The theory that Tutankhamun's tomb hides secret chambers becomes the stuff of a novel

The controversial and exciting hypothesis that the tomb of Tutankhamun, whose discovery is exactly one century old today, November 4, and is celebrated with different acts in Egypt, hides secret chambers, has just reached fiction for the first time as part of the new novel by a popular Spanish specialist in narrative about the old country of the Nile, Antonio Cabanas.

In his recently published book,

(Ediciones B), a fiction set in the kingdom of the young pharaoh, Cabanas (Las Palmas, 68 years old) describes how the king's tomb, discovered by Howard Carter in 1922 and numbered KV 62, number 62 found in the Valley of the Reyes (King Valley, KV), is only the reuse of a part of the one that was built for his stepmother, the famous queen Nefertiti.

The dependencies of this would have been hidden behind the wall (a false wall) that closes the burial chamber of the monarch, where his sarcophagus is located.

It is that of the Canarian novelist, a literary expression of the impressive theory of the British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves, who has been proposing since 2015 that the tomb of Nefertiti, still to be discovered, is actually found after that of Tutankhamun, for which he alleges archaeological arguments and iconographic.

The theory,

“There are holes behind the walls, and cracks that point to doors;

It seems to me that Reeves's theory, with whom I have spoken several times, is quite plausible and even

he begins to believe it”, says Cabanas, who is visiting Barcelona to present his book at the city's Egyptian Museum.

“If it creates controversy, great;

You have to be brave and I thought that a novel was a good way to explore the matter”.

The author is aware that research can make the theory obsolete, but he emphasizes that his thing is a novel.

To the obvious question as to why Carter, who spent ten years emptying the tomb, would not have realized its true extent, the novelist replies that there was too little space with the tomb so crammed with objects, and that the discoverer was too concerned with researching and preserving them.

"It was easy for him not to notice the secret chambers, with everything he had there."

Cabanas, who expresses great sympathy for Carter,

More information

Zahi Hawass apologizes to Howard Carter for stealing objects from Tutankhamun and affirms that the discoverer of the tomb did "a good job"

The tomb, in which objects that today are great icons of Egypt appeared, such as the gold mask, the canopic chapel or the coffins of the king (it must be remembered that Tutankhamun was not alone in the tomb: they were buried with him in small sarcophagi the mummies of his two unborn daughters) will be the center of the centenary celebrations, which are expected to be attended by relatives of Carter's patron, Lord Carnarvon (hopefully they will do better than their ancestor).

Some planned things have been dropped from the program, such as the announcement that the Egyptologist Zahi Hawass planned to make that he has identified Nefertiti's mummy (it seems that there are last-minute problems with the DNA) and the premiere of the Egyptologist's own opera on Tutankhamun , which is delayed.

It so happens that the Spanish historical narrative has also been a pioneer in giving birth this anniversary year to a novel about Carter and Lord Carnarvon who imagines that the death of the latter (which gave rise to the legend of the curse of Tutankhamun) was a murder (

by Luis Melgar, The Sphere of Books, published last summer).

The Edhasa prize for historical novel has also gone to a work that, although centered on Nefertiti, includes Tutankhamun (

, by Abraham Juarez).

Fiction is not the only Spanish literary connection with the centenary.

Several essays on the discovery have appeared, among them the very interesting one dedicated to Carter's stay in Madrid, his conferences in the capital and his friendship with the Duke of Alba (

, by Myriam Seco, who excavated the temple funerary of Tutmosis III in Luxor, and Javier Martíez Babón, with a prologue by Zahi Hawass, Almuzara 2022).

change of grave

Tutankhamun's dream, the

result of a year of research, is the story of the life of an Egyptian fisherman of mysterious origins, Nehebkau, who strikes up an intense friendship with Tutankhamun (without reaching the extremes of that of Terenci Moix's blind harpist with the young monarch).

The relationship serves the author to describe the main events of the short existence of the king and the turbulent time of Amarna, dominated by the personality of the heretic pharaoh, Akhenaten, considered quite unanimously as the father of Tutankhamun.

In the novel, when Tutankhamun dies they make a big change of his tomb: the one that was being built for him, with the dimensions and design characteristic of those of the pharaohs of his dynasty, is appropriated by his successor, Ay (the tomb called WV23, 23 in the adjacent Valle Oeste, West Valley, or Valle de los Monos), and the deceased young man manages a part of Nefertiti's tomb, reusing part of the trousseau of this and other dead characters of the royal family (it is true that a large proportion of the more than five thousand objects buried with Tutankhamun were not destined for him; they were second-hand so to speak).

“Everything in that tomb was a patchwork”, deplores the protagonist of the novel, who points out the “bottom-ups” carried out.

"It was unthinkable that a pharaoh would be buried in a tomb like KV 62," Cabanas says.

The wall of the tomb of Tutankhamun with an image of his burial and behind which would be the passageway to the tomb of Nefertiti, according to the hypothesis of Nicholas Reeves.

Jim Zuckermann

Cabanas describes, and this will excite many fans of Egyptology and its mysteries, how the superintendent of the necropolis and the workers break the seals of Nefertiti's tomb, break down the door (the same door through which she will enter more than three thousand years later Carter without imagining the wonderful things that had happened there) and recondition the grave.

Tutankhamun will thus be installed in what would actually be, and hence its smallness, only the initial section of Nefertiti's tomb, this one of normal size for a pharaoh (the queen would have reigned as such, first as co-regent of her husband Akhenaten and then alone with the name of Smenkhara, the mysterious king of the lists that would actually be her).

In the novel, which collects all these modern theories,

In the narration of Cabanas, in which we attend as privileged observers the burial of Tutankhamun, the manipulation of the tomb also serves so that the burial of Nefertiti remains hidden and therefore protected from the resentment of those who hate the queen for her role in the Atonian heresy.

Ay, considered Nefertiti's father, would orchestrate all of this.

The novelist skillfully squares Reeves's theories, giving his novel a great power of conviction.

the mystery of the mother

It is by no means the only Egyptological interest in

: the reconstruction of the life and death of the pharaoh (due to a chariot accident hunting Oryx in the desert, which adds to the king's chronic poor health, weakened by malaria and congenital disabilities) is very good and Cabanas uses fiction -along with the latest discoveries- to offer imaginative answers to many of the questions raised by the story of the young king, although not to one of the key questions, who was the mother of Tutankhamun, something in which he prefers not to venture a name.

He stands out in the portrait of the pharaoh in the novel, which presents him as an idealistic and courageous young man, despite the fact that everything works against him, and even gives him a moment of military glory,

riding his electro chariot shooting arrows at the Hittites and miraculously holding on with his useless foot (that's why there would be so many canes in the tomb).

“In this, the revaluation of Tutankhamun, I quite agree with the opinions of Hawass, with whom I have talked several times;

Tutankhamun was a poor man, but a great man."

The story is clearly indebted to

, the great classic by Mika Waltari: the pharaoh's friendship and a sudden (although there the king was Akhenaten and Sinuhé a doctor), his secret identity and his existential unhappiness, the loss of the love, the talkative servant, the lascivious and evil courtesan… There also seem to be echoes of

, by Norman Mailer, especially regarding the cult of the pharaoh's excrement and the official responsible for the king's anus, who is already in charge.

“I hadn't fallen for Sinuhé, I've read Mailer's book too, and he was a little pig, yes, but the one about the anus manager is absolutely true, the title existed, and the function”.

An extra attraction of the novel is that the protagonist has -and this makes him someone admired and respected and facilitates his access to the court- a strange ability to communicate with snakes, especially with cobras, so closely related to the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, so that they become docile under his hands.

"That also allowed me to explore the ancient Egyptians' relationship with magic, which obsessed them."

Cabanas has extensively studied cobras, with which he has had several hair-raising encounters.

Also noteworthy in

is the ardor with which the abundant erotic scenes are described and the attention to the sexual uses of Egyptian civilization, such as the immense harem of a thousand wives of Amenophis III, including some specialists in unusual services , like the use of the whip.

"I am a passionate person, I believe in the power of love, and that is transferred to my novels, apart from the fact that publishers always ask you to have sex in an Egyptian novel," he points out;

“but I avoid the coarse and the vulgar”.

He defends the recurring expression “granite limb” as “a classic reference to the solidity of the

”.

There are several very bawdy encounters with a princess whose intensity recalls Nefernefernefer, Sinuhé's nemesis, and which leads the author to a reflection that inadvertently paraphrases Anck-Su-Namun's famous lines in

about the body as temple.

A passage in the novel relates the Atonian religion to masturbation, masturb-athon?

“It is documented that there was a strong erotic-religious component in the religion of Akhenaten, and the hand of the god Aten is significant.

I have not dared to go much further.

Cabanas, author of previous novels such as

and

, has been a commercial airline pilot for years and has taken many people to Egypt before transporting them with his fiction.

Has he ever flown with a mummy, as Christiane Desroches Noblecourt did when taking Ramses II to Paris?

“Hahaha, no”, laughs the novelist, “but I have managed to take my passengers over the pyramids in the middle of a sound and light show, an unforgettable sight”.