yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

How Tutankhamun Got His Gold | Lost Treasures of Egypt


3m read
·Nov 10, 2024

Thomas and Jennifer are investigating one of Tutankhamun's secrets, excavating under a ruined fortress for evidence he got his gold from the inhospitable eastern desert. Did his miners shelter here? The team has just found something: stone blocks that offer a tantalizing glimpse of a settlement from Tutankhamun's time.

So, these are architectural blocks. They carry some hieroglyphic inscriptions, very faintly visible here, which would indicate that they were carved and set up in some sort of building that dates to the reign of Tutankhamun. It's exciting because that gives us a sort of a ballpark for the time when this site was busy and active and important during the 18th dynasty.

Jennifer's team must now move the precious blocks off-site for further analysis. As they dig deeper into the layers below the fortress, they uncover more clues that this site was in use in Tutankhamun's time.

"It is beautiful! This is a really distinctive, very different from any of the Ptolemaic material. The Greek style pottery that we find in most of the rooms of the fort—that is really common. This kind of pottery, which belongs to the New Kingdom, is not wheel-made; it's handmade. You can tell that by looking at the interior of the pot, which has a surface that is very irregular and that it's been smoothed with a smooth stone."

Most likely, it's not just one or two pieces of Tutankhamun era pottery. Jennifer's team is revealing that the layers of earth beneath the fortress are packed full of it.

"We have New Kingdom material under the floors of rooms 20, 19, 26, 18, and 17. But to have the fort now documented on top of deposits that indicate some kind of occupation in the New Kingdom—that's really exciting."

The discovery is proof the site may have been used in Tutankhamun's time by his gold workers. But the team has found another remarkable clue concealed in the fortress: cutting into the bedrock, 60 feet below the surface, is a well.

"It's a vital source of water that explains why the safe haven and Tutankhamun's gold workers were here. The world was built at the time of Tutankhamun by the evidence we have now. It was, I guess, more precious than even gold for people that they can have water to go inside the desert."

The evidence here and at other sites reveals how Tutankhamun got his gold from the remote eastern desert. Miners had to trek vast distances from the Nile Valley across the hot, dry desert to reach the gold mines. Ancient engineers dug wells along the route for precious drinking water. Each well was a day's walk from the last, creating a network of vital rest stops.

This allowed them to survive the brutal journey across the desert to mine gold in the east and bring it back to their pharaoh. Thomas and Jennifer have revealed one of Tutankhamun's secrets. Sites like this were a critical part of the infrastructure that allowed him to amass the gold for one of the most elaborate burials in history: the golden Tut's mask.

"All that gold in his tomb—that's coming from the eastern desert. Episodes like this, that looked really modest, are actually the mechanism that allowed New Kingdom gold to be mined."

More Articles

View All
Khan Academy announces GPT-4 powered learning guide
Hi everyone, Sal Khan here from Khan Academy, and I’m very excited to let you all know about the work that Khan Academy is now doing in artificial intelligence. Obviously, over the last many months, there’s been a lot of talk about artificial intelligenc…
Poor Visibility and Cold Fingers | Life Below Zero
With her loader on its way to Kavik, Sue attempted to meet the convoy to guide them to camp safely. However, dangerous conditions forced her to return home. Checking on the status and safety of the delivery crew is a priority. “Hack, a cold! I mean, comi…
AC analysis superposition
So in the last video, we talked about Oilers formula, and then we showed the expressions for how to extract a cosine and a sine from Oilers formula. We have a powerful set of expressions there for relating exponentials to sine waves. Now, I want to show …
Judging outliers in a dataset | Summarizing quantitative data | AP Statistics | Khan Academy
We have a list of 15 numbers here, and what I want to do is think about the outliers. To help us with that, let’s actually visualize the distribution of actual numbers. So let us do that. Here on a number line, I have all the numbers from one to 19. Let’…
Some Surprising Things
Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. What’s normal? Are you normal? Well, today let’s bathe our brains with those questions and scrub down with things that are surprising and counterintuitive. What does it mean to be normal in the first place? Well, maybe it just …
Slavery in the British colonies | Period 2: 1607-1754 | AP US History | Khan Academy
This is a chart showing estimated population around the year 1750 in the British colonies in the New World. I’ve arranged this more or less from north to south, and you can see that as you go farther south, the percentage of the population that was enslav…