145b: Funding the Regime

Gold in them hills. Tut'ankhamun is famous for his gold. But where did it come from? And how did the pharaoh pay for his costly Restoration project? In this episode, we briefly explore some records for Tut’ankhamun’s gold miners and how they obtained that precious yellow metal…

Date: c. 1336 BCE.

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Music by Keith Zizza.

Music by Jeffrey Goodman.

Audio mixing/editing by Vincent Cavanagh. 

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Select Bibliography:

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M. W. Brown, ‘“Keeping Enemies Closer:” Ascribed Material Agency in Ancient Egyptian Rock Inscriptions and the Projection of Presence and Power in Liminal Regions’, Unpublished PhD. Thesis, Yale University (2015).

J. C. Darnell, ‘A Bureaucratic Challenge? Archaeology and Administration in a Desert Environment (Second Millennium BCE)’, in J. C. Moreno García (ed.), Ancient Egyptian Administration, Handbook of Oriental Studies 104 (Leiden, 2013), 785–830.

J. C. Darnell, ‘Tutankhamun in the Wadi Abbad’, in J. Kamrin et al. (eds.), Guardian of Ancient Egypt: Studies in Honor of Zahi Hawass (Prague, 2020), 343–55.

J. C. Darnell, Egypt and the Deserts (Elements in Ancient Egypt in Context; Cambridge, 2021).

N. de G. Davies, The Tomb of Huy: Viceroy of Nubia in the Reign of Tutankhamun (No. 40) (London, 1926).

S. L. D. Katary, ‘Land Tenure and Taxation’, in T. Wilkinson (ed.), The Egyptian World (New York, 2007), 185–204.

N. Kawai, ‘Studies in the Reign of Tutankhamun’, Unpublished PhD. Thesis, Johns Hopkins University (2005).

D. Klemm et al., ‘Gold of the Pharaohs – 6000 Years of Gold Mining in Egypt and Nubia’, Journal of African Earth Sciences 33 (2001), 643–59.

R. Klemm and D. Klemm, Gold and Gold Mining in Ancient Egypt and Nubia: Geoarchaeology of the Ancient Gold Mining Sites in the Egyptian and Sudanese Eastern Deserts (Berlin, 2013).

E.-S. Mahfouz, ‘Les directeurs des déserts aurifères d’Amon’, Revue d’Égyptologie 56 (2005), 55–78.

W. J. Murnane, Texts from the Amarna Period in Egypt (Atlanta, 1995).

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