The Tutankhamun Deception

The Tutankhamun Deception by Gerald O'Farrell was given to me by my father a Christmas or two ago.

Essentially, the book can be split up into two parts; one part dealing with the story of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, and the other, the conclusions drawn from said discovery.

I'm not going to delve into the first part too deeply as this is a summary of what the book attempts to prove and not a review, and, in truth, the topic has been the subject of numerous, too many even, documentaries and other such studies. In short, it poses the theory that Carter and Carnarvon didn't discover the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 but rather that they discovered it in 1914.

During these eight years Carter and Carnarvon are thought to have quietly plundered the tomb and then waited, anxiously, for an ideal time to stage a fake unveiling, hoping all the while that no one stumbled into the tomb and claimed it as their own discovery.

I've heard both versions of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun from several different sources and, frankly, either version is as plausible as the other.

O'Farrell describes first what the official story of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun and then presents his own theory as to what really happened. It is during this time O'Farrell begins to hint at a series of murders that occurred after the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun and, indeed, intimating that the famous Mummy's Curse was in fact a cover for those murders.
The reason behind these murders centres around some missing papyri. What truth was contained in these fragile pages that would trigger a series of murders? What secret could be so sacrosanct as to necessitate so elaborate a conspiracy, especially one leading to the murder of Sigmund Freud?

It is the attempt to answer these questions that the focus of the book now turns to; an attempt to discover where the papyrus currently is and what they said. By carefully aligning the history of Egypt and that what is told in the bible, O'Farrell comes to several shocking, prolapse inducing conclusions.

To put it simply, O'Farrell believes that the papyri would have confirmed that:

• Akhenaten, Tutankhamun's father, was in fact Moses.
• That Tutankhamun's great-grandfather was Yuya, the biblical Joseph.
• That the Jews were not led out of Egypt by Moses but were forced out by a junta of generals (Ay, Horemheb, Ramses I and Seti).
• The reason that Moses (Akhenaten) was forced out was that he created the first monotheistic religion, the worship of one God, Aten.
• After Moses was made to leave Egypt, a new pharaoh was put in power; this new Pharaoh was Tutankhamun who was no other than Jesus Christ, the Messiah.
• That Tutankhamun had a brother called Smenkhkara.
• That, in short, the bible is completely based on Egyptian stories.

Well, holy shit.

If this were all true virtually every major religion would have collapsed, as they would have been exposed as having been based on a fallacy.
It was this that led to the murder of so many people, and it was this that led to the murder of Sigmund Freud — an attempt to suppress a paper that he was writing on the very topic.

O'Farrell then references the work of a friend of his, Charles Pope. Both believe that the Greek myth of Oedipus Rex was in fact based on an Egyptian tale, which describes the sexual relationship between Moses (Akhenaten) and his mother, Queen Tiye, and that it was this incestuous coupling that produced the births of Tutankhamun and Smenkhkara.

This of course has its own ramifications:
• Moses and Oedipus were the same person
• the father of Judaism practiced incest
• that the virgin birth of the Christ was in fact the result of an incestuous relationship.

All of this has been inexorably leading to the oddest, certainly the most salacious, sentence that I have ever seen committed to print, namely "The Messiah would then not so much be the Son of God as the son of Moses and his Grandmother!"

"The Messiah would then not so much be the Son of God as the son of Moses and his Grandmother!"

After I read that last sentence I found it hard to continue reading the book without an air of skepticism. There were times when I was starting to think that perhaps the book was written in jest.
I remember being almost convinced of this when O'Farrell talked about the murder of Sigmund Freud. It wasn't that I couldn't believe that Freud could be the target of a nefarious cabal of assassins determined to keep the true details of their religion secret but rather the details, the minutiae, of his death.

O'Farrell states that the first attempt on the life of Sigmund Freud probably took place in 1923, when Freud went to a surgeon to have what is described as, a "leukoplastic growth" on his jaw and palate removed.

Apparently, during the operation, something went terribly wrong and Freud began to bleed profusely. He was placed in a small side room to recover, his only company being a friendly, retarded dwarf - a friendly, retarded dwarf! When Freud, unable to recover and too weak to summon assistance, looked like he was going to die, the dwarf, sensing that something was wrong, ran to get the nurse, thereby saving his life.

Unfortunately, the second attempt to excise the growth didn't — or did, if you believe the conspiracy theory that O'Farrell plants — go so well and, in order to ease the considerable pain that Freud was in, a lethal dose of morphine was prescribed and given.

Strangely, O'Farrell seems to put a lot of focus on the murder of Sigmund Freud, as if his murder was as important as his revelation that the major religions are a sham.

He wonders why an old man (Freud was 67 at the time) was subjected to two unnecessary, cosmetic operations. I'm not too sure how he equates a death resulting from an unnecessary operation with murder especially as the surgeon who performed the second operation was a friend of Freud's.

The logic that O'Farrell uses seems to be flawless, but, unfortunately, methinks also rather specious.
It is the sort of logic that is based on the similarity names and other sketchy details, the sort of logic that posits that since the Trinity is a ‘three' and there are three sides in a triangle then, therefore, God must be a triangle.

Whether everything that O'Farrell talks about is true is a question for less apathetic heads than mine.

Published on Thursday, 5 June 2003