Showing posts with label King Tut. Show all posts
Showing posts with label King Tut. Show all posts

December 6 – Discovery of an Artifact, a Sculpture, an Icon

Posted on December 6, 2018

What do a German bank cellar, a German salt mine, and various museums in Germany all have in common?

 The obvious answer: they are all in Germany, of course!

 But the answer I'm going for is that they are all places where the famous Nefertiti Bust have been kept since its discovery on this date in 1912.


You probably already know that that discovery was NOT in Germany - of course not! - but in Egypt. Specifically, this statue was discovered in the ruins of the workshop of a sculptor named Thutmose in the archaeological site of the ancient Egyptian city of Amarna.

 Which leads to the question:

 Why has the world-famous Nefertiti bust been stored and / or displayed all over Germany instead of in Egypt?

 Why indeed!

 The archaeological team that discovered the bust was German, and when they discovered this gorgeous ancient art piece, they took it back to Germany. Every since then, Egypt has demanded its return - but to no avail!

 Nefertiti currently is on display in a museum in Berlin.

Here are some tidbits about the piece, and about Nefertiti:
  • Nefertiti was the Queen of Egypt, married to the pharaoh Akhenaten. This was a wealthy time in Ancient Egypt - one of the wealthiest! But it was also an interesting time  because Akhenaten and Nefertiti were bold and innovative. They moved the capital from Thebes to a new city, Akhetaten (now Amarna), they helped to shape new styles in art, and they did away with all the old gods and goddesses and started a new religion - a monotheistic (just one god, Aten) religion! 
Akhenaten and Nefertiti, plus their daughters.

Notice that the babies and children are drawn like miniature adults
rather than having babyish and childish proportions!
 

    • With all of this new-new-new stuff, women - including Nefertiti and her daughters - had more power than women generally had in the ancient world.

      Actually, all of this new-new-new stuff may have been BECAUSE women - including Nefertiti and her daughters - had more voice and influence! 
    • Either Nefertiti or one of her daughters served as a co-ruler with Akhenaten, during the latter part of his rule, and then ruled Egypt as the female pharaoh Neferneferuaten.


    • One of Nefertiti's daughters became Queen by marrying the young pharaoh Tutankhamun. (You know, King Tut!)



    • Not long after Pharaoh Akhenaten's death, his monuments were taken down, hidden, or destroyed. He was considered a heretic, which basically means a believer in a false religion. His name was left off of lists of pharaohs, and in histories he was referred to as "the enemy" or "that criminal" rather than as King Akhenaten! Traditional religion was restored, the capital was moved back to Thebes, and many art styles and fashions associated with Akhenaten were abandoned.

    It's possible that Nefertiti tried to do damage control when she saw the backlash. Many scholars think it was Nefertiti's influence that started the new religion, but she may also have been the one to reinstall the traditional gods and religious practices, the one to bring back the Amun priests, the one to raise King Tut in the old ways.


    • Because of the bust of Nefertiti, she is one of the best known women of Ancient Egypt. She is also considered an icon of female beauty. Very symmetrical, very delicate neck and features - although who knows what the real woman really looked like!


    Check out some modern artworks that depict Nefertiti:
    By Elena Zhilina

    By Jean-Paul Martin

    By Kai Hansen

    By KamilaSharipova


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    May 9 – Happy Birthday, Howard Carter

    Posted on May 9, 2014

    Howard Carter made one of the most famous archeological discoveries, anywhere, ever:

    He discovered the only intact tomb of an Ancient Egyptian pharaoh that has ever been discovered, before or since.

    Of course, I'm talking about the tomb of King Tutankhamun.

     And he found it in the Valley of the Kings, even though all the experts said that there were no more tombs to be found there.

    Here's a brief version of Carter's story:

    Howard Carter was born on this date in 1874 in London, England. His dad was an artist, and Carter learned about drawing and painting from him. As a matter of fact, Carter ended up getting into archeology through art!

    He had no desire to stay in his little English town and paint portraits of families and pets. Instead, he got a job working for the Egyptian Exploration Fund as a tracer—one who carefully copies drawings and inscriptions from tomb walls, sarcophagi, and other ancient sources. These careful copies are used by scholars in their studies of Ancient Egyptian history and culture.

    And so, at age 17, he left England for the first time and sailed to Alexandria, Egypt.

    It turned out that he was willing to work hard. He was enthusiastic. He was even brave! Get this – sometimes, after working all day copying the scenes of the walls of a tomb, he would spend the night in the tomb. I'm talking all alone, by himself. Except for the bats.

    Soon Carter began to work for a skilled archeologist named Flinders Petrie. He learned excavation skills while keeping up his artistic skills.

    Up and up he climbed in responsibility and knowledge. Illustration, excavation, restoration. When he was just 25 years old, Carter was offered the job of First Chief Inspector General of Monuments for Upper Egypt. At this point, he supervised and controlled all of archeology along the Nile Valley!

    Unfortunately, Carter lost his position when a bunch of drunken French tourists were violent toward the guards who protected the archeological sites. Carter allowed the guards to defend themselves—which seems like a pretty normal thing to me! But the French tourists were really mad and called on their important connections to demand an apology from Carter.

    Carter stood his ground and refused to apologize for what he thought was the right thing to do.

    Out of a job, Carter made a bit of a living by selling watercolor paintings and by giving people tours in Egypt. I'm sure this seemed like a very bleak time in his life. I bet a lot of people would've thought that Carter should have caved in and apologized.

    But if he had, he probably wouldn't have met Lord Carnarvon.

    Lord Carnarvon was a rich English nobleman who was staying in warm, dry Egypt while he recovered from an automobile accident. He was bored and restless, and he became very interested in what Carter told him about the Ancient civilization that had built the sphinx and the pyramids.

    The two became partners. Soon, thanks to Carter's hard work and knowledge, Carnarvon owned one of the most valuable private collections of Egyptian artifacts in the world. But Carter had seen a name of a little-known pharaoh several times—here on a cup, there on a piece of gold foil, over here on a few funerary items. The name was Tutankhamun, and Carter knew that no tomb for a pharaoh of that name had ever been found.

    And that meant that there was an as-yet undiscovered tomb somewhere.

    Carter used his smarts to look for a tomb of a King Tutankhamun. He searched for about six years with no results. Lord Carnarvon was getting a bit dissatisfied—after all, he was paying the bills, and there was little more than a few artifacts turned up in those six years. Carnarvon informed Carter that the 1922-23 season would be the last that he would fund.

    And in November, 1922, the top of a staircase was discovered.

    It took ten years for Carter and others
    to catalog the tomb's 2000+ artifacts.
    In three weeks, the entire staircase was excavated. Of course, at that point Carter and Carnarvon didn't know for sure that they had found what Carter had so long searched for. Not until November 26, 1922, when Carter broke through a plaster wall and made the find of the century!





    Curse? What curse?

    Lord Carnarvon died from an infected mosquito bite in Egypt in 1923, just about half a year after the discovery of the tomb.

    After Carnarvon's death, a rumor began that the mummy of King Tutankhamun had put a curse on all who dared enter the tomb. As conspiracy theorists always do, the people who whispered about this so-called curse seized on the deaths of several visitors to the tomb, a radiologist who x-rayed Tutankhamun's mummy, and Carter's personal secretary—even though they all died in different ways (one was killed by his wife, for example, and several died of various diseases)—
    and most died years later.

    Of course, a lot of people who had visited the tomb had nice long lives. Of the 58 people who were present when the tomb and, later, sarcophagus were opened, only 8 died within the next dozen years.

    And Howard Carter himself died of lymphoma at 1939, many years after his discovery. There was no mummy's curse!

    Find out more...

    ...about Carter and King Tut in this earlier post.

    And here is a very short video about Carter's amazing discovery. 


    Also on this date:
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    February 16, 2012 - King Tut's Burial Chamber is Opened



    The pharaohs of Ancient Egypt were buried with amazing statues, coffins, jewelry, and other items—items that are priceless because of their historic and artistic value, as well as because of the gold, semi-precious stones, and other fine materials they are made of.

    Archeologists knew of these fabulous tomb treasures because of the writings of the Ancient Egyptians, and the murals on the inside walls of the tombs—but every tomb that had ever been discovered had been plundered of its treasure long, long ago, in ancient times, and so most of the precious items that should have been there were long gone.

    Until November of 1922, that is. That is the year when Howard Carter and his team of archeologists opened the first almost-intact pharaoh's tomb ever discovered. The pharaoh, of course, was King Tutankhamun. And on this date in 1923, Carter opened King Tut's Burial Chamber.

    Tut's tomb was packed with all manner of things—from garlands of flowers that Carter photographed, but which disintegrated when touched, to the king's granite sarcophagus, which contained three mummiform (mummy-shaped) coffins, including one made of pure gold! Tut's body was buried with fabulous jewelry. There was also a treasury filled with funerary and ritual items such as a statue of Anubis, the jackal-headed god of afterlife, and model boats and chariots.

    It took a decade of work for Carter's team to catalog and take everything out of the tomb! The treasury alone stored 2,010 pieces, together worth almost $50 billion, and that doesn't count the golden coffins and that most famous solid-gold funerary mask!

    Check out this virtual tour of King Tut's tomb. 

    See some of the incredible, precious items found in King Tut's tomb on this website  and in this video. 

    Read more about the discovery of this incredible archeological find. 

    Watch some National Geographic videos about King Tut. Here is one – warning, it gets upsetting and gross near the end! 


    Also on this date:






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