One hundred years ago, on November 4, 1922, the British Egyptologist Howard Carter discovered, in the Valley of the Kings, in Egypt, the entrance to an inviolate royal tomb. In this tomb has been, for more than thirty-two centuries, the mummified remains of an unknown king, Tutankhamun, son of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. This pharaoh, who died before his 18th birthday, at the end of a reign of a short decade, almost instantly became a world celebrity, thanks to the sumptuousness of his “treasure”, that is to say the funerary material supposed accompany him to the afterlife.
A small tomb but full as an egg
Tutankhamun’s tomb is small for a royal burial. The place was probably not originally intended for Tutankhamun, but the tomb of the king, who died just out of adolescence, must not have been ready. Consequence: all the funerary material – more than 5,000 objects that Howard Carter will take ten years to catalog and study – was barely held in the four rooms of the tomb. This one bore the traces of two aborted looting attempts, and the stolen objects had been put back in place in a hurry.
A set of Russian dolls in the funeral home
The tomb of Tutankhamun allows in particular to analyze and understand the funeral ritual linked to the death of the king. The pharaoh’s body was at the heart of a veritable game of Russian dolls since, in addition to the bandages that covered it, it was nested in three coffins, a sarcophagus and four wooden “chapels”.
Mummification, a long and complex process
Mummification allowed the spirit of the deceased to recognize his bodily envelope in order to regain it and be reborn in the other world. The objective was also to prevent the decomposition and putrefaction of the corpse. The process, which lasted ten weeks, was quite complex and required in particular more than 250 kg of natron, a salt which was used to dry out the body.
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