Tutankhamun: The Life and Death of a Pharaoh - Hardcover

Christine El Mahdy is an Egyptologist at Yoevil College, where she is the founder and director of the Egyptian Society. Previous works include EXPLORING THE WORLD OF THE PHARAOHS and MUMMIES, MYTH AND MAGIC. She lives in England.

Biographies can be controversial even when based on richer documentary sources than a small corpus of often fragmentary inscriptions, decorative temple reliefs, tomb paintings, funerary equipment, and mummies from the 14th century B.C.E. El Mahdy (Egyptology, Liverpool Univ.) employs the fallacious premise that "we now have incontrovertible archaeological evidence for the true story of Tutankhamen, and can recreate the events of his life and death." Previous biographies of the short-lived king include Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt's classic Tutankhamen: Life and Death of a Pharaoh (1990) and Bob Brier's highly imaginative and sensational The Murder of Tutankhamen: A True Story (LJ 12/97). El Mahdy' s work fits somewhere in between and includes all of the evidence currently available for analysis. The author provides an introductory primer on Egyptian culture during the Eighteenth Dynasty and outlines the 1922 discovery and subsequent clearing of Tutankhamen's tomb. Unfortunately, El Mahdy includes totally speculative commentary, e.g., that Nefertiti and her purportedly half-sister Mutnodjme "regarded each other as full sisters" and that "it seems that Nefertiti was the more beautiful of the two." To her credit, she includes as appendixes the complete texts of Tutankhamen's Restoration Stela, Akhenaten's Hymn to the Aten, Amenhotep III's commemorative scarabs, and Thutmose IV's Dream Stela. El Mahdy rejects the "murder" of Tutankhamen as "out of the question" based on the lack of evidence but proceeds to accept Julia Samson's theory that there was no ephemeral King Smenkhkare but rather Nefertiti as coregent using that name. Most of this same material is handled more judiciously by Joyce Tyldesley in Nefertiti: Egypt's Sun Queen (LJ 2/15/99). If only one book is to be purchased, Tyldesley's is the most "factual." To appreciate the complexities of the archaeological puzzle, the books by Brier and El Mahdy offer the lay reader interesting alternative conjectures.DEdward K. Werner, St. Lucie Cty. Lib. Sys., Ft. Pierce, FL
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