# The Daily Telegraph/1923/The Tomb Of Tutankhamen

Source: The Daily Telegraph, January 19, 1923, page 9-10
Dr. Graftoon Elliot-Smith is a distinguished Australian scientist, and is Professor of Anatomy at London University. For nine years he lived in Egypt, where he has done a great deal of work on Royal mummies, and he is the author of the official catalogue of "Royal Egyptian Mummies." Lord Carnarvon's advisers have consulted him with regard to the unrolling of the mummy of Tutankhamen, which is expected to be found in the third chamber of the recently discovered tomb.
When the eyes of all the world are focussed on the tomb of Tutankhamen and the fresh revelation it affords of the superb achievements of the ancient Egyptians in the arts and crafts, it is worth while to consider how this new discovery is likely to affect our attitude to the history of civilisation and a fuller recognition of the human motives that found expression in its creation and development. Apart from the demonstration it affords of the fabulous wealth that was hidden away more than thirty centuries ago in the valley of the tombs of the kings, the new discovery appeals as an aesthetic revelation of dazzling brilliance rather than as an addition to our knowledge. So far its effect has been to force the scholar and the man in the street to take an interest in the civilisation that was capable of producing such perfect works of art, and to ask themselves whether this precocious culture was really so exotic as it is commonly supposed to be, or whether, on the contrary, such achievements on the very threshold of a yet unenlightened Europe did not exert a far greater influence than it is usual to accord them.
But at present we are concerned simply in considering what is the significance of the discoveries so far made; the furniture, which has never been surpassed in the perfection of its workmanship and exquisite decoration; linen of a fineness and a beauty of texture that have never been excelled; carved alabaster vases such as the world has never seen before; and statues that afford some justification for the ancient belief that they were, in truth, "living images." What is the meaning of all this lavish display of skill and beauty? Why was so much wealth poured into the hidden recesses of this desolate ravine, and the most exquisite products of the world's achievement in the arts and crafts buried out of sight in this strange necropolis? The true answers to these questions reveal the motive force that brought about the development of civilisation and made Egypt the pioneer in its creation.
EMBALMING AND IMMORTALITY
All these elaborate preparations, the laborious and costly process of hewing the tomb out of the solid rock and furnishing it with such magnificence, were made because the ancient Egyptians believed that the King's body to be housed in it had been made imperishable. It was because they imagined when the body was embalmed the continuation of the King's existence had been assured that they provided him with food and raiment, the furniture and amulets, the jewels and the unguents, and other luxuries which he had been accustomed to enjoy, before he was taken to his "eternal house" in the desolate valley of the tombs. They can be no doubt that in the early days of Egyptian history this naive belief was regarded in all seriousness as the simple truth. In fact, the thoroughness with which at first the Egyptians gave concrete expression to their faith in making material provision for every want that the deceased might experience could only have been inspired by the confidence that all these preparations were indeed effective. This conviction was deeply rooted in the practice of mummifying the dead, preserving the body so that it should become incorruptible and everlasting; and this was supposed also to involve the feasibility of the prolongation of the dead man's existence.
The hope of survival was thus based upon the efficacy of the embalmer's art: and the extraordinary constancy with which for more than thirty centuries - for a span of years four times the length of time that separates us from the arrival of William the Conqueror in Britain - they persisted in their efforts to improve their methods and render more perfect this gruesome practice is a striking tribute to the fundamental importance of mummification to the Egyptians. The craft of the carpenter was first invented for the manufacture of coffins to protect the corpse; the stonemason's first experiments had for their aim the preparation of rock-cut chambers still further to ensure its safety; the first buildings worthy of being called architecture were intended to promote the welfare of the dead, to provide places to which relatives could bring food necessary for the dead man's sustenance, and a room to house his portrait statue - another art that was the outcome of the practice of mummification - which took his place at the temple of offerings and preserved his likeness for all time.
These elements of civilisation, the arts of architecture and sculpture, and the crafts of the carpenter and the stonemason, were thus direct results of the custom of embalming. But its influence in moulding ritual and belief was no less profound and far-reaching.
EARLY BELIEFS
The belief in the possibility of the continuation of existence after death may have been (and probably was) much older than the Egyptians; but the evidence now available seems fairly decisive that the belief in immortality was not definitely formulated by mankind until the means had been devised of making the corpse everlasting, when "the corruptible body put on incorruption." Moreover, the ritual of the most primitive religions was based upon the practices of the early Egyptians for revivifying the mummy, or its surrogate, the mortuary statue, by burning incense, pouring out libations, opening its mouth to give it the breath of life, and performing a whole series of dramatic acts to animate it and restore its consciousness, and so make it possible for it not only to take an intelligent share in the life around it, but also to hear appeals for help and guidance and to answer such requests.
Egypt alone of the countries of antiquity provides the explanation of these strange beliefs and practices. They were devised by the concrete-minded people of the Nine Valley as part of a comprehensive philosophy of life and death which was formulated as a sort of life insurance, in accordance with the principles of which the deceased himself was supposed to be the beneficiary, and his reward an indefinite prolongation of existence.
This remarkable system of beliefs originated even before the beginning of civilisation, sixty centuries ago; but the latter event was responsible for intensifying the conviction of its reality and increasing men's hope in its potency.
THE DAWN OF CIVILISATION
Civilisation began when the Egyptians first devised the methods of agriculture and invented a system of irrigation. The irrigation engineer was the first man in the history of the world to control and organise the co-operative work of his fellow-men, and become the ruler of a whole community. If there si one lesson more than another than history has demonstrated in Egypt, equally in ancient and modern times, it is the absolute necessity of a strong and autocratic Government, because the conditions in the Nile Valley are such that the prosperity of the country and the welfare of the whole community is entirely dependent upon the just and equitable distribution of the waters of irrigation throughout the land. It is not to be wondered at that the engineer who successfully achieved this task, and in a very special and real sense controlled the lives and destinies of his people, became the King, whose beneficence was apotheosised after his death, so that he became the god Osiris, who was identified with the river, whose life-giving powers he controlled. For to a people who had never experienced anything of the kind before it must have seemed an altogether miraculous and superhuman act for one man to have in his absolute control the prosperity of a whole community and every individual unit of it.
The connection between this story and the tomb of Tutankhamen may not be apparent. But when it is realised that the original invention of the social system was so closely identified with the god Osiris, it will be understood that the ritual of mummification and burial aimed at identifying the deceased with Osiris, and by imitating the in... dents of his story to secure for the deceased a fate like that of the god, whose life-giving powers were sought to grant the continuation of existence. The early kings of Egypt, having only recently acquired control of the labour and wealth of their dominion, did not hesitate to squander both in the preparation of their tombs, in the vain belief that thereby they were making certain their own survival. Twenty centuries later, in the times of Tutankhamen, they were still obsessed with the same idea, and spent fabulous sums in preparing their tombs in the Bitsan el Molouk.
The peculiar importance of the study of these strange customs and beliefs in Egypt depends upon the fact that, not only were they invented by the Egyptians, and preserved in their entirety, so that the whole story of their development can be read in all their childish directness and simplicity, but also because other peoples of antiquity, to whose civilisation Europe owes her own heritage, adopted some of the results of these Egyptian devices, and, after eliminating some of their cruder details, transformed them into the essentials of the world's civilisation. Hence, in recovering the history of Egyptian cultural development, we are really probing into the sources of the customs and beliefs of our own everyday life and experience. Thus we must regard mummification as something more than an eccentric practice that excites our curiosity. For it played a fundamental part in shaping the development of civilisation, both its arts and crafts, as well as its most vital customs and beliefs.
GIVING LIFE TO THE DEAD
If we turn to consider the process of mummification, and the aims of its practitioners, it will be found that throughout the long ages in which it was in vogue the Egyptian embalmer kept constantly striving to attain two aims. His fist object was to preserve the actual tissues of the body as thoroughly as he could. But he was also attempting the much more difficult task of preserving the natural form of the body, and especially of the features, not merely that the deceased should retain his distinctive traits in a recognisable form, but rather that the simulacrum should be the 'living" image of himself. In other words, the aim was to make the representation of the dead man so lifelike that he should, in fact, remain alive, and be certain of maintaining his existence. The early Egyptians seem to have entertained in all its childlike naivete the belief that they were actually conferring vitality upon the image when they made it lifelike. The Egyptian verb for describing the work of the sculptor who carved the portrait statue meant literally, according to Alan Gardiner, "to give birth," in the sense of "giving life"; and there is no doubt they meant this idea of life-giving to be accepted as the simple expression of a fact, and not merely as a symbol or analogy.
When mummification was first devised, probably at the time of the earliest dynasty about 3200 B.C.) it was seen realised that if, in the climate of Egypt, the preservation of the tissues of the body was not very difficult to effect, the task of retaining the distinctive features was practically unattainable. All kinds of devices were tried, during the Second, Third, and Fourth Dynasties, by wrapping the mummy so as to simulate the human form, painting it, applying clay or resinous paste, and modelling them into portrait statues upon the enshrouded mummy itself. When these devices failed to achieve the desired aim of making lifelike portraits, the art of modelling statues of the deceased in stone or wood was invented, and paint and artificial eyes were used to make them as lifelike as possible. The skill with which the Egyptians of the Pyramid Age overcame the technical difficulties of the sculptor's art and made life-size portraits which, as I have said before, could not untruthfully be called "living images," is one of the most amazing achievements in the history of art. But it was more than the triumph of a craftsman: it was the realisation of a deeper desire to preserve the image, and so prolong the existence of the sculptor's model, the deceased, who was thus saved from annihilation.
SUCCESS AFTER TWENTY CENTURIES
Although these early sculptors had achieved to signal a triumph the embalmers never abandoned the hope of bringing their art to such a state of perfection as to make of the mummy itself the simulacrum of the deceased. With infinite patience and persistence they experimented through one millennium after another to attain this object. But it was not until the time of the Twenty-first Dynasty, more than twenty centuries after they first attempted to do it, that they were able to transform the mummy itself into a portrait statue. From the artistic point this represents to us a debasement of esthetic motive and practice; but to the embalmer it was the culmination of his achievement. But it was also the prelude to the degradation of his art. For the technique became so complex and difficult of execution that failure became a common incident, and to disguise the evidence of such incompetence the practice grew up of paying chief attention to the external appearance of the wrappings rather than to the corpse.
The wholesale plundering of the Royal mummies in the Twentieth Dynasty, and the knowledge acquired by the priests when remedying the damage so inflicted, seem to have been responsible for the rapid transformation of the methods in the Twenty-first Dynasty. For this experience afforded them a unique opportunity of studying the results and appreciating the defects of their predecessors' work. That they profited by this experience is evident from the changes they effected in their technique immediately after they had realised the defects of the methods of their predecessors. For their innovations were directed towards remedying the most obtrusive distortions found in the mummies of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties. The sunken cheeks were filled out by means of packing them with linen or mud, artificial eyes were inserted, the nose, lips, and ears were protected from distortion by wax plates, and the cheeks were painted. Many other devices were introduced to convert the mummy from a shrunken caricature into a more life-like portrait.
Mummification reached its fullest and most successful development during the six centuries from 1500 B.C. to 940 B.C., which represents the period of the collection of royal mummies in the Cairo Museum. They reveal the ancient Egyptian practice of embalming in its highest perfection, and have provided most of the information we possess of the history of mummification.
THE FIRST DISCOVERIES.
It is with feelings other than those of mere curiosity that we must contemplate the practice of an art that has made it possible for us, at the present day, to gaze upon the actual faces of the men and women who dominated the civilised world thirty centuries ago. Yet, as the argument in this article has indicated, the art of mummification has an even greater interest to the historian than this essentially sentimental appeal, for it represents the scaffolding of the great temple of civilisation.
None of the collections of Royal mummies that have opened our eyes to these vital considerations was known before 1881. For some years before that time the curiosity of archaeologists had been awakened by the fact that large numbers of valuable objects bearing Royal names of one particular period were being brought from Egypt to Europe, until in 1881 the late M. Maspero's suspicions were aroused that Royal tombs were being plundered. In April of that year he took drastic steps which led three months later to the discovery of the mummies of some of the most famous of the Pharaohs. Hieratic inscriptions upon the rough coffins left no doubt as to the identity of their occupants. But in some cases they also recorded the dates of their transfer from their own tombs into other tombs, and finally into the hiding-place at Deir el Bahari, where they remained undisturbed from about 1000 B.C.. until 1870 or thereabouts. The subsequent discovery of a collection of Royal mummies in the tomb of Amenhotep II. in 1898, and the series of other tombs in the Valley of the Tombs of the kings that have rewarded the search begun by Mr. Howard Carter in 1902, find a fitting culmination in this year's great revelation.
In another article I shall discuss the light such discoveries have thrown upon the history of Egypt and of early civilisation.