Who Was King Tut

This section of the book focuses primarily on Egyptian Beliefs about the Afterlife, and Edwards continues to use King Tut’s as a frame narrative to gain access to these broader details and explain them in a way that is intended to engage readers with its storytelling structure. Thus, this section contains an almost cinematic sense of immediacy that allows the author to create a more dramatic, vibrant sense of the step-by-step process of funerial rites and mummification. As Edwards states, “Right after he died, Tut’s body was ferried by boat across the Nile River. There, priests were waiting. Their job was to make his body into a mummy” (36). Her subsequent descriptions emphasize the importance of the afterlife to the ancient Egyptian pharaohs, and she therefore provides a detailed analysis of the Egyptians’ protracted methods of mummification. The importance of the belief systems underlying this process is also indicated through the grand extravagance of the pharaohs’ various tombs. The sheer immensity of the pyramids of Giza and the scale of the construction involved indicates that the belief in the afterlife was central to the Egyptians’ existence. As Edwards asserts, the construction of the largest pyramid of Giza required “two million stone blocks” (34), and it took “approximately one hundred thousand workers twenty years to complete” (36).

While she uses the pyramids of Giza as a prominent example of ancient Egyptians’ devotion to their beliefs in the afterlife, she also specifies that these events were temporally separate from King Tut’s reign and death. As she states, “The pyramids were built long before Tut’s time—more than one thousand years before” (32). By emphasizing the vast amounts of time involved, she highlights the fact that ancient Egypt was a long-lived, vibrant, and thriving culture; additionally, this explanation also reveals that even in King Tut’s lifetime, the mighty pyramids of Giza would already have been considered “ancient.”

Because the ancient Egyptians habitually buried vast treasures along with deceased pharaohs, it is clear to modern archaeologists that Ancient Egyptian Beliefs about the Afterlife held absolute sway. Objects left in the tombs of pharaohs, their queens, and other important Egyptians have helped historians and archaeologists to understand the vital importance of these beliefs, for the deceased pharaohs were provided with everything they might need in such an afterlife, including boats, chariots, furniture, food, stone servants, pets, reading and writing materials, and games. This archaeological evidence illustrates that “in the Land of the Dead, the person’s spirit would continue to enjoy all the same pleasures as before. Eating. Drinking. Hunting. Playing games. Going for boat rides” (31). To illustrate this worldview, Edwards also describes a funeral procession in which King Tut’s mourners supposedly wailed and cried as his body was taken to the Valley of the Kings, then became joyful once he was interred. By imagining their shift to happiness, Edwards attempts to illustrate the absoluteness of their belief in King Tut’s magical reincarnation.

However, Edwards follows this fanciful description with a more realistic acknowledgment that despite the all-encompassing nature of Egyptians’ belief in an afterlife, the historic problem of theft plagued the tombs of the pharaohs down through the centuries. With the juxtaposition of funeral rites and the subsequent desecration of the tombs, Edwards frames tomb robbery as a tragic and unethical violation of ancient Egyptian beliefs in an afterlife. Thus, she depicts the violent invasions of souvenir hunters as abominable acts, as when she describes the irreverent efforts of Giovanni Belzoni, who “used a battering ram to get inside a tomb” and is also known to have sat on a collection of mummified bodies. As Belzoni’s own description states, “I sank right down between broken mummies, a confusion of bones, rags, wooden boxes” (45). Edwards thus emphasizes Belzoni’s blatant disrespect for the sacred spaces he enters, and she also condemns the fad of “unwrapping parties” (45), in which stolen mummies were treated with utter disrespect; the bodies were essentially dehumanized and treated instead as an entertaining souvenir and a macabre party favor. Additionally, Egyptian mummies were distastefully fetishized, as when an English lord sent out invitations to his guests, enticing them to see “a mummy from Thebes unrolled at half past two” (45). Similarly, “a German prince in Berlin had a mummy unwrapped on his pool table” (45). Through such destructive and irreverent practices, a vast wealth of potential archaeological data was lost forever to the antics of frivolity.

Although Edwards’s tone throughout Who was King Tut? is primarily objective and factual, she nonetheless expresses an explicit and subjective opinion about tomb robbery to emphasize her belief that these events are tragic. As she states, “It is terrible to hear stories about the ancient dead being treated like this […] just so someone could get rich quick” (45). However, in sharp contrast to such crass souvenir-hunters, archaeologists such as Howard Carter are interested in exploring tombs in a less invasive manner, and their dedication to learning about ancient Egyptian belief systems causes Edwards to characterize them more favorably. Ultimately, Edwards depicts The Role of Archaeology in Uncovering History as a worthwhile and ethical endeavor. This assertion prefaces the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, which is fully detailed in later chapters.