Tutankhamen by Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt

Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt
New York Graphic Society
1963
U.S.A.
Library of Congress number: 63-15145
Third Printing

                                           'As yet unborn the bird already chirps in the egg,
                                           For thou hast given it the breath of life
                                           And set the time for it to break its shell,
                                          When it shall come forth and loudly raise up its voice.'


      'Then Carter decided to dig in the delta, and attempted to make Sais, at Sakha, his new site. But water from the Nile soaked the region and made it impossible to begin work before April; the temperature rose sharply, and the diggers were literally chased from the site by an invasion of cobras.'

The late eminent Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt was the first woman to have led an expedition to Egypt in the 1930's. Her work at the Louvre along with her important role in the rescue of Nubia's monuments with the coming of the high dam marked her as one of the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries greatest Egyptologist.


I love the full page diagram of the temple of Karnak and the processional route Tutankhamen would have taken during his coronation ceremonies. Madame Desroches-Noblecourt opens this volume with the development of Howard Carter and his financier Lord Carnarvon leading up to their meeting and through the early explorations made by the two men on behalf of the Egyptian Antiquity Service.


The content of the book includes many colored and black and white pictures on the majority of pages. Among these images are photos of a beautiful statue of Amun protecting Tutankhamen in the collection of the Louvre. The author takes the reader to the west bank across from Luxor where the descendants of ancient grave robbers built a community atop the cemetery of the nobles of the New Kingdom at Qurna.


Finding of a royal tomb in approximately 1871 by members from this little village brought about perhaps ancient Egypt's most enigmatic discovery of a collection of royal mummies at Deir el-Bahri. In the area of Deir el-Medina Mdm. Desroches-Noblecourt introduces the reader to the artisan villagers who cut and decorated the royal burials in valleys beyond the view of the ancient population of Thebes.


The village of Deir el-Medina has left to us through its outstanding amount of surviving literary material found in the villagers homes, tombs and the great pit (used as a garbage disposal), the intimate lives lived here. In the years which led to the discovery of Tutankhamen, the Valley of Kings was being excavated on behalf of the Egyptian Antiquities Service by Theodore Davis who brought to light important discoveries till at last Mr. Davis relented that the valley held no more tombs.


In these years the team of Lord Carnarvon and excavator Howard Carter made minor discoveries with perhaps the most important being a schoolboys wooden pallet with an inscription copying a stelae of King Khamose. Many in-situ colored and black and white images fill half and full pages making the read easy and young person friendly. It also has to be remembered when reading a fifty-two-year-old book that there have been many discoveries in the intervening years including objects from Tutankhamen's tomb which have been restored since 1963.


The finding of the boy king's tomb in November of 1922 brought 4 rooms filled with treasures of solid gold and gold plate, provisions and a complete or nearly complete set of funerary equipment of a pharaoh of Egypt. The reader is taken through descriptions of the excavation and the various objects discovered within.


Tutankhamen's parentage is presented along with the rise of the Aten being embraced by his potential grandfather Amenhotep III. Here also dealt with is the question of a co-regency between Amenhotep III and his successor Amenhotep IV with a number of scenarios put forward by Mdm. Desroches-Noblecourt without prejudice. In the end, however, the author chooses her preferred contenders to be Tutankhaten's parents.


To clarify the period of the Aten is to view contradictory surviving information into the most plausible scenarios beginning with the city of Akhetaten and its abundantly wealthy nobility exemplified by their tombs. The art of the period bursts forth in the palaces naturalistic, relaxed beauty created by the finest artists in the new style. The records of kings and queens of the royal family constituting Amenophis III, Amenophis IV-Akhenaten, Smenkhkare and Tutankhamen instead of being individuals with clear reigns they become blended as to who starts where and who finishes where within the timeline of co-regencies.


It is funny on facing pages 166 and 167 appear large black and white photographs of Amarna period art of which I have written articles concerning both pieces as fakes. Mdm. Desroches-Noblecourt's knowledge of the monuments is exceptional as is the piecing together of Tutankhamen's life through tomb inscriptions of his officials and his usurped statues and stelae. These being added to by various reliefs left behind in the temples including the Luxor temple.


Upon Tutankhamen's death the burial rituals would have begun immediately as the king's body was taken to the house of embalming, its viscera removed and the corpse made ready to spend forty days drying out in natron. The reader is led through the various provisions needed for the burial including a suitable tomb complete with sarcophagus and shrines.


With the now prepared body, the author recounts the order of wrapping and placing of objects on the pharaohs withered remains. It is the "Divine Father" Ay that officiates at Tutankhamen's funeral as portrayed on the wall of the burial chamber. Articles of funerary equipment found on Tutankhamen's mummy and as part of his canopic ensemble have been retrieved or withheld from the burial of Smenkhkare, which may well have been obtained by Ay for the deceased Tutankhamen's eternal journey.


Mdm. Desroches-Noblecourt's analysis of the contents of the tomb is some of the books most intriguing and ethereal reading, as connections between objects with the places where they should be placed for the betterment of the powers each contain is put forth. As Tutankhamen is left at rest his Queen Ankhesunamen is mentioned only one more time, on a ring in partnership with Tutankhamen's successor Ay.


The author closes off her book with the reign of the Pharaoh Horemheb who was responsible for the defacing of the monuments of the Aten. These defacements include the removing of the temples to the Aten at Karnak and using the blocks as fill in his three pylons built on that site.


It is likely at this time the tomb of Ay in the Valley of Kings was also destroyed. The book ends and is followed by a useful list of the principle people involved in Tutankhamen's life. Lastly, we have notes of the beautiful colored pictures by Dr. Anwar Shoukry.


It would be hard to find another person so knowledgeable about Tutankhamen's life as Mdm. Desroches-Noblecourt, though it is unfortunate that the author's acceptance of familial characters has recently been proved wrong through DNA. In this must-read volume on Tutankhamen, the author has created a triumph by not putting the reader through yet another telling of the tombs discovery in November of 1922. Instead, it is a book about this minor kings life tangled in the sins of his father. Tutankhamen is not for the youngest readers but suitable for teenagers with more mature readers probably getting the most out of it.

The Ancient Kingdoms Of The Nile and the doomed monuments of Nubia

Walter A. Fairservis Jr.
New American Library
United States of America
Third Edition
1962
ASIN: B008BOHW9l

    'It has been over a year since the first major appeal was made by UNESCO for concrete help in saving the monuments of Nubia from the waters which are bound to engulf them when the new dam, Sadd-el-Aali, is built. In that time scholars, institutions, and many private organizations have responded nobly to the challenge. At this time the valley of the Nile is alive with archaeological enterprise as men face up to what is, in reality, an overwhelming task: several dozen major temples to save, thousands of inscriptions and graffiti to record, untold numbers of cemeteries, town mounds, and crumbled churches to excavate, acres to map archaeologically.'


Mr. Fairservis opens his book with a geological view of the world's evolution with particular attention paid to Africa. As he journey's down the great river through forbidding landscapes in some places chocked with grasses where tribes can graze their cattle. Places where the mighty Nile thins out into marshes and of which many past explorers have become stuck and died.


Places where men like Sir Samuel Baker, an important mid-nineteenth century visitor who recorded in his diary many agonizing months with his party cutting their way through the mud and weeds so that they could pull the boats forward a couple of hundred yards in a day, if lucky. Having left the marshes the river becomes navigable again as it heads north to parched desert regions that receive little water till the White Nile meets up to the greater Blue Nile.


The author moves on to the climactic changes that have affected the world and the evolution of its creatures. The carving out of the Nile valley over endless years produced a series of plateaus. In the latter of which prehistoric tools can be found with proper context, these can show the development of the forms used and improved upon.


     'In 1924, the English Governor of Fung province in the Sudan had his house near the Blue Nile at Singa. He found in the river bed a fossilized human skull which is now generally accepted as representing a proto-Bushman. Not directly associated with this skull but deriving from strata of apparently equivalent age some thirty miles away (Abu Hugar) are a body of stone tools collected by Arkell. These tools, though primitive, are not as old as the handaxe-pebble tool industries but seem to be related to one of the aspects of the Levalloisian flake tool tradition.'


The approach of Mr. Fairservis has brought to his book at times is deeply intellectual which may not be a good thing for the young as well as those escapist readers looking for romance. Here the author presents what is to be lost of the millions of years of evolution and the early development of civilization in this region of the great North African people and the cultures they left strewn about the landscape.


For me, this is a brilliantly refreshing look at what has long been lost to Lake Nasser including the mud brick four-thousand-year-old Middle Kingdom forts which secured Egypt's interests controlling the goods of Nubia for Egypt. The exploration of these forts became of immediate interest to men like the late great Egyptologist Walter B. Emery whose excavations brought to light papyrus documents at Buhen.


     'Of great future interest are the torn-up papyri found under the stairway of the so-called Commander's house which are apparently dispatches to Buhen from Egypt. The potential of the Buhen excavations because of the well-preserved ruins is enormous if these finds of papyri are in any way indicative of what is to come. One shudders to think what will be lost if these fortress towns are not thoroughly excavated before the final floods which extinguish them.'


There are a few sections of black and white photographs displaying artifacts and paintings which highlight the authors points. One of my favorites is a piece of art created by G. A. Hoskins in 1833 of the ruins of a fortress at Semna. We are recounted the glories of the Middle Kingdom made possible partly by the reclamation of the fertile Fayum depression and the effective governing of Nubia inclusive of its resources by Egyptian nobles using cruel and traditional local methods.


Soon the power of the great kings of the Middle Kingdom passes into feuding local nomarchs who divide the two lands among themselves. This leaves a weakened state vulnerable to a gradual take-over by nomads from the north known as the Hyksos. These kings dominated Lower and Middle Egypt though the princes of Thebes maintain control of Upper Egypt.


It is the princes of Egypt's Seventeenth Dynasty that challenge the Hyksos King Apophis with the last two of the Theban princes dying before Ahmosis conquered the Hyksos driving them from Egypt and establishing the Eighteenth Dynasty and the period of the New Kingdom. The kings of this dynasty were warriors who kept expanding the borders to the north and south, with King Thutmosis III bringing the Egyptian empire to its greatest extent supplying the king, the priests of Amun and the nobility with enormous foreign tribute.


This pre-eminent family of rulers finally comes apart with the heretic king Akhenaton who rejects the old pantheon of gods for a solar deity called the Aton. This king leaves Thebes for a site in Middle Egypt where he neglects his duty of pacifying the Border States, and in a little over a decade slowly the empire of Thutmosis III falls away. When Akhenaton's reign ends it is the boy King Tutankhamun who restores the temples of the old gods and moves his court to Memphis.


At Tutankhamun's death, the noble line of Thutmoside kings comes to an end bringing an old man quickly followed by the general Horemhab to the throne to rule Egypt and install the Nineteenth Dynasty kings. The first three pharaohs of this dynasty bring back some of the lost glory with the great Pharaoh Ramses II spending most of the dynasty sitting on the throne. Mr. Fairservis writes about the structures built by these kings and in particular the monuments of Nubia that will be swallowed by water when the Aswan dam is complete.


     'The cliff temple of Derr is the fourth of those erected by Ramses in order from Elephantine (the First Catarac). Badly ruined, the structures that lay before the cliff entrance have now largely disappeared.'  'This temple was dedicated to the sun-god Re but there are numerous ruined reliefs depicting the usual wars of Ramses. The temple is apparently doomed, as its ruined condition precludes wholesale salvage, though portions of the reliefs will undoubtedly be removed.'


Of the fourteen temples in the path of the rising water, it is the temples of Abu Simbel that are deemed as the top priority in saving. Two plans are in the works for these temples which include either a coffer dam with a one hundred foot wall to close off the bay containing the temples or to cut them into blocks and raise them block by block to higher ground.


A series of mostly short reigning and ineffective rulers brings the period of the empire to an end once more dividing power between rulers for Upper Egypt and others in Lower Egypt both claiming to rule both lands. Egypt is now occupied by both native and foreign rulers, who although occupiers respected and continue to revere Egyptian traditions. The Kingdom of Kush rose from the south as an already Egyptianized peoples who's ruler's made up Egypt's Twenty-Fifth Dynasty.


The next several hundred years are spent repelling the Persians, and being subject to Persian dynasties until Alexander the great won control of Egypt. Alexander's general Ptolemy Soter declared himself pharaoh of Egypt and founded the Ptolemaic Dynasty. The Ptolemaic pharaohs ruled as Greeks from Alexandria but again respected Egyptian customs and were prolific restorers and builders of temples.


These temples are among the best surviving monuments of the ancient world and include the temple of Edfu, arguably the best preserved, but also temples at Dendera. Kom Ombo as well as Esna. The authors concern turns to the island of Philae where Ptolemaic rulers followed the tradition started by the Thirtieth Dynasty King Nectanebo II by adding to the structures on the island, building a temple to Isis. The death of Cleopatra brought an end to the Ptolemy's. Roman Emperors that followed added to the various temples including the Kiosk built by Trajan, known today as "The Pharaohs Bed".


Mr. Fairservis is dismayed by the flooding that before the building of the high dam took place between December and August when the island and much of its temples sank beneath the waters of the Nile. These regular events have left the monuments doomed if the funds to save the sacred buildings are not to be found.


In the seventh century of the common era, after the fall of the Roman empire, Islam swept through Egypt and the Sudan converting the Christian population and destroying their churches. This situation remained until the beginning of the nineteenth century when England wrestled control of Egypt from the French.


The Sudan had always been treacherous for Europeans to control including a Mahdist uprising in the 1880's to the early 1890's which culminated in the death of the Governor-General of Sudan by the Mahdi. The author finishes his book with a recalling of the efforts to record and retrieve the archaeology when the dam was erected in 1902 and raised a number of times over the course of the twentieth century.



I thoroughly enjoyed this book though not for the young; the reader will find themselves a fascinating history that has been told of a time when modernization left Nubia's monuments to the mercy of economics, time and the great waters of the Nile. Today many of these sites are now lost and forgotten beneath the dam’s lake but the rescue of much material will for years have value to archaeologists in the study. Still yet many of the great temples stand on dry ground commemorating not only the ancient pharaohs who ordered them but the mass of humanity from all over the world who came together to rescue the monuments of Nubia.