For El Kurru lies not in Egypt, but in Sudan – 275 miles north of the capital Khartoum, and a full 1,100 miles south of Cairo. To glimpse these Egyptian deities, portrayed so clearly in the grave of a man who died in 653BC, is an utter privilege – but, without context, also misleading.
Inside the burial chamber of the tomb of Tanutamun “The verdict is a good one,” Hatim says, turning to the mural on the other wall, where the king is seen moving back towards the exit, on into the “next world”. Together they convey Tanutamun towards the powerful figure of Osiris, who weighs and measures his soul. Hatim traces them with the torch – Isis, the mother goddess Anubis, the jackal, the guardian of the departed Thoth, the baboon, the god of wisdom. There he is, recreated by a masterful artist, being helped into the afterlife by gods and goddesses of the Egyptian pantheon. His only presence now is on the walls, in the elegant paintings which depict his achievements. King Tanutamun – the seventh-century BC monarch who once resided in pyramid K16 of the El Kurru necropolis – is long gone, his sarcophagus vanished. We choose our footsteps carefully, the air noticeably cooler as we descend into the burial chamber – where nothing, and nobody, awaits us. Holding a low-intensity torch, my guide Hatim El Nour goes first, the meagre beam identifying rough “stairs” in the soil whose edges have been eaten away by the millennia. The wooden door of the tomb is pulled back, and the underworld reaches up to drag us into its dark grip.
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