EHe is human, without a shadow of a doubt, a youth with delicate features and a peaceful expression on his face, apparently asleep and just waiting for Osiris, the god of the dead, to descend into the tomb among all the tourists and use his power over mortality to bring the mummy back in transformed a person. For three thousand three hundred and forty-five years the youth has been lying in his burial chamber, for the longest time under a golden death mask in a coffin made of pure gold, encased in two gilded wooden coffins and a mighty sarcophagus made of quartzite, protected not only fourfold by these four covers but also by Isis, Nephtys, Selket and Neith, the tutelary goddesses of the four cardinal points. For some time now, however, he has been resting like a pharaonic Snow White in a glass coffin, laid out like a relic of himself in one of the smallest and most unspectacular tombs in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor. And yet this insignificant king of the eighteenth dynasty, who died at the age of nineteen, became the most famous of all ancient Egyptian rulers for later generations, the face of ancient Egypt par excellence.
A treasure of five thousand four hundred treasures
On November 4, 1922, the British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb, found a treasure of 5,400 priceless treasures and sparked a worldwide enthusiasm for the world of the pharaohs that has continued to this day. The sensational find was the decisive catalyst for a renaissance that had begun a hundred and twenty years earlier with Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. His army also included scholars of all disciplines who cataloged Egypt’s landscapes, traditions and historical legacies, a titanic work that culminated in the epochal work “Description de l’Égypte” and gave the country’s history a new twist: it was two thousand years long the inheritance of the pharaohs, which had already made Egypt the first tourist destination in human history in ancient times, was only plundered and underestimated. Now one recognized in him what Napoleon postulated: “Ancient Egypt is the cradle of all western civilisation.”
