Tutankhamun

He was born Tutankhaten, the Living Image of the Aten, around 1341 BCE, in Akhetaten, the desert city his father had built for the sun disk. His father was Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh who had closed the temples of Egypt's gods, and his mother, as the geneticists would one day reveal, was his father's own full sister, a queen whose name is lost, known now only as the Younger Lady from her anonymous mummy. He was the child of the most controversial court in Egyptian history, born into the last tired years of the revolution, when the old gods had been struck from the walls, the capital was half empty, and the empire's letters went unanswered. Of his childhood almost nothing is recorded: a toybox, perhaps, the exercises of a prince learning his letters, the memory of a frightened court. When his father died around 1336 BCE, and after the brief shadows of two more rulers, Smenkhkare and Neferneferuaten, whose very identities are still disputed, the throne came down to a boy of about nine years old.

A child pharaoh is ruled by his elders, and Tutankhaten's elders had seen enough of revolution. The two powers behind the throne were Ay, an elderly courtier who had served his father and bore the title God's Father, and Horemheb, the commander of the army. Within three years the court abandoned the city of the sun disk and sailed back to the old capitals, Thebes and Memphis. The boy king changed his name: Tutankhaten became Tutankhamun, the Living Image of Amun, and his young queen, his half-sister Ankhesenpaaten, a daughter of Akhenaten and the beautiful Nefertiti, became Ankhesenamun. Then came the official undoing of his father's work. The Restoration Stela, set up in the temples, declared that the sanctuaries had fallen to ruin, that the gods had turned their backs on Egypt, and that the armies returned from foreign wars in failure because heaven no longer listened. The boy king reopened the temples, cast new cult images of the gods in gold, re-endowed the priesthoods with lands and income, and filled Karnak, the vast estate of Amun at Thebes, with new statues and colonnades. Egypt breathed again.

His reign was short and, by the standards of pharaohs, modest. There was fighting in Nubia, the gold land to the south, and skirmishing in Syria against the rising power of the Hittites, led in the field by Horemheb, and painted on a wooden chest in his tomb the boy king rides his chariot over trampled enemies in the approved style of conquering kings. His own body told a frailer story. The mummy and its scans reveal a youth plagued by malaria, a damaged foot that made walking painful, and a badly broken leg suffered not long before he died; among his treasures lay more than a hundred walking sticks and staffs, some worn smooth with use. Around 1323 BCE, at about nineteen, he died, and the court buried him in haste in KV62, a tomb in the Valley of the Kings far too small for a pharaoh, perhaps swapped for a grander one still unfinished. Some of his burial treasures were second-hand, made for another ruler and reinscribed. With him went the mummies of two stillborn daughters in tiny gilded coffins. And over his body the old man Ay performed the Opening of the Mouth, the rite that gave the dead back their senses, and by that act declared himself the heir.

What happened next reads like fiction, but it is written in the archives of the Hittites, the great rival empire of Anatolia, in modern Turkey. A letter arrived at the court of King Suppiluliuma from the widowed queen of Egypt, and its words still startle: my husband is dead and I have no son, but they say you have many sons; if you give me one of your sons, he shall be my husband and king of Egypt, for I will never take a servant of mine as husband. The Hittite king could hardly believe it and sent an envoy to make sure; the queen answered with a sharper letter, half wounded pride, half desperation. At last Suppiluliuma sent a prince named Zannanza south, and on the road the prince died, murdered, the Hittites suspected, by Egyptian hands. Someone in Egypt had decided the throne would not go to a foreigner. The old courtier Ay took the crown and, for a time, the widow: rings survive bearing the names of Ay and Ankhesenamun side by side. Then she vanishes from history, the last child of Akhenaten's house, and no one knows where she lies. Ay ruled about four years and died old, and the general Horemheb became pharaoh at last.

Horemheb finished what politics began. The whole heretic line, Akhenaten, the shadow rulers, Tutankhamun, and Ay, was struck from the official king lists, so that history stepped from Amenhotep III straight to Horemheb as if thirty years had never happened. The boy king's name was hacked from his monuments, and his small tomb, hidden low in the valley floor, was buried by flash-flood debris and then by the stone huts of the workmen who cut the tomb of Ramesses VI two centuries later. Robbers found it twice in antiquity, took small portable treasures, and were caught; the necropolis guards resealed the doors, and after that the valley forgot him completely. For 3,245 years Tutankhamun slept in the dark, surrounded by gold, the one royal tomb the ancient world had lost and never found again.

Then came Howard Carter, a stubborn English archaeologist, and his patron Lord Carnarvon, an English earl with a passion for excavation. After five empty seasons in the Valley of the Kings, Carnarvon was ready to quit; Carter begged for one more, and on 4 November 1922, beneath the ruins of the old workmen's huts, a water boy tripped over a step cut into the rock. The staircase led down to a sealed door stamped with the seal of the royal necropolis. On 26 November, Carter made a small hole in the second doorway, lit a candle, and looked into three thousand years of darkness. Can you see anything, Carnarvon asked. Yes, said Carter, wonderful things. The clearance took ten years and catalogued 5,398 objects: four gilded shrines nested like boxes within boxes, a stone sarcophagus, three coffins, the innermost of solid gold weighing over a hundred kilograms, chariots, thrones, beds, alabaster cups, and the gold mask that has become the face of ancient Egypt itself. When Carnarvon died of an infected mosquito bite a few months later, the newspapers screamed of a curse, and the legend stuck. The treasures toured the world in the 1970s and drew the largest museum crowds in history. The boy the king lists erased is now the most famous pharaoh of them all.