Episode #211 - Who Killed King Tut? (Part II)

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When the archaeologist Howard Carter and his wealthy patron Lord Carnarvon first opened the nearly untouched tomb of King Tutankhamun in 1922, they immediately understood the gravity of what they had discovered.

This tomb is still recognized as one of the best-preserved pharaonic burial sites ever uncovered by archaeologists.

The treasures visible in the antechamber, which was just the first of four rooms in the tomb, hinted at even more spectacular riches to be found deeper in the burial.

Both men realized that if they weren't careful, this sensitive archaeological site in the Valley of the Kings could quickly become a media circus.

Neither Carter nor Carnarvon were what today we would call media trained.

Howard Carter, in particular, had a reputation for being prickly and sometimes downright rude when dealing with journalists or anyone else he thought was asking a stupid question.

So Lord Carnarvon decided that he was going to get ahead of this.

To that end, he reached out to his old friend J.J.

Astor V.

At the time, Astor was the chairman of the Times newspaper group.

The two aristocrats hammered out a deal where for £5,000,

the Times of London would get the exclusive rights to report on Carter's excavation of the tomb.

Times photographers were also given exclusive access and were the only media permitted to take any pictures of the finds.

It was further agreed that Carnarvon would receive 75% of any money made from the sale of those photos.

The deal was meant to take what might become an unruly media scrum and turn it into something more civilized, to use the parlance of the times.

This plan completely backfired.

The exclusive agreement with the Times of London immediately bred resentment among those members of the press who felt like they were being unfairly denied access to a story of international importance.

This resentment was felt most acutely by the Egyptians.

Tutankhamun's tomb had been found just a few months after Egypt had been formally recognized as a sovereign state by Britain.

However, this did not mean that Britain's colonial presence in the country entirely disappeared.

It would take another three decades before Egypt was fully rid of British political influence.

Still, in 1922, the Egyptians felt like they were finally able to assert themselves when it came to protecting their heritage and keeping Egyptian antiquities in Egypt.

The fact that Egyptian journalists were being turned away from the excavation site was deeply frustrating.

This meant that Egyptians had to get news about their heritage from a British newspaper, and this reeked of the kind of colonialism that they were trying to shake off.

While Egyptian journalists may have had the most compelling reason to be annoyed by Carnarvon's Times deal, they were not the only members of the press openly angry that they were being denied access.

Ironically, the Times exclusive did not have the desired effect of limiting the media presence in the Valley of the Kings.

Instead, journalists from around the world arrived in force, trying to hustle scraps of information from anyone they could in their quest to fill column inches.

The interest in King Tut was so great that these fact-starved reporters soon took to printing rumors culled from random informants found in Egypt and beyond.

The Egyptian press were particularly keen on rumors that Carter and Carnarvon were secretly smuggling antiquities out of the tomb on small planes that they were landing in the Valley of the Kings.

This slander would eventually be proven false, but to the frustrated Egyptians, it seemed believable that these arrogant Englishmen would rob Egypt of her heritage like so many had done before.

The international press were just as keen to print anything that seemed interesting about King Tut that didn't involve them having to reprint what had already been reported in the Times.

When Lord Carnarvon suddenly fell ill and then died less than two months after opening Tutin Common's burial chamber, they finally had a story they could run with.

Carnarvon had died as the result of an infected mosquito bite paired with a nasty case of pneumonia.

But in the press, he soon became the victim of Tooton Commons' curse.

In his book, The Mummy's Curse, Roger Luckhurst has traced exactly how this narrative developed.

He's pointed out that the story went through a few iterations before the international press became fixated on the idea of a supernatural hex bringing death to anyone closely associated with the tomb.

Even before Carnarvon died, some papers were speculating that the Lord had been poisoned by some ancient substance in the tomb.

The English paper The Daily Express ran an article headlined, Pharaoh Guarded by Poisons?

in which an author of mystical Egyptian-themed novels speculated that Tut's tomb contained, quote, diverse secret poisons enclosed in boxes, end quote.

When there proved to be no evidence of ancient poisons, the Daily Express quickly pivoted to the idea that evil magic was behind the death of Lord Carnarvon.

In fact, in those early months, the Express seems to have been behind some of the most ridiculous rumors about the Lord.

When Carnarvon finally passed away, the Express printed the lie that the Continental Hotel where he had been convalescing momentarily lost power and was plunged into darkness, adding, quote, the curious occurrence was interpreted by those anxiously awaiting news as an evil omen, end quote.

Clearly sensing the interest in stories about King Tut's curse, the Express then cooked up a fake panic back in Britain.

The day after Carnarvon's death, they ran an article headlined, quote, Egyptian collectors in a panic, end quote, which read, quote, all over the country, people are sending their treasures to the British Museum, anxious to get rid of them because of the superstition that Lord Carnarvon was killed by the Ka, or the double of the soul of Tutankhamun, end quote.

According to the Express, the British public had become so convinced of the mummy's curse that even casual collectors of Egyptian antiquities were frantically trying to unload items that might carry a curse.

But this story was an unambiguous case of fake news.

Roger Luckhurst has pointed out that the records from the British Museum do not indicate that a flood of artifacts came in after Lord Carnarvon's death.

In fact, in the months after Carnarvon passed away, the British Museum received only one donation of an Egyptian artifact from a private collector, and there was no indication that this occurred because of a worry about a curse.

But the tale of the curse was now in the bloodstream of public discourse, and soon it took on a life of its own.

Of course, since this was still the heyday of spiritualism, every ghost hunter and seance aficionado had an opinion about Carnarvon's untimely passing.

Our old buddy, Sherlock Holmes, author, spiritualist, and most credulous man of the early 20th century, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of course, weighed in in the press, speculating, quote, an evil elemental may have caused Lord Carnarvon's illness, end quote.

A writer and former Egyptologist's Arthur Weigel even claimed that he had a strange premonition of Carnarvon's fate.

He had been in the Valley of the Kings on the day that the burial chamber had been opened and thought that Lord Carnarvon was not behaving with the correct reverence, given the gravity of what he was doing.

Weigel claimed, quote, I turned to the man next to me and said, if he goes down in that spirit, I give him six weeks to live.

I don't know why I said it.

It was one of those curious prophetic utterances that seem to issue without definite intention from the subconscious brain, end quote.

Apparently, he could sense the curse.

Soon, many papers around the world were printing the rumor that Carter's canary, used to test the air quality of the tombs, was eaten by a cobra, a symbol of ancient Egyptian royalty, a few days before the burial chamber was opened.

One American writer claimed that the Egyptian workers believed that, quote, the king's cobra had revenged itself on the bird for having betrayed the place of the tomb, end quote.

There was another rumor that claimed that Carnarvon had discovered a clay tablet in the antechamber of the tomb that ominously read, quote, death will come on swift wings to whoever toucheth the tomb of the Pharaoh, end quote.

The two men then apparently destroyed this tablet before anyone else could see it.

It was also said that when Tutankhamun's mummy was finally unwrapped, a wound was visible on the cheek, exactly where Carnarvon had received his infected mosquito bite.

All of these stories were completely made up by the press.

As months and years progressed, it was soon being reported that the curse had affected more than just Carnarvon.

Anytime anyone died who had been loosely connected with Tut's tomb or Carnarvon himself, there would be some publication that would write that King Tut's curse had claimed another victim.

When the railroad magnate Jay Gould died of pneumonia in May of 1923, it was rumored that this had been because he had visited the tomb of Tutankhamun a few months earlier.

In 1924, when the pioneering radiologist Sir Archibald Douglas passed away, it was suggested that his untimely death had occurred because he had x-rayed Tutankhamun's sarcophagus.

The fact that he had been battling cancer for years, likely caused by his radiology experiments, was ignored by the less scrupulous publications.

Even as late as 1934, more than 10 years after Tutankhamun's tomb was opened, the curse was being blamed for the deaths of those who happened to be present in the Valley of the Kings in 1923.

Call me cynical, but a solid decade seems like a real slow burn for a supernatural hex.

As you can probably tell, I'm fairly skeptical when it comes to the idea of ancient curses, especially this ancient curse.

As it turns out, ancient Egyptians didn't even have the concept of a quote-unquote curse as it's popularly understood in the modern West.

Hieroglyphic inscriptions describing bad outcomes for people violating tombs are actually incredibly rare in the burial places of Egyptian Egyptian pharaohs.

The Egyptologist Charlotte Booth has identified only three tombs out of the dozens that have been discovered in Egypt that have inscriptions that could be interpreted as something like a curse.

Only three, and there's nearly a hundred tombs that we know about.

And the tomb of Tutankhamun is not one of those cursed tombs.

The tale of Tutankhamun's curse was obviously the creation of cheap 20th century scandal rags, annoyed by Carter and Carnarvon's exclusive agreement with the London Times.

But narratives are attractive.

This is why the rumor of Tutankhamun's curse has grown beyond the tabloids that first nurtured it.

The coincidence of Lord Carnarvon's untimely death so close to the opening of the tomb seemed to call out for an explanation.

It can be hard to reckon with the randomness of the universe.

In a strange way, it's more comforting to believe that Lord Carnarvon died because of a mummy's curse rather than an infected mosquito bite.

You can avoid a mummy's curse.

You can't always avoid a mosquito.

Tutankhamun's vengeful ghost suggests order, a story that we can all understand and learn a lesson from.

But we need to be careful because the truth is that sometimes weird coincidences happen and evil intent is not always behind them.

You see, interestingly enough, King Tutankhamun's death has inspired just as much speculation and storytelling as Lord Carnarvon's.

There is a very attractive narrative that can help us explain and understand the untimely death of this young Egyptian ruler.

It's a tale of betrayal, murder, international intrigue, evil viziers, and captured queens.

It's a story as compelling as anything about ancient curses.

But just because it's a good story doesn't necessarily mean it's true.

Is there a way to tell this story without being seduced by it?

Let's see what we can do today on our fake history.

One, two, three, five.

Episode number 211, Who Killed King Tut, Part 2.

Hello, and welcome to Our Fake History.

My name is Sebastian Major, and this is the podcast where we explore historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story.

It simply must be told.

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This week, we are wrapping up our series on Egypt's King Tutankhamun.

As you've hopefully already put together, this is part two in a two-part series on Egypt's best-known boy king.

If you've not heard part one, then I strongly suggest that you go back and give that a listen now.

In that first part, we explored the circumstances that led to the discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922.

We then explored the outsized place King Tut has in popular culture, given the relative brevity and obscurity of his reign as Pharaoh.

When going through his pop culture footprint, I somehow forgot to mention that King Tut even appeared as a Batman villain in the campy 1960s Batman TV show starring Adam West.

You gotta love a villain who makes the Egyptian wing of the Gotham Museum his headquarters.

Very low-key.

Anyway, we spent some time in the last episode trying to place King Tutankhamun on the historical timeline.

In particular, we explored how his father's tumultuous reign set the stage for his relatively short time as pharaoh.

As you might remember, Tutankhamun was the son of Akhenaten, the so-called heretic pharaoh.

After roughly 200 years of prosperity and military dominance secured by Egypt's storied 18th dynasty, Akhenaten had turned the entire society on its head by completely reinventing Egyptian religion.

King Akhenaten turned away from the traditional gods of Egypt and instead insisted that there was only one God, and that God was the Aten.

The Aten was the sun itself, which the Pharaoh worshipped as the creator of the earth and the sole divinity that guided the fates of human beings.

This religious revolution also came with an artistic revolution that saw a total reimagining of Egyptian aesthetics.

But as we also explored, King Akhenaten was so consumed with his religious concerns that he completely neglected his other duties as the Pharaoh of Egypt.

While he was composing poetry to the sun god in his new holy city in the desert, Egypt was being harassed by enemies emboldened by the fact that the pharaoh seemed uninterested in leading the army and overseeing national defense.

When Akhenaten died some 17 years into his reign, Egypt had gone from being the undisputed military and economic superpower in the region to being openly disrespected and raided by her neighbors.

This meant that when Tutankhamun ascended to the throne at the tender age of eight years old, he was under enormous pressure to set things right.

Clearly, Akhenaten's 17-year experiment with monotheism had been deeply unpopular.

Aside from a hardcore group of Aten worshippers who populated the Pharaoh's new city of Amarna, or what he called Akhet-Taten, it seemed like most Egyptians had remained devoted to the old gods.

It also seems that even though the old temples were shuttered by Akhenaten, the traditional priesthood did not simply disappear.

In fact, it seems like they retained much of their power and influence, even during the period when Aten was the only god who was being officially recognized.

The persistent influence of the priesthood may have been one of the reasons why the Pharaoh was compelled to take his religious revolution to an isolated settlement in the desert.

The priesthood clearly could not overthrow the Pharaoh, but they may have been able to sideline him.

What's clear is that as soon as Akhenaten died, the traditional priesthood reasserted itself in a new and profound way.

But it clearly wasn't just the priesthood who wanted to treat the reign of Akhenaten like it had been a 17-year-long bad dream.

Clearly everyone who was around the newly installed King Tutankhamun was advising him to return to the old ways.

First, the young king changed his name from Tutankham Aten to Tutankhamun.

the god Aten being subbed out for the more traditional deity, Amen.

Next, the king was clearly advised to move the capital away from his father's holy city of Aten in the desert and back to the traditional power base of Thebes.

These facts are generally undisputed, but almost everything else about the end of Akhenaten's reign, the transition of power, and the short reign of Tutankhamun is deeply unclear.

For instance, Tutankhamun may not have been the first member of the royal family to succeed Akhenaten after his death.

The Egyptologist Aidan Dodson has proposed that a figure named Smenkare, who may have either been Akhenaten's younger brother or Akhnaten's eldest son, may have reigned as co-regent near the end of Akhenaten's life.

Dodson also proposes that there may have been a brief period when the great queen Nefertiti may have seized power and ruled as pharaoh in her own right.

There's some evidence that a female leader held power for a brief period before Tutankhamun took the throne, but it's deeply unclear if this was Nefertiti, another royal wife, or one of Akhenaten's daughters.

All of Dodson's theories are plausible, but like all things from this period, they are based on very small scraps of archaeological evidence.

Egyptologists have the same issue when it comes to the reign and early death of King Tutankhamun.

There's a body of evidence that, when arranged in just such a way, seems to tell the story of a palace coup, a forced marriage, the assassination of a foreign prince, and perhaps the murder of the king himself.

Was King Tut killed by one of his powerful advisors and then subsequently erased from the historical record by his successors?

Or is that just an attractive and exciting narrative?

Does the evidence truly point to foul play and the rise of a usurper?

Or are some Egyptologists getting lost in a murder mystery of their own creation?

Today, I'm going to do my best to lay out all the relevant evidence for you, and by the end, hopefully, you can draw your own conclusions about what actually happened to Egypt's best-remembered boy king.

Okay,

let's get into it.

Trying to reconstruct the reign of King Tutankhamun is like trying to fit together the pieces of a big jigsaw puzzle.

There was no contemporary narrative history that was written about his time as king.

So to get a sense of it, Egyptologists need to bring together all these disparate pieces of archaeological evidence and then fit them together to make a coherent picture.

Now luckily, we have Tutankhamun's amazing tomb and the 5,000 objects originally contained within it.

We also have all the art depicting Tutankhamun's reign that can be found on the walls of that tomb.

But as soon as we leave the tomb, the evidence becomes considerably more piecemeal.

Things are made even more complicated by the fact that many of the monuments and temples that were erected by Tutankhamun were later usurped by other pharaohs.

That means they literally scratched out King Tut's signature or cartouche and replaced it with their own.

But based on what we have, have, here are the best guesses about Tutankhamun's reign.

First and foremost, the young king was presented as leading a restoration of traditional Egyptian religion.

Changing his name from Tutankham Aten to Tutankhamun was a significant part of this.

The one and only God of the world, the Aten, was out.

and Amun, along with the whole pantheon of traditional Egyptian gods, was back in.

By the time Tutankhamun died, a huge collection of Egyptian deities can be found decorating the walls of his tomb.

The god Amun is given pride of place, but the king is also shown interacting with Osiris, the god of the underworld, and female deities like Nut.

This embrace of the old gods wasn't just a personal preference.

This was public policy that was being communicated to the people of Egypt on large monuments.

The most famous example of this can be found on a stela that was discovered in the Karnak Temple complex.

Karnak was one of the largest and most important temple sites in all of Egypt.

So erecting a monument at Karnak was significant.

Now, for those of you that don't know, a stela is a stone plinth or a small pillar on which messages are carved.

This particular stela is known to Egyptologists as the restoration stela of Tutankhamun.

On this monument there's a long message condemning the reign of Akhenaten and then celebrating the new king's restoration of the old religion.

It reads, quote, When his majesty was crowned king, the temples and the estates of the gods and goddesses had fallen into ruin, their shrines had fallen down, turned into piles of rubble and overgrown with weeds.

Their sanctuaries were as if they had never existed at all.

Their temples had become footpaths.

The world was in chaos and the gods had turned their backs on this land.

Hearts were faint in bodies because everything that had been was destroyed.

⁇

The Stella goes on to list all the good things the new king has done to restore the temples and reinvigorate the old religion.

It concludes: quote: Now the gods and goddesses of this land are rejoicing in their hearts.

The lords of the temples are in joy.

The provinces all rejoice and celebrate through this whole land because good has come back into existence.

The nine gods of creation in the temple, their arms are raised in adoration, their hands are filled with jubilees forever and ever.

⁇

So, the restoration stella sends a pretty clear message.

The old regime was bad.

The Atenist religion hurt Egypt.

The quote world was in chaos, end quote.

The new king, by contrast, has brought back the old religion and with it the good times.

The rejection of Akhenaten was so complete that Tutankhamun rarely identified him as his father in official artwork and tomb paintings.

Instead, he would use images of his grandfather, Amenhotep III, in places where a pharaoh would normally put an image of his father.

The message being that granddad was the last pharaoh we could all trust.

Now, this would later lead to all sorts of confusion for Egyptologists trying to create a coherent timeline of the 18th dynasty.

Now, I'm sure you can imagine how disorienting this was for a preteen who was now the king of Egypt.

I mean, imagine at the age of eight, all of a sudden you are thrust into this incredibly powerful position while being told that the god you'd been worshiping was a lie and that your father, who, if the art can be believed, was a very affectionate and family-focused man, was the most evil king Egypt had ever produced.

That would do a number on your head.

And there are some small indications that King Tutankhamun wasn't overly keen on erasing absolutely everything about his father's revolution.

One of the most studied objects to come out of Tutankhamun's tomb is a beautiful gold-gilded throne.

On the back of that throne, there's a painting that seems to show King Tut and his wife.

The king is relaxing on a throne, and the queen is affectionately touching his shoulder.

Everything about this image is pure Amarna period.

Both figures have the wide hips, pot bellies, and spindly arms common in art from Akhenaten's reign.

The relaxed domestic scene is the kind of thing that was only produced when Akhenaten was the Pharaoh.

If it wasn't obvious enough, above the royal couple is the holy disk of the Aten beaming down on them with its righteous sunbeams.

I'll post an image of this throne painting at ourfakehistory.com and on the Facebook group so you can check it out for yourself.

The cartouche on the throne, that is the king's hieroglyphic signature, uses the name Tutankh Aten.

That's King Tut's Atenist birthname.

So, what should we make of this?

Is this throne a relic from a very early period in Tut's reign?

Was it originally designed for Akhenaten and was then modified for King Tut after the heretic Pharaoh died?

Why keep this throne around when it was so obviously a reminder of the Ottenist experiment that had made Egyptians, quote, quote, hearts faint.

It's hard to know, but it seems like a good indication that even though King Tut was being presented as the great traditionalist and a restorer of the old ways, elements of the Armarna period lingered into his reign.

In fact, the throne might even suggest an early attempt to marry the old ways with the new ways.

The image of the Aten is paired with inscriptions praising traditional gods like Amun, Rey, and Horus.

The queen pictured on the throne is likely Tutankhamun's wife and half-sister, Ankh Hesen Amon.

You might remember from the last episode that most experts believe that she was the daughter of Akhenaten and the great queen Nefertiti.

Now, this was important because in a lot of ways, she was the key to royal legitimacy in this period.

Being the daughter of Nefertiti, she would have been perceived as fully royal.

Being married to Ankhesen Amon would have bolstered Tutankhamun's claim to the throne.

Being the son of the Pharaoh was obviously important.

But remember, King Tut's mother was not Nefertiti.

He was born to one of Akhenaten's other lower-ranking wives.

In fact, there's quite a lot of debate around who that woman was.

Some Egyptologists believe that Tut's mother was a woman named Kia,

while others believe that the DNA evidence suggests that he was related to a mummy that was found near his tomb that has been identified only as the young lady.

The point is, Tut's royal credentials were not quite as good as his half-sister's.

Now, I'm bringing this up because Ankhes Sinaman is key to one of the most dramatic theories concerning the death of King Tutankhamun.

So let's keep her in the back of our mind as we move forward.

The other key component of King Tutankhamun's reign, which differentiated him from his father, was a renewed enthusiasm for the Egyptian military.

If you remember, Akhenaten completely neglected his role as commander-in-chief of the Egyptian army, and as a result, the country found itself beset by emboldened raiders.

By contrast, Tutankhamun was presented in works of art leading the army, riding in a chariot, and taking the fight to Egypt's neighbors.

Now, once again, there's debate among Egyptologists around just how much the young king actually led his armies.

It was very likely that especially in the early part of his reign, he was only on campaign as a figurehead, if he was there at all.

But it's possible, as he got older, Tutankhamun may have taken a more active role in leading the military.

The military scenes found on objects from Tut's tomb certainly suggest that.

But that type of military propaganda always needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

If we trusted those images, then we would come away thinking that the Pharaoh vanquished all of Egypt's enemies single-handedly.

Still, by celebrating military exploits, Tutankhamun was connecting himself with the earlier pharaohs of the 18th dynasty and was putting more distance between his reign and the reign of his father, the religious radical.

But then, just as Tutankhamun was coming into his adulthood, he suddenly died.

He was no older than 20 years old when he passed away.

Likely, he was closer to 18.

We know that this was an unexpected death because King Tutankhamun's tomb shows signs that it was prepared fairly hastily.

We know that the Egyptian funerary rites for a king, including the process of mummification, took 70 days to complete.

The tomb that King Tut was ultimately laid to rest in may have been built, decorated, and filled with all the items that it was thought the king would need in the afterlife in that very short 70-day period.

Now, this is a little strange because Egyptian pharaohs usually started building their tombs early.

It was not uncommon for tomb construction to begin right after a pharaoh was coronated, or even earlier.

So, why did Tut's tomb need to be rushed?

Well, it turns out that King Tutankhamun had been constructing a tomb for many years, out in a little used corner of the Valley of the Kings, best known as the site of his grandfather's tomb, Amenhotep III.

Now, this makes perfect sense and fits with everything else we know about King Tut's reign.

Tutankhamun's program was about taking things back to the way they were when Amenhotep III was Pharaoh.

Being buried next to Amenhotep was totally in keeping with all of the optics of Tutankhamun's reign.

But interestingly, Tutankhamun was not ultimately buried in that tomb.

He was not interred in a tomb that had been prepared for him for years in advance and sent the perfect message about his place in Egyptian history.

Instead, he was placed in a relatively small, hastily constructed tomb in a far less meaningful part of the Valley of the Kings.

The question is why?

Well, the answer to that question may have to do with the person who was ultimately buried in the tomb near Amenhotep III that was originally intended for Tutankhamun.

That was Tutankhamun's successor, the former Vizier of Egypt, I.

Yes, his name was I, A-Y-E-I.

I clearly usurped Tutankhamun's tomb.

But is that all he usurped?

There are some Egyptologists who believe that I may have been plotting for years to supplant Tutankhamun and become Pharaoh in his own right.

Does that mean that the young king was assassinated?

Well, to answer that question, we need to look at the evidence.

So let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll get even deeper into this mystery.

I want to be very clear.

What I'm about to lay out for you is a theory.

It's a guess.

This is not hard historical fact.

The truth is that we don't know much for sure about the end of King Tutankhamun's reign.

We also know very little about the reign of the Pharaoh I, the man who followed King Tut as his successor.

I was first exposed to this theory in a lecture series by the Egyptologist Bob Breyer.

He's one of the experts that I've been citing throughout this series.

Now, in those lectures, Breyer is very careful to note that his take on the death of Tutankhamun is just a hypothesis and it is far from proven.

Further, he admits that this hypothesis is, quote, bad for your health, end quote, as many prominent Egyptologists do not support it.

Turns out he wasn't wrong.

As I went deeper into my research, I discovered that two of my other key sources, Tutankhamun expert Marianne Eaton Krauss and the well-known archaeologist and former Egyptian Minister of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, are not convinced that the evidence supports Breyer's theory.

So be advised, what you're about to hear is highly contested.

But there's a body of circumstantial evidence that could suggest that the vizier known as I may have come to power by way of a cleverly orchestrated palace coup.

First, it's likely that I had been influencing Egyptian politics for years before the death of Tutankhamun.

I had been the right fan-bearer to Pharaoh Akhenaten during the Amarna period, and in that time he was an avowed worshipper of the Aten.

We know this because I was permitted to build a tomb for himself in Amarna, which was inscribed with the hymn to the Great Aten.

This guy was clearly a savvy politician who was good at reading which way the political winds were blowing.

We also know that I's wife, a woman named Tai, was a wet nurse for the royal family.

So as a couple, they were in the inner circle.

Now I've been calling I Tutankhamun's vizier, but even that is contested.

Egyptologist Mary Ann Eaton Krause has pointed out that there is only one piece of gold foil that has been found in the Valley of the Kings that gives I the title of vizier.

And that's the only physical evidence that he ever actually held that title.

Now, we might be splitting hairs on that one, as it seems very clear that I was a trusted advisor close to the center of power during Tutankhamun's reign.

Whether or not he held the official title of vizier might be beside the point, as he was clearly a powerful and influential advisor.

Just how how powerful and influential, we don't exactly know, but Bob Breyer has suggested that I may have been the power behind the throne for all of Tutankhamun's reign.

If that's the case, then the entire restoration program associated with Tutankhamun may have been I's brainchild.

The pre-teen king was certainly guided by his advisors in those early years.

I and others likely pushed him to abandon his father's capital, denounce his father's spiritual revolution, and revitalize the old religious institutions.

So for the sake of argument, let's assume that I was actively directing the young king for the first decade of his reign.

Then Tutankhamun reaches the age of adulthood.

He's been going out on military campaigns, asserting himself more as a ruler in his own right.

Perhaps, as the gold throne of Tutankhamun hints, King Tut was ready to start forging his own path as a pharaoh that combined elements of the Armana period with the restored traditional religion.

Perhaps King Tutankhamun was ready to sideline the advisors who had been directing his reign for so long.

Just at that moment, King Tutankhamun suddenly dies, and his longtime advisor seamlessly steps into his place as the Pharaoh.

Suspicious?

Well, let's not be too hasty.

It is clear that I was keen to demonstrate the legitimacy of this somewhat unusual change in the kingship.

We know this from Tutankhamun's funerary artwork.

In one particularly famous panel found in Tutankhamun's tomb, we see the young king being mummified and then transformed into the god Osiris, lord of the underworld.

It was believed that all kings made this symbolic union with Osiris as part of their journey to the next life.

Then the painting shows the mummified Tutankhamun Osiris going through the sacred mouth opening ceremony.

This was where a priest performed a magical rite to symbolically open the mouth of the deceased pharaoh so he could eat and speak in the next life.

But in this case, the person acting as the priest not only wears the leopard skin, traditionally associated with Egypt's high priest, he also wears the crown of the pharaoh.

The cartouche above this pharaoh priest identifies him as I.

So, in this important piece of funerary art, I is making it crystal clear that he is the legitimate successor to Tutankhamun.

After all, he even performed the mouth-opening ceremony for the dearly departed King Tut.

Now, this kind of image is fairly rare in Egyptian tomb painting.

Given that I was an advisor and not a member of the royal family, his claim on the throne was tenuous.

So, these types of images were more necessary than usual.

So let's recap.

We have a situation where an advisor close to the king becomes Pharaoh and decides not to bury his predecessor in the tomb that had been prepared for him.

Instead, the new Pharaoh takes that tomb for himself.

Then he sticks the dead king in a small, fairly rushed burial and decorates it with images reinforcing his tenuous claim to the throne.

Now, here's the next piece of the puzzle.

In the aftermath of all this, King Tutankhamun's widow starts writing letters.

One of Egypt's great rivals in the late Bronze Age period was the Hittite civilization based in Anatolia, or modern Turkey.

Like the Egyptians, the Hittites built impressive megalithic temples, lived in large, thoughtfully designed cities, and had a powerful military which made them one of the regional superpowers.

Now during this period, the Hittites and the Egyptians were often in conflict.

The expansion of the Egyptian kingdom in the 18th dynasty saw them push into the traditional Hittite sphere of influence.

As a result, relations were often hostile.

So you can imagine the surprise of the Hittite king when he received a letter from a recently widowed Egyptian queen.

Thankfully, this correspondence was preserved by the Hittite record-keepers, and honestly, it's pretty nuts.

The letter read,

My husband has died, a son I have not, but to thee, they say, the sons are many.

If thou wouldst give me one son of thine, he would become my husband.

Never shall I pick out a servant of mine and make him my husband.

I am afraid.

End quote.

It was unprecedented for an Egyptian queen to reach out to a foreign king and make an offer like this.

She was going to break with centuries of tradition to make a Hittite prince the Pharaoh of Egypt.

Now, the king of the Hittites was apparently incredibly taken aback by all of this and exclaimed, quote, such a thing has never happened to me in my whole life, end quote.

He was suspicious that the whole thing was a trap.

He's quoted as saying, quote, maybe they deceive me, end quote.

So he decided to send one of his trusted ministers to Egypt to investigate the whole situation.

That advisor came back with another letter from the Dowager Queen, who had obviously heard heard that the Hittite king thought the whole situation was a little suspicious.

In that second letter, she writes,

Why did you say they deceive me in that way?

Had I a son, would I have written about my shame and my country's shame to a foreign land?

You did not believe me, and hast even spoke thus to me.

He who was my husband has died.

A son I have not.

Never shall I take a servant of mine and make him my husband.

I have written to no other country, only to thee I have written.

They say thy sons are many, so give me one son of thine.

To me he will be husband, but to Egypt he will be king.

This letter seemed to convince the Hittite king that this Egyptian queen was serious.

So the Hittite records tell tell us that the king sent one of his sons, a certain Prince Zanaza, to go to Egypt and marry this widowed queen.

But then something strange happened.

The prince never made it to Egypt.

Somewhere near the Egyptian border, something happened to the prince, and he ended up dead.

It's deeply unclear exactly what befell Prince Zanaza, but the Hittite records make it obvious that the king believed that his son had been ambushed by treacherous Egyptians.

The Hittite source tells us upon receiving word of his son's death, the king cried out, quote, O gods, I did no evil, yet the people of Egypt did this to me, end quote.

Now, the assassination of a foreign prince was no small thing, even 3,000 years ago.

This was an act of war, and indeed it led directly to a Hittite assault on Egyptian positions in northern Syria.

The Hittites ended up brutally sacking a number of Syrian settlements and capturing over a thousand Egyptians as prisoners of war.

Meanwhile, the erstwhile Pharaoh of Egypt sent his own letter to the Hittites, trying to restore peace and claiming that he had absolutely nothing to do with the death of this Prince Zanaza.

He wrote, quote, your accusations have no justification.

You are simply spoiling for a fight against me.

I seek peace and brotherhood with you.

As for your son's death, of that I am entirely innocent, end quote.

Now, this is an absolutely wild story.

What is going on here?

Well, according to Bob Breyer, the Egyptian queen who sent the letter that started this whole thing was none other than Ankasen Amen, the widow of King Tutankhamun.

He believes that her letter suggests that she was being forced into a marriage with I, the new would-be Pharaoh.

When she writes, quote, never shall I take a servant of mine and make him my husband, end quote, Breyer thinks that she is referring to I, the upjumped fan bearer.

Remember, she ends her first letter by saying, quote, I am afraid, end quote.

Bob Breyer believes that this is a clue that King Tutankhamun's death may not have been natural, or at least that his death was suspicious.

Why else would she be afraid?

If we follow this line of thinking, then the queen is in the palace with her husband's murderer, being forced to marry the evil vizier.

For fans of Disney's Aladdin, I think we can call this a Jafar situation.

Now, in case you don't know Aladdin, in that version of the tale, Jafar is the evil vizier who wants to marry the princess and become the Sultan.

So, I think we can see the parallels here.

Princess Jasmine, aka Queen Ankas Sen Amen, is being held by Jafar, the Pharaoh I, who is forcing her into a marriage.

The queen desperately tries to keep him from getting on the throne by reaching out to one of Egypt's traditional enemies.

But Jafar gets wind of this and kills the Hittite prince before he can swoop in and spoil his plans.

He gambles that his new regime can survive an international incident and war with the Hittites so long as he stays safely on the Egyptian throne.

So, if we go with the Jafar narrative, then it's not a big stretch to assume that the Pharaoh I

also had King Tutankhamun bumped off to clear his way to the throne.

If he's out here killing Hittite princes, what would stop him from killing killing the young heir of a deeply unpopular pharaoh?

There's one last piece of evidence that supports this version of events.

In the 1930s, the famous British Egyptologist Percy Newberry was in an antiquities shop in Cairo when he came across a remarkable ancient ring.

Now, it's pretty nuts that for years you could legally buy ancient artifacts in shops in Egypt.

But anyway, Newberry, being an expert, could read hieroglyphs and noticed that this ring had two cartouches or hieroglyphic signatures side by side.

One was for the Pharaoh I,

and the other was for Queen Ankesen Amen.

This ring that displayed those two names together suggested that perhaps they had been married after all.

Newberry made a detailed drawing of this this ring and even wrote to Howard Carter, the discoverer of Tutankhamun's tomb, explaining what he had found.

But Newberry decided that the ring was too expensive to buy, so he left it in the shop.

Someone else must have bought the ring because after that day, it was never seen again.

So, one of the key pieces of evidence supporting this theory is a missing ring drawn once by Percy Newberry.

For many Egyptologists, this phantom ring was simply not enough evidence to conclude that this marriage had actually taken place.

But then a second ring appeared.

In the early 2000s, another ring very similar to the one described by Newberry appeared on the antiquities market.

It's now kept in the Egyptian collection at the Berlin Museum.

Sure enough, it also contains the double cartouche or paired signatures of I and Ankensenamen.

So, does that settle it?

Did history actually play out like a bizarro version of Disney's Aladdin with Jafar triumphing and Princess Jasmine violently forced into a political marriage?

It's a very compelling story, and one I really like.

But there are lots of reasons why we should question this narrative.

First, there's no compelling physical evidence that King Tutankhamun was murdered.

Remember, we have Tutankhamun's body.

Before 1923, it had remained completely undisturbed inside his golden sarcophagus for thousands of years.

In the 1920s, Howard Carter had an anatomist examine the mummy, but he was incredibly rough with the ancient body.

This doctor was not an Egyptologist.

He was used to handling fresh cadavers and did not treat the body like a historical artifact.

It didn't help that Tutankhamun's body was essentially glued to the bottom of his sarcophagus by ceremonial oils which had been poured on his body at the time of mummification.

We now know that that initial analysis in the 1920s damaged the mummy in ways that have affected other analyses ever since.

The next time the mummy was examined was in 1968 when the body of Tutankhamun was x-rayed by an expert named R.G.

Harrison.

In those x-rays, Harrison identified a black mass near the back of the skull.

He suggested that this may have been caused by hemorrhaging brought on by a blow to the back of the head.

This analysis was key to Bob Breyer's hypothesis that King Tutankhamun had been murdered.

He believed that this little piece of physical evidence, paired with all the circumstantial evidence, the usurped tomb, the Hittite letters, the Newberry rings, suggested that murder was not out of the question.

But R.

G.

Harrison's 1968 X-ray analysis has not aged well.

Most experts no longer believe that King Tut died as a result of a blow to the back of the head.

In 2005, the Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass led a team of experts in a fresh examination of Tutankhamun's body that included CT scans and DNA analysis.

They were able to conclusively demonstrate that the head trauma noted in 1968 was likely damage caused by the rough handling of the mummy back in the 1920s.

Hawass's team concluded that the king likely died from, quote, a vascular bone necrosis in conjunction with a malarial infection, end quote.

So that meant that Tutankhamun had a broken bone that did not properly heal that led to complications.

That paired with a bout of malaria might have done him in.

in.

But even the conclusions offered by Hawass and his team have been contested and are not uniformly accepted by Egyptologists.

Medical experts F.J.

Ruli and Salima Ikram have argued that the many rounds of analysis on the body and the limited amount of tissue still left on it have made King Tutin Commons mummy an unreliable text.

As a result, every new round of research yields wildly different conclusions.

This point has been echoed by Egyptologist Mary Eaton Krause, who believes that speculating about the cause of Tutankhamun's death is pointless, as, quote, only the court physician might possibly have been in a position to tell us why Tutankhamun died, end quote.

In the same vein, some experts have proposed that King Tutankhamun may have suffered from a long list of of potential disabilities, but almost all of those are also contested.

So, long story short, there's no physical evidence of a murder.

The other big issue is that many Egyptologists don't think those rings conclusively prove that I and Ankesen Amon were married.

Again, Mary Eaton Krause has argued that the rings with the double cartouche, quote, suggest little more than Ankensen Amen survived the death of Tutankhamun and that some understanding existed between her and his successor, end quote.

In her opinion, this may not have been a forced marriage after all.

The two may have had a completely different understanding.

This is supported by the fact that there's no evidence from the reign of I that Ankasen Amen was his queen.

If he really was trying to legitimize his reign by marrying Tutankhamun's widow, then you would expect that we would find images of her in Ai's tomb or on objects associated with Ai's reign.

But we don't.

Instead, in Ai's tomb, the only wife who is depicted is Tai.

the woman he had been married to for decades and who had served as a wet nurse for Akhenaten's family back in the Amarna days.

Whatever I's relationship was with Ankhasinaman, the only wife he bothered recognizing for eternity on the walls of his tomb was Ty.

So, what about all those letters to the Hittites?

What's going on there?

Well, they are still a bit of a puzzle.

The truth is that we aren't exactly sure when those events took place.

The Hittite records use names for the Egyptian leaders that are different from the names that are used in Egypt.

So it's not exactly clear which Egyptian pharaohs and which Egyptian queens they're referring to.

They could be talking about a number of different people.

Now, it is true.

that the story told in the letters fits nicely with the period immediately following the death of Tutankhamun.

But it's possible that the whole episode took place after the death of Akhenaten, some ten years earlier.

Or those letters may have been written after the death of the Pharaoh Ai, which was only four years after the death of King Tutankhamun.

Like Tutankhamun, King I also did not have an heir.

Now the man who succeeded King I was named Horem Heb.

He was a military commander and another commoner in the service of the royal family.

Perhaps the author of those letters was not Anka Sinamen, but the wife of King Ai.

The servant she was fretting about was perhaps this Horem Heb, yet another upjumped advisor who managed to make himself pharaoh.

We just don't know.

The point is that all this evidence that can be used to create a narrative about King Tut's assassination and the forced remarriage of his queen to an evil usurper might not add up to that after all.

That's the dangerous thing about narrative.

I like the Jafar story.

This whole period makes so much more sense if we have a Jafar story.

It's a narrative we can recognize.

We know it from literature, movies, TV, hell, we know it from other parts of human history.

But just because it's a narrative that makes sense doesn't mean it's true.

I titled this series, Who Killed King Tut?

And one answer could be, King I did it.

The evil vizier killed the boy king.

The death is made to look like an accident, and he's hastily buried in a tomb filled with some strategic images of the new pharaoh.

The evil vizier then forces the queen with pure royal blood into a marriage and murders a Hittite prince looking to swoop in and steal the crown he had already spilled so much blood for.

It's a great story, but the evidence for it is kind of slim.

It's just as likely that King Tut died from complications associated with malaria.

With no heirs, the one man most trusted by the court stepped in.

The queen consents to this and even has rings made with their names together showing her support for the new pharaoh.

That's a less interesting story, but it doesn't mean it's not true.

What we know for sure is that when Horem Heb, the old military commander, became Pharaoh of Egypt, he was dead set on burying this entire period of Egyptian history.

Egyptologists believe he was Pharaoh for around twenty years,

but his record keepers wrote down that Horem Heb had an impressive fifty year reign.

In Horem Heb's version of history, he had succeeded Amenhotep III.

Akhenaten and his monotheistic experiment was erased.

But so too was young Tutankhamun and King I.

As best we can guess, it seems like Horem Heb believed that everything about those previous reigns had been tainted.

King Tutankhamun and King I were perhaps too closely associated with the heretic pharaoh, despite their attempts to restore the old ways.

Or perhaps Ai's crass usurpation of the throne and the mess with the Hittites was enough to have his memory damned along with the heretic Akhenaten.

The famous restoration stella that I quoted from earlier was completely repurposed to exalt the reign of Horem Heb.

Tutankhamun's name was carved out, and Horem Heb's name was put in its place.

Public monuments started during Tutankhamun's reign were similarly reattributed.

It seems that for Horem Heb, it was just simpler if the chaos of Akhenaten and his immediate successors was entirely erased from history.

And it almost worked.

King Tutankhamun was effectively forgotten for centuries.

This was one of the reasons why his tomb was in such immaculate condition when Howard Carter opened it in 1922.

It's quite possible that those two attempted grave robberies, of which there was evidence, happened not long after Tut was first interred.

The only people that knew to look for the tomb of King Tutankhamun were those who had lived through his reign.

But once he passed out of living memory, no one was looking for his tomb, because no one knew that he existed.

It disappeared along with his name on his most enduring monuments.

But the fact that it remained so excellently preserved ironically made King Tutankhamun the most famous Pharaoh in modern times.

His obscurity ensured that his tomb had the best treasures.

Those treasures made King Tut a celebrity.

On the walls of many Pharaohs' tombs, you will find an inscription that translates as, quote, speak my name.

that I may live again.

It was believed that just by intoning the name of a deceased person, you empowered them in the next life.

By omitting the name of the boy king from the king's lists and public monuments, his successors tried to create a situation where King Tutankhamun would not receive that nourishment in the afterlife.

It may have taken 3,000 years for King Tutankhamun to get his due, but he may have had the last laugh.

If saying his name allows a king to live again, then in the 21st century, there's no Egyptian pharaoh more alive than King Tut.

Okay,

that's all for this week.

Join us again in two weeks' time when we will explore an all-new historical myth.

Before we go, as always, I need to give a few shout-outs.

Big ups to Gwendolyn K.

Bindersholl, to Lucas R.

San Pedro, to Sebastian, to Caleb, to Lucas Erler, to Brian Gordon, to Garrison, to Andrew Underwood, to Meredith Hutchison, to Joseph Davy, to Mark Gurk, to Jerry Conway,

to Oz and Jenna, to Emily Muckler, to Ole Tobias Mosti, to Whitney, to Logan Caruso,

to Ben F.

To Eric Johnson, to Jana Worrell, to Luke Edwards, and to Paul Jordy.

All of these people have decided to pledge at $5

or more every month on Patreon.

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Thank you.

Thank you.

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As always, the theme music for the show comes to us from Dirty Church.

Check out more from Dirty Church at dirtychurch.bandcamp.com.

All the other music you heard on the show today was written and recorded by me.

My name is Sebastian Major, and remember, just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't real.

One, two, three, four,

There's nothing better than a one-place life.