367. Ancient Egypt: “Tut-mania” And Tutankhamun’s Tomb (Ep 6)

18:37Anita:Handsome he is too. So one thing which bubbles along under the more kind of headline-worthy news about the curse is a certain anxiety about the status of the tomb. And so Howard Carter describes these two black-painted, gilded statues of the king as guardian statues. I've got a cardboard cutout, one of them in my office behind me. And these are actually ritual representations of the king that may have been used during the king's lifetime, but which ended up in the tomb antechamber. So among the first things that Carter saw. And he describes them as sentinels because they hold weapons and they seem quite menacing.

19:24It almost kind of implies that Carter feels guilty for probing further into the tomb. So there is this, in a way, a kind of colonial guilt about the entering and the emptying of a pharaoh's tomb. And that finds real expression in a narrative which is cooked up by people who feel kind of left out in the cold by the Times deal. So the Times of London reporting deal means that in order to generate, you know, copy for newspapers, journalists have to write about something. And so this idea of, especially after Carnarvon's death, the supposition that it's a curse really kind of balloons.

20:11Anita:And what's interesting is that, you know, Carter's having none of it. He sees it for what it is and describes it as Tommy Rot. Any mention of the curse is Tommy Rot, he says. But what is also interesting is the human condition, because you have talk of the supernatural and talk of a curse, people are even more interested in seeing it with their own eyes and, you know, getting their hands on merch if they can. I mean, I think there's always, there had always been an association between pharaonic Egypt and magic. So it appears in scripture, Egyptian magicians. And that persists because, you know, we're talking about pharaonic religion appears to an outsider, quite mysterious, quite arcane, quite in some ways quite threatening.

20:54There's lots of things to do with the dead, focused on tombs and graves. So all of this makes a really heady cocktail that speaks to the moment.

21:04William:But it's also significant for the moment that all this stuff stays in Egypt. For the previous two centuries, most of the good stuff is being shipped out. You go to Italy and there's this enormous Egyptian museum in Turin associated with the early Italian royal family. the British Museum is obviously notoriously chock-a-block with Egyptian goodies. Now Tutankhamen, which is the best stuff of all, stays in Egypt. Now that would not have happened presumably 20 or 30 years earlier. No, and there's an interesting play on the rulebook because it said that if a tomb was found intact, certainly a royal tomb, that it should stay property of the state in its entirety.

21:49But if a tomb is robbed in some way not intact or not a coherent group of objects, then it's subject to this system of fines division, this colonial system cooked up by an Englishman and a Frenchman, Flinders Petrie and Gaston Maspero. So when Carter finds Tutankhamen, they find evidence and play up, deliberately play up, the evidence that the tomb had been robbed. So this seems to be done as a way of... They're trying to get it all out.

22:20William:Yeah. Well, getting at least some... Some of it out. What Carter describes as recompense for Lord Carnarvon, because Lord Carnarvon has spent a lot of money on the excavation. And this is also the justification for the Times deal, because Carter himself has spent a lot of cash in doing the business of archaeology. It's not cheap. Now, Carnarvon does get bits out, because when you go to Downton Abbey today, in the basement, there is some stuff. There's quite a lot of Egyptian bits and bobs, but it's not, obviously, the gold mask or any of the really big knockout objects. No, and to be clear, it's just sort of not done for libel.

23:03Highclere Castle doesn't have any actual Tutankhamen stuff, I don't believe any of that. There's some Egyptian stuff. It has Egyptian stuff because Carter was a buyer for Carnarvon before the find of Tutankhamen. That's not Tutankhamen stuff that you see there in the baser. So this is not necessarily directly connected to the tomb, but for sure Carter does pocket a couple of things, which may end up outside of Egypt, but then subsequently are returned. You wouldn't possibly be able to say.

23:31Anita:We can comment on the fact that there were massive rows about this. that Carter was accused of, you know, pocketing an amulet, which then gets given to somebody in 1934. And the allegation is very clear that, you know, while he was taking stuff out and putting things in crates and counting things up, there's stuff that went uncounted and slipped into pockets. Yes, that's a nice way to put it. Anyway, I think we'll leave it at that. We'll leave it at that. But it's important to say that that was, at the time, the expectation of any find. That was just how things were done. But back to the political context, with the Egyptian government keen to assert its own authority, it was no question to Egyptian officials at the time that everything should stay as one find.

24:20You know, the power of the Tutankhamen galleries and the Grand Egyptian Museum now is that they are everything together and you can see everything together from the tomb.

24:28Anita:So Campbell, I mean, look, this is the first wave, we should say, of Tartmania. There is a second wave to come. And just as the first wave comes on the heels of a hot war, the second one has a lot more to do with the Cold War. Join us after the break and we'll talk about this some more.

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27:21Anita:Welcome back. So just before the break, we were sort of giving you a little tease about the second wave of Tup Mania, but we ought to talk about events in Egypt, which we've, you know, done a whole series on here at Empire. And that is, you know, NASA's rise to power, the whole Suez crisis, and this complete assertion of, you know, Egyptian pride, if you like, Campbell. And with that assertion, where you've got sort of a living figure like NASA, I guess the Egyptology kind of fades into the background because here's a living, breathing colossus that people can fixate on. Yes, absolutely. I think most important to mention, of course, is Egypt's complete independence in the 1950s.

28:05And so Nasser is the president of Egypt. And that ushers in a period of great ambition. So the plan is pretty soon realised to raise the Aswan High Dam to generate energy. And so going hand in hand with that, I think there is a notable slump in interest in Tutankhamun. There's a slump in interest in Egyptian archaeology in general, and certainly non-Egyptian archaeologists working in Egypt don't dry up entirely, but aren't so significant. But in order to raise awareness and raise funds for the Aswan High Dam project and the removal, the movement, if you like, of the temples that are threatened with flooding.

28:52So temples of Abu Simbel, most famously, temple of Philae in the south of Egypt near Aswan. Tutankhamen has to go on tour. So although, as we'll discuss, there are major, you know, tours of geopolitical importance in the 1970s, actually in the early 60s, some material of Tutankhamen's goes around several venues in the United States, seen by Jackie Kennedy. This is a big thing. It's already a diplomatic move. So it's ancient objects, ancient material being leveraged for modern fundraising.

29:27William:So sadly, from a British point of view, the big moment of wave two, Tupmania, if you like, is 1972, when President Sadat, who's the guy who takes over after NASA, the guy who we met most recently with the 1973 war, attacking over the Suez Canal, and then Camp David, those are all episodes which you can listen to on our backlist. He sends Tutankhamen to the British Museum in London and I remember as a seven-year-old some of my earliest memories the excitement I was already mad keen on Tutankhamen and I knew already the galleries in Edinburgh backwards and I begged and I begged and I begged to go to London to see this thing and it was my first ever trip to London and I went down and I remember being amazed by everything by the by the double-decker buses and the Harry Krishna people who were outside the British Museum playing on their on their drums and then going in and this darkened museum space with this amazing lighting of this you know completely iconic death mask at the center and I remember you know as a literally a seven-year-old peering up at it because I was physically down below it you know you have certain memories from your childhood which are completely clear this for me is one of those it's my first big moment my first big trip the most exciting thing that ever happened to me and it was everything of that entire trip is absolutely sharp in my memory.

31:01Anita:So, I mean, you know, that tour had a profound effect on a man who's then going to devote his life to history. Where else did the tour go? Do we know what kind of impact it had on the people who saw? Yeah, well, that's a great story, William. Thank you for sharing it. I would love to have been one of those people.

31:20William:You're too young, Campbell. You're too young. You're barely out of short trousers. I'm born a little bit later. But I know several noted Egyptologists who, like you, wear children in the queue, and that inspired them to become Egyptologists. It's worth saying about that show, that really iconic 1972 show, there were 50 objects, including the famous gold mask, selected to mark 50 years since the find. So 1972, of course, was 50 years since 1922. And then that really ushered in the literal blockbuster because that and other venues clocked up. Well, at the BM, almost a million people in the United States, eight million people, where people were queuing around the block.

32:07So it busts the block. So there's the origin of the phrase. And one thing as a curator I'm often struck by in looking at the photos in the press around that time is the dramatic lighting. So the rooms were dark, the galleries were dark, objects were not given much in the way of contextual information, but they were spotlit. And so they really loomed out of the darkness.

32:32Anita:They popped, as we say. They popped. Absolutely popped. Yeah. So in what Britain has taught the Egyptians and Sadat at the helm is that there is a hunger for this. And he's a savvy man, as we've discussed in our Egypt series before. And he realizes that there is a certain currency and kudos that, you know, soft power, if you like, with jumping on the back of this tut mania. And what's really interesting, Campbell, is that there is a tour of the Soviet Union between 1973 and 1975. So straight after the British Museum, enormous success. And it's interesting because Sadat himself has kicked out previously all his Soviet advisors.

33:13Anita:Previously, when he comes to power, he's sick of them littering the place and boots them all out. And yet he realizes, if I want to build a bridge, let's make it a pharaonic bridge. Yeah, and emphasis on the soft power, because although, as I said, Tutankhamen, or items from Tutankhamen's tomb had been on tour in the United States in the 60s, you know, big stuff like the gold mask really do speak to diplomacy. The numbers also, I suspect, really shocked people because there are hundreds of thousands of people queuing up. And it gets, yeah, it gets the cultural products of one country in the newspapers of another.

33:55so it does help with diplomacy. But then the relationship I think with the USSR tools on the international scene generally but that with the United States warms up and that introduces the possibility of a return visit for Tutankhamen with bigger flasher things including the mask in the second half of the 1970s.

34:20William:This as we know from our Camp David episode is in the aftermath of the 1973 war. Sadat is making peace with Israel. Carter is pulling Sadat close to him. Jimmy Carter, not Howard Carter. Jimmy Carter, not Howard Carter, not to be confused. And Tutankhamen goes off in the wake of all this around the States. He goes to Washington, Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Seattle for three years between 1976 and 1979. Toot is on the move. And we even get a law case, don't we, when there's a policeman who has a stroke while guarding the treasure. And his legal claim on the city is that the injuries resulted from the curse of the pharaohs.

35:07I've not heard that one, but I would fully believe it.

35:11Anita:Very happy to tell you. So it's police lieutenant George E. Labrache who had the stroke and tried that on.

35:18William:History doesn't relate whether he got his injury claim with the curse of the pharaoh.

35:22Anita:But what does happen is that, you know, as a tool of diplomacy during the Cold War, suddenly, you know, the pharaohs are front and centre. Yeah. And I think that's probably also more generally in museums, the idea of the, you know, temporary touring exhibition as a diplomatic tool comes to the fore. It's not just for ancient Egyptian material. so yeah I mean Tutankhamen can go places that maybe politicians can't or you can smooth the way and that has yeah reverberations in in pop culture particularly in America uh yeah for Egyptology and what's really interesting is that that American exhibition happened because the canniest operator of them all Henry Kissinger personally gets involved so the Metropolitan Museum Campbell I'm right in saying you know not sure don't know and he picks up a phone and says are you mad just say yes because we're gonna take this so as campbell said nearly eight million visitors will go and and have a look at the the tut exhibition you'll have things like um oh steve martin comedian steve martin performing uh that king tut on on snl saturday night live and that you know which is just a jokey song go look it up it's still on youtube very funny breaks into the billboard top 100, sells a million copies.

36:45Anita:And then it's merch, so much merch. And I think this is the, I mean, I suppose the 1920s was merch-tastic. I don't know whether you've ever even done a survey of this. Who produced the most toot-tut? Tut-toot, tut-tat, however you want to put it. Tut-tat, yes. Which was the era with the most tut-tat? I suspect it probably was the 70s. And subsequent exhibitions haven't been able to replicate that sense of real excitement because we're quite used to it now. We're used to the blockbuster. We're used to the idea of a big show rolling into town. And photography and documentaries and films and books make this stuff quite accessible.

37:29But in the 1970s, you know, the first big glossy colour books about Tutankhamen were coming out. So even if you didn't go to the exhibition, you might see a documentary film on television or you might buy a book.

37:42William:And back in Egypt, of course, this is also being registered and this whole business of Pharaoh being associated with Sadat. Because in 1981, Sadat is assassinated by Khalid al-Istambouli and he says, I have killed Pharaoh. Yes. So all this is playing out at multiple levels. Yeah, exactly. It's worth saying, you know, in the Quran, in the Muslim holy book, you know, the Pharaoh is not depicted well. He's not depicted well in the Bible, I guess, or the Torah, but to call someone a Pharaoh is an insult. It's, you know, the mark of a tyrant. And then you get Solomon is the symbol in the Quran of justice and Pharaoh is the symbol of injustice, ironically.

38:30William:Very interesting. Anyway, then it goes off around Germany. It's not the end of the tour. Yeah, yeah. It goes to other venues. And again, I know plenty of people who are practicing Egyptologists now who were inspired by those shows of the later 70s into the 1980s. Where did you first see it? I first saw the mask of Tutankhamun in Cairo in 2001, my first visit to Egypt with my parents. But subsequently as a student working in the Cairo Museum on a databasing project for a few weeks, I remember when the cleaners were in, going in before the public entered and having a few minutes alone with the mask.

39:12And that is easily one of the best moments of my entire life.

39:16Anita:Can I just say I completely concur. So I was absolutely blessed to have this. I'm friends with an Egyptian novelist.

39:25William:The great Adaf Suef, who we love.

39:27Anita:Yeah, so he took, you know, me and a bunch of really excellent women who got in before. So they did this enormous reconstruction in recent years of the Cairo Museum. So what had been sort of fairly dark and dingy, maybe when you were doing your research, was suddenly illuminated, huge cavernous rooms created to show this stuff off. I mean, it was, I mean, beautifully, beautifully done. And they were working on the Tutankhamun housing, you know, the special place that opened last year. and we got to have a look and wander around like we were the only people in the world, Campbell. I'm really missing both of you.

40:02William:It was emotional.

40:03Anita:I mean, genuinely, genuinely to see something like that in that space and being all alone. And it's the stuff of my childhood too, you know, completely fascinated and obsessed with it. Kyrie's done a good job, hasn't it? I mean, the museum, can we? Yeah, no, it's absolutely beautiful. I think they've done a really, I mean, as a man who does this, tell us what they've done that the people should go and see if they can.

40:25William:And we should all go and see it, exactly. So the old museum in which I had that encounter is still very close to my heart and is still packed full of jaw-dropping treasures from Pharaonic and later Egypt. But the new museum, the Grand Egyptian Museum, is out at Giza by the pyramid. And so it was initially conceptualised to house the Tutankhamen treasures. But there are plenty more galleries, including a huge museum dedicated to bolts of King Khufu. but you can now go and if you go early and you run up to the gallery you can pretty much get get the mask to yourself everything is there and it's beautifully lit beautifully explained beautifully displayed with lots of space because in the old museum you had to jostle you still have to jostle on a busy day yeah but that's why having those experiences where you're relatively alone and unaccompanied is really special.

41:20William:The thing I love most are the Alfheim portraits. Are they still in the old museum? Where are they going? Yes, we've got several of them here, William. You should come and see them. Imagine I'll come and do a trip. Love to. These are these perfect late Egyptian... Roman period, yeah, paintings. Portraits probably done during life. I'm sceptical about that as well. I think they're stock images. We're seduced by them because they look so lifelike, but I'm writing a book on that subject. Are you? The way we have faced the ancient Egyptians.

41:51Anita:Well, and we'll get you on again for that. Campbell, can I ask about, you know, when you handle artefacts from ancient Egypt and people are still very much keen to know or to associate that period and the artefacts from it with magic, with the supernatural. You've got one at your elbow, in fact. Tell us the story of a little spinny statue because I love it and you should share it. Thanks for asking Anita. So next to me here on my desk is a replica of a very striking piece, arguably the most famous out of the four and a half million specimens we have here at Manchester University Museum. And this is a chap called Neb Eew Who lived about 4 ,000 years ago And who could never have imagined His fame in 2013 I was going into the gallery Which was new in Manchester And newly opened And I noticed he was in a different position Every morning He was rotating in his case But the case was locked and alarmed And I had the only key So I thought Someone's playing a trick on me So we set up a stop motion camera which took a photo every minute for a week and it showed that he was spinning at night.

43:07And so we put the 53-second clip online and this went viral. It was seen by 100 million people.

43:14William:Did you begin for the first time in your life to assume that there was this supernatural thing going on or were you a Sherlock Holmesian rationalist? No, it was sadly because of vibration from traffic outside and footfall in the gallery during the day that the movement was greater.

43:31Anita:When you did first tell the story before we, when we were setting up, I did say, oh, that'd be the, that'd be the trains or the traffic. I'm dead inside. I do believe I'm dead. This is, you know, my co-host weeps with emotion. Great disappointment.

43:44William:Sorry.

43:45Anita:Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the news, Campbell, at the time, when you released that footage, must have gone berserk. Did you, did you see a real spike in visitors? Yes, we did. For about a week, because news gets old fast. People brought in lottery tickets, thinking the statue was going to magically give them the numbers. People came from Japan. Yeah. Yeah. What? Oh, that's great. So the clip is on YouTube. You can see it still. And it did influence the depiction of a museum in an episode of The Simpsons. So there's a marker of pop notoriety in the 21st century. We were on The Simpsons. But it connects to the same thing that people find fascinating about Tutankhamen.

44:29There's something mysterious. There's something vaguely threatening. If it had been a, I don't know, a Mesoamerican artifact or a classical Greek artifact, it wouldn't have had the same effect.

44:41William:So you don't need take your lottery tickets to Campbell. Campbell can come to you if you join the club because we have, for our club members, a very, very wonderful episode, which Anita and I think is one of the most wonderful we've ever done with Campbell. talking about the discovery of the tomb. And he discusses at length the question of the curse of the mummy. So that is all available for club members. Anita, do you want to finish this episode off?

45:11Anita:Sure. Well, it's empirepoduk.com.

45:14William:In your characteristic fashion.

45:17Anita:Empirepoduk.com. It's only because you can't remember the email. Let's face it. If you want to join our club. And it really is a very good episode. But all that's left for us is to say, Dr. Campbell-Price, so great having you on again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you both. Brief Histories, Ancient Egypt, published by Welbeck. It's available wherever you find your finest books. And thank you very much indeed. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And goodbye from me, William Durham-Pool.