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| My visualisation of what the original 'Tut' golden mask may have looked like. Which one do you prefer? |
If Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves and others are right and the golden face plate of Tutankhamun was welded onto a different funerary mask base (Nefertiti's), then this may well be what the original looked like.
Even more sublime?
What do you think?
(A little Photoshop virtual archaeology!)
Saturday, November 28, 2015
My Nefertiti Nightmare. (The elephant in the tomb.)
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| Was her walling up an act of spite? |
Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves estimates that 80 percent of Tut’s burial treasures
originally belonged to a woman (Nefertiti).
That raises the question – did that leave anything much for her? To me, it's the 'elephant in the tomb.'
If Tut’s treasures were appropriated from Nefertiti, what
can we expect to remain in her tomb? Was she
stripped of valuables?
Or did even worse occur? One hopes her remaining burial goods weren’t destroyed in an
iconoclastic rage by the newly reinstated Amun forces who may have thought “let’s wall up the heretical wife of that Akhenaten!”
They probably wouldn't have dared harm
her body. She was a royal, after all. And a woman - and the Egyptians
were uneasy about angering the female dead.
Immurement is the name of the practice, popular in classical and mediaeval times - except this time a dead woman would have been shut away.
Just a nightmare, as I said.
Please let it be just that.
Please let it be just that.
FOOTNOTE: The practice of a pharaoh’s tomb goods (and statues)
being appropriated by a succeeding pharaoh is of course well attested. Rameses II
was its greatest exponent and made it a national sport. In a sense, kings saw nothing wrong with this.
As a new pharaoh, you were all pharaohs, the living tradition of the role. (Rather the same way
Americans view ‘The Presidency’ as something separate from past presidents or the incumbent.)
