In the last eight years I’ve been in the presence of several works of art that have been endlessly reproduced on posters, postcards, plastic models, piggy-banks, chess pieces, refrigerator magnets, beach towels, god knows what all else: they’ve been kitschified, parodied, and horrendously overexposed…but they retain their capacity to inspire awe when you see them in person. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that they are all sacred objects. The more recently composed were designed to inspire awe among believers. The oldest, however, were designed to never be seen again by a living human after they were laid in the ground. I had to travel to Athens to see the (bleached skeleton of) the Parthenon and to Vatican City to see Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel (no hardship in either case). Both are pretty firmly affixed to their home cities, which is probably a good thing because if they weren’t someone would have at least tried to steal them. (You do have to give the British credit for stealing as much of the Parthenon as they could carry).
Last week, when I saw some of the treasures found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, it was a journey into my own past as much as a journey into the deep history of Egypt. In 1976 or 1977, when the first blockbuster museum show made its grand tour of American museums, I went with my mother to the Art Institute of Chicago to see some of the treasures King Tut took with him. As you may recall, this show inspired the song Steve Martin wrote back when he was a wild and crazy guy, not the elder statesman of American comedy.
The centerpiece of the mid-1970’s traveling show was the funeral mask: a stunning piece of work by any standard (not just because it is wrought from 11 kilograms of gold). I have fond memories of a miniature golden coffin, about the right size for the interment of a GI Joe, in which a portion of Tut’s viscera were buried. The conventions of Pharoanic mummification required that certain organs be removed and stored separately from the rest of the body. Tutankhamen was entombed with four of these little coffins, miniature versions of the three coffins in which the main structure of the king’s body was laid. The coffin for Tut’s intestines traveled to Chicago in the mid-1970s and was reproduced on a poster advertising the show, a copy of which hung on my wall throughout my childhood. (This week, for the first time in years, I wondered whether that mounted poster made the journey to Cleveland and then to York with my father and step-mother. I suspect it did not.) The second mini coffin contained his stomach; the third his lungs; the fourth his liver. All four minis were placed inside a canopic chest made of calcite, a marble-like stone. The canopic chest is a squarish box, about half a meter wide and a little less than one meter high. Inside the box are cylindrical compartments into which the miniature coffins were placed upright like hefty, extremely expensive, extraordinarily decorated test tubes. Stoppers topped off with sculpted busts of the boy king kept the coffins safe inside the calcite deposit box.
As we viewed these objects in the Tutankhamun room of the Egyptian Museum, Gary and I wondered what happened to the heart. We didn’t think anyone ate it, given the importance the Ancient Egyptians placed on making sure Tut brought his whole body to the afterlife, along with furniture, transportation, and plenty of portable wealth. I also assumed that the heart played similar importance for the Egyptians as it did for later cultures, our own included. The catalogue I purchased at the Egyptian Museum’s gift shop solved this mystery: the heart was mummified separately, then, prior to burial, placed back inside Tutankhamun’s body and covered with a scarab. The heart was “the seat of emotional, intellectual, and physical life. When the deceased was brought before the court in the afterlife, his heart was weighed on the great scales of truth…. it was essential during the trial, then in the eternal life” (Masterpieces of Tutankhamun 3). The brain, on the other hand, was insignificant as far as the Egyptians were concerned. The embalmer used long metal hooks to pull it out through the nose. The fragments were not preserved.
The funeral mask stands in the middle of the King Tut room at the Egyptian Museum, inside a cubical glass case which allows viewers to see all four sides, just as it stood in the middle of the room in Chicago and New York and Los Angeles. One item that did not travel to the U.S. in the mid-1970s was the gold inner coffin into which Tut was laid after he was mummified and dressed in unimaginable quantities of gold jewelry—including molded finger casings for each finger—and the funeral mask was placed on his head. Weighing in at 110 kilograms, the coffin “is the largest object ever made from solid gold” (Masterpieces 1). I can think of many reasons why the Egyptian government did want this object to leave the country.
This intricately decorated and incredibly beautiful coffin was placed inside a larger version of the same coffin, made of wood but so heavily inlaid with gold and other precious metals and stones that it looked like gold. The middle coffin was then placed inside another wooden coffin (which is not in the Egyptian museum. To see it you have to travel to the tomb site itself.) This package of three coffins plus a mummified Pharaoh plus hundreds of pounds of gold and jewelry was placed inside a canopic box the size of a modest lakefront cottage, along with all of the other loot that managed to remain, undisturbed, inside the tomb for more than thirty-four centuries.
I was struck by the layers of redundancy built into Tut’s burial containers. Tut’s body wore a series of gold necklaces, along with earrings, rings, and the sceptrelike staffs he held crossed upon his chest. His necklaces were reproduced in his funeral mask, and again on the gold coffin, and again on the wooden coffin inlaid with gold. The staffs crossed over his chest were reproduced on both of the coffins in the museum. Gary and I were reminded of the Russian dolls in which one doll contains another which contains another which contains another. But these Tut dolls were all images of the same person: Tutankhamun, dressed for the afterlife.
The Royal Tombs of Tanis, unearthed in 1939—probably not far from the spot where Indiana Jones found the Ark of the Covenent—yielded the second most impressive collection of tomb loot in Egyptian history. The much less crowded room devoted to the Tanis loot is next door to the modern shrine of all things Tut. In Tanis archeologists found some of the burial impedimenta of Psusennes I, a Pharaoh who died about 1000 years after Tutankhamun. Viewing this collection it seemed that Tutankhamun must have died during a period of exceptional wealth for the Pharaohs. His treasures are outstanding, not just because they remained in his tomb until 1922, but because they were more impressive than those of at least some other dead kings. Psusennes I was buried in a silver coffin, with a silver inlaid middle coffin and silver miniatures for his viscera. Buried in such an impoverished state, one wonders why he even bothered dying.
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