Bust of Tutankhamun on a Lotus
While Howard Carter was locked out of the tomb by the Egyptian government, an official inventory of its separately stored contents revealed this painted wooden bust of the young pharaoh, undocumented and previously unknown to the authorities, suspiciously concealed inside a small wooden box. Bearing the misleading emblem of the English vintners Fortnum & Mason, it was obviously prepared for shipping. Carter’s embarrassed explanation was that the sculpture had been found in the rubble filling the tomb’s corridor (where it had presumably been abandoned in antiquity by fleeing robbers) along with a number of other objects that were “not yet fully registered.” The portrait faithfully captures Tutankhamun’s elongated platycephalic skull, a common feature among members of the inbred royal family of Amarna. A touching likeness of the young pharaoh, the sculpture represents him as the solar deity emerging from the corolla of the primordial lotus at the moment of creation. As a ritual object it symbolizes his divine rebirth every day with the rising sun. After more than 30 centuries of darkness, the pharaoh’s long night ended in 1922 with the first gleam of sunlight from Howard Carter’s breach in the tomb’s sealed entrance:
At first I could see nothing, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold – everywhere the glint of gold.
placed there before the rise of Athens and Rome by priests whose ancient civilization believed that to speak the names of the dead is to make them live again, these
wonderful things
invoked an astonished worldwide reception of the long forgotten boy pharaoh Tutankhamun, who spent his life making images of the gods and whose name indeed lives again as the most celebrated of Egypt’s ancient god-kings.
Click below to read and learn more about the lotus in ancient Egypt.
