These Objects Reveal Intimate Details of Tutankhamun's Life

This is a story about the life of the most famous pharaoh of them all, Tutankhamun, and the surprising connection he has with Northern England. I'm Joanne Fletcher, an Egyptologist born and bred in Burnsley. And in this, the centenary year of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, I've curated a very special exhibition in my hometown. Not only to celebrate the world of Tutankhamun, but also to celebrate the people from Northern England who played an important role in his rediscovery. Now you might be wondering what the story of the life of Tutankhamun has to do with Burnsley, and yet many of our local families have a direct influence in the development of the study of ancient history, and none more so than this very special man. This is Ernest Harold Jones. He was born in Burnsley in 1877, just across the street in fact. He went out to work at Amarna, to excavate in the Valley of the Kings, and really was the first to recognise the significance of the name Tutankhamun, and what it might mean for the discovery of new tombs in the Valley of the Kings. This man is a true local hero. Like many Egyptologists, my original inspiration for studying this amazing civilisation was Tutankhamun, and with all the publicity when his treasures first came to the UK in 1972, the fact that people could study Egyptology as a profession saw me choose my future career at the age of six. In Tutankhamun's time, the religious and political heart of Egypt was Thebes, and its huge temple of Karnak, and across the River Nile lay the Valley of the Kings, royal burial ground of the pharaohs of Egypt's new kingdom. But Tutankhamun lived at a time of political and religious upheaval. His father Akhenaten relocated the capital away from Thebes to the centre of Egypt and the new city of Amarna, and this is where Tutankhamun was born. It's easy to forget about Tutankhamun's life, because we're all so dazzled by the objects associated with his death, the contents of his golden tomb, but I want to focus on the years before his spectacular burial. Now if we're looking at the life of Tutankhamun, it's essential to realise that obviously he's just like all of us, he was part of a family, but not just any family. This is the wonderful mid-18th dynasty Amarna royal family. These are the superstars of ancient Egypt, and there he is, Tutankhamun himself, right in the middle, looking as he looked in his lifetime. Everyone knows the name Tutankhamun, immediately thinks of the fabulous gold death mask, but this is Tutankhamun as he looked in his life, as a real person, just like you or I, and all around him are members of his immediate family. At the front we have his father Akhenaten, the so-called heretic pharaoh, beside Akhenaten we have one of his wives, this is a woman called Kia, and although Egyptologists have many different theories as to who Tutankhamun's actual mother was, I personally still believe that this was a minor queen called Kia, whose head we see there, with this fabulous layered wig. However, Kia was very much eclipsed in her lifetime I would have thought, and certainly in the modern age, by a certain Nefertiti, the big blue crown behind this sort of constant presence, famous for being such a great beauty, and yet of course a hugely powerful woman, one of Egypt's many female pharaohs, highly likely she ruled after Akhenaten's death for a short period of years, and then the throne passes to Tutankhamun. Then of course at the other side of the case, we have sort of where it all began if you like, Akhenaten's father, my favourite pharaoh, the great son king Amenhotep III, there he is resplendent in his tall crown, smiling with that characteristic smile he has, and Tutankhamun often deferred to his grandfather's memory in later life, he was really his role model. And last but by no means least, you have Amenhotep III's great royal wife, the mighty Queen Tiye, so it's perhaps one of the smallest heads in the cabinet, but a massive personality because Queen Tiye was a real force of nature. The mummified body of Queen Tiye still retains her lustrous hair, and Tutankhamun seems to have had a close relationship with this woman, his grandmother, for he was buried with a lock of this hair which hints at the kind of intimate family relationship across the generations which we can all relate to. And so I think together this presents Tutankhamun as a member of a real family, far more than some tragic boy king famous for simply a gold death mask and coffin. Religion at Amarna was certainly a very complex matter, much has been made of Akhenaten bringing in a completely new framework, placing himself and his family at the heart of Egypt's new religion, where the only way to approach the single god, the Aten Sundisk, was through the royal family themselves. But we've chosen some special objects that give a much more intimate insight into how people worshipped inside their homes. Now this wonderful object is a pair of very delicate bronze tongs, and they were used in Amarna, in the royal city. They were discovered in a very fine house in the northern suburbs of the royal city, and they've been used to put incense onto a burning flame, onto a brazier, and this was done as part of daily rituals in household shrines, when the family who lived in the house were worshipping the royal family, Tutankhamun's father and stepmother Akhenaten and Nefertiti. Because at Amarna you had to worship the royal family, and only the royal family could then pass on your prayers and wishes to the ultimate deity, the great sun god, the Aten. And it's a wonderful thing because the sun god was represented as a golden disc whose rays come down and end in human hands, which would bless each member of the royal family. If you look very carefully, that's exactly how the ends of these tongs are formed, human hands. So the symbolism is very potent, they are exquisite. Now behind the tongs you can see three bunches of grapes, and these are wonderful things. They take us right into the heart of the royal palace, into the intimate quarters where Tutankhamun and his family would sit and drink wine. There's little holes at the top of each one where they could be placed and hung, almost like Christmas decorations. You were drinking your wine, you were looking up at the ceiling, and it was like being in the cool environment of this wonderful vineyard where the grapes always remained plump and luscious, and of course reminded the royal family where the wine that they were drinking actually came from. The royal court within which Tutankhamun grew up was supplied with the highest quality food and drink, much of which was grown along the Nile's fertile banks, or some of it imported from abroad. Now this is one of my most favourite objects from the whole of ancient Egyptian history. Here in my hand is an exquisite wine goblet. It's made as a blue lotus flower whose petals open every morning at dawn when the sun rises, and it's just such a beautiful thing. It's highly glazed pottery called and it just glitters. If you were the highest level of society, wine was the drink of choice. Initially it was imported into Egypt. It was seen as a way to exemplify your status. You could afford to have this stuff imported from the Levant, where all the best vineyards were, until around 3000 BC. And then the Egyptian rulers started to plant their own vineyards, and by the of Tutankhamun, by the 18th dynasty, 14th century BC, you have Egypt's rulers, including Tutankhamun, his stepmother Nefertiti, father Akhenaten, they all had their own personal vineyards because wine was a really big deal for the ancient Egyptian royals. It was a way to just display how sophisticated they were, what sophisticated palates they had, and to impress foreign dignitaries at banquets. We even have an image of Tutankhamun with a super-sized version, almost like a bucket, one of these, and he's glugging his wine. And for me it's wonderful to see Tutankhamun having a drink, enjoying himself, living, being alive. All the ancient artifacts in Barnsley's exhibition have been loaned by Bolton Museum, whose astounding collection of 12,000 ancient Egyptian objects includes some amazing fabrics over 3,000 years old. And I'm meeting its curator, Ian Trumbull. For me, one of the most important cases in this exhibition is this one, because this is the life of Tutankhamun. And as always, you know, we are what we wear. And this is a fabulous, fabulous thing. I mean, how did it come into the Bolton collection? Well, Bolton's got a fantastic textile collection. In fact, that's one of its strengths. You know, one of the largest ancient Egyptian textile collections in the world. And that's purely because of Bolton's textile history. So Bolton was a major textile producing town in the early 1900s. I think for me, the fact that Bolton's first curators, the Midgley's, came from Cawthorn in Barnsley, that was an absolute revelation, because they were real pioneers, weren't they? Absolutely. I mean, they had a real interest in textiles and the textile industry. And they were looking at the modern textiles that were being produced in the late 1800s, early 1900s. And then they were comparing those with the textiles that were coming from Egypt. William Midgley was able to study them with his cutting edge microscope, this big bulky machine that in its day was the thing. And that really set him up as a world-renowned expert on ancient Egyptian textiles. Absolutely. You know, it was an absolute northern powerhouse. You know, you had the money, you had the expertise, you know, in the north that were generating or helping the excavations in Egypt. And that material is then coming to those collections in the north. This tunic that we have at the back of the case here actually doesn't come via that, it comes slightly a different route. So it comes by a private donation that also included our adult male mummy. It was part of his mummy wrappings. But when it was unravelled, it turned out to be part of a tunic, which we know that he was New Kingdom. We are pretty sure that he's royal. So this is a royal tunic. So we had it beautifully conserved. And you can see here you have this collar, the detail on that. It comes all the way down the front, which has been reconstructed. And then you have the whole stretch of linen all the way down the front to the very bottom, which you still have the fringe at the bottom of the tunic remaining with these little very, very fine fringe with the little bits of wax on the bottom to stop the fringe unravelling. Surviving images of the royal family and courtiers revealed just how fine their clothing was, as exemplified by this especially sheer piece from Bolton's collection. You can see daylight through that linen. Yeah, you can stand behind it and you'll see yourself through it. It is incredible. I mean, the fineness on that is, you know, that was one of the things that enabled Bolton to generate the collection because our curators, the first curators, from Barnsley, were so interested in textiles. How did they manage to create something so fine? Because in Bolton at that time in the 1800s, they were still struggling to create something so fine. And yet, you know, three and a half thousand years ago, there you have people making it. These are the different things that people are wearing. It's not just a tunic. You know, you have your embellishments, you have your things that go with it, your statues, you know. And you know, that's exemplified from this little statue in the centre, which is fantastic. We're pretty sure that he's from Amarna. He's a really lovely little guy. Sadly, we don't know his name, unfortunately. So he's forgotten to history other than his little statuette. But his whole garments just set off this case and exemplify everything that we have here. We've already seen how Tutankhamen's father, Akhenaten, brought in a real religious revolution. By worshipping the single god, the Aten, he turned Egypt's traditional religion on its head, completely changing how things had always been done within the temples, the way the clergy had functioned, even the way people had communicated with their gods. But archaeologists are increasingly uncovering a far more complicated picture, suggesting that there was far more going on than we first thought. For the evidence shows that some of the old gods were very much still around, and were still being worshipped within the new city. Now this little piece of carved stone might not look very impressive at all. But in the single object, it encapsulates real drama and political and religious strife at the city of Amarna. It was found in the bedroom of a house in Amarna on Main Street. This is no major work of art. This is not the finest masterpiece. But the image speaks volumes. It's such a powerful image. It's the sacred ram of the state god Amun, the old god of Egypt. And we know it's Amun because he's wearing his special crown, the Atef crown. Amun was the primary god whose cult centre was Karnat Temple in Thebes. His ram figures line the temple's processional routes, and other examples show his sacred ram wearing this same tall Atef crown. But during Tutankhamun's upbringing, Amun had apparently been completely eradicated. Amun was the god that Tutankhamun's father Akhenaten completely banned. All his temples were closed down, his priests were thrown out of work, and the money from Amun's temples was taken by the royal family to build the city of Amarna. And so you would never expect to find this banned god anywhere in Amarna at all, and yet here he is. I think the fact that archaeologists found him in the bedroom of the house suggests to me some sort of secretive worship of the old gods. It's a tiny piece of evidence which shows that the old gods had never really gone away and lived on, at least in private. And after Akhenaten died, the situation was completely reversed. Akhenaten's son, a boy aged around nine, came to the throne of Egypt, a boy we know as Tutankhamun. And one of his first acts was to take the mummified body of his father Akhenaten out of Amarna, back to Thebes, and its valley of the kings. The Egyptians draw a line under this whole Amarna period. The worship of the Aten Sundisk is never seen again, and Amun has been restored to his rightful place. With Amun reinstated at the reopened temple of Karnak, the Aten Sundisk was cast into oblivion. And this huge religious upheaval really did shape Tutankhamun's life and the throne he inherited. It's even reflected in the changing nature of his name, for he wasn't always called Tutankhamun. Here we have Tutankhamun himself, the golden pharaoh, the boy king. And that's literally what this exact replica figure is. It was found in Tutankhamun's tomb, and it shows him aged around 9 or 10, the time he became pharaoh of Egypt, this very young age. Now when it comes to Tutankhamun's name, it's an interesting one, because he had several names. When he was born, he was known as Tutankhaten, which simply means the living image of the Aten, the great sun god. When he became king, aged around 9 or 10, he received a second royal name, Nebkeperure. Now this little figurine that has the throne name Nebkeperure on his belt buckle, we know that this was a name he used at Amarna, because these wonderful blue faience rings, or ring fragments, the four here in the case, they give two examples of Nebkeperure in hieroglyphs, and two examples of Tutankhamun in hieroglyphs. So between them they sort of give the ultimate double cartouche of Tutankhamun, Nebkeperure, pharaoh of Egypt. And as the renamed Tutankhamun embarked on his 10-year reign, he married his probable half-sister, Ankhesenamun, and together they steered Egypt towards some much needed stability. Then around the age of 19, Tutankhamun died, and that is how history remembers him. But now, in this centenary year of the rediscovery of his tomb, I think it's only right that we not only remember his death, but we start to celebrate his life. Thanks for watching this video on the History Hit YouTube channel. 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