ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY: February 16

Reaching the burial chamber of King Tut

The whole mummification and being buried with an assload of treasure stuff they did for Ancient Egyptian kings was to give them a kick-ass afterlife. I expect when you die, it’s game over. But King Tutankhamun did get a form of immortality a few millennia after he went off to the Great Certainty; the unsealing of his tomb captivated the world.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: February 16, 1923--

The fuck was this guy? Nobody special, in the grand scheme of Egyptian politics. He ascended the throne around age nine in roughly 1332 B.C.E., reigned for a decade, and died. To say he’d been sickly would be an understatement. What exactly killed him has been hotly debated, but can be generalized as having suffered a host of conditions and infections at a time when medicine was known for doing more harm than good. Sucked to be him. Continues below …

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His reign was known for one significant policy: a return to polytheism. The two pharaohs prior to Tutankhamun had incredibly brief reigns, but the guy before them, Akhenaten, had brought in a new religion called Atenism that was playing at being monotheistic. The persecution of those worshiping gods other than Aten had destabilized Egypt and Tut said fuck this one god bullshit back to the multiplex of deities bullshit. Speaking of, I’m also a deity. Tutankhamun was one of the few pharaohs worshipped as a god during his lifetime, despite being afflicted with a host of ungodlike ailments. Most pharaohs didn’t achieve god status until after they were committed to the extended desert dirt nap.

Speaking of the long sleep, a little over three millennia later a British Egyptologist name Howard Carter woke him up.

Lots of pharaohs were buried with fantastic treasure, and because grave robbers are a thing, most of it was looted long before the twentieth century. But Carter got lucky. Searching in the Valley of the Kings east of the Nile in Thebes, Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in November of 1922, untouched because the entrance was hidden by debris from cutting another tomb 150 years after Tut’s burial.

It took a few months to clear all the shit out of the way and reach the burial chamber. On February 16, 1923, Carter unsealed the chamber containing Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus. Like a Russian doll kinda thing, there were three coffins nested inside one another, the last one made of solid gold that contained the mummified remains of the long dead boy king. There was also a lot of jewels and other valuable shit, including his twenty-three-pound solid gold death mask, which became an iconic symbol of Ancient Egypt.

The New York Times referred to it as “perhaps, the most extraordinary day in the whole history of Egyptian excavation.”

Unlike Britain thieving the Rosetta Stone from Egypt a century earlier and refusing to give it back, they let them keep Tut’s treasure. Its permanent home is in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

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