Exploring the digital tomb of Tutankhamun

Ankhesenamun anointing her half brother and husband, Pharoah Tutankhamun. Photo: supplied

Inevitably almost, I have to write about Tutankhamun. As everyone knows, his was the only (almost) intact unlooted tomb of an Egyptian Pharoah. The robbers had got into it and disturbed the contents of an antechamber, but the tomb itself survived.

It was on November 4, 1922 that one of Howard Carter’s workers stumbled on a set of stairs descending into the unknown. It took three weeks before they reached the portal leading into the burial complex.

The stunning moment when Carter found the intact seal was too much for him and his sponsor the Earl of Carnarvon — they secretly crept back that night and entered the tomb proper.

When Howard Carter died in 1939, all his notebooks, drawings and photographs were donated to the Griffith Institute for Egyptology at the University of Oxford. The institute has recently made the photographic archive available online, and now you can explore the remarkable and in most cases, little known artefacts that accompanied the Pharoah when he was buried in 1323BC.

Insight into his brief life, he died when aged about 18, abound. He was married to his half-sister Ankhesenamun, daughter of the fabled Queen Nefertiti. Tutankhamun was not buried alone, two tiny female foetuses were also found. Recently, their DNA has been sequenced, and there is a 99.99% probability that they were his daughters.

The luxurious life of that young family is there for all who look at the archive. There is a pair of golden sandals, and gold finger and toe stalls for the royal extremities.

I was particularly taken by a delightful carnelian swallow perching on a golden bracelet.

The King owned a gold collar in the form of a vulture and a cobra and he sat on a throne embellished with a scene showing Ankhesenamun anointing him.

There are also some highly intimate items needed for Tutankhamun in eternity. These include 145 pairs of underpants, woven to a finer fabric than any found in the graves of the less exalted. And to cap it all the royal condom, again woven from linen, soaked in olive oil and attached to a belt. To this day, it has traces of his DNA.

And finally, there are images of the Pharoah himself once the golden coffins were removed, the shrivelled corpse of a young teenager.