The outermost shrine surrounding Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus is inscribed with the earliest known version of The Book of the Celestial Cow, also known as The Story of the Destruction of Mankind. The text describes the ageing Ra as having ‘flesh of gold, bones of silver, and hair of real lapis lazuli’. The association of the god’s immortality with the incorruptibility of precious materials explains why the king was buried in a solid gold coffin. Statues of the gods were often created in silver, covered or inlaid with gold – symbolic of the silver skeleton encased in golden flesh. Temple building inscriptions listed the materials used to create divine statues, and the decoration of their shrines and barques. Foundation deposits in temples and palaces included samples of the materials pledged to their building and ornamentation in the form of plaques of precious metals and stones. Thutmose III described his Festival Hall at Karnak as being ‘built of fine white Tura stone… the portals of cedar wood overlaid with fine gold with silver [electrum], with lapis lazuli, and turquoise’.
Despite the wealth of natural materials available to the Egyptians, the sources of some of the most desirable minerals were often hundreds if not thousands of miles away, in areas well beyond Egyptian control. In particular, the nearest lapis lazuli quarries were more than 3,000 miles (almost 5,000 km) away from the Nile Delta in Badakhshan, in north-east Afghanistan. It has been suggested that the ancient Egyptian word for lapis lazuli, khesbed, is derived from this toponym, but there is no evidence that ancient Egyptian explorers ever visited the region. Amenhotep III recorded his adornment of the Luxor Temple: ‘with electrum, lapis lazuli, turquoise… and every noble and precious stone from the revenues of the chiefs of every foreign country.’
Lapis lazuli is depicted in New Kingdom temples among the diplomatic gifts from Assyrian, Babylonian, and Hittite kings, and the tribute or taxation from Egypt’s vassal territories of Syria-Palestine. In reality, lapis lazuli, which had been used for decorative purposes from Predynastic times, must have been acquired through a series of commodity exchanges over an extensive network of great antiquity, passing through major trading centres in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, the Aegean, and the Levant.
