On 26 November 2022, it will be 100 years since Howard Carter peered through a hole in the entrance to the chambers of Tutankhamun’s tomb and saw “wonderful things”. It was to be one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time.
Before Carter discovered the tomb in November 1922, Tutankhamun was an obscure pharaoh, but far from unknown. It was known that he had started life as Tutankhaten and had been married to Ankhesenpaaten, the third daughter of the ‘heretic pharaoh’ Akhenaten and the queen Nefertiti, and that he had ruled briefly under this name at the city of Akhet-Aten (modern Amarna, about halfway between Cairo and Luxor). This city had been founded by Akhenaten in honour of a single deity, the Aten. This abandoned Egypt’s traditional polytheism of many gods presided over by ‘the king of the gods’, Amun-Ra.
However, after a few years, Tutankh changed his name in respect of the god at the same time). He was known to have ruled for a total of about nine years. Despite this, his association with the heretic regime meant that later kings excluded his name from king-lists and usurped his name on monuments.
