A good deal has been said about the need of recasting our ideas of Egyptian history in the light of the new information which has been gained from the tomb of Tutankhamen, and some writers have hinted that our whole conception of the close of the XVIIIth Dynasty is wrong, and must be recast to square with the new facts. We are asked to discard the idea of an Egypt beginning to decline from the lofty position which she had held under Thothmes III and Amenhotep III, and to substitute for this the picture of an Egypt waking with renewed strength from the uneasy religious dreams of the reign of Akhenaten, and asserting once more, and with greater vigour than ever, her dominion in the realms of both politics and art.

All this is merely a vain imagination. Historically, no new facts have emerged from the tomb of Tutankhamen. It is scarcely true to say, with Budge, that “we know no more now about the reign of this king than we did before Lord Carnarvon made his phenomenal discovery.” That would only be the case on the narrow reading of the meaning of history which would confine it to the mere recording of dates, conquests, and legislation. The art of any period constitutes no small part of its history, and for the history of far-past times it is one of our most valuable sources of information; and we may surely look for a large extension of our knowledge of the art of ancient Egypt in the reign of Tutankhamen from the treasures of his tomb.

But so far as concerns the facts of what the king, and Egypt under his leadership, accomplished in the matter of raising again the declining prestige and power of the Empire, we know no more than we did before the tomb was opened; nor is it likely that when the work is completed we shall have gained much more information, if any, on this point. For the likelihood is that if there are any papyri beneath the great golden canopy, they will be of a purely religious type, versions of one or other of the different forms of spiritual guide-book which the devout Egyptian carried with him on his long journey through the dark Underworld.

The artistic value of the find is another matter. There can be no question but that this splendid collection of the finest work of the craftsmen of the XVIIIth Dynasty, by far the greatest assemblage of such work known to exist, will prove of the utmost importance in shaping and correcting our ideas of Egyptian art at one of the most interesting points of its long development. Never before has such a mass of material of the highest class been available for study. Yet even here it would be rash to assume that the result will be any considerable modification of our views as to the period of culmination of the art of the New Empire. At the most, and assuming that all the art of the tomb is strictly of the time of the king with whose burial it is associated, and that its quality is all of the supreme standard which has been attributed to it, the net result would be the shifting of the apex of the curve a matter of thirty or thirty-five years, a small thing when we are dealing with an art whose history is written in millenniums. But it seems likely that even this is more than we need necessarily assume.

There is always the possibility that in the tomb of Tutankhamen we are dealing, not only with the splendours of one king, but perhaps also with many of the heirlooms of the royal house to which he belonged, in which case we should be faced with specimens of the art, not of one period of a few years’ duration, but with those of perhaps a whole century, perhaps of a longer period still. The work of sifting out the various sources and periods of the materials found in the tomb will prove a most fascinating, if also a most difficult, task; when it is accomplished—the work of years—we may be in a position to speak more definitely about the change or the confirmation which the tomb of Tutankhamen has brought to our previous theories of the growth and decline of Egyptian art; meanwhile we must wait, with the assurance that even in the extremest case, the discovery can scarcely commit us to anything revolutionary of our previous conceptions.

The mention of the possibility of some of the articles found in the tomb being family heirlooms of the XVIIIth Dynasty brings up the last question with which it is necessary to deal in this short survey. How does it come about that a Pharaoh of no great standing in the long line of Egyptian monarchs—a mere stopgap king, a pigmy between giants—was buried with surroundings whose splendour exceeds anything known in all the story of royal magnificence? The discoveries of Tutankhamen’s wonderful funerary equipment make us wonder what we may have lost in the fact that his is the only royal tomb which has been found practically unrifled. Had we found, for instance, the tomb of a really great Pharaoh, such as Amenhotep III, as intact as that of his descendant, we should have been in a better position to form a judgment on the matter; but that unfortunately has been denied us. One suggestion may be made, with the proviso that it is no more than a suggestion, which may be confirmed or disproved by subsequent investigation. It has already been suggested that some of the most curious, if not the most beautiful, of the finds are relics, not of the time of Tutankhamen, but of Amenhotep III, dating therefore from forty years before the time when they were stored away in the Valley of the Kings; and it has also been suggested that another very interesting article, the footstool with figures of Asiatic captives inlaid upon it, dates from an even earlier period, that of Amenhotep II, and is therefore a century older than the time to which the burial belongs.

Tutankhamen, we know, was the last king of the direct line of the XVIIIth Dynasty. His widow, Ankh. s. en. Amen, was left in a most insecure position from which she made, as we know, a desperate and unavailing effort to extricate herself. May it not be that, with the consciousness that all the glories of her house were in danger of passing to mere usurpers of undistinguished origin, such as the obscure priest Ay, who succeeded Tutankhamen, or the commonplace soldier Horemheb, who drove Ay from the throne, she secured at least some of the most treasured heirlooms of the royal house from desecration by hiding them in the tomb of her dead husband?

It is, of course, only an idea, which must stand or fall by the results of future study; but it seems, at least in the meantime, to offer a reasonable explanation of a point on which no other explanation is for the present forthcoming.