Egyptian pharaohs: everything you wanted to know | History Extra
""‘On the whole a dynasty is a family but it's not always, it's really a group of people who are linked together by an ideal rather than by blood. So most of the people within that dynasty will be father, son, than son and son and so on. But sometimes, someone's adopted in. Sometimes a king can crossover, so can be born into one dynasty and rule in the next dynasty. It's not as black and white as people think it is. People hear the word dynasty and think, oh, that's a family. And it's not, it's more confusing than that. But as I said, the Egyptians themselves wouldn't recognize this system. They've recognized all of Egypt’s kings as their ancestor king. So if you were the king of Egypt, you felt that you were related to every single king that must have gone before, which is clearly not true. They weren't. But they like to say that they were...
It's absolutely certain that kings married their sisters and the half sisters, we know this. But it wasn't something they had to do. And not every king did it. And I think there are probably enough breaks in, in the royal family that this happened for it not to become an absolutely massive problem. Because when we start to look at it, we can see that actually, although yes, this king married his sister, and the next king married his sister, the king after this didn't, and it kind of resets the clock a bit. So yes, it happened. But it didn't happen perhaps as often as we, we think it did. So what the effect is, is, it's really difficult for us to tell these days, why they did it. We don't know. But there are several theories. One theory is that it cuts down the number of relations that the king has, because he hasn't got any in laws if you like. So there's no no rival family sort of vying slightly for the throne, it means the queen is very loyal to the royal family because she's a member of that royal family. And it also means that the queen can be trained from childhood just as the king will be trained. Also, of course, the potential queens can be trained, so they understand the role, because the role of the queen is not just to marry the king, she also has her own duties to do, and she needs to know how to do those as well. So to them, it made sense. But not all kings did it. At, Tutankhamun, possibly the most famous Pharaoh, yes, he married his sister or his half sister, but his father Akhenaten didn't and his father didn't. So you can see that there are gaps there. And it's enough, I think, to reset the genealogical clock, and make sure that this, they're not as unhealthy as they might otherwise have been. But again, it's difficult for us to tell because they didn't know the problems that this would cause. So they don't write about any particular difficulties. Again, we don't find it outside the royal family until much, much later on. Right at the end of the dynastic age, non royal people start to do this as well. But much, much later on. It's not common, apart from in the royal family.’...
‘The ceremonial dress almost, about what they would wear when they would go out. Do we know what Pharaohs wore really? Were there any sort of standard items that you might expect? Because obviously, now we sort of say about very traditional crown. And I guess they had a similar item of dress’
‘Well they did, there are lots of Egyptian crowns. And we can see these, we can see them in art, and we can see them in sculpture. But the thing is, it's really interesting. We haven't found any of these. There's not a single crown from a pharaoh throughout the Dynastic age. So this really makes us wonder, is this because there was just one crown? And I should say that when we see them wearing crowns, they're wearing a range of different crowns. There's not just one crown, there's a whole range of, they're very different stylistically. They're all crowns of the King or Pharaoh, but they look very different. Where are they? Was there just one crown that was passed from King to King of each type? Or is it that the Kings’ crowns were maybe kept in local temples? So if you move to a, to a city, he would visit the temple there and he would take the crown out and wear it in that city and then put it back? Did they even exist? This is a really interesting concept. Did these crowns exist? Or is it there's something that the artists are showing us to show us that this is the king of Egypt, but actually they didn't actually physically have a crown? I'm thinking here like in in Christian art, where you see a halo that shows that someone is a saint. Maybe these are symbols that shows that this is the king but he didn't actually wear the crown...
There was a stage before the pyramid building, when the kings were buried at a place called the bydas [sp?]. And this is right at the very beginning of the Dynastic age. And we can see that round the royal tombs which were not pyramids, they were mudbrick tombs, sort of low flat tombs, that there were people buried, who seemed to have been buried at the same time as the king, because their burials have the same roof. So it's just possible at the very beginning of the dynastic age that some kings were buried with retainers who might have either been killed, or who killed themselves to accompany the king, on his journey to the afterlife. But this was a very, very short lived phenomenon. And certainly by the time you get to the pyramid age, there’s no suggestion at all that that happened...
After Tutankhamun, there are also some kings discovered in the north of Egypt, as a site called Tanis, which have got far less attention. Again, they're not as spectacular as Tutankhamun, and they were discovered when the war was on, which I think detracted away from people weren't quite as interested because they had other things to worry about. But the really big one, the one that's always attracted interest is Tutankhamun, and I think that's because he was completely surrounded by grave goods. So it's not just him, but it's his grave goods as well. And the whole package of it. And the fact that he was discovered after the First World War, when when people were really looking for a story that would take them away from the grief of the war and the influenza epidemic that followed. He became almost like a celebrity when he was, he did become a celebrity and he's just once you become a celebrity, he's become even more of a celebrity as times gone by. So that really is the one that people are interested in. But there are still some missing pharaohs and we haven't found everybody... the one that people are particularly or the ones that people are particularly interested in are the Ptolemy kings of Egypt who ruled from Alexandria. And in particular, Cleopatra, people have been looking for Cleopatra for some time now, and occasionally that you'll people might have seen television programs looking for Clepatra’s body, we think that what happened is that they were buried in Alexandria, and that that part of Alexandria then fell into the sea, because Alexandria is a coastal city, and lost beneath the Mediterranean’...
‘The New Kingdom kings were buried [in the Valley of the Kings]... while there was strong rule in Egypt, this was fine, because they could protect the royal cemetery. But there was a point where, the end of the New Kingdom, the pharaohs didn't have such strong rule. And they moved to the north of Egypt, leaving the Valley of the Kings obviously behind, or they didn't guard it, as well as it should have been guarded. And people started to steal from the royal tombs. And so what happens eventually, is that the priests, the priests of Amon, opened up the royal tombs and emptied them. And they took out all the grave goods and all the pharaohs. And they actually stripped off the pharaohs and they took all their bandages and all the amulets and charms that were wrapped within the pharaohs, off them, wrapped them up again labeled them and put them together in groups in the Valley of the Kings. The idea being probably that if you took all the grave goods away from the pharaohs, people would no longer be tempted to try and steal from the pharaohs and in a way worked because we now have these royal bodies, but they have already been stripped, but not by archaeologists, or even by modern thieves. They've been stripped by the people at the end of the New Kingdom, the Egyptians themselves. Were also opening these tombs and stripping them, either because they were thieves or because they were trying to protect them. Tutankhamun escaped because he'd been lost so he didn't get stripped off and repurposed. Also, the priests then of course, had all the assets or with all the surviving tomb goods that they went to the priesthood so that it was a win win situation for them. Save the pharaohs, but gave them a lot of income doing it. So it's a really difficult question. Yes, I absolutely agree that the first archaeologists are basically tomb robbers. But there's been a long, long history before that.’"
