An online lecture by Dr Chris Naunton.
The end of the Twentieth Dynasty was also the end of the great era known as the New Kingdom. By this time Egypt had relinquished its empire, and pharaoh no longer even controlled all of his own country which was now split between the king in the north and an all-powerful Chief Priest in the south. This was the beginning of the ‘Third Intermediate Period’. Such phases are generally harder to understand - the evidence is thinner on the ground and confused, but they are generally held to be times of relative decline. But in 1939 a French archaeologist Pierre Montet discovered the royal tombs of the Twenty-first and Twenty-second Dynasty kings at Tanis in the Delta region, several of which turned out to be intact. What Montet had found might have caused a sensation to rival the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb - a solid gold death mask belonging to Psusennes I, several others like it and countless other treasures including several falcon headed coffins, one of solid silver, a material, that was much less common in Egypt than gold. But the world’s attention was elsewhere - WW2 had broken out… This is the story of his incredible discoveries but also of the tombs that are yet to be found…
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