 Within the space of a few weeks in 1998 ARTP had made an astonishing discovery: that the entire central area of the Valley beneath the modern tourist areas remained completely undisturbed. This was a revelation of the greatest possible significance, since it implied the survival of a priceless stratigraphy not just at a single point but across the Valley as a whole.
This stratigraphy, properly excavated, recorded and read, has the potential to permit a fuller understanding than Egyptologists could ever have dared hope for - of the processes of siting, quarrying and stocking the tombs, of planning and administering the workmen’s village which occupied the site in antiquity, and of concealing, robbing and subsequently dismantling the burials and their furnishings at the start of the first millennium BC.
Virtually overnight, thanks to ARTP’s initial soundings, the Valley of the Kings had been transformed from a cemetery which most Egyptologists believed worked-out to a site which was archaeologically intact and, treated with care, capable of yielding a full and eloquent context for its many orphaned tombs and individual artefacts.
By the end of our second season in 1999 ARTP had been able to take its conclusions one stage further. We could confirm not only that the central area of the Valley of the Kings was indeed intact but also that it was unique in form - that the Valley’s cliffs descended beneath the scree not in a gentle slope but in a series of abrupt, natural ‘shelves’, arranged one below the other, descending several metres down to the wadi floor (see photo right).
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The implications of this discovery were even more startling.
The bulk of the extant Valley burials had been found as a consequence of the excavating technique favoured by our nineteenth- and early twentieth-century predecessors – Giovanni Battista Belzoni, Victor Loret, Theodore Davis and Howard Carter. These excavators simply followed the route of any and every exposed cliff face, digging down until they either did or did not hit upon a shaft or buried tomb doorway cut into the uppermost of these shelves.
Tutankhamun’s tomb was different: it was uncovered not by the old hit-and-miss method but by Carter opening up to investigation a wider area of the Valley. This had revealed a tomb positioned not at the base of an exposed cliff face but on a lower shelf closer to the Valley centre - out of range of the early excavators.
For Carter this location explained why the boy-king had escaped detection for so long. What he seems to have overlooked, however, is that a much more dramatic inference could be drawn from this state of affairs.
For ARTP the combined evidence of excavation area 1 and the location of Tutankhamun’s tomb indicated that a second, and perhaps even a third, layer of the necropolis existed and remained wholly unexplored. Layers within which the discovery of further, essentially undisturbed burials might reasonably be anticipated.
(Continued)
(21/03/2006)
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