Tutankhamen: The Life and Death of the Boy-King Book

What is left to be said about Tutankhamen? More known in death than life, a disproportionate amount has been written about the Boy King of Egypt who was crowned at seven or eight, dead nine years later and whose tomb was miraculously discovered by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon in 1922. Egyptologist Christine El Mahdy uses a lifetime's experience to sift the fragments of knowledge through a sieve and comes up with a determined and persuasive interpretation that sheds an intriguing new light on old facts. While acknowledging the glamour attached to archaeology, by her own admission she is no Indiana Jones or Lara Croft. When not being chased by a rolling ball down a narrow corridor she is discovering a dusty box at her museum which hasn't been opened for 50 years, mistakenly (and delightfully) sent to Bolton Museum rather than its grander counterpart in Boston. What she finds causes her to reappraise a whole history and add her own distinctive voice to the throng of chattering tongues. The usual temptation is to cram the holes around the scant facts with the delicious speculation they appear to invite (witness Bob Brier's 1998 racy thriller The Murder of Tutankhamen, and El Mahdy gives space to the many theories, but she does so while soberly guiding the artful narrative towards a well-concealed conclusion. What starts out as a middlebrow general reader of the subject gains in poise and polish as she hits her stride. Imperceptibly, the work transmutes into an exercise in applied logic written with a convincing rigour that wrings every drop from its subject and displays no qualms at trampling on received ideas. Whether she has assembled the pieces to make an important "truthful" image awaits the unromantic process of DNA testing, but in the meantime her engaging analysis--part academia, part potboiler--merits the attentions of the serious and the seriously curious, for a sliver of a tale that can still weave its ancient spell. --David VincentRead More