King Tut's Tomb

Section: Art

What does the tomb of tutankhamen and its contents show about the Egyptian concern for the afterlife? Tutakhamen´s tomb, and the artifacts inside are an indication of the concern the Ancient Egyptians held for the after-life of their king. In 26th Nov. 1922, the English archaeologist Howard Carter opened the virtually intact tomb of a largely unknown pharaoh: Tutankhamen.

This was the first, and to date the finest royal tomb found virtually intact in the history of Egyptology. It took almost a decade of meticulous and painstaking work to empty the tomb of Tutankhamen. Around 3500 individual items were recovered. When the Burial Chamber of Tutankhamen was officially opened, on 17 February 1923, the Antechamber had been emptied. It had taken near fifty days to empty the Antechamber; the time required to dismantle and restore the contents of the Burial Chamber including the gilded wooden and the sarcophagus was to be greater, and the work was not completed until November 1930, eight years after the original discovery. One must examine both the tomb itself, and its contents, to see the connection between the tombs and burial rituals and the doctrine of eternal life.

The royal tombs were not merely homes in the hereafter for the kings, as are the private tombs of commoners and nobility. Instead the tombs are cosmological vehicles of rebirth and deification as much as houses of eternity. As the king is supposed to become Osiris in a far more intimate way than commoners, he is equipped with his very own Underworld.

And as the king is supposed to become R' in a way entirely unavailable to commoners, he is equipped with his very own passage of the sun, whether this is thought of as the way through the underworld or through the heavens. Tutankhamon´s tomb, hurriedly prepared for the premature death of the king at the age of only about 18, is, as Romer says, a hole in the ground, compared to a proper royal tomb. The theme of fours is conspicuous in Egyptian religious practice. Tutankhamon´s tomb contains four chambers.

The burial chamber, with a ritual if not an actual orientation towards the West, is the chamber of departure towards the funeral destinies. The internment of the body certainly is the beginning of the sojourn of the dead, and the Egyptians saw the dead as departing into the West. The room called the Treasury is then interpreted to have a ritual orientation towards the North as the chamber of reconstitution of the body.

Since the most conspicuous object in the Treasury was a great gilt sledge holding the shrine containing the canopic chest, which holds the king´s viscera, this could well suggest the problem of reassembling the king´s living body. That task, indeed, has a very important place in Egyptian mythology. After the goddess Isis had retrieved her husband Osiris´s murdered body from Byblos, their common brother, Seth, the original murderer, stole the body, cut it into pieces, and tossed them in the Nile.

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