One could be forgiven for thinking that King Tut was a global rock legend or star of the silver screen not a minor dead monarch from 3500 years ago. For Londoners, Tutankhamun is coming to town for the first time in 35 years, and it’s, well, the biggest thing since…ages.
Anyone who remembers the last time the not so merry monarch came this way is obviously middle aged and hence out of touch, but the writer is not afraid to recall the endless queue snaking past metal railings, four to five hours long and reminiscent of Lenin’s tomb; slowly falling drizzle; me clutching my Mum’s hand throughout; then a reverential but brief glimpse of fabulous treasures. The ebony animals were scary, and the alabaster pots had bits of bodies in them, (OK, not any more). King Tut is seriously impressive when you're six.
Tut has the power to command even from the grave. School kids from Britain, France, the US and, of course, Egypt are painting Ankh symbols on what will be a giant 45’ high pyramid in the middle of London. Slave-like armies of publicists and ticket agencies are shifting block after block of glitsy tickets. Tut knew a thing or two about hype in his own time.
A Little Treasure
And that’s the great paradox of Tut the Global Wonder. Tut just wasn’t that important. OK he was buried with a lot of treasure but so were Tuthmosis, Hatshepsut and a host of other big-league royals who were buried in the Valley of the Kings. Dozens of them in fact. Egyptian history is like that. There is more time between the First dynasty and the Last (the 30th) than from the 30th up to now.
Ancient Egypt had its great rulers. Rameses the Second lived until his nineties, thus outliving most of his grandchildren, let alone his children. During his reign he built hundreds of amazing monuments. “Ozymandias” is just one of Rameses’ many honorific names. He ruled an Empire stretching from Khartoum to Mesopotamia. No-one has ever done that since, not the Greeks, not the Romans, not even the Arabs, and certainly no modern Empire.
Chip off the old block
The Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, (the big one), is so massive that when, in about 1200 AD a mad caliph gave the order to demolish it, and all the other pyramids, (a la Taliban – The point was it was an infidel temple), the demolition team gave up after a desultory nibble at one corner. YOU try demolishing a million-tonne building with picks and crowbars. Khufu was a Mr Big. No-one could call Khufu an under acheiver in the monumental stakes.
Tut-ankh-amun is different. Tut died when he was nineteen. Tut’s father Akhnaten was a revolutionary thinker who was the first to initiate monotheism, (based on Sun worship, but still a long way from polytheism), and moved the entire political elite of Egypt to a brownfield site in the desert. But TUT wasn’t a revolutionary. He didn’t build massive pyramids or temples. He didn’t conquer places. Tut didn’t do much that was memorable at all, except maybe get murdered by his successor, Ay.
Dead good
OK, maybe it’s unfair criticising a ruler who never made it into his twenties. But try telling that to Alexander the Great, or Elizabeth the First, or for that matter Rameses the Second. They all had the wit and determination to survive very tricky teenage years and become great leaders. Tut didn’t make it.
What made Tut the poster boy of dead Egyptian pharoahs was that the tombs of all the others were looted, sometimes while their bodies were still warm. Time has been cruel to them, but with a little help from Howard Carter, Tut snuck through unscathed, (apart of course for being dead). The discovery of Tut’s tomb was an extraordinary roll of the historical dice. By rights the tomb should have been empty, with scratch marks on the lintels and smoke on the ceiling. Its survival is chance not merit. In modern terms it was National Lottery not Champions’ League.
So when you marvel at the gold mask, and peer at the minute decoration on Tut’s bed; when you recreate in your mind a pharaoh’s court of unimaginable splendour and power, remember that Tut was a second division pharaoh, who never lived up to his father’s memory, never made his mark on the international stage, and who died young .
Now, if Rameses’s tomb had been untouched…