Actually there would have been no guarantee that Tutankhamun would have been discovered to this day had they not found it. As both Carter and Carnarvon said, when you went into the tomb, it was as if time has absolutely stood still for 3,200 years. And it looked like a snapshot of a, Carter said an opera workshop of the ancient world.
So Tutankhamun's throne was found underneath one of the beds, as Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter looked through the little hole they'd made. They'd have seen a glint of gold and it was wrapped in a shawl with some linen, so they wouldn't have seen much. Lord Carnarvon noted when he first broke in there, it was one of the things he saw of indescribable beauty and an extraordinary work of art.
As well as a work of art, it's rather a personal throne because there you've got Tutankhamun sitting on a throne, and his wife Ankhesenamen gently reaching out again to anoint him. She looks like she's holding a little bowl, with some oil in or something like that. This throne takes him back to the Amarna period – that of his father – because it's got the typically Amarna symbol at the top of the sun, with the rays pointing down.
Tutankhamun and Ankhesenamen are dressed in silver; the rest of the throne is gold and with precious inlays. Silver was a very rare metal because there wasn't any of it in Egypt. It had to be won as a trophy from lands that they conquered.
Tutankhamun's name is, needless to say, everywhere – it's on the back of the throne, it's on the sides here with the wonderful wings of the vulture and cobra type creature. And at the bottom of the cartouches here is the symbol for gold. The house of gold. This throne will be with him into eternity.
But probably bejewelled struts from the chair down to the wood halfway down, which was covered in gilt, which may well have been raided by grave robbers in antiquity times , because it was in the first room – they would have just got at it and yanked it out and yanked all the jewels. And Howard Carter estimated that 60% of the jewellery that would have been in the tomb – the everyday jewellery, the regalia from his time – was possibly stolen by grave diggers of ancient times.
Tutankhamun's grandfather, Amenhotep III, was a much more famous Pharaoh in sense of what he achieved during his reign. His tomb must have been fantastic, because he was a more successful and more renowned Pharaoh, people knew to look for his tomb. So I figure that those ones were going to be robbed first, whereas Tutankhamun was the minor Pharaoh. Minor in age, and minor in comparison to some of his successors and predecessors.
Strangely the best known one now?
Absolutely, isn't it ironic? And perhaps charming because all he was was a Pharaoh. He wasn't a great general, simply a boy who married a girl and died after a bad chariot accident.
So here you've got Tutankhamun, and there's so much detail – I always love showing this piece to the children. You can see how he put his bows at the side of the chariot, you can see his reins wrapped around the horse and the plumes at the top of the horse's head as they leap forward and wrapping the reins around his waist which looks bloomin' dangerous to me! He has his hands free for a bow and arrow, so if you got tangled in the reigns, you were going to have a bad accident. It would be completely not ideal – health and safety, you would say no, but practically I guess it worked.
On the sides are painted with the two armies which he had to battle. Because Egypt was naturally protected on the east and west by the desert, so you could only attack it from the north or the south. So you had the Hittites and the Nubians, so on one side he is depicted defeating and turning over the Nubians, defeated in battle on the other side are the Hittites. I would suspect he did not attack north and south. I suspect maybe this is a representation of what he would have done. At the time he took over, it was a reasonably stable country. They didn't need to acquire other land, they just needed to defend themselves.
He never ever saw the inner coffin of the mummy, certainly not the gold mask – the iconic object of the tomb – he never saw that. So these were some of the last pieces. But what a thing to have known you had found, at least, when you died!
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