"Phaorah's Revenge!" (The Murder of Tutankhamen - Bob Brier)

Member Name: Trevor15

Product:	The Murder of Tutankhamen - Bob Brier
Date:	24/01/01 (290 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Introduction to ancient Egypt through an interesting theoretical base..

Disadvantages: Names can become quite confusing, making the story sometimes harder to follow.

Murder! Pillage! Politics!. . . Current drug culture, perhaps? . . . Not at all: It's a 3000 year old murder mystery, according to Bob Brier, the author of 'The murder of Tutankhamen'.

The boy-king, Tutankhamen (Tut), was dead by the time he was 20. Being the child of a secondary wife, Tut was never groomed for royal duties, this was left to his half-brother, the child of the king's Great Wife. But disaster struck and the brother died. This left the Pharaoh with 6 female children and no other sons. When the Pharaoh himself died, Tut, aged around 10 year old was made to marry his (full-royal-blood) half sister, also aged around 9 - together they became the new King and Queen of Upper and Lower Egypt.

Tut had come to the throne at a difficult time in Ancient Egypt. Akhenaten, their father, had left the usual seat of power in Thebes and had built a new city that was to home his new ideologies: no more was there to be multiple Gods or further wars. Separated from his now very confused subjects, though, unrest became rampant throughout the land. Even neighbouring countries refused to honour their defeats of war, believing Egypt to be waning.
With the exception of the throne, the two most powerful forces in Egypt at the time were the priests and the army. The former had suffered the injustice of having their sacred Gods obliterated by the Pharaoh, while the army felt ridiculed by the Pharaoh's passivity. What was a child of just 10 years to do with this inheritance?

The book provides a fascinating insight into the lives of Ancient Egyptians and their Pharaohs, indeed the author provides a prose-style chronology of Tut's immediate ancestry and the state of the country throughout, which is fascinating in its own right. But where he differs from most other academics is that he believes the boy-king was murdered. With this assertion he acts as private detective, searching for clues throughout the world, completing his
jigsaw piece by agonising piece.

Using technology of the 20th century to explain events that occurred over 3000 years ago, the author attempts to enlighten the reader by recreating the days of Tut and the possible reason(s) for his demise just 10 years after his ascension to one of the most powerful thrones in the world. The 'mystery' is compounded by successive Pharaohs obliterating any mention of Tut's name from documents and structures, purposely supplanting his name with their own and omitting any mention of him in the 'List of Kings'. A Pharaoh, a living God, doomed to eternal obscurity. . .?

Over 3000 years later, Pharaoh Tutankhamen was to be returned to his place in history. His tomb in the Valley of the Kings - where the cadaver still remains in situ - has made him the most famous of all ancient Egyptian rulers. But Bob Briers (the author) believes that, among all the breath-taking riches found in the tomb by Howard Carter, the contents of the sarcophagus holds the conclusive proof that the Pharaoh was indeed Murdered! Maybe he is right; and maybe he isn't. Either way, journeying back in time with Bob Briers will recreate some of the most spectacular and fantastical rulers the world has ever known, this alone is sufficient to fire the most mundane of imaginations, but when combined with the possibility of a 33 century old murder - with a living God as the victim - the journey becomes spectacular.

As one of the world's recognised authorities in Egyptology, Brier is passionate about his subject matter, evident throughout the 300 plus pages of his illustrative book, but he manages to write in a manner accessible to the uninformed. He doesn't stranglehold the reader into accepting his theory of skulduggery, simply relying on his 'facts' to speak for themselves. There is a substantial amount of assumption along the route to the conclusion, but a little artistic licence may be forgi
ven when conducting an investigation into events of several thousand years ago.

The book provides a hefty amount of information relating to the infrastructure of ancient Egypt, not least its rulers of the 18th Dynasty (Tut's immediate ancestry) prior to arriving at Tut's birth. Imparting knowledge of royal lineage however could easily become repetitive if facts are simply regurgitated, but Briers avoids a bland chronology by introducing and exploring all issues through prose, which facilitates a steady and uninterrupted continuum to the story.
He explores the reason(s) why King Tut's tomb should be the only one to date not to have been plundered in antiquity by robbers; the discovery of the tomb by Howard Carter in 1922, and then he uses this angle as a springboard with which to propel the reader back 3000 years into the depths of time, a time that Egypt was a dominant force in the world and having at its helm the boy-king, Tutankhamen. . .a Pharaoh that was to be obliterated from his own history. . .doomed to remain in dark obscurity for 3000 years.

If Brier's investigation does in fact prove that a reigning Pharoah was murdered, who could this person/people have been? Who would have dared take arms against the living God, an individual believed to be a tangible mainfestation of the most powerful of deities? Bob Brier believes the tiny tomb in the Valley of the Kings, the final resting place of one of the most enigmatic rulers of ancient Egypt, holds the answers. But he concludes that, before the Phaorah will release his secrets, we need to know the right questions.

ISBN 0 297 84130 0
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

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