As I said in the post just before this one, this is the first time that the entire 5,398-piece complete collection from the tomb of King Tutankhamun has been displayed all in one place. I distinctly remember squeezing through a tight space between his canopic shrine and another displayed artifact (I think it was his throne) back in 2008. This was when everything was jammed into the Cairo Museum in Tahrir Square. It really reminded me of somebody’s attic. So much stuff in such a relatively small space.
Some of the items found in his tomb were used in royal ceremonies and religious rituals, while others were more personal, including his jewelry, clothing, furniture, food and drink, vehicles and weapons. All of the items are grouped as follows in the Tutankhamun Gallery of the GEM:
- Discovery – the story of how Tut’s tomb was discovered.
- Lifestyle – Tut’s personal possessions.
- Rebirth – regarding the Egyptian concept of the afterlife.
- Funeral – how his body was preserved, dressed, placed in the three coffins, the sarcophagus, and the multiple shrines, plus the funeral rituals.
- Identity –Tut’s family tree.
Tutankhamun was born as Tutankhaten in roughly 1342 BC. His reign was roughly from 1332 to 1323 BC. He was about nine years old when he came to the throne and about eighteen or nineteen when he died. It is thought that he might have died from a combination of malaria and a severe leg fracture.
Since he was born during the reign of Akhenaten, he was named Tutankhaten, which meant “living image of Aten”, because of a major religious shift during Akhenaten’s reign. Instead of worshiping multiple gods, Akhenaten decided that only one god should be worshiped. That was Aten. The Aten was the disc of the sun and originally an aspect of Ra, the sun god in the traditional Egyptian religion. After Akhenaten’s death, Tutankhamun changed his name and returned to the ancient multi-deity religion.
Although he is thought to be the son of Akhenaten by most Egyptologists, there is a debate as to whether Akhenaten was actually his father or maybe it was Smenkhkare. Smenkhkare was a co-ruler of Akhenaten towards the end of Akhenaten’s reign. He also reigned for a short time after Akhenaten’s death before he too died and Tutankhamun took the throne. Tutankhamun was definitely a prince and referred to as the son of a king, but it wasn’t really clear as to which king. DNA testing has confirmed that his father is a particular mummy, but there is a dispute as to whether the mummy is Akhenaten or Smenkhkare.
His mother was definitely not Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s chief wife. DNA testing has identified a female mummy known as The Younger Lady as Tutankhamun’s mother. Both she and Akhenaten are believed to have been children of King Amenhotep III and his chief wife, Tiye. Nothing complicated there.
Tutankhamun’s wife, Ankhesenamun (originally Ankhesenpaaten) was definitely one of Akhenaten’s daughters with Nefertiti. They had two still-born daughters who were buried with Tutankhamun in his tomb. His death was the end of his bloodline. Information about Akhenaten and Tutankhamun is sketchy because their successors tried to erase them from history and so there isn’t as much information about them as with other pharaohs.
The majority of the photos that I took and am sharing here are from the areas of Lifestyle (photos 001 to 008) and Funeral (009 to 017, plus 020 to 027), although the throne was in the section referred to as Identity (018 & 019).
Photo 001 has Tutankhamun’s footwear, which was mostly sandals. 002 is of various chests and other furniture that contained his belongings. Next come some beds in 003. They look pretty uncomfortable to me, especially with those headrests. A few headrests can be seen in the photo to the right behind one of the beds.
Photo 004 shows clothing and some jewelry. Those linen triangles were loincloths.
Several alabaster urns and figures are in 005. Some chairs in 006. Chariots in 007. And a closeup of a chariot in 008.
Moving to the Funeral section of the collection, we have the outermost of the four shrines in photo 009. This were all of gilded wood. The second shrine in 010 had a gilded wood frame on top which held a linen cloth with gilt bronze and rose-shaped sequins. This was called a pall.
Photo 011 shows the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th shrines in a line. The sarcophagus, the base of which was carved from a solid block of quartzite (the lid is of painted granite), is still in the tomb. I have some photos of that which I will share in a later post when we visit that tomb.
There were three nesting coffins. Photo 012 is of the outermost coffin, which was of embellished gilded wood. The second coffin (013) was also of embellished gilded wood. The third coffin (014), however, was of solid gold. Tutankhamun’s mummy was inside of that coffin, wrapped in funerary wrappings (015) and wearing the magnificent solid gold mask shown in photos 025 to 027.
Photo 016 shows the funerary beds that were found in the tomb and 017 shows an Anubis statue also found in the tomb. The throne, is shown in 018 & 019. It was of wood, overlaid with gold and silver.
Photo 020 shows the garment mannequin of the pharaoh. It is made of painted wood. The Canopic Shrine is in photo 021, with the Canopic Chest and Jars in photo 022. Each jar held a specific internal organ (liver, lungs, stomach, intestines) and normally featured a lid shaped after one of the Four Sons of Horus, who served as divine protectors. In this case, the lids all resembled Tut himself.
The guardian statues of King Tutankhamun (023 & 024) are a pair of life-sized wooden sentinel figures that stood facing each other on either side of the entrance to the pharaoh’s burial chamber. You may remember the photo of these in the tomb when it was discovered from the post about the Griffith Institute at Oxford University in England.
I took numerous photos of the mask from every angle. Here, I have included photos of the back of the mask (025), a side view (026) which shows a bit of the inside of the mask as well, and a full frontal view. Tutankhamun’s mummy remains in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings and will not be moved. We visited the tomb a bit later in this trip and I will be publishing a post of that visit, complete with photos.
Next – The Over Four Thousand Years Old King Khufu Solar Boats at the GEM
