Book Review: “Treasured” by Christina Riggs

Treasured by Christina Riggs

Everybody knows the story of King Tut’s Tomb.  Discovered in the Valley of the Kings a century ago.  Three thousand years old.  The most intact royal burial from ancient Egypt.  Astonishing treasures.  And plenty of hype and popular mythology, curses, plots, etc.

But, of course, the ‘reawakening’ (as Riggs calls it) of Tutankhamun hardly happened in a vacuum.  Tut has played a big part of the twentieth and twenty first century, a part which has little to do with the life, death, and internment of the king of Egypt in 1300 BC.  Riggs sets out to sketch this history.

Tut’s discovery by a British funded and controlled project came at the end of centuries of conflict ending in European domination and colonial occupation.  To the European eyes, Tut was a media sensation and a romantic colonial adventure. In the European and American media, the Egyptians who participated in the project are invisible and discounted as irrelevant, mere lackeys, if not nefarious ‘tomb robbers’.

But Tut’s emergence coincided with Egyptians seizing independence from the British.  For many Egyptians, then, Tut became a symbol of their grand heritage and hopes for sovereignty.  The emerging independent government claimed the treasures and ownership of the remains, much to the annoyance of the colonial adventurers.  Naturally, these conflicts were omitted from the media stories in Europe and America.

Similarly, for many Africans around the world, Tut and Egypt have been symbols of African greatness, Black greatness.  This racial story contests with the racist pseudoscience of the European archaeological establishment and popular mass media, who struggled to make Tut, the African king, be ‘white’.

Riggs also documents many women who contributed to documenting and preserving the relics, women who were unrecognized, underpaid, and invisible.  This story is familiar to anyone who has worked in academia anywhere in the world.

We are all familiar with Tut’s career as international sensation. The traveling exhibitions, TV shows, and all the related books and souvenirs (In chapter six, Tut visits the “Land of the Twee”) .

There was serious background to this froth, because Tut became an important political asset for Egypt and its diplomatic partners.  Riggs explains the geopolitical background, trading access to Tut’s treasures for funding and political alliance. 

By the twenty first century, Tut has become a major economic resource for Egypt, the flagship of Egypt’s tourist attractions along with the (immobile) pyramids and sphinx.  Riggs has visited the just now opening Grand Egyptian Museum, outside of Cairo. 

The new behemoth is under the Pyramids, and will house all of Tut’s stuff in a huge, closed off theme park.  All the better for tourists to see the pretty things and drop a lot of money, without any contact with everyday Egypt or Egyptians.

Tut’s Treasures and the stories about them are a major cash machine.  But not Tut himself.

Riggs documents the slapdash treatment of Tut’s body, which she makes plain reflects a complete disregard for Tut the human being.   His eternal rest has been totally disrupted, ritual objects deconstructed and scattered, his person torn apart and looted, his private burial on public display.

In all of the popular story telling, there is very little regard for Tut’s own story, especially the religious meaning of his tomb and the goods buried with him.  As Riggs notes, artifacts that were carefully wrapped and hidden were supposed to be visible only to the gods.  They have been unwrapped, removed from their context, and given new meanings (economic, political, personal) in this new century.

Of course, King Tut is only the poster boy, the shiniest example of how cultural heritage has come to be treated by so many people.  In the last century, Tut has been a symbol and a commodity in our contemporary world, as well as an character in stories about race, power, politics, and national pride.  The romantic tale of ‘discovery’ (and curses, murder, etc.) has nothing to do with understanding how Tut himself lived and died, or what the shiny trinkets in the museum meant to him and his contemporaries who created and deployed them.   

Tut has not been treated as a real human being, due the respect owed any man. Welcome to the twenty first century.

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1. Christina Riggs, Treasured: How Tutankhamun Shaped a Century, New York, Public Affairs, 2021.

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