King Tut’s Mask Howard Carter found King Tut in the innermost chamber of Tut’s tomb The ancient pharaoh’s mummy lay inside three nested coffins The innermost one was made of solid gold A magnificent solid gold mask covered the young pharaoh’s face bearing the royal insignia of Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt a vulture and a serpent respectively The mask’s expression is serene The beauty and appeal of the young pharaoh’s face have made it the best-known artifact found in the tomb and a symbol of the splendor of ancient Egypt Today King Tut’s mask shines as brightly as ever at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo Egypt Tut took the throne in 1333 BCE As a member of the royal family Tut would have been well prepared for his role as pharaoh Young royals studied reading writing literature mathematics and foreign languages Their schooling included athletics such as archery ball games boating swimming and wrestling In his spare time Tut may have played in the courtyards with his many half brothers and half sisters swam and fished in the Nile Tut likely enjoyed a game of senet As royalty he ate and drank the finest foods and wines the land provided and lived in a palace filled with beautiful statues and wall paintings Perhaps as an attempt to bring order and harmony to Egypt or simply as a political move Tut set about restoring the gods his predecessor Akhenaten had banished especially Amun king of the gods Akhenaten had forced his people to worship only one god Aten the sun disk Young Tut not only brought back the old gods and temples his 8
father had banned he changed his name from Tutankhaten to Tutankhamen or living image of Amun 1 These acts were the most significant of the young pharaoh’s rule He died while still a teenager in 1323 BCE He lay nearly forgotten for thousands of years until Howard Carter discovered Tut’s tomb in 1922 CE Although robbers had entered in ancient times fabulous riches remained in Tut’s tomb While he was relatively unimportant as a ruler during his life the treasures in his tomb made King Tut the best-known Egyptian of all time and Egyptomania Egyptomania fascination with ancient Egypt dates as far back as the 300s BCE to ancient Greece The ancient Romans were interested in Egypt too Roman emperors in the first centuries CE collected Egyptian statues and obelisks and built their own Egyptian-style statues and buildings The Romans even built pyramid tombs and worshiped some of the Egyptian gods Few Europeans visited Egypt from 641 CE when it came under Islamic rule until the late 1600s but people continued to study and imitate the Egyptian artifacts already in Europe When the French military commander Napoléon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798 taking along scholars as well as soldiers Egyptomania exploded again and continued throughout the 1800s Howard Carter’s discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922 fanned the flames Today the mummies pyramids and other artifacts of this ancient culture continue to intrigue people 9
The Nile Valley The Nile valley the valley in which the Nile River flows is 660 miles 1,062 km long Its floodplain covers 4,250 square miles 11,000 sq km Its width varies from 1 25 miles 2 km to 11 miles 18 km At the mouth of the river where the Nile joins the Mediterranean Sea is a wide triangle of wet fertile land called a delta The Nile delta covers approximately 8,500 square miles 22,000 sq km 3 reignited the world’s fascination with the mysterious culture of ancient Egypt THE GIFT OF THE NILE Egypt is the gift of the Nile wrote one of the world’s first historians the Greek Herodotus 2 The Nile River was the lifeblood of ancient Egypt so vital the people thought it divine Each year after heavy tropical rains fell in Ethiopia to the south the Nile burst its banks during the inundation or flooding When the floodwaters receded they left behind fertile black soil for growing crops The Nile also provided an abundance of fish and waterfowl a means of transportation and papyrus reeds for making papyrus a precursor to paper Stretching 4,132 miles 6,650 km from beginning to end the Nile is the world’s longest river It is one of the few rivers that flow north instead of south Since the water flows downstream to the sea the Egyptians called the southern part of their country Upper Egypt and the northern part Lower Egypt 10
The Egyptians called their country Kemet black land 4 They named it for the black life-giving soil in the floodplain They called the desert around them Deshret red land 5 The ancient Egyptians saw the desert as chaotic with its wild animals and the desert tribes who spoke other languages They saw the barren landscape as sacred too by burying their dead in cemeteries there The desert also brought life as the source of many needed materials and wild game Egyptians hunted elephants gazelles lions and rabbits there The desert provided other resources The eastern desert held copper ore and the desert hills near the Nile valley provided the granite limestone and sandstone used for building temples and tombs The deserts also N Mediterranean Sea R e d S e a N i l e R i v e r CAIRO MEMPHIS ANCIENT EGYPT 1400S BCE
