Sunday 15 May 2005

King Tut and the Dreamcoat Tribe

This week we got to see the haunting photograph of a beautiful and delicate face, staring at us across some 3350 years. It was the computer imaging of the face of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen done from recent computer scans of his mummy. Viewing it, I felt as if I had traveled through time to see a living person.

Those of us of Scottish ancestry have a longstanding interest in Egypt, since we are supposedly descended from the mythic Scota, an exiled daughter of a Pharaoh who married Gaythelos, a Gael. That said, the modern fascination with ancient Egypt really took off in the 19th century after Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt yielded the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. That unlocked the meaning of the hieroglyphs, from whence archaeology and translation surged ahead with discoveries that continue to mount year by year. But the discovery of Tut’s tomb is still probably the most romantic and mysterious episode in the history of Egyptology. It combines the pathos of a young king who died in the flower of early manhood – but apparently not by murder – with the glamour of fabulous treasure. And then there’s that famous curse, and a dead British lord….

But I have another reason for my fascination. Looking at young Tut’s face I felt like I was connecting with one of the core childhood stories of the shared traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is the story of the patriarch Joseph, so delightfully retold in recent time’s in Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

Some years ago I ran across the book Stranger in the Valley of the Kings by Ahmed Osman. The story he tells in that book is fairly simple and straightforward. He tells of an Egyptian official named Yuya, and his wife Tuya, whose tomb and mummies were discovered in 1905. Prior to Tut’s, it was the most intact tomb discovered, and was officially opened in the presence of Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, on Feb. 13, 1905.

Yuya was the vizier or chief minister of Egypt, apparently first appointed during the reign of Tuthmosis IV (ca. 1413-1405 B.C.E). His wife seems to have been connected to a royal or priestly family. Their daughter Tiye eventually became the wife of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III. Tiye’s son was in turn the infamous heretical pharaoh, the monotheist Akhenaton, who imposed the exclusive cult of the god Aten on the Egyptians. Tutankhamen is believed to have been a younger brother or half-brother, and also the son-in-law, of Akhenaton. Young Tut had been part of Akhenaton’s monotheistic experiment, originally bearing the name Tutankh-aten.

Normally one might not be too excited about the mummy of the great-grandfather-in-law of King Tut. But there is something unique about Yuya. First of all, he was not an Egyptian, but a Semite. Second, the evidence of his tomb does not fit the normal religious pattern of the era. For instance, unlike any other known mummy, Yuya’s body was not laid out with the hands in the “Osiris” position. Thirdly, and most importantly, Yuya bore a unique title. He is referred to as “the holy father of the Lord of the two Lands” (i.e., Pharaoh). The only other place that such a title is known in reference to that era of Egyptian history is in the Bible, in Genesis 45:8, where the patriarch Joseph reveals himself to his brothers saying:

So now it was not you [the brothers] who sent me hither, but God: and he hath made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and a ruler through all the land of Egypt.

Beginning with this reference, Osman builds a plausible case that Yuya was very probably the biblical Joseph, and that from his family sprang Egypt’s brief royal diversion into the worship of “The Lord” (Hebrew “Adonai” corrupted into the Egyptian “Aten”). And young King Tut was at the heart of the supposed Josephan family in the latter stages of the Atenist experiment.

The story of King Tut may also help form the bridge between the death of Yuya, at the end of Genesis, and the rise of Moses at the beginning of Exodus. Exodus begins with the account of a passing generation, and we read:

Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.
(Exodus 1:8)

This new king became known as the Pharaoh of the Oppression, and it was during his time that the story of the infant Moses in the bulrushes is set. (A story, by the way, that suspiciously resembles one told in Egyptian mythology about the infant god Horus.)

Now Tut was the next to last pharaoh in his 18^th dynasty.  After Tut�s death (ca. 1352 B.C.E.) he was succeeded by an elderly relative named Aye, who took Tut�s widow Ankhesenamun, as an additional wife.  (She was, remember, also the daughter of Akhenaton, and originally called �Ankhesenpa-aten�.)  But after about four years, Aye passes from the scene, succeeded by the usurper Horemheb who did all he could to wipe out the memory of the Atenist experiment, and who Osman believes to be the Pharaoh of the Oppression who �knew not Joseph.�

If this scenario is right – and it does seem plausible – it is even possible that Tutankhamen’s wife, Ankhesenamum, might be the “daughter of Pharaoh” who supposedly adopted the infant Moses. (Whose name is actually Egyptian, in the mode of Tuthmosis, Ahmosis, and so on… except for lacking a prefix.) It is known that Tut and the daughter of Akhenaton had two stillborn daughters, whose remains were found in Tut’s tomb. They had no other known children. There is a strange letter from a Queen of Egypt of this era, probably Ankhesenamum, to the King of the Hittites. In this letter the queen appeals that her husband has died, and she has no son, and she is being pressured to marry “a servant”, and “I am afraid!” She then pleads with the Hittite ruler, even though the two lands were enemies at the time, to send one of his sons to be her husband. According to the Hittite account, a prince did go, and was killed by the Egyptians. After being forced to marry Aye, she disappears from all records. The royal lineage of Yuya was apparently defunct.

According to the Bible it took nearly a generation after Horemheb’s usurpation for the Exodus to occur, probably during the reign of Ramses I (ca. 1335-1333 B.C.E.) the founder of the 19th dynasty. The Bible also claims that at the time of the Exodus Joseph’s mummy was taken along to be buried in Canaan. If Yuya is indeed “Joseph” then that claim is wrong. But I wonder if the legend might indicate, instead, what became of the missing mummy of the anathematized Akhenaton?

And so, in seeing the picture of Tutankhamen this week, I find myself wondering about his life and death, and the swirl of religion and politics surrounding his brief reign, and his family ties, and his exposure to the religion of “the Lord” from which his was forced to turn in favor of traditional Egyptian polytheism, and the “sister-wife” who bore him no sons. He appears as a delicate and beautiful youth, and is a figure more mysterious than ever.

Yours aye,

- Ken Cuthbertson

P.S. Note: While I highly endorse Osman’s Stranger in the Valley of the Kings, his later works are much more erratic and muddled in quality. There are some brilliant insights in places, but they are so intermingled with other claims and eccentricities that it is hard to separate wheat from chaff.