A DYNASTY OF DESPOTS

From the colossal to Tutankhamun's temples of Luxor golden death mask, the pharaohs of ancient Egypt's golden age created some of history's greatest treasures. Yet, writes Guy de la Bédoyère, behind the glittering facade lay a society built on brutality, inequality and staggering levels of corruption

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0n 26 November 1922, when Howard Carter reported what he could make out in the gloom of a dusty chamber in the Valley of the Kings, a new phase of Egyptomania began. For more than 100 years, since Napoleon's Egyptian campaign at the turn of the 19th century, Europeans and North Americans had been enthralled by the architecture, art, design and dress of this ancient civilisation.

Carter's discovery was different, though. "Everywhere the glint of gold!" he famously recalled of the moment he first saw the wonders of Tutankhamun's tomb. The scene was set for an international fixation with this gilded young pharaoh who presided over a glittering court of fabulous wealth. Tutankhamun seduced the world, further sensationalising the popular image of Egypt at its height during the 18th Dynasty (c1550-1295 BC).

Monuments such as the temples at Luxor and Karnak in southern Egypt had already stunned visitors and archaeologists alike. They spoke of a Bronze Age imperialist state possessed of astonishing confidence, led by chariot-borne pharaohs firing off a fusillade of arrows at their cowering foes.

Yet look beyond the dazzling architecture, the power and the riches, and there's a darker tale to be told about ancient Egypt's so-called golden age. It's a story of wealth, glory and political power being monopolised by a tiny, spectacularly self-entitled elite, while everyone else was left to scrabble around in the dirt.

Dynamic forces