On November 30, 1922, The Times broke one of the most important stories of all time: Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon had discovered an intact royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings.
Arthur Merton, the paper’s Cairo correspondent, described the finding of Tutankhamun’s tomb as “the most sensational Egyptological discovery of the century.” A century later, archaeologists have uncovered the “lost golden city” of the pharaohs, a discovery that may prove to be just as sensational as the first. But this second great excavation will be very different, not just in what may lie within, but in the way the world reacts to it.
The excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb was widely seen as a British and imperial triumph, a tribute to British expertise, perseverance and cash. The country had recently emerged victorious from the First World War and here, with unmistakable symbolic resonance, was evidence of another mighty empire, preserved for eternity beneath the sands.
Reporting focused on the sheer power and opulence reflected by the pharaoh’s tomb, the beauty of his golden mask, the array of treasures and luxuries buried with him to enjoy in the afterlife.
“The ancient king who thus suddenly steps out from oblivion has a permanent significance,” The Times declared in its leading article. “The earth holds in her recesses the rich memories of our race.”
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The paper noted with approval the carvings depicting Egypt’s imperial power over Syria and Ethiopia. Tutankhamun’s tomb was a statement of dominance, and The Times in 1922, the most influential newspaper of the most powerful empire on earth, bathed in that reflected glory.
The new discoveries offer a very different sort of reflection, of the daily lives of human beings more than 3,400 years ago, both ordinary and mighty. Today we are more interested in the way the ancients lived than the treasure they died with; the pharaohs are fascinating less as political symbols than as individuals. We want to know what they were like, these people, and the rediscovered city may tell us.
Like Pompeii, the artefacts already uncovered were “left by the ancient residents as if it were yesterday”, according to a statement by the Egyptian archaeologists working on the site. Here are neighbourhoods with almost complete mud walls, and rooms filled with the tools of daily life: coloured pots, jewellery, scarab beetle amulets, the preserved skeletons of people and animals, and mud bricks bearing the ancient royal seal of Amenhotep III, the great pharaoh who ruled between around 1386 and 1353 BC. To modern historians the discovery of an entire bakery and kitchen is almost as exciting as a golden funeral mask.
This was the king’s capital and it is filled with the everyday items related to the economic and artistic infrastructure of a royal city: items for metal and glass production, workers’ homes, administrative buildings and a cemetery filled with rock-cut tombs.
Tutankhamun’s tomb revealed how the pharaohs ruled and worshipped. The lost city can tell us how they worked, ate, lived and died.
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But why was the city abandoned so swiftly? The first discoveries appear to indicate that its inhabitants simply downed tools and left. Unlike Pompeii, there was no natural disaster to freeze the place in time. The answer may lie in one of the great family sagas of the period, a story of upheaval within the royal dynasty, religious schism and a renegade pharaoh who turned his back on his capital, his ancient gods and his ancestors.
The empire of Amenhotep III stretched from the Euphrates to Sudan. His reign lasted four decades and saw the building of some of Egypt’s greatest monuments, including the Colossi of Memnon, vast stone statues representing the pharaoh and his wife. Towards the end of his reign, it is believed that Amenhotep exercised power jointly with his son and successor, Amenhotep IV. A vessel containing two gallons of boiled meat found at the new site is inscribed with the year 37, the very period when father and son were supposedly ruling in tandem.
But then, five years after the death of the great Amenhotep III, came an upheaval. The new pharaoh abandoned Egypt’s traditional polytheistic religion and introduced a new form of worship based around the sun god Aten. He changed his name to Akhenaten (“devoted to Aten”), and with his beautiful wife Nefertiti he quit the traditional capital at Thebes and built his own royal city to the north, at Amarna.
The new-discovered golden city may form part of the old capital complex that was suddenly abandoned by the heretic pharaoh and his royal entourage. As Akhenaten constructed his new city around worship of the sun god, the desert sand may have blown over and hidden this part of his father’s forsaken capital.
Akhenaten’s revolution did not last. After his death, his statues and monuments were obliterated, his art rejected, his religion eradicated: in the archival records of future pharaohs he became “the enemy”. The old ways of worship were reinstated, notably under his son, the boy-king Tutankhamun, who changed his name from Tutankhaten to distance himself from the apostasy of his predecessor.
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The discovery of the royal metropolis within Thebes may help to answer one of the oldest mysteries in Egyptology: what happened in the life and mind of the young pharaoh to make him reject all that his father stood for, and move out? That question again reflects a modern sensibility, a search for the human story behind the artefacts.
Today the desert sands part to reveal not just potentates, but people.