By Ed Sum (The Vintage Tempest)
Spike TV’s Tut is a hefty melodrama that puts Cleopatra (1963) to shame. When the last of the pharaohs was simply trying to preserve a world that would later be unseated by the Romans, so too did the young boy king try to restore order prior to the rule of his father, Akhenaten. To change from a polytheistic society to monotheism was not welcomed by everyone. The worship of the Aten was deemed too radical. Tutankhamun sought to restore an old world order so that many Egyptians living outside of Thebes would welcome him. But his rule was a short-lived one. He had an inner circle of people conspiring to unseat him for their own sordid reasons. Not all of them were concerned about their country’s spiritual identity and that’s the basis of this three-part mini-series. Their motivations lay nowhere near what historians have ruled through meticulous study of the mummy and stories told on this king’s tomb walls.
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