by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched a Secrets of the Dead episode on KPBS about the so-called “Silver
Pharoah,” Psusennes I (the name is a transliteration of the Greek
transliteration of the hieroglyphic original), who ruled in Lower (Northern)
Egypt in the so-called “Intermediate Period,” a sort of Egyptian Dark Ages that
occurred between the heyday of the pharaohs most people have heard of —
Amenhotep III, Akhnaten, Tutankhamun and Rameses II — and the semi-restoration
under the Greek Ptolemies. Psusennes I is unique among the Pharoahs because his
tomb survived totally intact — for some reason the grave robbers who plundered
virtually all the pharoahs’ tombs looking for treasures they could steal missed
this one even though they plundered Psusennes II’s tomb right next door — and
was discovered in 1940 by a French archaeologist who, judging from his photos
on this show, looked oddly like Peter Lorre in the Mr. Moto movies.
Unfortunately early 1940 was exactly the
wrong time to be an archaeologist who had just made a major find in Egypt; due
to a pressing engagement with World War II the world couldn’t have cared less,
and the archaeologist himself sent the tomb’s treasures to the Egyptian Museum
in Cairo for safekeeping and hot-footed it back to France so he could be with
his wife and their three kids during the national emergency. After the war he
returned and continued his explorations, but much of the material — including
Psusennes’ remains (he’d been mummified but he’d been buried in the damp soil
of the Nile Delta instead of the dry desert heat of the Valley of the Kings, so
his body had decomposed and only his skeleton remained) — remained relatively
unresearched until recent times. It seemed odd, to say the least, to be
watching a show about a time of civil unrest and political turmoil in Egypt
during a time of civil unrest and political turmoil in Egypt — the army had
just intervened and overthrown Egypt’s first democratically elected president,
Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Peace and Justice Party (meaning
Egypt is going the way of Pakistan, Algeria and Turkey: the people can have the
illusion of democracy and free
elections, but the military will remain the decisive power and any time they
don’t like the way an elected leader is governing, they’ll just get rid of him)
— and one could make the claim that Psusennes succeeded precisely where Morsi
failed, winning the support both of the military (the show included a forensic
reconstruction of what Psusennes might have looked like, and the result bore a
striking resemblance to a Native American warrior chief) and the church (he was
credentialed by the religious leaders of southern Egypt to be the High Priest
of Amon in the North, so he had both secular and spiritual authority, sort of
like the British monarchs from Henry VIII since).
It was an interesting show,
though Charles pointed out that it fell into the trap of a lot of programs about previously little-known historical
figures, asserting that Psusennes has now become important simply because we’ve
heard of him. The reference to the “Silver Pharoah” is due to Psusennes’
decision to have his sarcophagus made of silver instead of gold — at one point,
Live Schreiber’s narration explains, silver was actually rarer than gold in
Egypt (until they established foreign trade routes — we know they were trading
with Afghanistan because it was the source for the lapis lazuli in Psusennes’
funerary decorations) — and Psusennes may have chosen silver because it was
harder to work than gold (it’s a harder metal and much less malleable) and
therefore a silver sarcophagus was more of an artistic challenge than a golden
one. All accounts indicated that Psusennes reigned for 46 years (1047 to 1001
B.C.E.) and lived into his late 70’s — an unusually long lifespan for the time,
even for a member of the Egyptian 1 percent — and though short by today’s male
standards (5’ 6”) he was muscular and powerfully built, indicating that he got
regular exercise and probably fought in battle alongside his kingdom’s troops.
The show was a neat little excursion into a barely known slice of ancient history
and was refreshingly free of the gory grimness that mars a lot of the Secrets
of the Dead episodes — and it was ironic
that we were watching it not long after seeing The Loves of Pharoah, that silly silent film with an almost cartoonishly
risible portrayal of the court of a fictitious Egyptian Pharoah!
