KING

TUTANKHAMUN
 About the Boy King
King Tutankhamun (or Tutankhamen) ruled Egypt as pharaoh for about 10 years until
his death at age 19, around 1324 B.C. Although his rule was notable for reversing the
tumultuous religious reforms of his father, Pharaoh Akhenaten, Tutankhamun’s legacy
was largely negated by his successors. He was barely known to the modern world until
1922, when British archaeologist Howard Carter chiseled through a doorway and
entered the boy pharaoh’s tomb, which had remained sealed for more than 3,200 years.
The tomb’s vast hoard of artifacts and treasure, intended to accompany the king into
the afterlife, revealed an incredible amount about royal life in ancient Egypt, and
quickly made King Tut the world’s most famous pharaoh.

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 1. SUMMARY
 Tutankhanum was an Egyptian pharoh who ruled for about 10
years

 Tutankhamun, also known as Tut, was a teenager when he died.

He was the last successor of his powerful Pharaoh Dynasty which
ruled Egypt and its empire for centuries.

 He was laid to rest, heavily loaded with gold.

 His tomb was discovered in 1922 which made the world raise a
question about what had happened to him and whether he had been
murdered?

 After almost 80 years, his body was about to undergo a CT scan

which would give new information and clues about his life and
death. His face would be recreated with the help of a procedure
called forensic reconstruction.
 A fast, strange and unnatural wind was blowing as
King Tut’s body was taken from his grave called ‘Valleys of the
Kings’, an ancient Egyptian cemetery. Dark clouds moved quickly
across the desert all day long and later, they covered the stars. 

  On January 5, 2005, at 6 pm, King Tut’, famous mummy was

placed in the CT scanner to investigate the mystery behind his
death which had occurred more than 3300 years ago. 
 All afternoon, tourists visited the 26 feet deep, underground rock-
cut tomb to pay respect to the king. 

  Many people looked in admiration at the murals on the walls of

the chamber and took a look at the face of Tut that had been
painted with gold.

 As Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt, leaned over the

body to have a look, he said that the mummy was in a very bad
condition because of what the British archaeologist Howard
Carter did to it in the 1920s.
  He discovered King Tut’s tomb in 1922 after a long search. The
treasure found at Tut’s grave is the richest till date and has come
to be known as the Pharaoh’s legend. 

 It has artefacts in gold which are eternally beautiful. Tut was

buried with things of daily use like a razor made of bronze,
games, linen undergarments and boxes of food and wine
which was believed he could use in the next life. 

 Carter began investigating his three coffins which were nested

one in another. 
 In the first coffin, he found a piece of cloth with garlands of
willow, olive leaves, wild celery, lotus petals and cornflower,
which suggested that he had been buried in the months of
March or April.

  When he reached the third coffin, he was in trouble. The body had
hardened due to the resins which had cemented the body and it had stuck
to the bottom of the coffin which was made of gold. 

 Carter tried to loosen the resins by keeping the body in the hot sun. He
kept the mummy in 149 degrees Fahrenheit heat for several hours but
still, it remained stuck.
 He reported that a chisel could be used to cut down the
mummy from the limbs and the trunk so that it could be
taken out of the coffin.

 According to Carter, he had no choice other than to cut the mummy. He

believed that if he hadn’t done that, thieves would have removed the gold
from the tomb and would have looted it.  

 For his life after death, he was given precious collars, necklaces with
decorative patterns, bracelets, rings, amulets, ceremonial aprons, sandals,
sheaths for fingers and toes and now, an iconic inner coffin and a mask. 
 In 1968, an anatomy professor X-rayed King Tut’s mummy
and revealed that the front limbs and breast bone were
missing.
 Now with the advancement of technology, CT scan or Computed
Tomography can give a virtual image of the whole body, to find
answers to two questions – How he died and how old was he at the
time of his death is still a mystery. 

 Tut’s grandfather, Amenhotep III, was a very powerful Pharaoh who

ruled over a period of forty years. His son, Amenhotep IV, succeeded
him and began the strangest period in the history of Egypt.
 He promoted the worship of Aten (the sun disk).

  He changed his name to Akhenaten meaning servant of the Atens.

He also shifted the religious capital from Thebes to the new city of
Akhenaten, called Amarna. Further, he attacked Amun, a god,
smashed his images and closed his temples.

 Another mysterious ruler, Smenkhhare, succeeded him and died

soon. Next, Tutankhamun, also known as Tut, sat on the throne and
ruled for nine years. 
 He worshipped god Amun in the old ways. However, he
died mysteriously.

 Tut is one of the mummies in Egypt. King Tut’s mummy was the

first one to be scanned by CT under the next phase of scanning the
mummies with the machine donated by the National Geographic
Society and Siemens. 

 The CT scan machine scanned the body by creating 1700 digital X-

rays in cross-sections. Tut’s head was scanned in 0.62 mm slices to
record the tiny details.
 During the night, workmen climbed up on the ramp and the
flight of stairs to carry the body from the tomb into the
spinning sand outside.

 They raised the body onto a hydraulic lift, then into a trailer where

the scanner was kept. After twenty minutes, two men ran towards
the office nearby to bring two fans.  

 The scanner was not working as the sand had entered a cooler fan.
The guard joked that it was because of the curse of the pharaoh
because they had removed his body. 
 Once the fans worked, the procedure was finished. The data
was checked in case of any losses and then technicians
returned the body to the pallbearers who carried him back to
his tomb.

  In less than three hours, he was resting at the same place where the
priests had laid him many years ago. 

 In the trailer, the technician showed a beautiful image of Tut on a

computer screen.
 As the work was done, the pressure was finally off from the
shoulders of Zahi Hawass. While sitting in his chair, he
smiled and said that he was relieved that nothing went
wrong.

 By the time they left the trailer, the wind had stopped and the winter air
was like death itself. 

  Just above the tomb the Orion constellation shone in the night sky,
watching over the boy king. 
FACTS ABOUT KING TUT
▫ He always wore orthopaedic sandals.
▫ He loved ostrich hunting.
▫ His death is still an unsolved mystery.
▫ He was surrounded by jostling political advisers.
▫ He married his half sister.
▫ His DNA helped the archeologists identify others of his
family.
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FACTS ABOUT EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION
▫ Egyptian men and women always wore makeup. It was
believed that it had healing powers and helped them
protect their skin.
▫ They used moldy bread to help with infections.
▫ They were one of the first civilizations to invent writing.
They also used ink to write and paper called papyrus.

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▫ Egyptian men and women always wore makeup. It was believed that it
had healing powers and helped them protect their skin.
▫ They used moldy bread to help with infections.
▫ They were one of the first civilizations to invent writing. They also used
ink to write and paper called papyrus.
▫ The pharaoh kept his hair covered. It was not to be seen by regular
people.
▫ Cats were considered sacred in Ancient Egypt.
▫ The Egyptians believed in afterlife and had a very unique burial ritual.

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Burial Ritual
The Ancient Egyptians had an elaborate set of funerary
practices that they believed were necessary to ensure their
immortality after death (the afterlife).

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 BURIAL RITUAL OF KING TUT​
Since Tutankhamun died suddenly, his burial was arranged in haste. Following the 
mummification of his human remains, his body was placed in a gold coffin
and transported across the Nile to the Valley of the Kings. In the funeral procession
were Tutankhamun's wife and close relatives, priests and the highest officials of the
land.​
The outer coffin was made of wood covered with a thin layer of gesso (plaster) and
overlaid with gold foil. It was sculpted in the image of Tut as Osiris, the god who
presided over the judgement of the dead. He carries a crook and flail, and wears
the royal beard and a nemes headcloth. On either side of him, Isis and Nephthys
 spread their wings in a protective embrace. Two rows of hieroglyphs run down the
front of the lid.​
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▫ ​
 PROCEDURE OF KING TUT'S BURIAL​
This boat, with its high prow and stern, is typical of those built during the New
Kingdom. It carries an exact replica of the gold coffin in which Tutankhamun's
mummy was transported across the Nile to his tomb in the Valley of the
Kings. Statues of gods and goddess were taken from one temple to another along
the Nile in divine barks. Priests lead the funeral procession taking
Tutankhamun's coffin to his tomb. Re-enactment scene from the film Mysteries
of Egypt. The tomb in which Tutankhamun was buried was probably intended
for another person, but because of the young pharaoh's untimely death, it became
his final resting place. Following the ritual "opening of the mouth" performed by
his successor, Ay, his body and coffins were placed in a red sarcophagus in the
burial chamber.
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The foot of the outer coffin was sliced off and splashed with resin before the
lid was set in place. The mismatched lid may have been dropped as it was being
lowered into place because it was cracked. By the looks of it, the shrines around
the sarcophagus were hastily erected, banged into place without due care as to the
proper ritual orientation. A wall was constructed to seal the burial chamber from
the antechamber. With all the worldly goods required for a happy existence in the
afterworld in place, the entrance to the tomb was sealed, and Tutankhamun's 
cartouche was stamped on the wet plaster wall. The outer corridor was then
closed off and the entrance to the tomb filled with rubble to prevent access to the
burial chamber.​

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TREASURES FOUND ALONG WITH THE MUMMY

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THE THREE COFFINS

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 OTHER BURIAL RITUALS

1.THE POT BURIAL

 Perhaps the oldest form of ritualistic burial discovered in Egypt, pot

burials simply consisted of an individual buried within a burial pot. The
earliest examples date from the Predynastic Period, before the reigns of the
Pharaohs. The symbolism of the pot burial is also disputed, partially due to a
lack of evidence from so long ago. Common theories posit the pot as a
metaphorical womb, symbolizing rebirth. Another theory suggests
that the pot represented the womb of the sky goddess, through whose body
the soul of the deceased would have to travel to reach the afterlife.​

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2.TOMB RELIEFS

Tomb reliefs are one of the major sources of knowledge about Egyptian
society. We can all picture the weird full body depictions of the Egyptian,
with their heads and legs turned sideways. The reason for this, however,
is that the Egyptians understood images to have power. They were
representations of reality, endowed with the essence of the real thing.
Tomb reliefs showed everything a person might need in the afterlife, as
the images would act as the real objects or people in the afterlife. This is
why all parts of the body were shown, so that a person would retain all
parts of their body.​

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3.FUNERALS AND GRAVES

Even the poorest Egyptian was given some kind of

ceremony as it was thought that, if the deceased were not
properly buried, the soul would return in the form of a ghost
to haunt the living. Ghosts were considered a very real and
serious threat, and grieving families were often hard-pressed
to afford the kind of funerary rites which the morticians
advertised as the best in keeping the soul of the deceased
happy and the surviving family members ghost-free.
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As mummification could be very expensive, the poor gave
their used clothing to the embalmers to be used in wrapping
the corpse. This gave rise to the phrase “The Linen of
Yesterday” alluding to death. “The poor could not afford
new linens, and so wrapped their beloved corpses in those
of 'yesterday'” (Bunson, 146). In time, the phrase came to
be applied to anyone who had died and was used by the
Kites of Nephthys (the professional female mourners at
funerals) in their lamentations.
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Bunson notes, “The deceased is addressed by these
mourners as one who dressed in fine linen but now sleeps
in the 'linen of yesterday'. That image alluded to the fact
that life upon the earth became 'yesterday' to the dead”
(146). The linen bandages were also known as The Tresses
of Nephthys after that goddess, the twin sister of Isis,
became associated with death and the afterlife. The poor
were buried in simple graves with those artifacts they had
enjoyed in life or whatever objects the family could afford
to part with.​
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 Thanks!
Done as a part of English Summer Assignment by-
▫ Manav Agrawal
▫ Aarush Gupta

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