Tutankhamun: African King

The summer of 1923 gave newspaper readers a break from the press circus surrounding the tomb of Tutankhamun, the discovery of which just a few months earlier had grabbed the world’s attention. But an anonymous editorial in the Harlem-based weekly Negro World was suspicious of the sudden lull in what had been near constant coverage. The archaeologists must have clammed up for a reason, the editorial surmised, and that reason could only be race. If Tutankhamun proved to have skin the colour of ‘unbleached coal’, public interest would disappear, for ‘white Americans call nothing creditable Negroid if they can possibly find another name for it’.

The language is of its time, when ‘Negro’ and ‘Negroid’ were proud terms for Black identity in the segregated United States. The sentiment, however, remains clear: would the mainstream media ever acknowledge that Ancient Egypt was an African culture and Tutankhamun an African king?

In fact, news from the tomb had dried up because archaeology in Egypt always halted during the hottest months of the year. The English archaeologist Howard Carter and senior Egyptian foreman Ahmed Gerigar secured the excavation site and crated up dozens of artefacts for the long journey from the Valley of the Kings to Cairo. In May 1923 labourers hired for the occasion wheeled the crates on light-rail carriages from the Valley to the Nile, where an Egyptian government steamboat would transport them downstream to the antiquities museum. The journey took place over two days, when temperatures were already over 38 degrees Celsius. In an interview with The Times (which had exclusive access to his work), Carter observed that the metal lengths of light-rail track, which the Egyptian men had to lift and lay repeatedly over the six-mile trip, were white-hot. The hired labourers were Saidi, southerners, conventionally considered backwards, hardy and darker-skinned by Europeans and some upper-class Egyptians. Carter spoke of them as if they were an indistinguishable human mass, impervious to heat.

In both these glimpses of the Tutankhamun excavation, the myths and hierarchies associated with the idea of ‘race’ are on display from different vantage points. African American suspicions of white-washing held a mirror up to racism in Egyptology. Carter’s assumptions about Egyptian workmen were indebted to categories that ascribed intrinsic physiological differences to Europeans, Arabs and Africans. Moreover, the tomb’s discovery in November 1922 came as Egypt took its first steps out of the British Empire’s grip. In February that year the British government, under David Lloyd George, broke off negotiations with Egyptian representatives, including prime minister Adli Yakan. Rather than meet the Egyptian politicians’ demands, Britain unilaterally granted its protectorate a form of independence short of sovereignty: Egypt would control its domestic affairs, but Britain reserved control of foreign affairs, the Suez Canal Zone and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

For more than a century Europeans had asserted that the people of modern Egypt did not care about its pharaonic past and were a threat to its antiquities. After centuries of Ottoman dominance and four decades of British occupation Egyptians were ready to demonstrate how wrong this orientalist idea had always been.

In the flesh

The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in November 1922, and the intensive news coverage that followed, did not introduce ideas about race into discussions of Ancient Egypt. That discourse was as old as Egyptology itself.

In the 18th century contact with other peoples as a result of European colonial expansion encouraged scholars such as Carl Linnaeus and Petrus Camper to formulate classification systems for human differences – the birth of the concept of race. Camper’s system relied on measurements of skulls and comparisons with works of visual art where no human remains were available, such as from Ancient Greece. By the end of the century the German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach realised that unwrapping mummified bodies from Egypt offered a unique opportunity to study an ancient population quite literally in the flesh. It was Blumenbach who coined the term ‘Caucasian’, based on skulls he had collected from the Caucasus mountains in Georgia. He considered the Ancient Egyptians to fit a category he dubbed ‘Ethiopian’.

Egyptian mummies were still rare in Europe, but that changed in the wake of Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt and the 1805 appointment of Muhammad Ali as governor (wali) of Egypt on behalf of the Ottoman Empire. Muhammad Ali turned to Europe to help modernise Egypt’s military, agriculture and industry. Europeans welcomed the opportunity to line their own pockets while also lining the halls of their new museums with Egyptian antiquities – including embalmed human remains. In early 19th century France and Britain, unwrapping these bodies became something of a fad among learned societies, surgeons and natural scientists. Augustus Bozzi Granville in London and Georges Cuvier in Paris identified the mummified bodies they stripped, dissected and measured as ‘Caucasian’. Created by northern Europeans, this category quickly assumed a superior position in relation to dark-skinned ‘Ethiopian’ or ‘Negroid’ populations. In a sign of their artificiality and inherent instability, terms and parameters used for purported races changed over time, while the position of North Africans, including Ancient Egyptians, remained a matter of debate. By the time Egyptology emerged as an academic discipline in the mid-19th century, and especially from the 1870s, its white European and American practitioners reasoned that the ancient population of Egypt was closer to Europe than to Africa and that Egypt’s modern population was too mixed – and, the thinking went, too Muslim – to match the accomplishments of their pharaonic forebears.

Small wonder that Tutankhamun could not escape racialised discourse once Carter and Gerigar located his sealed tomb. A minor ruler that almost no one had heard of, Tutankhamun offered a blank surface on which to project assertions and anxieties about racial identities. The tomb was also the first big archaeological find in a world connected by technological advancements after the First World War. Advances in printing, photography, radiotelegraphy and transport helped make Tutankhamun a global media event, as did the timing of the discovery. Tourism to Egypt had only just resumed after the disruption of the war and the 1919 uprising against the British occupation. By 1922 tourists from Europe and North America were once again enjoying the tea rooms and nightclubs of Cairo and the winter sun of Luxor and Aswan.

Saturation point

Archaeologists, too, were back at work in Egypt, although Howard Carter had never really stopped. He used the quiet war years to start exploring every inch of the Valley of the Kings, the royal tomb field for which his sponsor, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, had acquired an excavation permit in 1914. Carter had been based in Egypt since he arrived there aged 17 in 1891, employed as an artist for a British archaeological survey. He spent the early months of 1892 working with William Flinders Petrie, soon to be appointed to Britain’s first professorship in Egyptian archaeology at University College London. Petrie was an influential excavator who embraced race science as a way to interpret the archaeological record and classify both ancient and modern people; in later life, he was a proponent of the eugenic theories espoused by his friend and collaborator Francis Galton.

Archaeologists like Petrie and Carter spoke Arabic and worked closely with Egyptians all their lives, even thanking expert colleagues such as Ahmed Gerigar in some of their publications. However, the patronising tone of such offerings, as well as statements found in private papers, reveal entrenched racial biases. Archaeology strove to present itself as an evidence-based discipline at a time when most of its practitioners believed themselves uniquely capable of scientific thought.

There were practical considerations, too. Excavators were used to receiving a generous share of the objects they found, to sell off or donate to their financial backers. By the end of the war, new proposals to restrict the export of antiquities from Egypt sounded like a death knell and growing calls for Egyptian independence were treated with disbelief. Already in 1920 Harry Burton, who became the photographer for the Tutankhamun excavation, had written to his boss in New York: ‘I don’t think anybody knows what the granting of self-government to Egypt really means. We shall just have to wait + see. In any case it will probably be years before it materializes. At least, I hope so.’

It was Harry Burton’s sharp photographs that made both Howard Carter and Tutankhamun famous. Usually attached to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s better resourced excavations nearby, Burton joined Carter’s small team by an informal arrangement. His time and skills were effectively a down payment, in expectation of the museum receiving a future share of artefacts from the tomb.

Burton’s photographs of the tomb’s interior began to saturate the world’s press in late January 1923, followed soon after by his images of the artefacts once they had been removed and repaired. There were objects of rarity and refinement – alabaster perfume vessels, a gilded wooden chair (or ‘throne’) inlaid with coloured glass – as well as more humble items such as the single, child-sized glove found in the bottom of a box. Like other photographers of the time, Burton worked with half- and full-size glass plates and the prints he made in Luxor, then shipped to London, were copied there for sale and redistribution to news outlets. Carnarvon had signed an exclusive contract with The Times which had first rights on images and stories, while the Illustrated London News printed Burton’s photographs using better quality ink and paper, often leading with them on its cover.

Face to face

Both The Times and the Illustrated London News got their stories directly from Carter, who relayed the sparse biographical details of Tutankhamun that began to emerge. Who was this king, the last of a long family line that made up the 18th Dynasty? At the time of the tomb’s discovery even the age at which Tutankhamun died was unknown, although he was presumed to have been young. To readers following the story, his youth added a certain poignancy after the losses of the First World War.

Moreover, what did Tutankhamun look like? For a freshly minted celebrity, it was difficult to say. The early weeks of the tomb clearance focused entirely on the first room of the tomb, the Antechamber. It had no wall-paintings or reliefs, just bare walls against which pieces of furniture, storage boxes and dismantled chariots had been stacked, almost to ceiling height. Only a handful of the hundreds of objects inside it depicted Tutankhamun. Carter – and the media – examined these for details, assuming they were reliable portraits of the king. On a painted box that showed him hunting from his chariot, and on the throne that showed his wife, Ankhesenamun, caressing him, Tutankhamun had the reddish-brown skin conventionally used for men (and many women) in Egyptian art. So, too, did the so-called ‘mannequin’, an enigmatic wooden sculpture, lacking arms and legs, that Carter surmised had been a tailor’s dummy or valet for Tutankhamun’s clothes. It had skin painted reddish-brown and several journalists snapped photographs of it being carried by one of the (unidentified) Egyptian men who transferred objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb to the larger tomb of Sety II, which was used for storage, a workspace and a photo studio. Intentionally or not, the angle of some photos made the mannequin itself replace the Egyptian porter’s upper body; others invited direct visual comparison between two Egyptian bodies, one ancient and one modern.

In the Antechamber, two striking life-size representations of Tutankhamun did show the king with skin as dark as coal. Carter dubbed them guardian statues, because they flanked the plastered-over opening to the Burial Chamber. Their faces, torsos and limbs had been coated with an resin-infused mixture (‘black goo’, as archaeological chemist Kate Fulcher calls it) almost certainly as part of their activation by priests in the funeral rites. Their clothing, jewellery, eyebrows and eye rims were gilded, while the sacred linen that had once wrapped them had turned to tatters.

Other objects in the tomb depicted racial categories that Egyptologists assumed were fixed and identical across time. On carved walking sticks and in gilded reliefs on the ceremonial chariots, figures of the king’s trampled or tied-up enemies displayed a range of facial features, hairstyles and clothing to distinguish them from ‘proper’ Egyptians. These symbolic enemies represented a threat to the cosmic order, which it was a pharaoh’s divine responsibility to uphold. The enemies are all male, often visibly African and sometimes with features perhaps from Libya or west Asia. They reflect an ancient belief system with its own interests in human difference, but to modern viewers, it was difficult not to see them as examples of the racial, and racist, imagery that saturated contemporary life.

An African king

Even without his black-skinned statues, or the bound prisoners on his walking sticks, it was obvious to the readers of Negro World and other African-American media outlets in the 1920s that Tutankhamun and his family were as African as the society they ruled. Americans of African descent had long identified with Ancient Egypt, acknowledging it both as a symbol of biblical slavery and an origin point of the oldest and mightiest Black civilisation. One tradition, drawing on the Book of Genesis, credited the foundation of an Egyptian kingdom to Ham, the son of Abraham and an enslaved woman named Hagar.

In 19th-century America men of African descent joined Black-only lodges of Freemasonry, with its Ancient Egyptian-inspired rites and symbols, while figures like Frederick Douglass and Martin Robison Delany encouraged Black Americans to view Egyptian antiquity as an ancestral source of inspiration. By the early 20th century the African ness of Ancient Egypt was taken for granted by many African Americans, in the same way that Egypt’s proximity to the ancient Classical world, and thus to (presumed) whiteness, was taken for granted by western Egyptologists.

As seen in Meta Warrick Fuller’s bronze statue ‘Ethiopia Awakening’ (1914), Ancient Egypt and Ethiopia often merged, not thanks to categories imposed by scientific racism, but because both represented strong, independent African states, past and present. At that time, Ethiopia (Abyssinia) was the only African country that had not been invaded and colonised. Warrick Fuller was part of the Harlem Renaissance movement, which was more global than its name suggests; she had trained in Paris and studied with Rodin. Another figure associated with the movement was the writer Langston Hughes, one of whose earliest poems appeared in 1921 – when he was just 19 years old – in The Crisis, a monthly magazine edited by W.E.B. Du Bois and published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ became a modernist classic, in which its narrator claims a deep and ancient knowledge of the Mississippi, the Euphrates, the Congo – and the Nile.

Nor was a sense of affinity between African Americans, Africa and the Arab world limited to small literary and artistic circles. The Crisis had a 100,000-strong circulation, while Negro World reached double that with its weekly editions, distributed internationally thanks to the network of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. African-American engagement with Ancient Egypt filtered through all social levels. Fraternal orders like the IBPOEW (Improved Benevolent and Protective Order Elks of the World) played a crucial role in middle-class Black communities across the US. They offered social events, business networks and mutual financial support at a time of entrenched discrimination. Ancient Egypt had a place in these, as well; in 1923, IBPOEW Lodge 389 in Cleveland, Ohio renamed itself the King Tut Lodge.

Egypt rising

As the historian Clare Corbould has argued, Ancient Egypt offered a ‘usable past’ for many African Americans shaping a communal identity in the early 20th century. The same was true for Egyptians. Egyptian scholars had spent decades promoting education for all Egyptians about their ancient past. However, a short-lived School of Egyptology in Cairo, designed to train Egyptian egyptologists, had to close when the French-run antiquities service refused to hire its graduates. The most successful of them, Ahmed Kamal, relied on income from teaching and translating until later in life, when he set up a programme in Egyptology at what became Cairo University. He lived just long enough to follow news of the Tutankhamun discovery from Cairo, where he died in August 1923.

The generation that came of age around the time of the 1919 revolution took inspiration for Egypt’s future from its past. Egyptian artists, like Muhammad Nagi and Mahmoud Mukhtar, and writers such as Naguib Mahfouz were part of a modernist movement known as Pharaonism. Like Meta Warrick Fuller, Mahmoud Mukhtar studied sculpture and lived in Paris for several years. He won a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1920 for a marble sculpture he called Nahdat Misr, ‘Egypt Reawakening’. It represents a peasant woman lifting a veil away from her face, as the reclining sphinx next to her rises on its forelegs. A fundraising campaign in Egypt, begun by a nationalist newspaper, led to the statue being realised on a monumental scale, carved in the red granite favoured by the pharaohs and found only at Aswan.

If sphinxes and peasant women evoked an ‘authentic’ and eternal Egyptian identity, so too did Tutankhamun, as his treasures began to emerge from the tomb. Egypt’s venerated poet Ahmed Shawqi wrote odes in classical Arabic in honour of the king yet, as with African-American interest in Ancient Egypt, Egyptians of all social levels embraced the discovery and its significance for the new nation. A song by the nightclub singer Mounira al-Mahdeyya described Egyptians as the children of Tutankhamun and schools staged plays inspired by the find, with props representing the vases, guardian-statues and other Antechamber objects made famous in the Egyptian press.

As work resumed at the tomb in the autumn of 1923, Tutankhamun had become a symbol of Egyptian resistance against foreign occupation, ancient and modern, amid concerns that western Egyptology was exploiting Tutankhamun for its own ends. The excavation’s second season was tense, not only because Carter’s team was dismantling the fragile, bulky shrines that filled the Burial Chamber but also because Egypt’s newly elected government, led by Sa’d Zaghloul, expected the English archaeologists to clear all decisions with the antiquities service. The service was still run by a Frenchman, Pierre Lacau, but formed part of the ministry of public works, headed by anti-colonial activist Morcos Hanna. In February 1924, just after raising the stone sarcophagus lid to reveal the gilded coffins inside, Carter refused to continue work. Lacau and Hanna revoked the excavation permit. Zaghloul chastised Carter for trying to claim rights over a tomb that was not his, but Egypt’s. Carter lost the legal case he brought against the ministry, not helped by the fact that his British lawyer, who had prosecuted Hanna for acts of sabotage in the 1919 revolution, described the Egyptian antiquities service as no better than thieves. The balance of power had changed.

Tutankhamun unmasked

Egypt’s triumphant repossession of the tomb in spring 1924 gave way to a dawning realisation of how much work there was left to do – work that no one had the time, patience or funding to undertake. When, in November that year, British General Lee Stack was assassinated by Egyptian student revolutionaries on the way to his residence in Cairo, Britain forced the resignation of Zaghloul and his government. A caretaker government under Ahmed Ziwar was more conciliatory towards British interests, smoothing the way for Carter to return to work.

The next big task was opening the coffins and unwrapping the body that still lay within. Stripping, studying, measuring and drawing (and, from the late 19th century, photographing) embalmed bodies was standard practice and, though there were a few qualms about interfering with a royal body, consensus decreed that it had to be done.

Because resin-infused libations had been poured over Tutankhamun’s body, it had to be dug out of the coffin in layers, starting at the feet. Carter and colleagues severed the head at the cervical vertebrae, with the now famous gold mask still in place. Heated knives helped them extract the head and unwrap it, revealing the face of Tutankhamun, with cracked skin, sunken eyes and shrunken lips. Burton’s photographs of the head appeared in the western press in 1926, showing front and profile views (the visual language of both ethnic and police photography); a draped piece of cloth concealed the severed neck. The Illustrated London News described the royal face as ‘refined and cultured’, coded language for ‘Caucasian’ or ‘North African’ physiognomy.

There was little to report about the body other than Tutankhamun’s age at death, around 18 or 19 years old. Arabic media paid even less attention to the autopsy than the western media did. It was the dazzling gold mask, with its astonishing blue glass and coloured stone inlays, that made the front pages in February 1926 instead.

The king whose name had become so familiar now had a familiar face, which Carter described to the press as a ‘life-like portrait’. Beardless (the beard was only re attached in the 1940s), smooth-cheeked, slender-necked and with no skin colour known to humankind, here was a Tutankhamun who could be almost anything to anybody.

A whiter shade of gold

Pure gold did not put an end to racialised debates about Tutankhamun and Ancient Egypt, which revived when the mask, one of the guardian-statues and other artefacts began to tour the world in the 1960s. The young pharaoh has been Black African, modern Egyptian or vaguely ‘universal’ (a shade of white), depending on viewer and context. Headlines a few years ago confidently declared that he had Spanish DNA, apparently forgetting (among other issues with ancient DNA analyses) that Spain was part of a Middle Eastern and North African empire for centuries. Tutankhamun has been unable to avoid the past century’s troubled history of race and racism.

Christina Riggs is the author of Treasured: How Tutankhamun Shaped a Century (Atlantic, out in paperback September 2022).