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Tutankhamun's trumpets are a pair of
broadcast aired on 16 April 1939. The trumpets were played by James Tappern of Prince Albert's Own 11th Royal Hussars regiment. The recording was recently featured, and can be heard on the BBC Radio 4 program ''Ghost Music''. Rex Keating, who presented the 1939 broadcast, later claimed that during a rehearsal, the silver trumpet shattered, and Alfred Lucas, a member of Carter's team who had restored the finds, was so distressed he needed to go to the hospital. Due to their fragility, it is unlikely the trumpets will be played again in any official musical reconstructions.
The instruments were likely played on a single note for military signaling; of three notes that modern trumpeters got out out of the instrument, one was poor quality, one was the normally used tone, and the last put so much pressure on the instrument as to destroy it.
Image:Trompette d'argent et sa sourdine en bois du tombeau de Toutânkhamon.jpg, Silver and gold-plated trumpet and its wooden mute
Image:Trompette d'argent et sa sourdine en bois du tombeau de Toutânkhamon 2.jpg, Same objects
Tutankhamun's trumpets are a pair of trumpet
The trumpet is a brass instrument commonly used in classical and jazz ensembles. The trumpet group ranges from the piccolo trumpet—with the highest register in the brass family—to the bass trumpet, pitched one octave below the standard ...
s found in the burial chamber of the Eighteenth Dynasty Pharaoh Tutankhamun
Tutankhamun (, egy, twt-ꜥnḫ-jmn), Egyptological pronunciation Tutankhamen () (), sometimes referred to as King Tut, was an Egyptian pharaoh who was the last of his royal family to rule during the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty (ruled ...
. The trumpets, one of sterling silver
Sterling silver is an alloy of silver containing 92.5% by weight of silver and 7.5% by weight of other metals, usually copper. The sterling silver standard has a minimum millesimal fineness of 925.
'' Fine silver'', which is 99.9% pure silver, i ...
and one of bronze or copper
Copper is a chemical element with the symbol Cu (from la, cuprum) and atomic number 29. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. A freshly exposed surface of pure copper has a pinkis ...
, are considered to be the oldest operational trumpets in the world, and the only known surviving examples from ancient Egypt.
The trumpets were found in 1922 by Howard Carter during the excavation of Tutankhamun's tomb. The bronze trumpet was discovered in the tomb's antechamber in a large chest containing various military objects and walking sticks. The silver trumpet was subsequently found in the burial chamber. Both are finely engraved, with decorative images of the gods Ra-Horakhty
Ra (; egy, rꜥ; also transliterated ; cuneiform: ''ri-a'' or ''ri-ia''; Phoenician: 𐤓𐤏, CIS I 3778 romanized: rʿ) or Re (; cop, ⲣⲏ, translit=Rē) was the ancient Egyptian deity of the sun. By the Fifth Dynasty, in the 25th ...
, Ptah
Ptah ( egy, ptḥ, reconstructed ; grc, Φθά; cop, ⲡⲧⲁϩ; Phoenician: 𐤐𐤕𐤇, romanized: ptḥ) is an ancient Egyptian deity, a creator god and patron deity of craftsmen and architects. In the triad of Memphis, he is the hu ...
, and Amun. The silver trumpet's bell is engraved with a whorl of sepals and calices representing a lotus flower
''Nelumbo nucifera'', also known as sacred lotus, Laxmi lotus, Indian lotus, or simply lotus, is one of two extant species of aquatic plant in the family Nelumbonaceae. It is sometimes colloquially called a water lily, though this more often re ...
and the praenomen and nomen of the king. The bronze trumpet may be made of copper; the metal has not yet been analysed. Similar looking trumpets feature in Egyptian wall paintings that are usually, though not always, associated with military scenes.
Silent for over 3,000 years, the trumpets were sounded before a live audience of an estimated 150 million listeners through an international BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
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...Dimensions, manufacture and performance
The silver trumpet has a length of , the bronze/copper trumpet is about shorter. Their tubes are around in diameter at the mouth end, increasing to about before flaring out to at the extremity. The mouth-ends are strengthened by rings and are large by modern standards – which would have made the trumpets hard to play; Tappern needed to add a modern mouthpiece (with packing to make it fit) before his performance. The bronze trumpet was examined in detail by Jeremy Montagu in the 1970s. It consists of two sections. The slightly conical body is from a rolled sheet of copper alloy between 0.2 and 0.25 mm thick. It has been soldered lengthways with a "very skilfully brazed meander joint ... smoothed to a perfect finish", yet is "slightly rough" internally, indicating that (as might be expected in a ceremonial instrument) appearance was of greater value than acoustic performance. The bell is of a different, thinner material: anelectrum
Electrum is a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver, with trace amounts of copper and other metals. Its color ranges from pale to bright yellow, depending on the proportions of gold and silver. It has been produced artificially, and ...
-like alloy of gold, between 0.1 and 0.13 mm thick. It is without a visible seam, probably "burnished until the gold simply flowed together". The 3.25 mm thick ring that forms the mouthpiece was probably also made of electrum. The ring is apparently not fixed to the body, Montagu suspected that although it was possible to generate three notes on the instrument, the highest note would not have been sounded; besides being an effort to produce, the trumpet's construction could not have tolerated it. The lowest note does not carry far, leading Montagu to hypothesize that only the middle note was used in a rhythmic signaling code.
Claims of magical powers
The bronze trumpet was among items stolen from theEgyptian Museum
The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, known commonly as the Egyptian Museum or the Cairo Museum, in Cairo, Egypt, is home to an extensive collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities. It has 120,000 items, with a representative amount on display a ...
in Cairo during the Egyptian looting and riots of 2011, mysteriously returned to the museum some weeks later. According to '' Al-Ahram'', after its return Hala Hassan, curator of the Tutankhamun collection at the Egyptian Museum, claimed that it had "magical powers" and that "whenever someone blows into it a war occurs. A week before the revolution, during a documenting and photographing process, one of the museum's staff had blown into it and a week after revolution broke out. The same thing had happened before the 1967 war and prior to the 1991 gulf war, when a student was doing a comprehensive research on Tutankhamun's collection."
References
Further reading
* * * * * {{Tutankhamun __NOTOC__ Ancient Egyptian musical instruments Individual musical instruments Tutankhamun