Customer Reviews

The Boy Behind the Mask: Meeting the Real Tutankhamun

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Charlotte Booth's new biography of King Tut is, necessarily, brief: we know in fact very little about this king, other than the extraordinary contents of his tomb. Given that unavoidable limitation, Booth has done a good job of setting out the things we do know (including information from the 2005 CT-scan of Tut's mummy). She emphasizes the importance of the teenage pharaoh's reign in returning the land of Egypt to normality following Akhhenaten's death, and even offers a few tentative but plausible hints about the boy-king's personality: he probably loved hunting (based on the chariots and other equipment that he owned); felt affection for his grandmother Tiye and other family members (having preserved a lock of her hair, and other family heirlooms, in his tomb); and he may even have been something of an intellectual (he was buried with four scribal kits, and is known to have restored an astronomical instrument belonging to his ancestor Amenhotep III).

Theories about various disputed or unknown aspects of Tutankhamun's life, including his parentage and the cause of his early death, are ably summarized by the author without going into excessive detail. There are a few minor problems in the book - typos, inconsistent spellings, a misattribution of the Red Crown to Upper Egypt (!), etc. Some of the black and white photographs are poorly reproduced. Otherwise, this short but readable book, while breaking no new ground in Tutankhamun studies, is quite an able summary of what we currently know, or can reasonably infer, about his life.