A collection of roughly made clay trays and wooden staffs found among the golden treasures of Tutankhamun鈥檚 tomb may offer the earliest evidence of an important ancient Egyptian royal funerary ritual. The idea is the latest indication that the boy king had a burial unlike that of any other pharaoh.
Tutankhamun鈥檚 nine-year-long reign in the 14th century BC came shortly after a period of religious turmoil in ancient Egypt. One of his predecessors 鈥� Akhenaten, who was probably Tutankhamun鈥檚 father 鈥� had abandoned ancient Egypt鈥檚 traditional polytheistic faith in favour of a new religion centred on the worship of a single deity known as Aten.
Tutankhamun and his advisers played an important role in restoring the older faith. But this also presented them with an opportunity to reinterpret and update some traditional rituals, says at Yale University. Evidence for this may lie in the four clay trays, each about 7.5 centimetres by 4.5 centimetres, and four 1.1-metre-tall wooden staffs found in Tutankhamun鈥檚 tomb.
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Brown suspects they were used in a funerary ritual known at the Awakening of Osiris, which was first represented in ancient Egyptian artwork several decades after Tutankhamun鈥檚 reign. 鈥淚鈥檓 pretty convinced that what we鈥檙e seeing within Tutankhamun鈥檚 burial chamber is probably the earliest iteration of this ritual that we can see in the archaeological record,鈥� says Brown.
The trays and staffs were placed on reed matting just 1.5 metres from the head of Tutankhamun鈥檚 sarcophagus. Brown says this invites comparison with the later artwork showing the Awakening of Osiris ritual.
In this artwork, the pharaoh 鈥� who in death has become Osiris, the god of the underworld 鈥� is commanded to wake by staffs held behind his head. Brown says the clay trays were a crucial component of this ritual too because they would have held libations 鈥� perhaps in the form of water from the Nile 鈥� that were believed to help revive the decomposing body. Such libations were often placed on reed matting so that their symbolic purity was untainted by the impure ground. Even the fact that the clay vessels were crudely made from Nile mud is important, he says, because Osiris was also symbolised by the fertile Nile soil.
at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands agrees that the clay trays may have had a ritualistic purpose 鈥� although in a forthcoming article he argues they may have been used in a different ritual known as the 鈥渟pell of the four torches鈥� that predates Tutankhamun鈥檚 rule. In this ritual, four torch-bearing guides stand near the sarcophagus and help the dead pharaoh journey through the underworld, before each extinguishes his torch in a clay tray filled with milk from a white cow.
鈥淚 definitely think that鈥檚 a good interpretation too,鈥� says Brown. He adds that the ancient Egyptians often used the same objects in several different ways, so the clay trays could have been used in both rituals.
鈥淚t鈥檚 quite possible that what we see in Tutankhamun鈥檚 burial is a precursor to the Awakening of Osiris ritual,鈥� says at the American University in Cairo, Egypt.
About 10 years ago, Ikram argued that there is . For instance, many aspects of his embalming process were highly unusual, and the boy king may be the only pharaoh whose penis was mummified in an erect position 鈥� another symbol of Osiris and his regenerative potential. Ikram speculates that the ancient Egyptians went the extra mile to showcase the links between the dead pharaoh and Osiris to emphasise his legitimacy as well as the legitimacy of traditional religious beliefs and practices. 鈥淭he burial certainly firmly linked Tutankhamun to the kings from the earlier part of the 18th dynasty, separating him from Akhenaten,鈥� says Ikram.
Journal of Egyptian Archaeology
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