 This morning and this afternoon I should like to consider once again two of the best-known, most controversial and in many ways least understood tombs in the Valley of the Kings: KV55, generally referred to as Tomb 55, and KV62, the burial of Tutankhamun. Much of the ground I cover will be familiar to you, since the two tombs are hardly a backwater of Egyptology, though some of the conclusions I draw and suggestions I make will be new and will, I hope, go some way towards explaining a number of odd features that each of these tombs displays.
But first a few words of introduction. Both KV55 and KV62 belong to the Amarna period, which may be defined as the reigns of Akhenaten, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamun and Ay, four kings who ruled Egypt during the second half of the 14th century BC. The period owes its name to the new capital, dedicated to the Aten or solar disc, which Akhenaten established at el-Amarna in Middle Egypt following his abandonment of Thebes and the traditional Egyptian pantheon. The period is a great favourite with those Egyptologists who, in John Ray`s inimitable words, fancy themselves as being good at solving puzzles. This is because the sources available to us, though relatively rich and varied, are at the same time open to more than one interpretation. The broad, sweeping generalisations which are sometimes possible in the study of more sparsely documented periods tend, with Amarna, to be denied us. Every scholar of the period has assembled his own jigsaw-puzzle view of events, and each differs in its detail. Do not be too alarmed, therefore, if some of the things I say today do not necessarily correspond with what you may have read previously on the subjects - even by myself. The picture changes day by day, since many permutations of the facts are possible.
Many of the ambiguities with which the Egyptologist has to contend today arise from the casual manner in which the evidence has in the past been gathered and presented - and nowhere has this evidence been more casually gathered and presented than in the Valley of the Kings. Today more than eighty tombs and pits may be accounted for in the royal wadi - of which we see here a detail of the main or eastern valley. Of these tombs, a handful of the larger 19th and 20th Dynasty sepulchres have stood open since Classical times, and from these we expect little. But the greater number of tombs was uncovered relatively recently, during the quarter century between 1898 and 1922, when Egyptology was up and running, and our expectations of this material ought to be high. Unfortunately, many of these discoveries were made under the direction of a man with no real understanding of archaeological aims or techniques.
Theodore M. Davis, a successful American lawyer and financier born in 1837, was described by one contemporary as `an eccentric, brusque little man, but a good friend to people he liked`. This friendship evidently excluded those who worked for him, to whom he was difficulty personified. Since the early 1880s Davis had been in the habit of wintering each year on his Nile boat, the Dahabiya Bedawin, in company with his `cousin` - actually a lady-friend - Mrs Emma B. Andrews. But, beyond a spot of `antika hunting` in the shops and bazaars, the first two decades of his time in Egypt passed without significant archaeological event. It was not until 1902, following a chance meeting with Howard Carter, that Davis began to take any practical interest in digging.
Carter, the young Inspector-General of Antiquities for Upper Egypt, ever since his appointment had been on the look-out for someone else`s money to finance his excavations in the royal valley - and Theodore Davis seemed just the man for the job:
`[Davis] often told me that he would like to have some active interest during his sojourns in Egypt,` Carter later wrote, `so I put the following proposition to him. The Egyptian Government would be willing for me to carry out researches in the Valley on his behalf, if he would be willing on his part to cover the costs; and in return for his generosity, the Egyptian Government would be pleased to give him any duplicate antiquities resulting from these researches ...`
Davis thought this a wonderful idea, and within a matter of weeks had plunged into what would be the most extensive and wide-ranging series of excavations ever carried out in the Valley of the Kings. The Davis years would not draw to a close until more than a decade later, in 1914, by which time the American amateur could lay claim to having financed the clearance of a staggering 30 and more tombs. He is remembered still, in fact, as `the man who found a new tomb every season`.
Clearly, Egyptology owes Davis an immense debt of gratitude for sponsoring these explorations, at no small expense and, on the whole, with little regard to personal reward. But his involvement, as I have already intimated, would nevertheless be at a price.
When Davis first embarked on his sponsorship deal, it was understood that the day-to-day running of the work would be firmly under the control of the Chief Inspector - from 1902-4 Howard Carter, and in 1904 James Quibell. Davis merely coughed up the cash. But in 1905, following the appointment of Arthur Weigall, whom we see here, the basis of the arrangement changed, and very much for the worse. Since the excavations were encroaching substantially on his Inspector`s duties, Weigall encouraged Davis to appoint his own archaeologist to supervise the day-to-day digging - in other words, to apply for his own personal concession to excavate. And Davis, being the autocrat he was, naturally leapt at the opportunity to run his own show.
The first excavator to be retained by Davis was Edward R. Ayrton, an English archaeologist of no-small talent who was lasted for three years from 1905 until 1908. He was succeeded by the sickly Welsh artist Ernest Harold Jones, who died in the saddle, so to speak, in 1911. And Davis`s last digger, until the excavations were wound up in 1914, would be Harry Burton, another Englishman.
Davis established the headquarters to what had now become his personal fief at the entrance to the West Valley; the single-storey building is just visible here in centre right of the photograph. Unlike Carter, the powerful and respected government official, Davis`s diggers were mere employees, and he ordered them around accordingly. The difficulties of working for the man are recalled by Harold Jones in a dejected letter home:
`The pleasure of excavating`, Jones wrote, `is spoilt by Davis` interference - generally ignorant inexperience of the nature of things and of the workmen. He is old and I might almost say stupid at times through his stubborn arrogance. What gives me less trouble, and pleases him most, is to give in to him and let the work suffer ...’.
And suffer the work undoubtedly did. In the case of Tomb 55, Davis’s ‘interference’ and ‘stubborn arrogance’ was to affect not only the excavation, recording and publication of the find, but compromise every subsequent interpretation of it. The following reconstruction of events has, of necessity, been drawn from several disparate sources.
The story of Tomb 55 begins on Sunday, 6 January, 1907, in the central part of the Valley of the Kings, a few metres to the west of the tomb of Ramesses IX, seen here on the left of the picture. The area under excavation was covered with chippings from the quarrying of this Ramessid tomb, and as, basket by basket, these chippings were removed Ayrton’s men brought to light the first of a flight of steps leading down to a well-cut tomb entrance - the smaller walled entrance with a figure standing by it.
Although no photographs have survived, at the mouth of the new tomb the excavators describe having encountered the remains of a cemented door-blocking, plastered on its outer surface and stamped with the seal of the necropolis administration - a jackal over nine bound captives, the traditional enemies of the Egyptian state. What seems to be a fragment of this plastered blocking, shown here, was recently brought to light within the tomb by Lyla Pinch Brock. Weigall, in a popular report on the discovery, also records the presence of the seal of Tutankhamun - a claim which cannot now be corroborated, and may well be a mistaken reference to the small seal impressions the team would later find inside the tomb.
From the various descriptions that have survived, official and unofficial, it is clear that this outer, cemented blocking had been partially dismantled, to permit entry, in ancient times; subsequently, as the excavators found, this later access had been closed off with a loosely built wall of rough limestone blocks resting upon the partial rubble-fill of the corridor which lay beyond. Some metres down the corridor, the rubble could be seen to flow out into a single chamber.
The newly discovered tomb was first entered, by Davis, Ayrton, Weigall and the artist Joseph Lindon Smith on 9 January 1907. The examination of the find continued the following day, with Smith starting work on producing watercolour sketches of the interior; while on 11th January a photographer by the name of R. Paul arrived from Cairo and set to work recording the burial in position before clearance began. Other visitors during the course of the following few days included the Birmingham MP Sir Benjamin Stone, equipped with his camera. Here we see a souvenir of Sir Benjamin’s visit - a group shot of the grumpy-looking Mr Davis, the dapper Mr Ayrton, and the elegant Mr and Mrs Weigall standing outside the tomb of Ramesses IV.
The photographs taken by R. Paul, if less entertaining than Stone’s effort, are nevertheless of crucial importance to our understanding of what the Davis team had actually found and how it lay.
The tomb itself was a modest affair, consisting of steps, corridor, a single chamber and a niche. The first of Paul’s photographs shows the state of the corridor more or less as it was first encountered by the excavators. On the right can be seen the planks inserted by Ayrton to permit access across the shattered surface of a door and panel of a large gilded wooden shrine. And here we see Martha Bell’s analysis of the shot...
Paul’s second photo shows the situation at the bottom of the corridor slope, with the flow into the chamber of the corridor’s rubble fill. And here again we have Martha Bell’s keyed drawing of the shot...
This photograph shows the southeast corner of the chamber, with the dismantled elements of the gilded shrine, the various parts of which are identified on Bell’s drawing...; and here we have close-ups of two of the better preserved panels - here’s the second, which illustrates well the poor state of preservation, with the gilded gesso shattered and almost wholly detached from the wooden base.
As its inscriptions proclaimed, the Tomb 55 shrine had been prepared for the burial of Queen Tiye by her son, the heretic king Akhenaten, and carried scenes of the royal pair offering to the solar disc - this being a drawing by Harold Jones of the best preserved. As you can clearly see, the heretic’s names and figure had everywhere been hacked out. These reconstructions of the original form and decoration - in profile, and from the door end - we owe to Martha Bell. The original appearance of the structure was clearly not dissimilar to the second and third shrines from the tomb of Tutankhamun.
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In the western part of the tomb Paul’s photographs show a decayed wooden coffin, of superlative quality despite its condition, heavily gilded and smothered with inlays of semi-precious stones and glass; the lid was further adorned with a decayed crook and flail - symbols of kingship - and an uninscribed uraeus of gilded and inlaid bronze. Here we see Martha Bell’s analysis of the Paul photograph... The inscriptions of the coffin shed little light on the identity of the mummy which lay within, since the cartouches had been systematically cut out in a manner reminiscent of the treatement meted out to Akhenaten’s cartouches on Tiye’s gilded shrine. The face of the coffin was similarly uninformative, since the sheet gold upon which had once been modelled the features of the occupant had been brutally torn away below the eyes.
Here we have Paul’s seventh shot, with a more general view of the south-east corner; and here is Martha Bell’s analysis of it. To one side of the coffin, within the recess or ‘niche’ which had originally been intended to give access to a second chamber, stood four canopic jars. These, like the coffin, were of extraordinary quality, with beautiful portrait-head stoppers. And, like the coffin, the canopics had suffered at the hands of the owner’s enemies by having the heads of the uraei which decorated the brow snapped off; the identifying inscriptions of the jars themselves had also been chiselled away.
Again, within this same canopic niche, lay a rectangular brick of Nile mud, one of four magical amulet-bases which had been scattered around the tomb in the general direction of the four cardinal points to provide protection for the corpse whose name they bore; two of these bricks carried hieroglyphic texts with the prenomen of Akhenaten, ‘Neferkheprure-waenre’, while their two replacement companions (which have never been photographed) are said to have been similarly inscribed in hieratic. Elsewhere among the floor debris were found a gilded bronze uraeus, seen here, with the later form of the Aten cartouches which perhaps came from a guardian statue or even a second coffin; and the remains of a number of decayed wooden boxes which had spilled their contents. No details exxist of the boxes themselves, but for their contents, which consisted of a range of minor funerary objects in a variety of materials, some inscribed with the names of Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye, we are better informed. Here we see a selection, taken from photographs in Davis’s publication of the find: two miniature faience figures of Bes and a faience serving-girl cosmetic pot; model fruits in faience, a dummy knife, model vessels, and a model papyrus roll - while in the centre we see the loose uraeus of gilded bronze ; vessels, amulets and a miniature faience casket; cosmetic and ritual vessels; faience model boomerangs, jewellery, pebble burnishers, and other items; and a bronze patch-repair, a wooden chisel handle and the remains of the scourge from the coffin.
And that, essentially, was it - an oddly sparse and confused burial assemblage, which Carter was able to supplement with a number of strays recovered from the vicinity of the tomb entrance in 1921: notably a yellow jasper burnisher and some copper-alloy rosettes from the funerary pall. More recently, Lyla Brock’s sieving of the sparse floor debris brought to light the fragment of plaster door sealing referred to above; blue-painted pottery fragments; and a hieratic docket and mud wine-jar seal both dating from the reign of Amenhotep III. Of particular interest is a limestone chip with part of a drawing of the KV55 corridor - a sketch evidently drafted at the time the tomb was being quarried. This ostracon was found by Earl Ertman, a member of Lyla Brock’s team, still in place at the back of the canopic niche. It had been missed not only by Davis’s excavators but also by Harry Burton (who employed the tomb as a darkroom over many years during Carter’s clearance of the tomb of Tutankhamun) and by the numerous visitors who have poked around in the years since.
As soon as Paul had completed his photographs, Ayrton began the ticklish job of clearing the tomb and preparing the objects for transfer to Cairo. First the corridor was emptied of its fill - here we see a recent photograph of the entrance by Lyla Brock, the still-visible stain on the wall indicating the height to which this fill formerly reached. While this clearance was under way, the fragile shrine panels were left suspended on timber supports. Their condition, as we have seen, was dire and, despite emergency applications of varnish and paraffin wax, they were doomed to fall to pieces before the excavators’ eyes, and regrettably before they had been fully copied. This slide of one of the panels displayed in the Cairo Museum gives some indiction of how little could be salvaged from the mess.
On Friday 25 January 1907 the excavators turned their attention to the coffin, the lid of which we see here. This had been dislodged in antiquity and subsequently collapsed, but was successfully lifted in sections for eventual restoration in Cairo. The water-rotted base had evidently crumbled away into its component inlays and their gold foil surrounds. These bits were collected up by Ayrton and carefully sorted into cigarette tins - only to be stolen from the anatomist Elliot Smith’s workshop in the Museum during the course of the following months. A few years ago these remains of the coffin base turned up in the hands of a European private collector. Here is a selection of fragments from the outer edge inscriptions, as photographed at that time. They and the other elements have since been reconstructed to show the trough`s original form - in scale that of an outer, second coffin, it seems - , and will hopefully be reunited with the Cairo lid in due course.
Beneath the coffin lay the decayed remains of a lion-headed bier, evidently similar to that later found by Carter supporting the coffins in the tomb of Tutankhamun; and beneath this, among the debris, were several small clay seal impressions. No photograph of these important seals was published at the time (presumably they lacked, for Davis, sufficient glamour to be included in his elegant report); but, by the happiest of chances, a print survives among a small collection of Ayrton’s photographs in the archives of the Egypt Exploration Society in London and was kindly brought to my attention some years ago by Patricia Spencer. As we can see, four different seal types are represented:
- the first containing what appears to be a cryptographic version of the prenomen of Amenhotep III;
- the second, showing Tutankhamun as a sphinx trampling a captive;
- the third, showing a king standing before a goddess - of which a second example occurs in the tomb of Tutankhamun;
- and the fourth, showing a lion before a crocodile with a captive between - again a type attested in the burial of Tutankhamun.
The Tomb 55 mummy was in an extremely fragile state, and according to his version of events, Joseph Lindon Smith was entrusted with the task of dismantling it in situ. (This cartoon, incidentally, was prepared for a dinner menu to celebrate Smith’s triumphant return to Boston at the end of the season.) Beneath the gold lining sheets which had fallen from the coffin lid, the corpse was described as ‘somewhat scantily swathed in two or three wrappings of linen, fine in texture but very worn’. As these wrappings were removed, presumably in decayed chunks, the body itself could be clearly seen. Its left arm was crossed over the chest, as in a female burial, and, like the extended right arm, had been simply adorned with three gold-foil bracelets. The head, which had been struck by a rock in antiquity, was broken away from the body, though the vulture pectoral which had been bent around to form an ad hoc crown was still in place. Here we have a more recent colour picture of the same. Removing this pectoral, the skull was lifted out of the coffin by Smith and placed in a basket held by Ayrton.
Other items of jewellery found on the corpse included a gold cartouche containing part of the early name of the Aten, and a piece of gold foil with both of the early Aten cartouches. And as Smith felt through the bandages of the chest for the loose beads of a broad collar, shown here in its reconstructed form, he records how the decayed mummy ‘crumbled into ashes and sifted down through the bones’ into a shallow pool of rain-water in which the coffin lay. Further jewellery elements, missed by Lindon Smith among the sludge, would be stolen by the workmen, offered on the Luxor antiquities market and eventually bought back by Davis, through Carter, for his (Davis`s) personal collection. Sadly, these stray items did not go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the bulk of the Davis collection, but were later dispersed by his descendants, unrecognised, at auction in 1976. They have not yet been tracked down, but again by another stroke of good fortune drawings of a selection of the pieces were brought to light fairly recently in the archives of the Oriental Institute, Chicago, by John Larson. And here we have a sample.
Back among the coffin debris, now minus the skull, Lindon Smith continued to delve and brought to light a further coffin lining-sheet, inscribed, he records, with the name of Akhenaten intact - an inscription which did not not necessarily identify the occupant, but probably formed part of the original owner’s titulary. Finally, the remaining bones were gathered up and added to the basket containing the head; this basket was then sealed and sent on to Cairo. In deference to Mrs Andrews’ delicate feelings on the matter, Davis maintained, in her presence, the polite fiction that the body was to be left in the tomb - which was the welcome news she recorded in her diary.
What was to be made of this confused deposit? The coming years would see no shortage of answers, the alternating identifications of the body in particular taking on the appearance of a game of ping-pong between those who favoured Akhenaten and those who would support the claims of Smenkhkare.
Davis, on the basis of early indications that the body might be female, firmly believed that he had found the tomb of Tiye herself - hence the title of his publication. Then it was shown that the remains were not those of a woman but of a man. Maspero, on the basis of this and Lindon Smith’s coffin lining sheet, at first inclined to see in Tomb 55 the burial of Akhenaten, later changing his view to suggest that the body was, in fact, that of Smenkhkare, Akhenaten’s obscure successor. This was because the age suggested by the anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith seemed, at 25-26, so low. For Georges Daressy, Davis had uncovered a reburial of Tutankhamun, in a coffin originally prepared for Queen Tiye. Arthur Weigall, on the other hand, writing in 1922, thought that Tomb 55 was to be understood as a reburial of Akhenaten and Tiye, from which Tiye had later been removed - and Elliot Smith’s subsequent diagnosis of Froehlich’s Syndrome seemed to offer a convincing explanation for the apparently modest age at death of the ‘Akhenaten’ body.
The director of the Cairo Museum, Rex Engelbach, by 1931, had on the contrary concluded that both canopic jars and coffin had been prepared originally for a person of non-royal status who then became king - and this person, he felt, could be none other than Smenkhkare. No little support for this conclusion was furnished by the anatomist Douglas Derry: Derry had stressed the physical similarity between the KV55 corpse and its mooted half-brother, Tutankhamun, and had obligingly reduced the age at death estimate still further, to 23 years. Gardiner in 1957 re-espoused Weigall’s view that the body was Akhenaten’s, whatever the anatomists might say, and the German scholar Guenther Roeder, writing a year later, returned once again to the Smenkhkare identification. HW Fairman, in an article published in 1961, concurred with Roeder, though he believed the coffin had originally been made for Akhenaten’s daughter Meritaten; while Cyril Aldred, writing in the same issue of the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, returned to the Weigall view that the body in KV55 was that of Akhenaten himself. The apparent delay in the maturation of the skeleton, Aldred proposed, was the result of a pituitary gland disorder - though this was to be discounted by R. G. Harrison’s fresh examination of the remains in 1966, which in fact reduced the age of the body still further, to 20-25 years.
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The impasse was broken in 1967, with a demonstration by the Russian Egyptologist YY Perepelkin that the original owner of the KV55 coffin and jars had indeed been a woman - but the woman in question was Akhenaten’s secondary wife, Kiya, of whom we see here a plaster portrait mask from the workshop of the sculptor Djehutymose at el-Amarna. This identification is proved by the presence in the coffin’s texts of Kiya`s unique and standardized form of address: ‘The goodly child of the living Aten, who lives forever and eternity’. (The German Egyptologist Rainer Hanke, unaware of Perepelkin’s work, came to the same conclusion in 1975.) Perepelkin went on to point out that the Tomb 55 coffin had in its final form clearly been intended for Akhenaten himself, though curiously the adaptations could only have been made some years after his death. Since this conflicted with the anatomical data, however, the conclusion had to be that the mummy found within the coffin was not Akhenaten himself but that of a much younger man - presumably Smenkhkare.
And so the debate has continued, with further articles published by myself, James Allen, Martha Bell, Aidan Dodson and others, to the last pulling in opposite directions and agreeing on very little. New evidence has been singularly unforthcoming - until the recent re-estimation of the body’s age at death - 35 years, announced in a lecture by Fawzia Hussien and James Harris a couple of years ago. If this estimate is any more reliable than those that have gone before, then real progress can at last be made.
Let us grasp the nettle at the very start - the purported links with this tomb of Akhenaten’s coregent and probable successor, Smenkhkare. If we look back at the history of the Smenkhkare connection, it can be seen that the claimed association is based upon (i) an anatomical estimate of the body’s age at death (which has now been superseded), and (ii) a tacit assumption that this estimate corresponds with Smenkhkare’s assumed age and sex - which again is arguable and about which more will be said this afternoon. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that there is, in fact, absolutely nothing in the archaeological record which makes any mention of or allusion to Smenkhkare, whose claimed links with the Tomb 55 deposit are, in my view, wholly illusory. No amount of tendentious interpretations of the coffin’s mangled texts should be allowed to obscure the fact that the only names indisputably associated with KV55 are Tiye and Akhenaten - as we shall now consider.
The starting point for any interpretation of the Davis tomb has to be a reconstruction of the deposit as it lay at the time of the discovery, and the most accurate reconstruction to date is that published by Martha Bell in 1990. This plan clearly illustrates the disturbed state in which the contents of the tomb were found in 1907. Yet amidst this chaos may be discerned a clear division into: those objects which, judging by their function and the inscriptions they carry, are to be associated with the burial of Tiye - notably the shrine, but also other small items including the Amenhotep III seal impressions; and material from the burial equipment of Akhenaten - the four magical bricks, and, in consequence of their position, the altered coffin and the four en suite canopic jars. This division is reflected in the positioning of the main items from each of these two groups - namely the shrine and coffin - which, when found, bore no obvious relationship to each other. In fact, it is clear that the shrine, though dismantled, had at one stage occupied the main area of the chamber, while the coffin and canopic jars had been consigned to the edge of the chamber, as if introduced after the erection of the shrine. Taking into consideration both the implicitly personal nature of the objects involved, which would have been ritually worthless to anyone other than the person for whom they were inscribed - an important point which is usually passed over - , the deposit must represent the remains of not one but two quite separate and distinct reburials contained within the same chamber. And, as the inscriptions show, these burials must have been those of Tiye and her son, Akhenaten.
Support for this conclusion is provided by the fact that both mother and son appear to have been interred originally not only within the same sepulchre - the royal tomb at el-Amarna - , but also within the same chamber of that tomb - room E. Edwin Brock and Maarten Raven have independently demonstrated, from the reconstruction of surviving fragments, that a sarcophagus prepared for Tiye had been placed in the Amarna royal tomb; while Geoffrey Martin some years ago pointed to the likelihood that Tiye had been a principal figure in the decoration of wall B of the main burial chamber. Akhenaten’s original interment at el-Amarna is suggested not only by the presence within the royal tomb of considerable portions of broken funerary equipment - for the most part stone and faience shabtis - but also by the adaptation carried out to room E, which had been changed from a four-pillared hall to a two-pillared burial chamber. Equally suggestive is the presence at the entrance of regular-shaped blocks which had been employed to close off the burial chamber. Other stones from this blocking, interestingly enough, were found at the bottom of the well room, D - where they had presumably been stacked following the dismantling to facilitate the transfer of the royal couple to Thebes. While the date at which this transfer was carried out is suggested by the seals of Tutankhamun recovered from the KV55 floor debris.
The condition in which Davis discovered KV 55 was clearly not the condition in which this reburial had been left at the end of the 18th Dynasty. As the blocking evidence shows, the tomb had subsequently been entered, though not, apparently, by robbers. But when? The answer is suggested by a curious feature in the tomb of Ramesses IX, KV6. During the quarrying of the south-west side-room of this tomb, which directly overlies the principal chamber of KV55, work had been brought to an abrupt halt. Why? The answer, we may reasonably guess, is that the rock had begun to sound hollow, drawing the stone-cutters’ attention to the presence of the forgotten KV55 below; in order to avoid breaking through into an earlier chamber and compromising the security of KV6, tools were evidently downed for the workers to explore.
The condition of Tomb 55 when stumbled upon by Davis indicates clearly that what the Ramessid workmen found horrified them - for not only did they proceed to hack out the inscriptions identifying the occupant of the coffin, as here in the top line of the foot, but the lower part of the coffin’s gold face was ripped away and the eye inlays prised out. The mummy, in short, was consigned to eternal damnation, its identity destroyed, its eyes blinded and its nose and mouth deprived of the breath of life. Just to make sure, the canopic uraei were broken off to deny their owner divine protection and kingly status; while for good measure, perhaps as the investigating party was leaving, one of the workers hurled a stone at the coffin which crushed the front of the mummy’s skull at the right side. Who but Akhenaten could have aroused such feelings of hatred?
It was clearly seen as a priority by those responsible for this desecration that the burial of Queen Tiye be removed from Akhenaten’s polluting presence for reburial elsewhere. And, since it was obviously intended that the shrine should accompany the queen’s evacuation, a start was made on ‘censoring’ its scenes - hacking out the heretic’s image and, so as not to impair the structure magically, replacing, in red ink, the hated name of Akhenaten with that of the more palatable Amenhotep III. Dismantling the monument was clearly a difficult job: at least one of the jammed bronze tenons had to be cut through with a chisel, and the massive wooden panels crashed heavily against the walls, denting them and leaving substantial traces of their gold foil surface. And finally, when the dismantling had finally been accomplished, it was found that the larger of the panels were just too large to be manoeuvred up the only partially cleared corridor! The air must have turned blue as the workers pushed and shoved the heavy elements without success, until finally they were forced to abandon them in disgust where they lay. Tiye’s mummy, presumably in its coffin and accompanied by most of the equipment which had accompanied her in her 18th Dynasty reburial, was nevertheless removed - though in the darkness of the chamber a few pieces were inevitably missed and left for Davis to find. And it was probably during the course of this removal that the few small elements of funerary equipment recovered at the tomb entrance by Carter in 1921 were accidentally dropped.
To sum up: for the first time in 90 years, the burden of proof lies firmly with those wishing to identify the body from Tomb 55 as anyone other than Akhenaten himself. We can reconstruct clearly from the surviving data the nature of the deposit - a double reburial of Tiye and Akhenaten; when and by whom this reburial was made - by agents of Tutankhamun; where the two bodies were transferred from - chamber E of the royal tomb at el-Amarna; when and why KV55 was subsequently disturbed - by those cutting the tomb of Ramesses IX, who had detected the presence of a lost tomb through the hollow knocking of their chisels; and where (if James Harris is correct in his identification) the mummy of Tiye finally ended up - in the guise of the Elder Lady in the tomb of Amenhotep II, seen here.
Many problems of course remain. Why, for example, was Akhenaten interred in a coffin which had originally been prepared for his secondary wife Kiya? And what had happened to Kiya herself? By what miracle did Tomb 55 escape the attentions of the commissions charged with dismantling the royal necropolis at the end of the second millennium BC? And, if the body from KV55 is that of Akhenaten, where was Smenkhkare buried? These are questions to which we’ll return during the course of this afternoon.
Thank you.
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