by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched a show on PBS’s
series Secrets of the Dead that proves American public television can make documentaries of the
same ineffable tackiness as anything on Arts & Entertainment, Discovery or
History. Actually a rerun (the original air date was given as July 10, 2013),
it was called “Ultimate Tut” and was based, as if you couldn’t guess from the
title, on the find of the tomb of Egyptian Pharoah Tutankhamun (that’s the
version of his name most of the various experts being interviewed were using)
by Howard Carter’s expedition in 1922. Most of it was pretty old news, though I
hadn’t known before that Tutankhamun actually ascended to the throne of Egypt
at age nine (I had thought he’d been in his teens). What was known and not particularly any big “discovery,” as
the narration (written by Sean Smith, who also directed, and delivered in the
usually breathless style by Jay O. Sanders) tried to communicate, was that
Tutankhamun was originally named Tutankhaten and was the son of one of Egypt’s
most famous power couples, Pharoah Akhnaten and Queen Nefertiti. Akhnaten
attempted with dictatorial power to wipe out Egypt’s ancient polytheistic
religion, based on the sun-god Amun (that’s the spelling given here — the one I
grew up using was Amon and he’s also sometimes referred to as Amun-Ra, a
combination of the New Kingdom’s sun god Amun and the Old Kingdom’s sun god
Ra), and replace it with a monotheistic religion based on the worship of one god, Aten. Aten was also a sun god, but instead of
being represented anthropormorphically he was shown as a giant disc in the sky,
and Egyptians who were used to a pantheon of animal-headed human gods suddenly
were being forced to address their prayers and make their sacrifices to a giant
golden disc representing the otherwise invisible and undepictable Aten.
Akhnaten changed his own name (he was originally Amunhotep IV, son and heir of
Amunhotep III) and abandoned the New Kingdom’s capital, Thebes, building his
own city, Amarna (sort of the Brasilia of ancient Egypt), and of course he had
the priests of Amun arrested and executed en masse to establish his new religion and suppress the
old. Then he died when his son and heir Tutankhaten was just nine, a plague
struck Amarna and the boy king decided the high priests of Amun had been right,
and his dad wrong, all along: he re-established the old religion and changed
his own name to Tutankhamun to emphasize the seriousness of his conversion.
The
show promised access to Howard Carter’s original photos of Tut’s tomb, his
mummy and the journals he’d originally kept, but we got only glimpses of these
things and instead we got treated to some odd conclusions about how he lived,
how he died (in 1968 a group of researchers from Liverpool University came to
the conclusion that Tut had been murdered because the head was crushed and the
heart, usually included with mummies — especially royal ones — was missing; but
the producers of these shows decided that Tut had been killed in a chariot
crash, presumably in the middle of a battle), and what happened to him after
his death. The interment and mummification were such a rush job that the corpse
spontaneously caught fire from the linseed oil used to prepare the bandages
(ordinarily a royal mummy wouldn’t be entombed until the oil had dried) and
Tut’s famous sarcophagus wasn’t even his own — its famous head include pierced
ears, and the experts said the only people in Egypt’s 1 percent who wore
pierced earrings were children and women — and someone came up with a
facial-recognition program to compare the Tut sarcophagus with the famous bust
of his mother Nefertiti and decided the sarcophagus had originally been
prepared for her. What’s more, Tut had had
two children (incidentally his wife’s name was Ankhesanamun, also the name of
the Egyptian princess, reincarnated as modern Anglo-Egyptian woman Helen Grosvenor
and played by Zita Johann in the 1932 film The Mummy, a film obviously inspired by the discovery of
Tut’s tomb and the worldwide craze for all things ancient Egyptian it inspired)
but both had been stillborn, he had named his favorite general as his heir but
the general had just been killed in a war in Syria (that really sounded like plus ça change, plus ça même chose right now!), and the vizier, a man named Ay
(pronounced “I”), had taken advantage of the power vacuum, seized the throne
and four years later, facing his own death, had himself buried in the elaborate
tomb Tut had had constructed for himself while Tut had been relegated to the
smaller and less fancy tomb originally intended for Ay’s own remains.
The show
claimed that Tut’s tomb was not as “undisturbed” as Carter and others had
claimed in 1922 — tomb robbing was a common enough Egyptian crime that the
state had imposed execution by impalement as the penalty (and the hieroglyphic
representing it is a quite graphic stick figure of a body being impaled on a
large stake), but the original tomb robbers had generally contented themselves
with petty pilfering of items easy to dispose of and sell or fence. The real
epidemic of tomb robbing took place two centuries later and was done by the
tomb diggers themselves, who had a pay dispute with the government and
responded with what appears to be the world’s first documented strike, and they
worked with corrupt priests in the religion of Amun to loot the famous tombs
and get rid of the priceless artifacts — once again, something all too
premonitory of the looting of the Baghdad museum in 2003 (also by people who
had been deprived of their legitimate livelihoods by a political upheaval and
the overthrow of their ruler by a foreign power) and other corrupt trade in
Middle Eastern antiquities taking place now. Tut’s tomb escaped, these authorities argue,
because just months after it was dug a flash flood covered the lowest part of
the Valley of the Kings, where it lay, and it was buried under a mound of sediment
left behind by the flood and soon baked to a crisp by the hot Egyptian sun. The
program was the usual mix of well-established historical fact and speculation,
though it differed from the usual A&E or History Channel fare in that at
least all the explanations were rationally possible — they didn’t argue either
that Tut was a space alien or was abducted by some, which was nice …
