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On This Day: King Tut’s Tomb Unsealed
February 16, 2009 06:00 AM
by
findingDulcinea Staff
On Feb. 16, 1923, King Tutankhamen’s tomb was unsealed and entered by an excavation team led by British archaeologist Howard Carter and financial backer Lord Carnarvon.
Tomb Reveals Treasures
Carter found the coveted mausoleum in Luxor, Egypt, in November 1922. But it was not until Feb. 16, 1923, that the door was unsealed, revealing King Tut’s solid gold coffin and mummified remains.
According to the firsthand account of a member of Carter’s excavation team, published in The New York Times on Feb. 16, 1923, it took hours of grueling work in the sweltering heat to move the tomb's final door. Inside, the mummy was housed in “a spacious and beautifully decorated chamber completely occupied by an immense shrine covered with gold.”
Before it was opened, Carter made a small hole in the door and used a candle to glimpse what seemed to be a “golden wall” blocking the King’s burial chamber. The sight was actually “an immense gilt shrine built to cover and protect the sarcophagus,” Carter wrote in his book “The Tomb of Tutankhamen.”
King Tut died when he was 20 years old, and it is widely believed that he was murdered. Possible murder suspects include the king's wife, Ankhesanamum, his military commander in chief, Horemheb, and Prime Minister Ay, according to the Discovery Channel.
However, Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities announced in 2005 that computer scans of Tutankhamen’s remains revealed a broken leg but no evidence of foul play. The results disproved the theory that King Tut was killed by a blow to the head, but failed to rule out the possibility that he was poisoned.
“All this has proved was that there was no blow to the back of the head. The cause of death is by no means clear,” said Kathlyn Cooney, a Stanford University Egyptologist, accoridng to NPR.
Valuable artifacts were removed from the tomb in the decade following Carter’s first entry, most of which are now housed at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
According to the firsthand account of a member of Carter’s excavation team, published in The New York Times on Feb. 16, 1923, it took hours of grueling work in the sweltering heat to move the tomb's final door. Inside, the mummy was housed in “a spacious and beautifully decorated chamber completely occupied by an immense shrine covered with gold.”
Before it was opened, Carter made a small hole in the door and used a candle to glimpse what seemed to be a “golden wall” blocking the King’s burial chamber. The sight was actually “an immense gilt shrine built to cover and protect the sarcophagus,” Carter wrote in his book “The Tomb of Tutankhamen.”
King Tut died when he was 20 years old, and it is widely believed that he was murdered. Possible murder suspects include the king's wife, Ankhesanamum, his military commander in chief, Horemheb, and Prime Minister Ay, according to the Discovery Channel.
However, Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities announced in 2005 that computer scans of Tutankhamen’s remains revealed a broken leg but no evidence of foul play. The results disproved the theory that King Tut was killed by a blow to the head, but failed to rule out the possibility that he was poisoned.
“All this has proved was that there was no blow to the back of the head. The cause of death is by no means clear,” said Kathlyn Cooney, a Stanford University Egyptologist, accoridng to NPR.
Valuable artifacts were removed from the tomb in the decade following Carter’s first entry, most of which are now housed at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Key Player: King Tutankhamen
The "boy pharaoh" Tutankhamen ruled Egypt from 1336 to 1327 BC. His father Akenhaten left the 9-year-old heir with a country in ruins as a result of religious extremism. The young king was originally named Tutankhaten, or "the living image of Aten," after the sun god. While he was young, the military and priesthood used him as a puppet while they pushed a return to traditional ways and religion. As a result, they renamed him Tutankhamen, after Amen, a traditional god. Under their guidance, the young king reinstated traditional gods and temples. Tutankhamen died suddenly at the age of 19.
Related Topics: Painstaking work, King Tut's twins
Carter first discovered what proved to be Tutankhamen’s tomb in November 1922, but did not reach the doorway to the young pharaoh’s crypt for another three weeks, after finally clearing a passage down a lengthy stairway. Valuable artifacts were removed from the tomb over the course of the following decade, most of which are now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Source: findingDulcinea
ScienceDaily reported in September 2008 that two fetuses found in the tomb were likely twins fathered by Tutankhamen. Anatomist Robert Connolly, who has been studying the mummified remains of the pharaoh since the 1960s, discussed his findings at a conference at the University of Manchester on Sept. 1, 2008: "The work carried out by Catherine Hellier in Norway and I suggests that the two fetuses in the tomb of Tutankhamen could be twins despite their very different size and thus fit better as a single pregnancy for his young wife. This increases the likelihood of them being Tutankhamen's children.
Source: ScienceDaily
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