The Pharaoh & the Queen: Egyptology’s Iconic Faces
- Graham Walker
- Jun 28
- 6 min read
Updated: Jun 29
This month’s been all about a couple of iconic faces which for us here at Immortal Egypt - and no doubt for many others - very much encapsulate Egyptology in so many ways: both so familiar and both with back stories that could (and do) fill volumes.
The first is perhaps the most famous artefact from the whole of ancient history: the funerary mask from the tomb of Tutankhamun, made in the 1320s BC and whose production materials we’re currently researching. With the tomb so famously discovered by Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter in 1922, Carter and his team were only able to access its burial chamber, funerary shrines and triple coffins a full three years later, coming face-to-face with this utterly stunning object during the king’s autopsy in 1925 when Carter described its expression as ‘sad but tranquil’, ‘placid and beautiful’.
Then packed up and sent north to Cairo Museum with the vast majority of the other 5,397 objects found inside the tomb, around 2,000 of these were placed on public display with the mask the obvious centrepiece. And there it’s been viewed by multiple millions of visitors, both within the museum and around the globe during prolonged world tours, very much an ambassador helping support UNESCO’s salvage of temples which would otherwise have been submerged by the rising waters of Lake Nasser following the creation of the Aswan High Dam.
Beginning in 1961, some 30 objects from the tomb toured 18 cities around North America before being joined by the mask in Japan and receiving 3 million visitors in 6 months between 1965-1966. Then after Paris hosted ‘Toutankhamon et son temps’ (above) in 1967, the ‘Treasures of Tutankhamun’ exhibition finally came to the UK in 1972. Marking the 50th anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb by the aforementioned Carnarvon and Carter, enigmatic images captured the reaction of Lord Carnarvon’s daughter Lady Evelyn Beauchamp, herself part of the original discovery with her father who sadly never saw the mask following his tragic death in 1923.
And certainly the mask mesmerised the 1.6 million people who came to see it after having queued for hours around the local streets (below), in many cases after having travelled considerable distances to reach London in the first place. With all this reported on tv and in the press in the days before the internet of course, such ‘Tutmania’ was further fuelled by endless images of the mask in books and magazines, on souvenir posters, postcards, postage stamps and first-day covers, jewellery, sew-on patches and even on packets of crisps: the mask was literally everywhere. Sending one Barnsley 6 year old already besotted with ancient Egypt into Egyptological overdrive, the fact that those interviewed about the exhibition were referred to as Egyptologists as their job title sealed my fate, and I never looked back.
Of course the 1972 London exhibition then toured the USSR before once again returning to the USA and Canada and ending in West Germany, finally returning home to Egypt in July 1981 just in time to be viewed by that same Barnsley schoolgirl now aged 15 on her first visit to Egypt. And able to renew acquaintance with the famous face which has obsessed me my entire life, we’ve met up in Cairo on countless occasions since (below).
For the mask has never returned to the UK, neither as part of the ‘Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs’ at the Dome 2007-2008 nor the 2020 ‘Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh’ at the Saatchi Galley, since the Egyptian authorities no longer let the mask leave Egypt. Yet it will be on its travels again at some point in the near future, albeit only across Cairo, leaving the ‘old’ museum to finally be unveiled inside the Grand Egyptian Museum (promotional film at: https://www.egyptindependent.com/video-teaser-released-for-the-opening-of-grand-egyptian-museum-on-july-3/ whose official opening is currently scheduled for the end of this year.
With several hundred Tutankhamun objects having already made the journey, including the canopic shrine, ceremonial chair and spectacular pectoral necklaces, the mask “will be the last artefact to be transported to the new museum” according to the museum website https://egyptianmuseumcairo.eg/artefacts/mask-of-tutankhamun/ Still pulling in the crowds at the old museum when we were there a few months ago, it will be interesting to see the mask in its eventual new home whose state-of-the-art lighting should allow the mask’s production materials and key features to be seen in greater detail than ever before. For however familiar the face, there is always far more to discover behind the idealised features (see https://www.academia.edu/7415055/Tutankhamuns_Mask_Reconsidered_2015_).
And the same is certainly true of a second object of Egyptological fascination: this portrait of Amelia Edwards (1831-1892) (above), ‘Queen of Egyptology’ and indeed its ‘Founding Mother, whose encounter with Egypt in 1873 not only changed her life but the lives of so many of us since https://www.immortalegypt.co.uk/post/celebrating-the-founding-mother-of-egyptology-amelia-edwards. For it was Amelia’s vision, passion and sheer hard work that created both the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) and Britain’s first chair of Egyptology at University College, inspiring those around her, from the society’s male archaeologists to its Local Secretaries who generated the funds required to excavate and preserve Egypt’s heritage at a time very few others were doing so.
And with Amelia herself earning her own living as a writer in a society in which women were expected to marry and depend on husbands by whose rules they then must live, Amelia decided upon a rather different path. As a vice-president of the Society for Promoting Women’s Suffrage, she certainly used her Egyptological knowledge to support female emancipation, highlighting the fact that British women like her had fewer legal and social rights than their counterparts in ancient Egypt!
So it was very much in her role as ‘feminist icon’ that I first encountered Amelia after that first trip to Egypt in 1981, when it was nonetheless close to impossible to find either advice or indeed any visible role models in my quest to become an Egyptologist – at least until the EES’ centenary year, when the BBC screened ‘For the Love of Egypt’.
Telling the story of Amelia and her classic book ‘A Thousand Miles up the Nile’ (above), the book was transformative, and I now knew where I was going. Applying to study Egyptology at University College whose Edwards Library and Petrie Museum had both been established with Amelia’s own collections, I also joined the EES of course, in whose offices this very portrait always provided a familiar face in an often elitist and sometimes unkind world. Yet Amelia’s ability to inspire never waned, and it was a massive honour to help unveil an English Heritage blue plaque outside her family home in 2015 (https://www.ees.ac.uk/resource/amelia-edwards-blue-plaque-unveiled.html). Even more so, the invitation to lead the society’s Local Ambassadors, successors of her original ‘Local Secretaries’, who gathered at Bolton Museum last year to celebrate the loan of this very special portrait (below).
Painted by Florence Blakiston Attwood-Mathews sometime between 1882-1892 and donated to the society in 1966, the portrait was cleaned and conserved in 2023, not only rejuvenating Amelia but revealing so much new detail. And so too a fascinating new book about the woman in the portrait: ‘Amelia B. Edwards: Queen of Egyptology’ written by society’s director Dr. Carl Graves.
Launching the book only a few days ago in Bolton’s Egyptian galleries https://www.ees.ac.uk/resource/historic-book-launch-at-bolton-museum.html, its already been described by one reviewer as “the most important book about Amelia Edwards to date”. And with its meticulous research revealing so much about Amelia and the women who supported her and the society she created, it also documents the struggles she experienced during her all-too short life, a life which nonetheless continues to make massive impact today.
And by looking behind the portrait to find the real woman who still has the ability to ‘speak’ to each new generation, she not only seems to validate our love for Egypt, but the particular path along which each of us chooses to travel.
For the inspiration of both the queen - and the pharaoh - clearly remains as strong as ever.
‘Amelia B. Edwards: the Queen of Egyptology’ by Carl Graves (with a foreword by Jo) is available at: https://www.ees.ac.uk/resource/amelia-b-edwards-the-queen-of-egyptology.html while the portrait is on display at Bolton Museum until 2028; Jo’s tours of Egypt including visits to the Tutankhamun collections in Cairo can be found at: https://www.theculturalexperience.com/tours/ancient-egypt/ & https://www.theculturalexperience.com/tours/ancient-egypt-hidden-treasures-expert-led-archaeology-and-history-tour/
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