 1892, Carter, mere copyist no longer, debuted as an excavator in Amarna under the direction of the terrible Flinders Petrie. Carter’s great “guess”—that Tut’s tomb still remained to be discovered—began here, as he immersed himself in this ancient moment in time, making it his own.

The cast of characters at Akhetaten:

Tutankhaten
, Living Image of the Aten (later changed to
Tutankhamun
, Living Image of Amun). Son of Akhenaten by the snub-nosed, carefree-looking royal favorite nicknamed Kiya, or “Little Monkey.” Though Tutankhamun passed only his childhood at Akhetaten—he was a bit player here, waiting in the wings—its religious, political, and artistic milieu formed him and determined the main events of his reign. It was the world into which he was born. Without understanding Akhenaten’s revolution and the reaction against it that followed, one may be dazzled by the beauty and splendor of the objects in Tut’s tomb, but one will not understand the tale they tell.

Queen Tiye
, mother of Pharaoh Akhenaten and great wife of his father, Amenhotep III. She came to live at Akhetaten during the reign of her son. Tiye was in the tradition of strong women going back to the beginning of her dynasty (the Eighteenth). She followed in the footsteps of Queen Aahmose, for example, who was awarded the golden flies, the medal for military valor; and Queen Hatshepsut, who usurped the throne and ruled alone for thirty years. Tiye was given extraordinary prominence in the records of the time and was a power to be reckoned with in her own right.

During the thirty-eight years of the reign of her husband, Amenhotep, there was peace. No other kingdom dared challenge it. It was unnecessary for Amenhotep III to engage in long military campaigns or to cultivate the martial virtues of ancestors. Instead, he covered Egypt with magnificent temples—and devoted himself
to the concubines of his huge harem (on one occasion alone, 316 Mitannian beauties were received into the harem).

The pet names of his favorites, recorded on cosmetic palettes and perfume jars, show him to have been an old voluptuary. However, neither “Little Miss Whiplash” nor any of the other harem ladies presented a challenge to Queen Tiye—they were mere diversions for the debauched king, shown in a late portrait as obese and wearing a woman’s gown.

In his perceptive article “Hair Styles and History,” Amarna expert Cyril Aldred took up the gender-bending aspect of life at Akhetaten. Describing two Amarna portraits (carved canopic vase stoppers), he remarked, “What may capture our interest in these two heads of royal sisters is the side light they throw upon the character of the age … in which members of the royal family exchange each other’s clothes, the kings wearing a type of woman’s gown and appearing with heavy hips and breasts; and the womenfolk wearing their hair cut in a brusque military crop.”

Aldred might have added that the women’s hairstyle, “the Amarna look,” was created by chic court ladies who copied the wigs of the Nubian soldiers—and not even the officers’ wigs, but the coarse head coverings of the lowly infantry, who must have caught a princess’s eye.

It was a sign of the times. At the beginning of the dynasty, some two hundred years earlier, the preoccupation was with creating a vast empire. For the first time, Egyptians looked beyond the Delta and the narrow Nile valley. Now, however, the players at pharaoh’s court—wealthy, secure, and sophisticated—developed a penchant for artistic, philosophical, and sexual experimentation (a situation similar to our own times, in fact, which is perhaps why the era has provided so much food for thought for modern figures ranging from Freud to Philip Glass, who used Amarna texts, verbatim, in his opera
Akhnaten).

But if Tiye’s husband had given himself up to sexual preoccupations,
and if her son was now obsessed by God, the queen was interested in politics, remaining an important political influence during both reigns (in fact, we find the king of Mitanni writing to her on Akhenaten’s accession to assure continued good Mitannian-Egyptian relations, an unprecedented situation). Her establishment at Akhetaten was a large one—palace, gardens, stables—but her body did not remain there after death.

When Akhetaten was abandoned, her grandson Tutankhamun took her for burial in Thebes, most probably in KV tomb #55. Although when it was discovered, the tomb, pillaged in antiquity, did not contain Tiye’s body, a shrine found there indicates that it once had been there. The queen was portrayed on the gilded wood worshipping the Sun Disk together with Akhenaten (luckily, the image was recorded right away, for it soon crumbled to golden dust).

There was another burial in tomb #55 whose identity is much debated. A man in a gorgeously inlaid coffin with an intricate rishi, or feather design. He might be Smenka’are—or he might be Akhenaten, reburied here by his son. The names on the coffin were purposely destroyed in antiquity, and half of his face mask was torn off. But the style of the coffin and the canopic vases (for his viscera) were pure Amarna. And royal. The question of his identity became important to Carter when he started keeping a keen eye on which royals had been found and which had not. The idea that Tutankhamun would have brought both his grandmother Tiye and his father or brother to Thebes would suggest that his own tomb must be somewhere near theirs.

However, through a series of exasperating ancient and modern mischances, everything relating to tomb #55 is problematic. Evidence has been destroyed, crucial pieces of jewelry stolen (by a laboratory assistant), the mummy damaged through rough handling. For a century, Egyptologists, anatomists, dentists, and DNA experts have all offered contrary theories about the royal mummy in the feathered coffin. The trouble began, in fact, from the moment
the tomb was discovered. An American obstetrician who happened to be in Luxor was called in and, after examining the mummy, misidentified its sex (one has to be grateful that the young man, whoever he was, was not expecting).

Most probably, Queen Tiye’s body was removed from #55 during the next dynasty (the Ramesside era) and hidden together with a cache of other royals in KV tomb #35. She is the mummy called the Elder Lady in this group (again, most probably). Her clutched right hand is raised across her breast in royal position, her expression incredibly striking even in death. After three thousand years, the Elder Lady’s face still emanates the strength and dignity of Tiye’s statue portraits—leading one Amarna expert to call it “striking, almost beautiful.” Her reddish (hennaed?) hair flows down to her shoulders and has been matched with a lock of hair in Tut’s tomb—a keepsake found in a miniature gold coffin.

Pharaoh Akhenaten
, Servant of the Aten, or Sun Disk. Revolutionary thinker or tyrannical fanatic—or both. Frequently portrayed with exaggeratedly feminine features, with heavy hips and breasts, and sometimes, like his father, in a woman’s gown.

The pharaoh’s private life: devoted husband of the famous beauty Nefertiti; affectionate images of them with their six daughters are everywhere at Akhetaten. Also gay icon: On the Pase stela (now in Berlin), Akhenaten is seen in loverlike pose with Smenka’are, his son from a minor wife. Smenka’are became co-regent late in the reign, and on inscriptions his name was followed by the epithet “beloved of the king’s body.”

After Nefertiti’s death (around year 12 of the reign), Akhenaten married their eldest daughter, Meritaten, making her great royal wife. Akhenaten’s reign lasted seventeen years and was followed by Smenka’are’s short reign. During his three years as pharaoh, Smenka’are married Meritaten, his half sister, formerly their father’s daughter-wife—making Smenka’are Akhenaten’s son, son-in-law,
co-regent, and lover all in one, a real-life situation very much like one of the Marquis de Sade’s extravagant fantasies.

It should be noted that father-daughter or sister-brother marriages were de rigueur for Egyptian pharaohs and their Greek successors, all the way down to Cleopatra, who was married to her younger brother early on in her career—being gods, they emulated the incestuous gods. However, Akhenaten’s relationship with Smenka’are was unique in Egyptian history. Attempts have been made to interpret the Smenka’are figure on the Pase stela as Nefertiti in drag—that is, to identify the co-regent, later Pharaoh Smenka’are, as actually being Nefertiti in male attire and with a new name. But as Amarna expert Cyril Aldred points out, the discovery of a Nefertiti shawabti, or magical funeral figure, in a context preceding Akhenaten’s death conclusively disproves such theories: Such shawabti figures were always created after their owner’s death. Put simply, Nefertiti could not have succeeded Akhenaten since she predeceased him.