Tutankhamun

The clearest statement of what this reign was for is the stela set up at Karnak in the king name. Its account of the situation he inherited is bleak and deliberate: the temples of the gods from Elephantine to the marshes of the delta had fallen into ruin, their shrines overgrown, their sanctuaries as though they had never been, their courts used as footpaths. If anyone prayed to a god, the god did not come; if an army was sent to Syria to widen the borders of Egypt, it had no success. The gods had turned their backs on this land.

Then the repair. Images were made new in gold and precious stone, priesthoods were restaffed from the sons of the notables of their towns, endowments of land and people were restored and doubled, temple workshops reopened. The king own name had already been changed from Tutankhaten to Tutankhamun, the court had moved back to Thebes and Memphis, and the change of name is the whole policy in two syllables. A document of this kind is a proclamation and not a survey, so its picture of ruin is as much rhetoric as report. It still tells you exactly what the new regime wanted to be seen doing, and that the interruption had been severe enough to require saying so. The stela was afterwards usurped by Horemheb, who replaced the royal names with his own.

He was written out. The later king lists jump from Amenhotep III to Horemheb, treating the whole Amarna sequence as a gap, and by the Ramesside period he was not part of the official past at all. That erasure is probably why the tomb survived. It is small, it is low, it lies off the main axis of the Valley of the Kings, and the debris of later tomb cutting covered its entrance, so although it had been entered and partly robbed in antiquity it was never emptied.

What Howard Carter found in 1922 was therefore the only substantially intact royal burial of the New Kingdom, and almost everything the modern public pictures when it thinks of Egyptian funerary religion comes from it: the nested gilded shrines, one of them carrying the text of the Book of the Heavenly Cow, the canopic chest and its miniature coffins, the shabtis, the amulets laid in the wrappings, the gold mask. Two mummified foetuses were buried with him. The atlas records the obvious caution that goes with this. A single burial of a young king who died unexpectedly, in a reused and undersized tomb, is not a representative sample of anything, and the enormous influence of the find rests on an accident of preservation. The story of a curse on those who opened it was a newspaper invention of the following months.