What does the tomb of tutankhamen and its contents show about the Egyptian
concern for the afterlife? Tutakhamen's tomb, and the artifacts inside are an
indication of the concern the Ancient Egyptians held for the after-life of their
king. In 26th Nov. 1922, the English archaeologist Howard Carter opened the
virtually intact tomb of a largely unknown pharaoh: Tutankhamen.
This was the first, and to date the finest royal tomb found virtually intact
in the history of Egyptology. It took almost a decade of meticulous and
painstaking work to empty the tomb of Tutankhamen. Around 3500 individual items
were recovered. When the Burial Chamber of Tutankhamen was officially opened, on
17 February 1923, the Antechamber had been emptied. It had taken near fifty days
to empty the Antechamber; the time required to dismantle and restore the
contents of the Burial Chamber including the gilded wooden and the sarcophagus
was to be greater, and the work was not completed until November 1930, eight
years after the original discovery. One must examine both the tomb itself, and
its contents, to see the connection between the tombs and burial rituals and the
doctrine of eternal life.
The royal tombs were not merely homes in the hereafter for the kings, as are
the private tombs of commoners and nobility. Instead the tombs are cosmological
vehicles of rebirth and deification as much as houses of eternity. As the king
is supposed to become Osiris in a far more intimate way than commoners, he is
equipped with his very own Underworld.
And as the king is supposed to become Rê in a way entirely unavailable to
commoners, he is equipped with his very own passage of the sun, whether this is
thought of as the way through the underworld or through the heavens.
Tutankhamon's tomb, hurriedly prepared for the premature death of the king at
the age of only about 18, is, as Romer says, a hole in the ground, compared to a
proper royal tomb. The theme of fours is conspicuous in Egyptian religious
practice. Tutankhamon's tomb contains four chambers.
The burial chamber, with a ritual if not an actual orientation towards the
West, is the chamber of departure towards the funeral destinies. The internment
of the body certainly is the beginning of the sojourn of the dead, and the
Egyptians saw the dead as departing into the West. The room called the Treasury
is then interpreted to have a ritual orientation towards the North as the
chamber of reconstitution of the body.
Since the most conspicuous object in the Treasury was a great gilt sledge
holding the shrine containing the canopic chest, which holds the king's viscera,
this could well suggest the problem of reassembling the king's living body. That
task, indeed, has a very important place in Egyptian mythology. After the
goddess Isis had retrieved her husband Osiris's murdered body from Byblos, their
common brother, Seth, the original murderer, stole the body, cut it into pieces,
and tossed them in the Nile.
