The Amazing Riches of Tutankhamen
by Professor T. Eric Peet
Tutankhamen as Horus the Avenger
This gold-plated wooden statuette
is one of more than thirty found in the store chamber of
the tomb.
It represents the youthful Horus in his canoe about
to launch his javelin at the hippopotamus, the river
demon lurking to destroy him. |
THE tourist who pays a visit to Egypt for the first time
will undoubtedly receive a great surprise on his first pilgrimage
to the Cairo Museum.
However closely he may have followed the descriptions
of the finds in the tomb of Tutankhamen, however vivid his
imagination, he will hardly be prepared for the discovery
that the material completely fills the long East Gallery
of the
upper floor of the museum, and even overflows into the North.
Now the East Gallery is 80 yards long and 10 yards broad,
and the cases in it are placed no farther apart than is necessary
to allow visitors to move freely. Only after seeing this
can
anyone realise the quantity of material which was packed
into the famous tomb in the Valley of the Kings. |
Why and for whom were these treasures collected into these in
significant underground chambers? When Amenhotep III, one of the
greatest of the kings of Egypt, died in 1375 B.C., he left as heir
to the throne his son Amenhotep IV, after wards re-named Akhnaton,
a boy with views of his own on the subject of religion. This youth,
within a few years of his accession, had suppressed the national
worship of Amen, and substituted that of the Sun's Disk or Aton,
at the same time moving his capital from Thebes, the modern Luxor,
to Tell el-Amarna, some 350 miles farther down the Nile. There,
after a reign of about 17 years, he died, leaving apparently no
son, but a number of daughters. One of these was married to a certain
Smenkhkara, who for year or two succeeded his father-in-law and
then disappeared. A younger sister had been married Tutankhamen,
of whose birth we know nothing, though some now think he may have been
a brother of Akhnaton (others believe he was a son). Continued...
Cairo Museum
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