The UC Santa Barbara Undergraduate Journal of History

Twentieth-century Anglophone waves of "Egyptomania" - in the second and seventh decades forms the basis for much of our cultural understanding of the New Kingdom. The songs "Old King Tut" and "King Tut" provide examples of this aforementioned narrative surrounding the life of Tutankhamen, an eighteenth-dynasty Pharaoh. Their extremely inaccurate lyrics do more than induce eye-rolling from scholars of Ancient Egyptian history, these subversions of the truth reveal the politics behind both twentieth-century waves of Egyptomania. This essay, written for the Sarah Lawrence Programme at Wadham College, University of Oxford, examines these songs as examples of cultural attitudes towards the New Kingdom with the relevant social context.