November 2025 marks 100 years since archaeologists first examined the mummified remains of Tutankhamun. What followed was not a scientific triumph, but a destruction. Howard Carter’s team used hot knives and violence to decapitate the pharaoh, mutilate his limbs, and sever his torso. Then they covered it up.
Tutankhamun’s tomb was first discovered in the Valley of the Kings in November 1922 by a mostly Egyptian excavation team led by Howard Carter. However, it took several years for the excavation team to organize and catalog the tomb’s antechamber. This was the first part of what would become a 10-year excavation.
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When Carter’s team finally opened Tutankhamun’s innermost coffin, they found the pharaoh’s body adhered to the coffin by a hardened black pitch-like substance. This resin was poured over the packaging to protect the body from decomposition during burial.
Carter said the body was “securely attached” and that “no lawful force” could have freed it. In a desperate attempt to soften the resin and remove the body, the coffin was exposed to the heat of the sun. When this failed, the team used hot knives, cutting Tutankhamun’s head and funerary mask from his body in the process.
The autopsy that followed was gruesome. Tutankhamun was left “decapitated, his arms separated at the shoulders, elbows, and hands; his legs severed at the hips, knees, and ankles; and his torso severed from the pelvis at the iliac crest.” His body was then glued together to mimic an intact body, in a macabre reconstruction that concealed the violence of the process.
Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley has pointed out that this destruction is conspicuously absent from the public account of Carter’s dissection. The stone is also absent from his personal excavation records, available at Oxford University’s Griffith Institute and online.
Mr. Tyldesley suggests that Mr. Carter’s silence may reflect either a deliberate cover-up or a respectful attempt to protect the dignity of the late king. However, his omission was photographed by archaeologist photographer Harry Burton. These shots provide a clear visual record of the amputation.
In some of Burton’s images, Tutankhamun’s skull can be seen pierced to keep it upright for photographs. These images stand in stark contrast to those Carter chose for the second volume of his book detailing the excavations, The Tomb of Tutankhamun, published in 1927. In this sanitized image, the pharaoh’s head is wrapped in cloth and his severed spinal column is hidden, making the image more appealing to the average consumer.
As we reflect on the 100th anniversary of this expedition, it is worth reconsidering the legacy of Carter’s excavation, not only as a landmark in Egyptology but also as a moment of ethical reckoning. The mutilation of Tutankhamun’s body, hidden in the official narrative, challenges the narrative of archaeological triumph and invites us to look at the past with a more critical perspective.
“This is a great day in the history of archaeology,” Carter wrote in his excavation diary on November 11, 1925, when the medical examination of Tutankhamun’s body began. But archived evidence suggests that behind gold’s seductive shine there is something far more morally complex, even terrifying.
This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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