This well-made armchair is fashioned out of those tropical products,
ivory and ebony, for which ancient Egypt was famous.
Our names, by the by,
ivory and ebony come directly from their ancient Egyptian origins,
evil and heavenly.
Now, the first thing to be said about this chair
is that it is very small and could have been used only by an infant.
The second thing to notice is that it lacks the essential motifs
of a royal throne, the fretwork of the entwined heraldic plants
of Upper and Lower Egypt, the lily and the papyrus.
These can be seen, for example,
on another of the objects from the tomb.
This small chair cannot have been used, therefore,
by a reigning king or queen, but must have belonged to Tutankhamun,
before he was crowned king.
The design on the side panels tells us a little more about the owner.
The outer surfaces are carved in relief and gilded with the figure
of a gazelle amid foliage.
This motif was adopted by the Egyptian court at this time
to symbolise the children of rulers.
Putting these observations together, we can say that this chair belonged
to a child who was the son of a pharaoh.
Now, this is the kind of detective work that we shall have to employ
if we wish to give any connected story of Tutankhamun.
For the truth is that only scanty facts have survived the 3,000 years
between his day and ours.
The monuments of Tutankhamun are not numerous.
The Temple of Luxor, in the ancient city of Thebes, is one of the few
places where traces of his short reign have survived.
On the wall of one of the gateways of this temple, Tutankhamun is shown
burning incense to the great city god Amun.
In the Cairo Museum, there is a statue of Tutankhamun as the child
member of the Theban family of gods.
He wears his hair with a sidelock in the fashion
of ancient Egyptian children.
Only a few other representations of him have come to light
outside his tomb.
This statue was designed for his mortuary temple,
but appropriated by a later king.
The reign of Tutankhamun occurred comparatively late in the history
of ancient Egypt.
The Egypt of the written records began with the archaic period
in about 3,000 BC. Around 2,700, the Old Kingdom period began.
After a short period of collapse,
The Middle Kingdom thrived until a second time of trouble.
Tutankhamun was the 11th pharaoh of the New Kingdom,
born about 1,370 BC.
That his father was a king is confirmed by this fragment
of stone, which names him as a beloved king's son of his loins.
Who this king was is disputed, but Tutankhamun himself
named his father as Amenophis III,
on a lion that he completed for a temple in the Sudan.
His mother could well have been Tiye, the principal queen
of Amenophis III.
He closely resembled her, to judge by their portraits.
A number of her trinkets were buried with him, including a lock
of her hair, carefully wrapped and anointed.
Queen Tiye had already borne several children, including the oldest
surviving son, also called Amenophis, who at the time
of Tutankhamun's birth had been ruling as his father's
co-regent for the last eight years.
This Amenophis seems to have suffered
from some glandular disorder.
He was, moreover, a man of fanatical religious views.
His sole god was the Aten,
symbolised by the sun disk. As co-regent,
he changed his name to Akhenaten in honour of his god and founded
for him a new capital city, Akhetaten, the seat of the Aten,
which is known today as Amarna.
Tutankhamun at birth was actually called Tutankhaten,
fair, like the living Aten.
He was probably taken on visits to Amarna for the great religious
festivals held there.
Tutankhamun's father, Amenophis III, ruled for over 38 years,
an empire that stretched from the fourth cataract of the Nile
in the south to the river Euphrates in the north.
He was the wealthiest and most powerful pharaoh to have sat
on the Egyptian throne, a kind of earlier and greater Solomon,
famous for his enormous building schemes and for the opulence
and high quality achieved in the arts during his reign.
He is the king celebrated in the Colossi of Memnon.
These two gigantic statues of him once stood before a temple
that stretched back a quarter of a mile, all the way
to this re-erected stele.
The court of Amenophis III probably resided at Memphis
for the most part.
Tutankhamun must have lived there as a child, though he would also
have spent some time at Thebes in his father's palace.
The site of this palace has been partially excavated.
Like Akhenaten's city at Amarna, its mud brick walls were faced
with gaily painted plaster.
It is still possible to discern some traces of the original designs,
like this ankh sign, for example.
In his later years, Amenophis III didn't enjoy good health.
He'd grown very corpulent and suffered
miserably from toothache.
His death left his son and co-regent Akhenaten to enjoy sole rule.
The Dowager Queen Tiye now came to Amarna to live, but probably
the young Tutankhamun, now aged four, came with her at this time
and took up residence in the northern part of the town.
At Amarna, he would have become better acquainted with the
royal family now ruling the Egyptian dominions.
There was, of course, the king himself, his eldest brother
Akhenaten, obsessed with the cult of the Aten and steadily moving
towards an intolerance of other gods.
In the end, Akhenaten instituted a widespread campaign
against their worship, particularly that of the influential
Amun of Thebes.
Then, there was Akhenaten's beautiful queen, Nefertiti.
She had six daughters, Tutankhamun's nieces.
One of them was Ankhesenpaaten,
whom Tutankhamun was later to marry.
At Amarna,
Tutankhamun would have led the life of any prince who was the son
of a chief queen, and therefore a future ruler,
if his older brothers died before him, and with the high death
rate of the ancient world, this was a distinct possibility.
Howard Carter found in Tutankhamun's tomb
a box which he described as a toy chest.
It still contained game boards, gloves, and paint boxes.
Carter also found a small box in the tomb with its original label,
saying that it had belonged to Tutankhamun as a child.
The little infant chair belongs to this period of his life too,
as does the fire making drill and its companion block of wood.
This was obviously a utilitarian device, and the signs
are burning around the holes in the block show that it was used.
He would have learned to read and to write with the pens
in this pen case.
While Tutankhamun was still a child at Amarna, Akhenaten and Nefertiti
mourned the death of their second daughter. Only a year later,
Nefertiti herself and Queen Tiye also died.
The eldest daughter, Princess Meritaten, was married
about this time to an older brother of Tutankhamun.
His name was Smenkhkare and this is almost
certainly his portrait.
He was appointed as co-regent with Akhenaten and the two kings
ruled together for a few years, but soon Smenkhare died in his 20th
year and Akhenaten followed him not long afterwards.
Neither king had a son.
The young Tutankhamun found himself
seated alone on the throne of his ancestors.
He was nine years old, and he inherited a situation
which would have daunted the most experienced ruler.
His vassals to the north, traditionally pictured here
on his footstool, was switching allegiance
to the growing Hittite power.
While at home his own subjects, the docile lapwings at his feet,
had become disaffected during Akhenaten's rule.
Tutankhamun was married, as custom required, to the next surviving
heiress of Akhenaten, the Princess Ankhesenpaaten,
nearly twice his age.
The back panel of this throne shows her anointing the new king,
who wears the elaborate Triple Crown of his coronation,
still under the beneficent rays of Akhenaten's god, the Aten Sun disk.
Akhenaten's attempted religious revolution had left his young
successor with the country in social and economic upheaval.
The sorry state of Egypt is well described in a great stele,
which Tutankhamun erected early in his reign in the Great Temple
of Amun at Karnak. With unusual frankness, he declares...
"Now when his Majesty arose as king, the temples from one end
"of the country to the other had fallen into decay.
"Their shrines were desolate and overgrown with weeds.
"Their sanctuaries were as if they had never been.
"Their chambers were a trodden path.
"The land was topsy turvy, for the gods had forsaken it.
"If one prayed to a God, he did not come.
"If one supplicated a goddess, she did not come either.
"Their hearts were weak within them, so that they destroyed
"what had been made."
As part of the restoration of the old order,
the young king now changed his name from Tutankhaten,
which had been his since birth to Tutankhamun.
His queen changed hers also to Ankhesenamun.
Under Tutankhamun's rule, the images of Amun which Akhenaten
had desecrated were soon repaired.
The head of Amun was, for example, restored to the statue of an earlier
king seated beside the god.
At the same time, the confiscated treasures and revenues
of the temples were restored to them and the old worship revived.
Since the king was still only a child, we may presume
that his decrees were made at the suggestion of his advisers.
The reform of the army and the suppression of abuses
by the tax collectors were the concern
of the General Staff officer, Horemheb...
..while the role of regent was taken by the elder statesman Ay,
who was probably Queen Tiye's brother. With the aid of such men,
the young king tried to repair the damage done by Akhenaten.
Akhenaten's capital at Amarna was abandoned.
All the burials that had been made there were removed
to the former burial grounds at Thebes, a stone's throw
from where Tutankhamun was later buried.
Some of the royal burials were redeposited.
This small tomb was discovered in 1907, but so badly excavated
and recorded that it has not been possible to reconstruct
its history until very recently.
The burial had been desecrated, not by tomb robbers, but by officials
of a later pharaoh who regarded the Amarna kings as illegitimate.
They had done their work badly,
however. Sufficient evidence remained to show that Queen Tiye,
and probably Akhenaten, had at one time been buried there.
These gold covered planks are part of Queen Tiye's shrine.
There were also these jars with human headed stoppers
for the embalming of the mummies' internal organs.
At the heart of the deposit was a decayed mummy in a gilded
and inlaid coffin of royal type, similar to the second
coffin of Tutankhamun.
But the name of the deceased had been cut out
from the inscriptions...
..and the gold mask had been wrenched off the face.
A recent examination of the bones from this coffin leaves little room
for doubt that they are of Smenkhkare.
Seals show that the contents of this tomb were originally housed
there by Tutankhamun.
Later, two of the occupants were removed.
Presumably, Queen Tiye was reburied in her husband's tomb elsewhere
in the valley, but what happened to Akhenaten is totally unknown.
Nefertiti and her daughters must also have been reburied in some part
of the Theban burial grounds.
It may be that the Amarna queens still lie hidden somewhere
among the crags and wadis on the edge of the desert at Thebes.
As for Tutankhamun, he soon had to pack away his toys and take
up more manly pursuits.
Reliefs and paintings on objects from his tomb show him
as the Homeric sportsman, hunting the wild animals of the desert,
or shooting at birds and fish,
his queen beside him to point out the quarry.
But his days were also passed in more warlike activities.
It fell to him to reassert Egyptian claims in Asia that had been badly
eroded under Akhnaton, and to lead his armies into the field.
In the seventh or eighth year of his of his reign, the Hittite
forces raided the territory on the modern Lebanon-Syria border
in a breach of their treaty obligations with Egypt.
In reply, the Egyptian armies captured Kadesh on the river Orontes
and encouraged the revolt of another Hittite vassal.
A scene on the wall of the temple of Ramesses II at Thebes shows
the sort of fighting that took place between the Egyptians and Hittites
in this region.
Egyptian successes on the Orontes were short-lived.
The Hittites soon drove them out of Kadesh.
It was at this point, according to the Hittite account,
that the Egyptians became demoralised by the death
of their pharaoh, Tutankhamun.
A possible reason for his sudden death was only found recently,
when his mummy was re-examined by modern techniques.
In 1969, the body of the young king was removed from the sarcophagus
in the tomb at Thebes for the first time since Carter's team
examined it in 1925.
Modern X-rays indicate a condition of the skull,
which may have been caused by a cerebral haemorrhage resulting
from a wound in the region of the left ear.
So, the king may have fallen in a skirmish somewhere
in Palestine or Syria.
Among the collection of wine jars that belonged to the reign
of Tutankhamun, the very latest one bears a date
referring to his 10th year of rule.
This shows that he reigned for little more than nine years
at the most.
Tutankhamun had no son to succeed him.
Queen Ankhesenamun had evidently borne the king no heir,
although the mummified remains of two premature stillborn children
found in these two little coffins in his tomb
are generally taken to be his.
It was in these straits that the young widow wrote
to the Hittite king of all people, asking him to send to Egypt one
of his sons, whom she would marry, and so make Pharaoh.
This was a very undignified request for a queen of Egypt to make,
as she didn't hesitate to point out.
But it is probable that, according to the ideas of the age
about the divinity of kings, it was preferable for her to seek
the hand of foreign royalty rather than that of one
of her own subjects.
The suspicious Hittite king hesitated too long.
He finally dispatched his son, but on the way to Egypt to claim
the throne, the young prince was killed.
At this crisis, the aged Ay, whose family had been intimately connected
with the ruling house of Egypt for some generations
and who was very likely Tutankhamun's uncle, had no option
but to assume the crown himself, and buried the young king in a tomb
which had hastily been prepared for him, just across the way
from where his brothers and mother had been buried some six
or seven years earlier.
Ay's first duty as the new pharaoh was to carry out carry out
the burial rites due to the dead king.
The wall of Tutankhamun's burial chamber shows Ay in the leopard skin
of a high priest, performing the ceremony of opening the mouth
for the dead Tutankhamun.
Below this painting, inside his stone sarcophagus,
Tutankhamun's remains rested undisturbed for about a decade,
until his tomb was violated by thieves.
They were discovered before much damage could be done.
When the tomb was resealed by the officials of the royal burial
ground, it was to remain untouched for another 3,270 years,
until the picks of Howard Carter's workmen struck its stone threshold
on the morning of the 4th of November, 1922.