The Murder of King Tut Read online

  “But, sire, we are the most powerful nation in all directions. Certainly we must protect that.”

  Things have changed for the worse since the move to Amarna, Horemheb wanted to shout. The country is going soft. The king never even leaves the palace. The great cities of Memphis and Thebes are in decline. We, as an Egyptian people, are in rapid decline.

  But he said none of these things. Instead, Horemheb listened to the pharaoh drone on in his stupid, idealistic way.

  “And we will. We will worship Aten, who will protect our borders. But I see no need to wage war. What is so wrong with being a peaceful nation?”

  “I believe in peace through strength, sire. We know this works from long experience.”

  “I would expect to hear nothing less from you, General. That is your job.”

  “And what is strength if it is not wielded? May I ask you that?”

  The pharaoh smiled in a most condescending manner. “General, when was the last time you spent a day just dreaming?”

  Horemheb’s jaw nearly dropped off his head. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You heard me. Do you ever write poetry? Do you ever lose yourself in thought? Have you ever completed a painting?”

  “I am a warrior, sire. I am not trained to sit and think; I am trained to do.”

  “Then do this.”

  Akhenaten said nothing. Instead, he closed his eyes as if to meditate.

  Horemheb waited until he could wait no longer. “Sire, what is it you would like me to do?”

  “Relax. Take your mind off war. Egypt no longer needs conflict, for we are protected by the great sun god, who will provide for all our needs.”

  And lead us to ruin, Horemheb thought angrily.

  “You are dismissed,” said the pharaoh with a gentle wave of his hand. “Go write a poem.”

  Chapter 16

  Amarna

  1341 BC

  “TUT. MY POOR TUT. What shall become of you?”

  Nefertiti held her newborn son in her arms and feared for his life. Technically, the child was not her own, for he did not spring from her loins. But that idiot husband of hers with the wandering eye was the father, so the child might as well be the son of the queen.

  The birth mother’s name was Kiya, and the pharaoh had given the pretty young harlot the title Greatly Beloved Wife, which placed her above even Nefertiti in esteem.

  Kiya was-had been-a Mitannian princess named Tadukhepa, sent to Egypt by her father, as a peace treaty between the two nations. For three long years Nefertiti had endured the woman’s presence, watching her repeatedly take the queen’s place in the pharaoh’s bed. The man whom Nefertiti once loved had become a stranger to her, devoted to his beloved Aten and his child bride.

  Why, the pharaoh had even begun telling people that he himself was Aten, that the pharaoh and the god were one and the same. It was Nefertiti who had the nerve to correct him, and for that he had cast her from his bed.

  I am still the mother of his children, she reminded herself.

  Yes, but all girls. This one, the son, will be the next pharaoh. I am no better than Tiye. When the pharaoh dies, the empire will fall to this child, this baby. And what will become of me?

  What does it matter? There will be nothing left of the great Egyptian nation by the time my husband dies. That fool has seen to that.

  The people of Egypt were starving and reverting to their nomadic ways, forsaking their farms and cities for a hardscrabble life on the move, all thanks to Akhenaten’s neglect or perhaps his insanity. The priests of Thebes wanted to kill him for usurping their gods with his own-and for asserting himself as a god. The royal vizier pretended to be a faithful servant, but once he got tired of Akhenaten’s preening, he too would want to stab the pharaoh in the back.

  And what of Horemheb? Surely the general went to sleep each night and dreamed only of a military takeover.

  So what stopped them? Could it be that they actually believed the pharaoh was a god? What fools men are. Or what liars.

  The baby started to cry. Poor Tut.

  Nefertiti was about to whisper to the child, telling him that at that very moment his mother was being placed inside her tomb. She had died giving birth, and Tut would never feel the comfort of her arms or suckle her bosom. But the time for such talk was past.

  “Be still, my son,” Nefertiti said. “I am your mother now, and I will raise you to be the pharaoh your father should have been. You will be king. I promise you.”

  Chapter 17

  Deir el-Bahri

  1894

  THE BLAZING SUN was beating down on Howard Carter’s neck. It was Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, which meant that dig season was over, since the men fasted during the day. This made them too weak to dig in the hot sun.

  Now Carter, working alone, alternately photographed and sketched the northwest chamber of a newly excavated temple near Luxor. He was nineteen years old.

  It was Carter’s second season excavating the structure dedicated to Hatshepsut, a female pharaoh nearly as famous as Nefertiti. It was a rocky location, situated at the base of a cliff, two miles from the Nile. Daytime temperatures often soared above 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and there was no shade.

  Still, Carter worked dawn to dusk, in the fashion he had learned from Petrie, mainly because he so loved what he did. This was his life. There was nothing else for him.

  His boss now was a Swiss named Edouard Naville. The prolific excavator had long believed that a vast temple complex lay beneath the soil at Deir el-Bahri, and the results of several seasons’ work were proving he might be correct.

  Grand columns and towering walls now rose from the ground, unearthed after centuries of landslides and storms had covered them over.

  Naville had been pleased with Carter’s growing professionalism but was also concerned that the young Englishman was too slow when it came to sketching and photographing. The same methodical bent that Petrie had once encouraged was now seen as a serious flaw.

  But this cloud had a silver lining. Naville had requested a second artist to help Carter. The man hired for the task was none other than Carter’s thirty-year-old brother, Vernet.

  The two had worked side by side through the early months of 1894, producing a series of dazzling sketches that were soon to be reproduced in book form.

  Howard Carter had come a long way, actually. Not only had he learned to excavate, photograph, and supervise dig crews, but the young man was showing that his childhood sickliness was a thing of the past. When Naville closed the site for Ramadan, he asked the Carter brothers to continue working.

  But the strapping Vernet fell prey to the heat and deprivation. He was forced to return to England, leaving his brother to finish Naville’s job alone.

  Carter had enjoyed the time with Vernet, but he never once contemplated returning home with his brother.

  The life of an Egyptologist had its perils to be sure. It wasn’t everyone’s idea of the ideal job. But for Howard Carter, it was paradise.

  And one day, he hoped to be a modern-day king-in the Valley of the Kings. He dreamed of making the greatest tomb discovery of them all, even though he had no idea what it might be.

  Chapter 18

  Deir el-Bahri

  1899

  THERE WAS NO SHADE to be had in the valley of Deir el-Bahri, not so much as a dancing speck. So as Carter set up his easel atop the ruins of an ancient and quite spectacular mortuary temple, the clock was ticking.

  The rising March sun was just now lining the horizon. Within an hour, the heat of the day would get uncomfortable, and beads of sweat would drench Carter’s hatband.

  Within two hours, his brushstrokes would dry almost as soon as he applied the watercolors.

  And within three hours, the lead of his pencil would become too soft to sketch even a single line.

  So he worked quickly, drawing the exterior of the temple, making sure that its massive proportions were in scale with the equally massive cliff rising like a great wall behind i
t.

  The precision and symmetry of the sprawling complex, with three levels and sculpted columns, evoked images of an army of craftsmen, at the height of their talent, proudly building a structure that would last for all time.

  What an idea. No wonder he could never leave this magical place.

  Carter had acquired a reputation as a very good artist-indeed, his subjects ranged from the animals in the Cairo Zoo to intricate tomb interiors. But he had been in Egypt eight years now. It was impossible for him to paint a watercolor like the one on which he now labored without mentally filling in the history behind it.

  A bead of sweat trickled down his face, but he was already lost in a reverie.

  The temple before him had belonged to Queen Hatshepsut. It had taken fifteen years to build, but then the queen had been buried someplace else. The building looked more like a palace than a tomb and was peculiar for being so ostentatious. At the time of its construction, back in the fifteenth century BC, pharaohs were trying to conceal their burial places, not flaunt them for tomb robbers.

  Hatshepsut’s temple, where Carter spent many years excavating. The Valley of the Kings lies on the other side of the cliff.

  But just as this was no ordinary temple, Hatshepsut had been no ordinary pharaoh. After her husband (who was also her half brother) died, she ruled as one of the first female pharaohs. Her reign had been prosperous, as were those of her children and her children’s children.

  Carter knew that Hatshepsut had once been deeply in love, for she was a queen before she was a pharaoh. He knew also of her father, Tuthmosis I, the first pharaoh to be buried in what came to be known as the Valley of the Kings rather than in a pyramid.

  The pyramids, so obvious and tempting, had been easy to plunder, which meant the pharaohs were deprived of their possessions during their journeys into the afterworld. Carving a tomb in a desolate valley seemed the best way to discourage thieves.

  Sadly, the architect Ineni had been wrong about that.

  So had Hatshepsut.

  Despite the fact that the massive mortuary temple sprawled like a small city across the valley floor, no trace of Hatshepsut had yet been found.

  Carter dabbed more paint on the paper-quickly. The sun was low on the horizon and directly in his eyes. He averted his gaze to reduce the risk of ophthalmia, bleeding of the eyes that came from looking too long at the sun. The disease was common among Egyptologists and could easily end a career.

  A few hundred yards off, tourists and their Egyptian guides were dismounting mules and making their way to the temple.

  Little did they know that one of the world’s most promising Egyptologists was in their midst. Carter had worked his way up from being a poorly paid junior draftsman and was now learning the methods of the great excavators.

  The key to becoming an excavator, Carter knew all too well, was luck. But after that came money, a great deal of money. He needed to find a wealthy benefactor to cover his costs. He had seen such patrons in Luxor, hanging out at the Winter Palace Hotel or enjoying the Nile nightlife aboard lavish yachts.

  Carter didn’t know how to mingle comfortably in that society-or any society, really-but it was time that he learned.

  How hard could it be to fool a bunch of fools?

  Chapter 19

  Valley of the Kings

  January 1900

  “GENTLEMEN ARE INVITED to take off their coats,” Carter advised the tour group as they approached the tomb. “It will get rather warm inside. Ladies, I’m afraid you’ll have to settle for removing your hats.”

  His work ethic and passion for Egyptology had already lifted the ambitious twenty-five-year-old Carter from the obscurity of his early days to the relative power of his new position as chief inspector for the Antiquities Service in Upper Egypt.

  Carter had beaten out Percy Newberry for the job, and now he oversaw all excavation in the region.

  Many within the British Egyptology community found this distasteful, even ridiculous. They objected to Carter’s lack of book knowledge, his lack of a university degree, and, perhaps most of all, his lack of table manners. To them, Carter was not one of the world’s foremost Egyptologists, just its most infamous and crude.

  At a Christmas dinner in 1897, Newberry’s brother had marveled at Carter’s lack of social graces: “He doesn’t hesitate to pick his last hollow tooth with a match stalk during dinner, bite bread that is so hard you can barely cut it with a chopper, and help himself to whiskey in an absentminded fashion, emptying half the bottle into his tumbler, then laugh and pour it back again.”

  Even Gaston Maspero, Carter’s new boss, admitted that his charge was obstinate.

  But Carter also had supporters and admirers, many of them female.

  Lady Amherst still welcomed Carter to Didlington Hall whenever he returned to England. He was something of a hero to her family for his ongoing series of adventures in the Egyptian desert.

  Carter was certainly someone to reckon with, even if he didn’t know which fork to use for his salad. He was now museum curator for the entire Valley of the Kings. The area was an isolated jumble of hills, cliffs, and dry riverbed located three miles west of the Nile, just below the “horn,” the highest point in the Theban hills.

  Nobody knew exactly how many Egyptian rulers were interred beneath the sunbaked earth. And there was a good chance no one would ever know. Time and weather, crumbling rock, and blowing sand had completely changed the valley floor and enhanced its natural camouflage.

  To actually stumble upon a tomb was to find the proverbial needle in a haystack, which is why any discovery was so precious and why everyone, from tourists to tomb raiders, was eager to see inside each burial chamber.

  Since Italian circus strongman-cum-Egyptologist Giovanni Belzoni had performed the first serious excavation of the area in 1815, the tombs of more than two dozen pharaohs had been found within its craggy, soaring walls. Belzoni had stopped excavating in the valley after thirteen years because he believed there was nothing left to find.

  The discovery of tomb after tomb since then proved he’d been wrong.

  In exchange for a “concession”-permission to dig in the valley-excavators agreed to split all treasure fifty-fifty with the Egyptian government. Sometimes the discovery process was as simple as clearing away a few scattered rocks. At other times finding a tomb required scraping away mountains of hard-packed sand and stone, clear down to the bedrock.

  The allure was treasure first, history second.

  Chapter 20

  Valley of the Kings

  January 1900

  CARTER COULD NOT AFFORD to purchase a concession.

  Nonetheless, just a few weeks into his new position, he was busily making the valley his own. In addition to setting up a donkey corral that could accommodate a hundred animals, he had begun installing heavy metal gates on all tomb entrances-to keep out the pesky robbers and squatters who prowled the valley at night.

  He was also introducing electric lighting to make the tombs more inviting to the European tourists who visited the valley during the day.

  And for reasons having nothing to do with his job and everything to do with his own future success, Carter had begun to woo wealthy foreign tourists, hoping they might be convinced to fund a concession for him.

  American businessman Theodore Davis was just such a tourist.

  Davis was a small, hugely opinionated man with a dense white mustache spanning ear to ear. A regular visitor to Luxor (the site of ancient Thebes), he had begun to display an obsessive interest in Egyptology.

  Now Carter stood with Davis and his group at the entrance to the tomb of Amenhotep II, a spectacular and yet dangerous place to be leading novices, especially rich, influential ones who might break a leg or suffer heatstroke. “It was a fine hot day,” wrote Emma Andrews, Davis ’s traveling companion, who also took pains to point out that Carter was “pleasant, despite his dominant personality.”

  These tourists were hardly dressed for tomb explorati
on, the men wearing hard shoes and ties, and the women floppy hats and long dresses. Carter gave them each a candle and issued sharp instructions not to lag behind.

  He led them down a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor, which descended steeply into the side of the cliff.

  “Pay careful attention to each and every step, please,” Carter advised as the earth suddenly disappeared: the tomb builders had excavated a well thirty feet deep and ten feet wide to dissuade-or trap and mangle-the uninvited.

  Carter had laid boards across the chasm, and one by one the party made its way safely to the other side. In truth, he was playing up the danger a bit to pique the interest of these potential investors.

  The tunnel plunged deeper into the earth, revealing an ancient stairwell that had given way and forced the group to scramble over a pile of loose stones. Paintings lined the walls here, ancient murals in subtle shades of maroon and yellow.

  Carter was an impatient tour guide, despite his desire to woo a potential benefactor. Slower and weaker members of the group were tolerated but just barely.

  At the site of another crumbled stairway, the tourists had to pick their way, hand over hand, up the rocky pile, then squeeze through a narrow opening to continue the journey. By now most were sweating and breathing hard. The close air made some of them sick. More than one finger and forearm had been burned by dripping wax as the sightseers struggled to manage their candles.

  Yet they gamely pressed on, following Carter, quite literally, into the bowels of the earth.

  The corridor turned a corner, and suddenly the group was inside a great rectangular chamber, and this room made the difficult trip worth every step.

  The ceiling was painted with blue and yellow stars. And there, in the middle of the room, was a stone sarcophagus-with the mummy still inside.