In King Tut’s burial chamber, a rite known as the “Awakening of Osiris” may have been performed, according to evidence of mysterious artifacts. It is the earliest evidence of the rite being used on a pharaoh.
Osiris, an ancient Egyptian god of the underworld, was brought back to life after he was murdered by his brother Seth, who dismembered him and scattered his body parts across Egypt.
Eventually, he was reassembled. His son Horus waved a staff at Osiris and commanded him to wake up. In some ways, the rite reenacts this story.
Nicholas Brown, a postdoctoral associate in Egyptology at Yale University, was reexamining excavation records of Tutankhamun’s tomb when he noticed that four clay troughs and four staffs had been found in the pharaoh’s burial chamber.
The significance of these objects had been overlooked and deemed as unremarkable, but they played an important role in ancient Egyptian funerary practices starting in the 14th century B.C.
The four troughs likely would have held water to be poured on or near Tutankhamun’s mummy. In addition to water, they may have contained other substances, such as ointments.
The four staffs represented the staff Horus used to resurrect Osiris. The water libations are highly symbolic because funerary texts were written on the walls of some Egyptian pyramids, per the Pyramid Texts.
“Liquid libations are said to be fluid derived from the corpse of the deceased, or from the corpse of Osiris,” wrote Brown.
“These fluids are necessary in order to rejuvenate the decaying corpse and restore its life-giving fluid to the body.”
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Water used for libations was retrieved from the Nile River and known as the “Eye of Horus.” It was a “powerful symbol of regeneration and overcoming evil, including death.”
The four troughs and four staffs would have represented the cardinal directions and stood surrounding the deceased for protection.
King Tut’s father, the pharaoh Akhenaten, started a revolution that tried to direct Egyptian religion to the worship of Aten, the sun deity. He even ordered the destruction of the images and names of other deities.
“Akhenaten shifted the country’s religious beliefs to the monotheistic religion focused on the sun disk, the Aten; this also affected the official afterlife beliefs focused on resurrection through Osiris, which was no longer permitted,” stated Brown.
When Tutankhamun rose to power, he reversed this religious revolution, returning Egypt to its polytheistic religion. The Awakening of Osiris ritual showed that ancient royal funerary practices, along with Osiris, were back.
Not all scholars completely agree with Brown’s interpretation of events, but they do consider it worth analyzing further. Even more than a century after its discovery, King Tut’s tomb still has fresh insights to offer.
The recent findings were published in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology.
