so we've been stressing the idea of this 3 000 years of artistic and architectural continuity but we also just talked about the fact how we love an exception and it is during the amarna period that we have an exception and it is a brief one but it is significant because it's going to lead us to king tut somebody you heard of before you got to class so we're going to see how religion and politics is going to create a change in the artistic canon and we're also going to talk about why king tut is really a no big deal pharaoh but he's extremely significant to egyptology in the 21st century so we talked about the rule right the artistic rule every time an egyptian is going to do a painting or a sculpture they're going to sit down and create their 18 squares well that's what they did until this guy came along this is the pharaoh akhenaten and he rules from 1353 to 1335 so remember we're still counting backwards bce and he represents the only moment when art changes and here's why akhenaten when he takes over as pharaoh switches the religion from polytheism to monotheism and he moves the capital to a new site called tel and starts building from zero this is a big deal if you can imagine let's say that we got a new governor in california and they decided to move the capital from sacramento to malibu imagine that someone comes into office a political office and says we will no longer have freedom of religion everyone is going to worship donuts because he was the pharaoh people did what he said and you've got to wonder what the priests and the other elites were thinking whether they bought it all whether they were like we'll just wait as long as this guy lasts but what happens is is that there's a tremendous style change in art and let's take a look at this particular example because this is going to show us all the players in the story this is akhenaten remember how i said that egyptian pharaohs were shown as idealized and ever youthful look at his big saggy gut hanging out there right look at his three daughters one two three they all have these big elongated heads this is one of his wives nefertiti somebody else who you've heard of before you got here remember the rigid pose of mankari and his wife look at these guys they are relaxed they are playing with their children they have a they're visually engaged with their children this is unheard of unprecedented there is no rigid frontal pose there is no uh cannon used of the 16 squares this is just completely off the mark and the question is why did he wake up and say i want you to make me look like this or was it a subversive response by the artists we really don't know here we see unprecedented naturalism fluid curved lines no evidence of that grid and importantly this contact between parent and child and do you see what she's doing she's playing with nefertiti's earrings that's exactly what a child does look at the wind blowing the ribbons off the back of her headdress this is a relief carving so this is a carving that would have been attached to something else and we can see that it has hieroglyphs and low relief and then it has a deeper relief here this is called the aton and this was the solar disk that akhenaten was going to be worshiping now akhenaten's mother is seen here her name is tai and you can see that she is from sub-saharan africa and she too is not idealized so mother son do you see these smile lines in her face she would have had a very elaborate headdress that is now missing and we think it's sort of like a doubled feathered affair okay like this and on the front of her forehead she would have shown this very well-known diadem of a snake so why akhenaten made these dramatic changes we just don't know but what we know for sure is that shortly after akhenaten's death everything reverted here's the well-known plaster bust of nefertiti and this is made by thutmose so we have an attribution here obviously clearly beautiful did he improve her looks who knows and honestly who cares what we think this is is a model uh you're not going to have the queen come in every time you need to recreate her image so you you're going to create a model so you can refer to it without bothering her and that is why scholars think we can explain the fact that only one of her eyes is completed it's not damage it is simply unfinished in that way we know that this is created by the most because it was found in his workshop that had objects inscribed with his name on it today the portrait bust of nefertiti is located it has been moved to a museum in berlin and you can be sure that this is an object that the egyptians would like to have back so what happens within three years of akhenaten's death the capital was moved back to thieves the old religion was restored and akhenaten's name was erased from the king's list so they had this habit in ancient egypt of going in with a hammer and a chisel and knocking out the names of the pharaohs who they didn't like anymore and this is one of the reasons why akhenaten is someone who has been researched more recently than others it is because his name was erased but he did leave an important remembrance one of his other wives so remember he's got more than one is named kia and she is probably the mother of king tutankhamun king tooth uncommon is of course king tut and he comes to rule after his father dies he's only 18 years old when he dies and so he really doesn't have time to be a great warrior to be a great leader he also doesn't have time to create an elaborate burial and funeral scenario and this is an important part of the story so tutankhamen comes to power as a child he has various not so great people who are helping him rule and at the age of 18 he dies and one of the rules for for ronic burial is you got to get him in the ground pretty quick and so when we look at this most well-known object the death mask of king tutankhamun and realize that it was made by expert craftsmen in just a few weeks it really helps us understand the power and the financial resources so this guy he's a pharaoh even though he's only 18. this is one foot high and this was placed directly over the mummy so this was closest to him i'm sure you know that he's got these multiple sarcophagi and each one larger so he's in this tiniest one and then this is resting over his head it is made from hammered gold it's covered in semi-precious jewels it has holes in the ears where it would have had earrings and this is a portrait if you will he shows this unified crown he's wearing the protective styled headdress and all these beautiful little inlaid beads this is the kind of stuff that is going to create all this fascination and interest in king tut over the years a king tut's tomb was discovered in the 1920s by howard carter a british archaeologist who was funded by lord carnevon sponsored his projects for about 15 years the story of the discovery of tutt's tomb is well known and it's easy for you to find out more information about it but it's the details in the story that make it so amazing recently in the news you can see that uh this was uh dropped and broken that his beard was snapped off and here you see a conservator reaffixing the beard you can google that and find out the details of the story because i want to move on to tut mania tut mania is the western european and euro-american fascination with all things tut the first time it happened of course was in the 1920s when king tut's tomb was discovered the second time was in the 1970s where in 73 richard nixon helped attain dayton between egypt and syria and in 74 nixon visits sadat in egypt and sadat says what can we do to improve the way the world looks at egypt and they suggest that they send artifacts on a world tour now it's interesting to note that in 1974 president gerald ford signs the art and artifacts indemnity act which provides full insurance for these hundreds and hundreds of objects from the cairo museum to be put onto an aircraft carrier the sixth fleet transported at no cost a cost to the taxpayer across the ocean to the united states where an exhibition is laid out to follow the floor plan of tut's tomb the exhibition was accompanied by full-scale original black and white photos taken by burton who is the guy who accompanied carter in the 1920s and i remember this well yes indeed i was a mere child in 1976 and i was able to go to lacma and to see this exhibition and it was one of the most important memory of my teenage years but as you can see here the tut idea became commercialized and that is such an important part of the story king tut's exhibition was what we call the very first blockbuster exhibition maybe you're familiar with the fact that when a museum will have a show that is so famous has such famous artwork that everybody goes like a couple of years ago there was the picasso and diego rivera show um that hundreds of thousands of people to go to well the first time that ever happened was the king tut show in los angeles uh the the show traveled then to chicago and new york afterwards people were scalping tickets people stood in line all day in order to go and see this you can even see look here was the rtd bus as we used to call them with with the phoronic eyes on them and so this look at this 7 000 people a day 1.3 million people in los angeles alone and this is the first time that curators saw non-specialists flock to museums and they're like oh ding ding ding ding cash register this is a money making process fresh you know museums don't make a lot of money and this was life-changing for the museum world and so this is why king tut is the most important pharaoh to the 21st century even though he was no big deal at the time that he was alive