Arthur, however, had complete faith in homeopathic remedies and the healing power of crystals and so had died. Shortly after decorating the final hieroglyph, he contracted a minor ailment, easily cured by prescription medication. After ten years he had created a tomb faithful to the Egyptian Book of the Dead. On his return home he excavated his back garden and began to construct a pyramid. Ironically, however, he was absolutely right. This conviction had no more of a rational basis than the other odd beliefs for which he was renowned. Whatever the cause, Arthur had developed his latest unshakeable belief: The Pharaohs had understood the truth about the nature of life and death. Perhaps it had been due to the inspirational beauty and grandeur of the tombs and temples perhaps it had been due to standing in the sun too long without a hat on. It was with such an open-minded yet uncritical outlook that he had visited the monuments of ancient Egypt. until the arrival of Arthur.Īrthur had been born in England in the second half of the twentieth century and had been enthusiastic in his New Age beliefs. Two thousand mysterious years had then passed without the Dead bringing news from the World Below. Then, suddenly and without explanation, new arrivals had ceased. Ramesses had shared the sacred Kingdom of the Dead with Egyptians who had lived before him, and those who had come after, until more than a thousand years after the death of his mortal body. It had been more than three thousand years since his entombment, and he had never ceased to reflect with admiration on the accuracy with which Imhotep had described the funerary practices required to reach this Afterlife. Within a few generations, the tomb’s entrance had been clogged with stone debris, built over by workmen’s huts and forgotten.Ramesses the Second gazed from his palace balcony upon myriad workers cultivating the fertile banks of the Great River. The pharaohs who followed King Tut chose to ignore his reign, as despite his work restoring Amun, Tutankhamun was tainted by the connection to his father’s religious upheavals. The entrance corridor was apparently looted soon after the burial, but the inner rooms remained sealed. The tomb’s antechambers were packed to the ceiling with more than 5,000 artifacts, including furniture, chariots, clothes, weapons and 130 of the lame king’s walking sticks.
Kingdom of the dead tombs series#
Embalmers removed his organs and wrapped him in resin-soaked bandages, a 24-pound solid gold portrait mask was placed over his head and shoulders and he was laid in a series of nested containers-three golden coffins, a granite sarcophagus and four gilded wooden shrines, the largest of which barely fit into the tomb’s burial chamber.īecause of his tomb’s small size, historians suggest King Tut’s death must have been unexpected and his burial rushed by Ay, who succeeded him as pharaoh. Akhenaten upended a centuries-old religious system to favor worship of a single deity, the sun god Aten, and moved Egypt’s religious capital from Thebes to Amarna.Īfter he died, Tutankhamun was mummified according to Egyptian religious tradition, which held that royal bodies should be preserved and provisioned for the afterlife.
Genetic testing has verified that King Tut was the grandson of the great pharaoh Amenhotep III, and almost certainly the son of Akhenaten, a controversial figure in the history of the 18th dynasty of Egypt’s New Kingdom (c.1550-1295 B.C.).
WATCH: The Egyptian Book of the Dead on HISTORY Vault Who Was King Tut? The tomb’s hoard of treasure, intended to accompany the king into the afterlife, revealed an incredible amount about life in ancient Egypt, and made Tutankhamun the world’s most famous pharaoh. He was barely known to the modern world until 1922, when British archaeologist Howard Carter chiseled into the intact tomb of King Tut. Though his rule was notable for reversing the religious reforms of his father Akhenaten, Tutankhamun’s legacy was largely negated by his successors. King Tutankhamun (Tutankhamen or simply King Tut) ruled Egypt as pharaoh for 10 years until his death at age 19, around 1324 B.C.
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