To appreciate the history
of gold, there can be no more moving experience than to look upon the face of
Tutankhamun,
the boy king who ruled Egypt from 1361 to 1352 BC. The great mask of solid gold,
beaten and burnished, that was found over the head and shoulders of his mummy
has an almost haunting presence that astonishes the thousands who see it in the
Cairo Museum or visited
the exhibition that toured Europe and the United States in the 1970s. "It
is the finest funerary mask ever found in the world," Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt,
a leading Egyptologist at the Louvre
in Paris, once wrote. As he first peered into gloom, the archaeologist, Howard
Carter, who located Tutankhamun's tomb near Luxor on the river Nile in 1922, was
asked "What do you see?".
"Wonderful things" Carter replied. But even he could not conceive the
golden treasures he would unveil. They are unforgettable proof that 3,500 years
ago the techniques of mining, refining
and working gold to the highest level of craftsmanship were already well advanced.
To the Egyptians, the yellow blaze of gold was a symbol of the sun god Ra.
The civilisations of ancient Egypt along the fertile banks of the Nile go back
at least to 4000 BC. Jewellery always fascinated the Egyptian people. At first,
bright, glazed stone beads sufficed, but by the beginning of the First Dynasty
in 3100 BC, craftsmen had progressed to fashioning beads from highly coloured
semi-precious stones and gold. For the next 3,000 years jewellery adorned the
living and offered protection to the dead, who could use it in the Afterlife.
"Jewellery might signify rank or office, but was also worn for decoration
by everyone from the meanest peasant to the pharaoh himself" notes Marjorie
Caygill of the British Museum
in her new A-Z companion of that museum's collections. "Most basic types
were established in form as early as the end of the Old Kingdom, circa 2200 BC;
only earrings made a relatively late appearance. In paintings and statues the
Egyptians were depicted in all their finery - ear plugs, diadems, pectoral, choker,
collar."
The gold itself came initially from alluvial
deposits
in the Nubian Desert between the Nile and the Red Sea (the Egyptian word for gold
was nub) and from the south in what are now Sudan and Ethiopia. Rather later,
underground mining was developed as surface deposits were worked out. The historian
Diodorus recorded the wretched conditions in which slaves worked and lived underground
in the first century BC.
The supply of gold, however, was often erratic. Egyptologist Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt,
tells of Queen Hatshepsut, co-regent with Thutmose III, one of Tutankhamun's predecessors,
who heard of two great columns at a temple gate set up by a much earlier pharaoh
that were, supposedly, of electrum,
containing 75% gold, 22% silver and 3% copper (a common way gold was found in
ancient times) and weighed no less than 75 tones. She determined to do the same.
Sadly, the royal treasury lacked that amount of electrum, which would have been
an extraordinary quantity in those days when gold output in the entire region
might have been two or three tonnes annually at best. She had to make do, instead,
with columns covered with thin sheets of electrum.
The reality, again revealed by Madame Noblecourt, was of modest supply. She records
how Tutankhamun installed a man named Huy as his Viceroy of Nubia, gave him a
gold ring of office and sent him up the Nile on a fine river boat (which is pictured
on a surviving frieze) to collect taxes and tributes from the south. Huy took
along an "accountant scribe of the gold" and set up in a Nubian palace,
where men and women came with tributes, sometimes gold rings, but usually gold
dust in small bags. The gold was weighed on scales and recorded by the scribe.
After a while, Huy returned upriver to Tutankhamun in Thebes, and in a great ceremony
laid the bags of gold dust before him. Thus was gold that ended up in Tutankhamun's
tomb gathered in. And the ornaments that he wore in life were placed with him
when he died.
The unique feature of the Tutankhamun treasures is the huge range of gold artefacts
uncovered. It is simply the most comprehensive collection of the work of Egyptian
goldsmiths. Many other individual examples of Egyptian gold jewellery or sculpture
from earlier and later periods survive in the British Museum, the Louvre or the
Metropolitan Museum
in New York. But here, in one tomb, was the great Egyptian gold show of 1352 BC
in its entirety.
Tutankhamun himself was buried in a sarcophagus within which were fitted, one
inside the other, three coffins. The first two were covered with gold
leaf, the third was solid gold sheet two millimetres (0.01 inches) thick and
weighed almost 110 kilos (3,536 troy oz). Within lay the mummy of Tutankhamun,
the head covered by the gold death mask, a serene portrait of a young man of 18
with a long, thin nose and full lips. It shows, says the Louvre's Madame Noblecourt,
"Workmanship of the highest order". Packed amid bandages winding the
mummy itself were 143 articles of gold jewellery, all in an excellent state of
preservation after nearly 3000 years. Gold finger stalls were on the king's hands,
gold sandals on his feet, along with necklaces, diadems, gold rings, bracelets,
daggers, pectorals, pendants and amulets. One great necklace of a vulture was
made up of 256 pieces of gold. Tutankhamun was provided with two daggers encased
in gold sheaths, one with an iron blade, the other with a blade of hardened gold.
The gold dagger and its sheath are regarded as supreme examples of the goldsmith's
artistic ability and technical skill.
All around in the chambers of the tomb were other examples of their handiwork.
A throne of carved wood, gold-plated and inlaid with multi-coloured glass, glazed
terracotta and semi-precious stones. A wooden shrine covered with panels of sheet
gold on which had been worked scenes from the daily life of Tutankhamun and his
Queen Ankesenamun; a touching documentary in gold of a teenage couple at home
surrounded by flowers and birds, and out hunting duck in the marshes. And a small
solid gold figure of Tutankhamun wearing only a blue crown and a kind of plated
kilt, a sculpture of a very young man, almost a child. That is part of the enduring
charm of the Tutankhamun treasures: they are magnificent but they also offer a
window on the life and times of an Egyptian ruler centuries ago. To see these
treasures in the Cairo Museum or simply reproduced in books, is to feel a real
affinity for this young man because of the way his life has been captured, not
by a painting or a photograph, but in gold.
See also: library/history
and library/jewellery.