Posted on 11/03/2013 9:31:59 AM PST by afraidfortherepublic
The mummified body of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun burst into flames inside his sarcophagus after a botched attempt to embalm him, according to scientists in a new documentary.
After his death in 1323 BC, Tutankhamun was rapidly embalmed and buried, but fire investigators believe a chemical reaction caused by embalming oils used on his mummy sparked the blaze.
A fragment of flesh from the boy pharaoh, whose tomb was discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter and the Earl of Carnarvon, was tested by researchers who confirmed his body was burnt while sealed in his coffin.
Tut has long fired the public imagination. He became pharaoh at the age of 10 in 1333 BC and ruled for just nine years until his death.
He was the last of the royal line from the eighteenth dynasty of the New Kingdom, one of the most powerful royal houses of ancient Egypt.
The discovery of his nearly intact tomb, complete with a gold coffin and gold funeral mask, was a worldwide sensation and sparked public interest in ancient Egypt.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Maybe Tut was a drummer.
At least he didn’t choke on somebody else’s vomit.
Any familiar talent on the label?
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Did he get T-Boned?
Theban Mapping Project
*kof-kof*
Isn't that what he was, by then?
Yes, I thought that was an amazing assumption. After all, how can they tell after all these years? (And yes, I did read the article.)
Couldn’t have burned for more than a second or two in a sealed coffin.
Nice blast from the past.
I watched it about 6 times today.
Still funny.
Ay, assuming the royal power, officiated at the splendid funeral of his protege Tutankhamen. Having reached the throne in his old age, Ay did not occupy it for long. The exact order of events that ended with Ay's elaborate and beautiful sarcophagus being smashed to smithereens, we do not know; but the Eighteenth Dynasty was terminated by invasion. Ay was not followed on the throne by any kin of his -- the House of Akhnaton was followed by foreign rule.
Akhnaton had sons-in-law who followed him on the throne, Smenkhkare and Tutankhamen. Often this role is ascribed to Tutankhamen -- but the youthful king was followed by an old general, Ay, the maternal grandfather of the two young princes. Was it Ay who appointed Haremhab to administer the land for him, and then, in his own lifetime, crowned him? But "of Haremhab's relation to Ay we know absolutely nothing." (4) And if there is no historical link between Haremhab and Ay, the last known king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, does any compelling reason exist, or even any ground whatsoever, to place Haremhab immediately after Tutankhamen or after Ay, where we usually find him in books on history? A likely ground is not only non-existent, but everything confounds such placement of the "appointed pharaoh."
We get a first glimpse of him in the tomb of the prince Sheshonk, son of Osorkon II and his wife Karoma. The prince, named as successor to his father, died young, still during his father's reign, and never assumed the royal diadem. The king built for him a funerary chamber in Memphis, where the prince had served in his lifetime as the high priest of Ptah. The excavations of Samaria, discussed above, revealed that the Libyan king Osorkon II was not a contemporary of Ahab, as is usually asserted, but reigned after the time of Jeroboam II -- i.e., after ca. -744, which marks the death of Jeroboam II, but before the destruction of Samaria by the Assyrians in -722.
The tomb was discovered in 1942, and its clearance and publication were entrusted to Ahmad Badawi.(1) At the entrance to the tomb, on the lintel of the doorway, Badawi found an incised relief showing Haremhab kneeling in front of a talbe bedecked with offerings; behind Harmhab can be seen the deceased prince, also in a kneeling position. Haremhab's cartouche is somewhat damaged; a deliberate attempt had been made to erase it. But from what remains Badawi could identify the figure in front of the crown prince as that of Haremhab.
In the accepted scheme of history Haremhab is supposed to have reigned some six hundred years before the funeral chamber for Prince Shoshenk, son of Osorkon II, was built.
...Haremhab...belonged neither to the Eighteenth nor to the Nineteenth Dynasty; he was not a descendant of Akhnaton, nor was he an ancestor of the Ramessides. He is supposed to have ruled Egypt during an interregnum. It is not apparent why he was "chosen to be king" and to administer Egypt. Nothing is known of his end. The idea so often expressed that Haremhab was a successor of Ay is baseless. We shall encounter Haremhab later in this volume -- but he lived one hundred and fifty years after Ay...
The so-called Nineteenth Dynasty will be found to have been displaced not only by the five hundred and forty years of error in the dating of the Eighteenth Dynasty, but also by an additional one hundred and seventy years -- the duration of the Libyan and Ethiopian dominations over Egypt: and the total error will be found reaching the huge figure of seven hundred years.
Since the pharaohs of these dynasties waged wars and maintained peaceful relations with the kingdoms and peoples of the north, the transfer of these Egyptian dynasties to a time much more recent carries an enormous tide into the histories of the entire ancient East, including Asia Minor and Greece...
...Osorkon could not have reigned in the beginning of the ninth century and that Shoshenk could not have been the biblical Shishak because he was the Biblical Pharaoh So referred to in the Scriptures during the closing days of Samaria, in the time of King Hezekiah.
The Libyan Dynasty endured for about one hundred and twenty years and the Ethiopian rule for close to fifty years, the latter being repeatedly interrupted by Assyrian conquests of Egypt. Thus in our view the only Dynasty correctly placed in the conventional scheme is the Ethiopian.
If you liked “Old King Tut” then hopefully you’ll like “Three Thousand Years Ago” by Billy Murray as much as I do. http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/recordings/detail/id/9353/
Old king Tut was in his early twenties, and only ruled for a very few years. Cleopatra was separated from him by about 1400 years, so never sat on his knee.
Fun!
***Cleopatra was separated from him by about 1400 years,***
Don’t bet on it. There was more than one Cleopatra. Besides, it is just an old Tin Pan Alley song.
I remember reading that some English investors in EGYPT wanted to sell Egyptian mummies to the railroad as fuel.
That’s right. They burned easily, and with high heat.
That must have put a serious damper on his afterlife.
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