Inlaid wooden chair or throne found in Tutankhamun’s tomb.
The most celebrated part of the Cairo Museum’s collection has for the best part of a century been the incomparable treasures of Tutankhamun’s tomb housed in two long galleries on the upper floor. The greatest archaeological discovery of all time, the virtually intact tomb of the young pharaoh was discovered in 1922 in the Valley of the Kings, undisturbed since antiquity owing to the King’s relative obscurity.
Tutankhamun was born Tutankhaten, son and successor of the ‘heretic’ pharaoh Akhenaten who dispensed with Egypt’s centuries old religion in favour of his new god, the sun disk he called Aten. At Akhenaten’s death Tutankhaten was only nine years old and early in his reign was persuaded to restore Egypt’s religion and traditions, abandoning the cult of Aten and restoring the prominence of Amun, god of Thebes, thus changing his name to Tutankhamun. His early death barely a decade later and association with his reviled father led to the young pharaoh sharing his fate in being struck from the records and lists of Kings (an act of damnatio memoriae), thus his tomb itself was quickly forgotten and hidden beneath later structures whilst those of more famous rulers were stripped bare, probably within decades.
Howard Carter’s discovery of the still sealed tomb in 1922 caused a sensation, nothing so complete had ever been found before. The tomb itself was small by pharaonic standards, prepared in a hurry as the king died in his late teens with two main chambers and a further two side chambers crammed with artworks, treasures and furnishings, along with the king’s body sealed within four gilded-wooden shrines, three superbly rich coffins and the incomparable golden mask upon his head. Better still, the pharaoh’s reign in the 18th Dynasty coincided with a particularly high period for artistic achievement, meaning that so much was of the highest quality. One can only imagine the riches that must have disappeared from the much larger tombs of the more famous rulers, compared to this tiny treasure-trove!
Tutankhamun’s collection has resided in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum ever since its discovery, but by the end of 2018 will have moved again to the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza (currently being prepared for partial opening later this year). The treasures will be displayed in their entirety for the first time, and many pieces have already been transferred. This visit offered us a last opportunity to view most of the major pieces in their central Cairo home for one last time.
For more on the ‘obscure’ pharaoh who millennia later became Egypt’s most celebrated, see the link below:-
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankhamun
