Ancient Treasures Read online

  The following day, Ibrahim Effendi, the local inspector of the Department of Antiquities at Luxor, arrived and, with the help of electric light, the tomb was fully explored for the first time in 3,000 years. The incredible material in the first chamber (the antechamber of the tomb) was in complete disorder, a sign of the ancient intruders mentioned previously. Carter and Carnarvon discovered a sealed doorway (broken open in antiquity) inside the room that led to another chamber (the annex of the tomb). Inside the annex, Carter states in his diary that he came upon a “mass of furniture. An utter confusion of beds, chairs, boxes, alabaster and faience vases, statuettes”; again there were obvious signs of ancient looting with “every sort of thing overturned and searched for valuables.”5 But although Carter knew he had found the tomb of Tutankhamun (later designated KV62), there was still no trace of the mummy. On Wednesday, November 29th, the tomb was officially opened and a special report despatched to The Times in London via a runner sent to Luxor. A few days later the tomb was closed up, and Carter left for Cairo to arrange for a steel gate to be made for the inner doorway of the tomb to protect against any attempts at looting the priceless artifacts inside. After the gate was fixed on December 22nd, the tomb was opened to European and Egyptian press, and a few days later the long and arduous task of recording, photographing, and removing the items from the two tomb chambers and cataloguing them began.

  Carter’s diary for March 20, 1923, notes that he left for Cairo due to the illness of Lord Carnarvon, who had contracted blood poisoning thought to have been caused by an infected mosquito bite on the cheek. The next day Carter describes Carnarvon as “very ill with an acute attack of erysipelas and blood poisoning”6 and on the 26th writes that he had developed pneumonia. Carnarvon died early in the morning on April 5th in the Continental-Savoy Hotel in Cairo, less than two months after the official opening of the burial chamber of Tutankhamun, which has led to a wealth of speculation (which we will come to later).

  In 1924 and 1925, during the fourth and fifth seasons of excavation, Carter uncovered and examined the actual burial chamber of Tutankhamun, with most of the work being done on the coffin and sarcophagus in October 1925. The burial chamber was the only decorated chamber in the tomb, which is unusual in Egyptian royal tombs, where it was common for most of the walls to be decorated with scenes from the Book of the Dead. This absence of decoration may be more evidence that Tutankhamun’s tomb was originally intended for a private individual and had to be adapted for royalty. The tomb’s burial chamber contained four gilded wooden shrines nestled one inside the other; the outer shrine measured 16.66 feet in length, 10.76 feet in width, and 9.02 feet in height, and took up almost the entire room. The innermost shrine contained a quartzite sarcophagus that itself contained two gilded wooden coffins and an incredible solid gold coffin, inside of which was Tutankhamun’s mummy. The three coffins fitted inside each other rather like Russian matryoshka dolls.

  On October 28th the mummy of the boy king was revealed, with his exquisitely made gold death mask, which has become for many people the emblem of ancient Egypt. Carter and his staff carried out a thorough, four-day examination of the mummy, carefully unwrapping the bandages and recording the artifacts that had been secreted inside. They began work on the treasury of Tutankhamun’s tomb in October 1926, and by November 1930 the entire contents of the tomb—the antechamber, annex, burial chamber, and treasury—had been cleared out.

  2.2. Tutankhamun’s gold funerary mask. Image copyright by Jon Bodsworth. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

  A huge treasure of more than 5,000 items was discovered in Tutankhamun’s tomb. When they had been photographed and recorded, most items were shipped to Cairo, where they are now held in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. Roughly 700 artifacts were discovered in the antechamber, which seemed to contain the objects used by the pharaoh in his everyday life and had been deposited in this chamber to follow him into the afterlife. The astonishing array of artifacts included richly decorated dismantled wooden chariots; three gilded wooden couches in the form of a lion, a cow, and the goddess Ammut (who was part hippopotamus, part crocodile, and part lioness); a cedar chair with its legs carved like the paws of a lion and decorated with a winged sun-disc with gold-foil overlay; and Tutankhamun’s throne, a beautifully crafted wooded chair overlaid with sheet gold and silver, and inlaid with motifs in faience and semiprecious stones. The main panel of this golden throne is beautifully decorated with a scene showing a seated Tutankhamun being anointed with scented oil by his queen, Ankhesenamun.

  The annex was the smallest room in Tutankhamun’s tomb and yielded 280 objects, including a superbly carved and painted alabaster boat, valuable oils, foods, wines, pottery, stools, baskets, and a number of gaming boards for the game of Senet. Almost the whole area of the burial chamber was taken up by the shrines, so it could not be filled with burial artifacts. Tutankhamun’s mummy, however, contained more than 100 items, intended as magical protection for the king, including an impressive Horus pendant made of gold inlaid with semi-precious stones. King Tutankhamun’s gold royal crown, with inlays of glass and semiprecious stones, was found on the head of his mummy, as was the greatest of all treasures from the tomb, the king’s death mask, weighing about 24 pounds and made of gold inlaid with blue glass. The gold emblems on the forehead of the mask of a vulture and cobra symbolize the king’s sovereignty over Upper and Lower Egypt.

  2.3. Tutankhamun’s gold funerary mask in the Egyptian Museum. Image by Bjorn Christian Torrissen. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license on Wikipedia.

  The treasury room, as its name suggests, was full of an incredible array of objects, including ceremonial model boats, a gilded wooden statuette of Tutankhamun on a skiff throwing a harpoon, an elaborately decorated wooden chest overlaid with carved and painted ivory, and a wooden figure of Anubis, the jackal-headed god of mummification, mounted on a gilded shrine with carrying poles. The Anubis shrine had been positioned at the entrance to guard the chamber. Also discovered in the treasury was the king’s stunning gilded wood canopic shrine, with four figures of guardian goddesses (Selket, Isis, Nepthys, and Neith), also made of gilded wood, on its sides. Inside this shrine was Tutankhamun’s canopic chest, which had been carved from a single block of semi-translucent calcite, and inside this were four finely carved alabaster canopic jars containing the organs of the king.

  After the excavations of Tutankhamun’s tomb came to an end in 1932, Howard Carter returned to London, retiring from archaeology and undertaking part-time work as an agent for museums and private collectors, while at the same time working on the publication of his findings from the Valley of the Kings. But on March 2, 1939, he died of lymphoma, a type of cancer, in Kensington, London, at the age of 64, before he was able to fully publish his discoveries. The relatively early deaths of Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter, as well as of others connected with the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb, have led to stories of some kind of pharaoh’s curse. We should not be too surprised at this, as most great ancient treasures are prone to attract a curse or two, as this book shows. Shortly after the tomb was opened in 1923 a British novelist with an interest in the mystical, Marie Corelli (pseudonym of Mary Mackay), issued a dramatic warning that was published in the New York World in which she said that “the most dire punishment follows any rash intruder into a sealed tomb.”7 There were stories that an ancient Egyptian warning had been found inside the tomb and when Lord Carnarvon died six weeks after the tomb had been opened, Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and by that time a convinced Spiritualist, suggested his death had been caused by “elementals” or “curses” concocted by ancient Egyptian priests to guard the tomb of King Tutankhamun. But no such curse had ever been found inside the tomb.

  The idea of a “mummy’s curse” that ensured the early death of those who entered the tomb was promoted by newspapers seeking to increase their sales no matter what the facts of the situation were. Access to the reports from Ca
rter’s excavations was also limited, leaving many newspapers without a direct source of information in the Valley of the Kings, a situation perfect for the invention of juicy stories relating to deadly ancient pathogens being released on the opening of the tomb and such like. However, a 2002 study by Dr. Mark Nelson from Monash University in Australia, the results of which were published in the British Medical Journal, found that the 25 Western members of Carter’s team (his study did not include Egyptians due to the difference in life expectancy between Westerners and Egyptians) who entered the tomb lived to an average age of 70. Lord Carnarvon’s early death was in large measure the result of an automobile accident in Germany in 1901, which crushed his jaw, and punctured his chest and lung. The accident left him with an extremely weak immune system, and his doctor advised him to seek a warmer climate—hence his trips to Egypt. Howard Carter, who one would assume would be most at risk from any pharaoh’s curse, lived more than 17 years after discovering the tomb.

  Throughout his time in Egypt, Lord Carnarvon built up a collection of Egyptian antiquities from excavations and purchase from Egyptian bazaars and private individuals. On his death this collection was divided up, with some pieces being donated to the British Museum and to Newbury Museum (in Berkshire in the south of England). The bulk, though, of the artifacts went to the United States, and some of them are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2009 an Egyptian Exhibition opened at Highclere Castle, the country seat of the Earl of Carnarvon, in Hampshire, in the south of England, perhaps best known for its role as the main setting for the hugely popular British television period drama Downton Abbey. The exhibition included reproductions of some of the items uncovered by Howard Carter in Tutankhamun’s tomb, as well as a number of smaller items from royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. The exhibition drew the wrath of Zahi Hawass, at the time the secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, who stated that the objects on display were taken from Egypt illegally and should be returned immediately.

  Various treasures from Tutankhamun’s tomb have been exhibited throughout the years in a number of different countries throughout the world. The Tutankhamun Treasures exhibit traveled to 18 cities in the United States and six in Canada between 1961 and 1967; the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition, which contained 50 objects from the tomb, opened on March 30, 1972, in the British Museum and is still the most popular exhibition in the Museum’s history. From London the exhibit moved on to the USSR, West Germany, the United States, and Canada. More recently Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, which again featured 50 artifacts from Tutankhamun’s tomb, as well as objects from other 18th-century royal burials, began in 2004 in Basel, Switzerland, and went to Bonn, Germany, then to various cities in the United States. From November 15, 2007, to August 31, 2008, the exhibition was at the O2 in London, and in 2011 it finished in the Melbourne Museum, Australia, where it broke all records for touring exhibitions in the country, attracting almost 800,000 visitors. Today Tutankhamun’s mummy still lies in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings where Howard Carter discovered it 90 years ago. For a number of years the tomb was closed to the public while restoration work was undertaken, but in November 2012 the Egyptian government had the tomb reopened in an attempt to revive the flagging post-revolution tourist industry in the country.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Gold of Troy: Priam’s Treasure

  In 1873 wealthy German businessman and amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann discovered a huge hoard of 3,000-year-old gold and other valuable artifacts at the supposed site of ancient Troy, in modern-day northwest Turkey. Known as Priam’s Treasure, after the Homeric king of Troy, most of this incredible collection was later smuggled out of the country to Berlin, where it remained until 1945, when it disappeared from a bunker beneath the Berlin Zoo. Nothing more was heard of the hoard for decades, though it was suspected that the Red Army had stolen it from the bunker when they captured the city (though Russia always denied this). However, in 1993 Priam’s Treasure was discovered at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. In 1990 an agreement was reached between the Russian and the German governments to return the works of art stolen during WWII, but protracted negotiations between the two countries have not resolved the issue and the collection remains in Russia. Further complicating the matter, Turkey has also claimed ownership of the treasure, which it says was illegally removed from its territory by Schliemann. Perhaps more controversially in recent years are the allegations questioning the authenticity of Priam’s Treasure, suggesting that the artifacts are in fact 19th-century forgeries, probably assembled by Schliemann himself.

  Schliemann’s sensational archaeological discoveries at the Bronze Age sites of Mycenae and Tiryns in Greece, and Troy in northwest Turkey, during the 1870s and 1880s made him a celebrated public figure. The revelation that the supposedly mythical Troy of Homer was a real city whose ruins Schliemann had discovered captured the public imagination in a way never equaled until Howard Carter found the tomb of 14th-century BC pharaoh Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings in 1922. The image of Schliemann’s beautiful Greek wife, Sophia, wearing part of Priam’s Treasure known as “the Jewels of Helen,” made an indelible impression on the public’s mind at the time and helped to bring the world of Homeric heroes and their long-suffering wives into the modern world.

  But behind all the pomp of the apparent discovery of Homer’s Troy lies a rather different story, where questions remain over the most basic of Schliemann’s assertions about the site of Troy, and his version of events of the discovery and subsequent fate of Priam’s Treasure.

  3.1. Sophia Schliemann, wife of Heinrich Schliemann, wearing treasures discovered at Hisarlik. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

  Born on January 6, 1822, in the town of Neubukow, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, northern Germany, Heinrich Schliemann was the son of a Protestant minister. Heinrich’s father read his son the captivating tales of classic literature from an early age, and Heinrich became particularly engrossed by Homer’s poems, especially The Iliad. After the early death of his mother when he was 9, Heinrich was sent to live with an uncle and five years later was apprenticed to a small grocer, where he worked for five years before a back injury forced him to leave. Looking for more adventurous employment, in 1841, at the age of 19, Schliemann signed on as a cabin boy on a ship sailing for Colombia, but the vessel sank during a hurricane off the coast of Holland. The young man’s luck was in, and along with the captain and one other crew member, he was washed ashore and eventually found his way to Amsterdam. There he obtained a job as a clerk and later, in 1844, as a correspondent and bookkeeper at Messrs. B. H. Schroder & Co., a large import and export firm. It was around this time that Schliemann discovered he had an amazing flair for languages, which eventually enabled him to learn, if accounts are to be believed, English, ancient and modern Greek. French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Polish, Italian, Greek, Latin, Russian, Arabic, and Turkish.

  In 1846 the firm sent him to St. Petersburg as their commercial agent. In Russia Schliemann flourished, soon founding his own company to sell commodities such as indigo, sugar, tea, coffee, and wine, while remaining employed by Schroder & Co. He also visited the United States where he apparently made a fortune in the Californian gold rush. Back in Russia in 1852, he married Ekaterina Petrovna Lyshin, with whom he had a son and two daughters. Schliemann’s astute business sense, illustrated by becoming a military contractor during the Crimean War (1853–1856) and investing in American and Cuban railways and Brazilian bonds, brought him great wealth but not happiness. In 1863, at the age of 41, Schliemann gave up his business in order to devote his time and fortune to his interests, particularly his childhood love of Homer. In 1868 he traveled to Greece, trying to locate the sites visited by Ulysses in Homer’s epic, from which emerged his book Ithaka, der Peloponnes und Troja (1869). He also divorced his Russian wife and, though his friend the Archbishop of Athens, met 17-year-old Sophia Engastromenos, whom he married in October 1869. But Schliemann
’s main obsession was to find the site of the ancient city of Troy, which by now he had concluded from his research was either at Hisarlik, a site near the Dardanelles in northwest Turkey, or at Bali Dagh, a hill overlooking the village of Bunarbashi, not far from Hisarlik.

  Schliemann was far from being the first to believe that ancient Troy lay at Hisarlik. In 1822 Scottish journalist Charles Maclaren published A Dissertation on the Topography of the Plain of Troy, claiming that the fable Homeric city lay within the huge mound at Hisarlik. But the real pioneer in the hunt for Troy was English scholar and Consular agent for the United States at the Dardanelles Frank Calvert (1828–1908). The Calvert family had arrived in the Troad (modern-day Biga peninsula, in northwest Turkey) in 1829, and in 1847 Frank’s brother Frederick bought a 2,000-acre farm at Akca Koy that included about half of Mount Hisarlik, the other half being owned by the Turkish government. Frank Calvert believed the mound contained an important archaeological site and began careful trial excavations there in 1863, carrying on until 1865, though crucially he never published his findings. Calvert’s discoveries from the excavations and his topographical knowledge of the area soon convinced him that he had discovered the site of Troy, and he sent a request for financial assistance to the British Museum. The request, however, was rejected, perhaps because of the notoriety surrounding the family due to a shipping swindle involving his brother Frederick, who was imprisoned (probably wrongly) in 1868 for his part in the fraud. Constantly unable to find sponsorship for full excavations of the site, Calvert must have thought his luck had turned one day in the late summer of 1868 when Heinrich Schliemann arrived at Hisarlik, searching for the site of Troy, and with seemingly endless resources at his disposal.