 The Valley of the Kings, situated in the Theban desert some 350 miles south of modern Cairo, is perhaps the most famous cemetery in the world. Once, more than three thousand years ago, its cliffs contained the greatest concentration of bullion-rich burials the world has ever seen; and from the start of the 19th century, scholars and adventurers were drawn to it like bees to a honeypot. All were looking for hidden tombs - and some would find them. Giovanni Battista Belzoni, ‘the Patagonian Sampson’, started the ball rolling in 1816 with the discovery of a mere six - or eight, depending on how one is counting. While between 1898 and 1915, first the Frenchman Victor Loret and later the American Theodore Davis would expand the total by a further 40 burials and pits. Their successor, Howard Carter, found only one - but that was Tutankhamun. The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb was an awesome event, and the story bears retelling.
It was early in the evening of 26 November 1922 when Carter and his sponsor, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, pushed a lighted candle through a hole in the Antechamber’s sealed doorway. `At first I could see nothing’, Carter wrote, ‘the hot air escaping from the chamber caused the candle to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist: strange animals, statues, and gold - everywhere the glint of gold ... When Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, “Can you see anything?” it was all I could do to get out the words, “Yes, Wonderful things”.’
Carter’s new tomb turned out to be the greatest archaeological discovery the world has ever seen--a tomb filled with the riches of a king who had lived and died during one of the most magnificent periods of Egyptian history. When it is recognized that the tomb had been robbed not just once in antiquity but twice, the extent of pharaoh’s wealth becomes apparent; the activities of the thieves had made hardly a dent. So rich was the burial that Carter now had ten years of hard work ahead of him before the small, tightly packed tomb was fully emptied. For future exploration in the Valley of the Kings, however, Carter’s magnificent find seemed to sound a death knell. With all of Egypt’s kings now accounted for, everyone assumed the Valley to be dug out. Scholars who showed any interest at all in the site (and few did) turned their attention to the documentation and re-clearance of those burials already to hand; the search for new tombs, it seemed, was over. It remained over until 1998 when the Amarna Royal Tombs Project was given permission to take up where Carter had left off, and the explanation of why we should have wished to do so is a complicated one. It involves some history and a close scrutiny of the two Amarna-period burials so far identified in the Valley of the Kings - Tutankhamun, and KV55.
The story begins far from Thebes, around three thousand five hundred years ago, with the birth of a royal child. Tutankhaten, as this child was known, was son of king Akhenaten, the heretic who had abandoned Egypt’s traditional religion to force upon his subjects the worship of a single god - the solar disc, or Aten. As an appropriate cult centre for his god, Akhenaten had established a new city at the site of el-Amarna, mid way between modern Cairo and Luxor. This foundation was known as Akhetaten, ‘Horizon of the Aten’. It was a city created from nothing and intended to flourish for eternity. Thebes and the Valley of the Kings, burial place of his ancestors, were forgotten, and preparations soon under way for Akhenaten and his family to be buried in a single, complex tomb in el-Amarna’s eastern cliffs.
As things turned out, Akhenaten’s Amarna dream would endure for no more than a dozen years, and before the end it appears that the king had chosen to share the throne with his principal queen, Nefertiti. As co-regent Nefertiti adopted a kingly name: Ankhkheprure Nefernefruaten. And when Akhenaten died, during his 17th regnal year, I believe that Nefertiti succeeded as independent pharaoh, her name now changed to Ankhkheprure Smenkhkare.
Nefertiti had provided her king only with daughters, with Tutankhaten, Akhenaten’s heir, the child of a shadowy lesser wife - Kiya. For a brief moment, as mother of the heir, Kiya outshone Nefertiti - but then she disappears - victim, perhaps, of Nefertiti’s jealousy, or simply dying in childbirth as a scene in the Amarna royal tomb might suggest. With Akhenaten’s own death in the 17th year of his reign, power passed directly to Nefertiti; Tutankhaten was side-stepped and suppressed - in the same way that Queen Hatshepsut had suppressed her step-son, Tuthmosis III, over a century before. But Akhenaten’s widow was destined to hold on to power for a short time only. Nefertiti’s fall came not long after, and was dramatic. We know the details thanks to a find made a hundred years ago in modern Turkey, at Boghaz Koy, site of the ancient Hittite capital - a clay tablet inscribed with the annals of an ancient Hittite king, Suppiluliuma, pharaoh’s powerful rival in the Near East at this time. The text recalls that the Egyptian queen had sued for peace - but this was to be no ordinary peace: ‘My husband has died’ Nefertiti wrote, ‘and a son I have not ... If you give me a son of yours, I will make him my husband’.
It was an extraordinary offer, and Suppiluliuma was naturally suspicious. But the Egyptian queen wrote again, and this time a Hittite prince, Zannanza, was duly despatched - only to be murdered en route to Egypt. Shortly after Nefertiti-Smenkhkare disappears from view, doubtless as a result of her treason, and was buried either close to Kiya, in the family vault at el-Amarna, or more likely in an independent tomb at Thebes. Tutankhaten, still a small child, comes to power at last.
Tutankhaten is of course better known to us today by the later form of his name, Tutankhamun, and his reign proved a busy one. There was much damage to be repaired following the persecutions of Akhenaten, and much money to be spent on restoring the old and neglected traditional cults. In reality, little of this fell to Tutankhamun’s direct responsibility: as a mere child he made none of the decisions. Power was vested firmly in the hands of his advisers, and most powerful of these was the mysterious god’s father Ay - not improbably Nefertiti’s father. All went well until Tutankhamun reached adolescence, when he died. According to some, the king’s skull shows damage consistent with a blow to the head. Perhaps the boy was murdered, and perhaps Ay, a man with more to gain than most, was behind the plot. Perhaps Tutankhamun had begun to have a mind of his own and was turning out truly to be his father’s son, with views and a wilfulness just as threatening.
Whatever the truth of the matter, with the young king dead Ay was faced with a serious dilemma. Because of pharaoh’s youth, no funerary arrangements had yet seriously been set in train; but, in order to succeed as king, Ay was obliged by ritual and tradition to provide his predecessor with a proper burial. The situation, we may guess, was further complicated by a general lack of funds - Akhenaten’s profligacy and the work of restoration under Tutankhamun had, we may guess, effectively emptied the royal coffers.
Finding a tomb for the young king was the first and easiest problem to solve, with a small, private sepulchre in the Valley of the Kings, KV62, hastily adapted and pressed into service. With what, though - in the mere seventy days available between death, mummification and burial - was Ay going to fill it? This is the crux - and the solution Ay came up with was an imaginative one. A close inspection of the treasures of Tutankhamun’s tomb reveals the startling fact that only the smallest proportion had ever been prepared with him in mind; the bulk of the boy king’s burial equipment was secondhand. Egyptologists have long recognized that the tomb contained a few intrusive objects of this sort, but the extent of the recycling proves to be much greater than previously thought - and for the reason that the evidence of re-use has in most cases been skilfully concealed. Tutankhamun’s ‘recycling’ of old funerary gear reveals itself in a variety of ways:
- in the over-provision of certain classes of burial equipment - such as this ‘extra’ image of a striding king, a statue of a type already represented in the tomb by a matching pair;
- it shows itself also in certain inappropriately-female physical characteristics among the burial’s various sculptures - as here in another royal image of gilded wood, with female (and not simply Amarna-style) breasts; and here in the obvious feminine line of the hips of this large shabti figure.
Re-use is revealed too:
- by the occasional presence of the original owner’s name - as in this ink ownership docket of Akhenaten on a shawl employed to wrap one of the tomb’s divine images;
- and by the insertion into an existing text of a new name - as demonstrated here in an altered pectoral (whose epithet HqA nfr suggests original ownership by Akhenaten); or here in one of the composite bows named as having originally been prepared for Ankhkheprure Nefernefruaten.
Reuse is further revealed
- by inappropriate facial features - seen most strikingly in the second coffin, its en suite canopic coffinettes, and the canopic stoppers;
- and finally by a complete physical reworking of objects which is today barely discernible - most dramatic of all, the apparent insertion of an entirely new face in Tutankhamun’s gold head-piece (where traces of the adaptation are clearly visible on the inner surface) and in the king’s outer coffin (which wears a unique type of wig otherwise sported only by Akhenaten himself).
If we take a closer look at Tutankhamun’s ‘core’ burial equipment - those items associated with the body itself - the extent of this reuse of older funerary material will become apparent; for here it is possible to detect clear evidence of substantive change in a staggering eighty percent of the pieces:
- in the second of the king’s four large, gilded shrines, where the cartouches have clearly been replaced;
- in the sarcophagus, which has been subjected to quite radical alterations in design;
- in the outer anthropoid coffin, with the strong possibility of a replacement face, as we have considered;
- in the second anthropoid coffin, the face of which is quite inappropriate for Tutankhamun, as already noted, and which displays clearly replaced cartouches;
- in the inner, gold anthropoid coffin, with its otherwise inexplicable alterations in surface design;
- in the gold mask, with clear evidence of a replacement face having been soldered in;
- and in various of the trappings of the mummy, where the names of the original owner are still visible or have clearly been replaced.
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Carter’s tomb, it turns out, contained not the treasures of Tutankhamun at all, but the treasures of the king’s ancestors. But how, practically, did Ay come by these items? To answer this, we need to look at another tomb in the Valley.
Tomb 55, as it is generally known, was discovered by Theodore Davis in 1907, just across the path from where Carnarvon and Carter were to dig up Tutankhamun fifteen years later. It proved a puzzle from the very start, containing a confused jumble of burial furniture belonging to a range of Amarna-period royals and the single mummy of a 35 years old + man.
If we take a close, systematic look at the deposit, however, four principal items or groups of items may be isolated.
The first group comprises:
1) the rotted remains of an exquisite coffin. As we now know from the distinctive formulae of its inscriptions, this coffin had originally been prepared for Akhenaten’s secondary wife, Kiya. It had subsequently been altered for the use of a king who may be identified from the epithets as Akhenaten himself; and it was finally vandalised in antiquity by ripping away this king’s portrait mask and excising his cartouches. The aim of this action, clearly, was to deny both the occupant both identity and the prospect of any future well-being;
2) a set of four alabaster canopic jars (two seen here), with stoppers carved to match the coffin. The text panels of the jars had originally carried the name of Kiya, and had been erased for practical reasons to make them suitable for reuse within KV55, presumably by Akhenaten;
3) a set of four ‘magical bricks’ of mud, whose incised spells still preserve the cartouche of their owner, Akhenaten.
The tomb’s second grouping consists of the dismantled panels of a large sepulchral shrine of gilded wood, inscribed for Queen Tiye, widow of Amenophis III and Akhenaten’s mother.
The fragmentary wall decoration and the shattered remnants of their sarcophagi in the great royal tomb at el-Amarna tell us that both Tiye and Akhenaten had originally been buried in that tomb, side by side in the principal burial chamber. Tomb 55 at Thebes was thus clearly a reburial of the two royals, in which they occupied within the chamber the same respective positions as they had occupied at el-Amarna.
The date of this transfer we can establish from several small seal impressions recovered from the Tomb 55 floor debris, the latest of which bear the cartouches of Tutankhamun.
To establish precisely how the move from el-Amarna was managed we must refer to the Tutankhamun find and Tomb 55 deposits in combination. And we can deduce from this combined evidence that the Amarna dead had been brought to Thebes, stripped, and their funerary equipment pooled; that this material was then reallocated for the use of Tutankhamun; and that what was left over was then redistributed again between the original owners.
As an example, consider Tutankhamun’s coffins. Close scrutiny of Tutankhamun’s burial reveals that at least one of Akhenaten’s coffins - the outermost - was taken over at this time by the boy-king; while the evidence from Tomb 55 reveals that the heretic was not left naked, but furnished with a replacement from the nest of coffins belonging to Kiya.
For Egyptologists, the process of use and reuse is not entirely unfamiliar: indeed, it was destined to be repeated three centuries later when the Valley of the Kings itself was dismantled, the royal mummies cached, and a selection of their tomb contents taken over for the burials of the 21st Dynasty kings at Tanis.
What we see in Tomb 55 and Tutankhamun’s burial, in short, is the result of Ay’s pragmatic decision to strip the Amarna royal dead of their funerary equipment in order to prepare an appropriate burial for Tutankhamun. And Ay’s strategem has interesting ramifications for Egyptology - and particularly for ARTP - today. For, since the burial equipment of both Kiya and Nefertiti had been available for re-allocation at Thebes in the immediate post-Amarna period, it follows that the bodies of these two queens must have been present at Thebes also.
Where are they now? On the model of Tomb 55, the likelihood is that these queenly bodies, partially re-equipped, were re-interred in small tombs in the Valley of the Kings. If these deductions are correct, then the Valley of the Kings reburials of Nefertiti, Kiya and other members of the Amarna crew still await discovery or identification - and it is for evidence of these reburials that ARTP is embarked upon its current quest.
Having identified our quarry, where to look? The Valley of the Kings is a large site, but the central part, in the general area of Tutankhamun’s tomb and KV55, seemed to us a likely spot. And so here, at the very point where Howard Carter had left off in 1922 - a restricted area between The Gold Tomb (KV 56) and the tomb of Ramesses VI (KV 9) - ARTP began to dig. It was a site already highlighted as interesting by an American sonar-survey in the 1970s which had revealed two unexplained ‘anomalies’. Our own observation, that the ground plans of KV 56 and Tutankhamun appeared deliberately to avoid the area, only heightened the mystery and the site’s appeal.
Four years on, and as many metres down, we are still digging at this site, and at three others within our concession - which currently extends from KV61 on the west to KV55 on the east, and from Tutankhamun in the north to Ramesses I in the south. And we have been surprised at what has been revealed.
The Project’s first four seasons have confirmed that the Valley of the Kings remains a site of the greatest archaeological potential and importance. They underscore the absolute necessity of slow, patient and thorough work employing the best modern archaeological technique to salvage what little still remains. It is clear that rapid and poorly supervised ‘clearances’ like those tolerated in the past must now be condemned.
Our understanding of the Valley of the Kings and of its employment and development have been greatly enhanced by four basic ARTP discoveries.
First, our work to date shows conclusively that the Valley in antiquity bore little physical resemblance to the site we see now. In antiquity the ground level was in places as much as 4 metres lower than it currently stands, with the tomb entrances situated significantly higher in the cliff face, safe from the danger of occasional flash floods. The tomb of Amenophis III in the West Valley gives a good impression of the original, ancient setting. To prevent future flood damage, this ancient landscape is something which, in the principal Valley, hand in hand with controlled and detailed excavation, we should now be working to reinstate.
Secondly, we have discovered that the interior of the Valley, at the ancient ground level, seems to have been divided into a series of self-contained sectors by several naturally occurring ‘walls’ - as we now propose, the famous (but previously unexplained) ‘five walls of the Valley’. The best known of these walls is that barrier formerly located at the entrance to the Valley, which was dynamited years ago to allow easier tourist access. A second ‘wall’ was located last year beneath the tourist path on our Site 4, complete with its protective rock-cut shrine, and we may assume that there are similar natural barriers still waiting to be uncovered at other points beneath the scree.
Thirdly, we have found that significant areas of the Valley were extensively occupied by workmen’s settlement, so much so that the site was at certain times in antiquity a veritable village, buzzing with activity - indeed, very much like the atmosphere today.
And finally, and most excitingly, we have discovered the significant fact that beneath the rubble the Valley is arranged in a series of steps into which the tombs were dug. Of these steps, it would seem that only the topmost has been systematically investigated; the entrance to the tomb of Tutankhamun, significantly, was located in a second, lower layer which has not otherwise been explored. The implication of this is that there are more tombs to be discovered in the Valley, albeit tombs of lesser royalty or high-ranking officials rather than kings, most of whom are now accounted for.
Of specific finds made in the course of our work there have been many, but the following, because of their potential for the future, may be noted.
First, ARTP’s work each season has brought to light a mass of unrecorded hieratic graffiti. Of these, none is more suggestive than two on the newly exposed cliff between KV56 and the tomb of Ramesses VI. These contain the name and title of the late 20th Dynasty scribe Wennefer. Curiously, Wennefer’s modest graffiti seem to be restricted to one particular stretch of gebel between the tomb of Amenophis II and the tomb of Ramesses VI. What is interesting is the fact that the man’s texts occur only above the entrances to tombs - the great tombs of Amenophis II (KV35) and Horemheb (KV57), and the adjacent shaft-tombs KV56 and KV58. If, as seems likely, Wennefer had been progressing down the Valley, locating from an administrative papyrus buried tombs, then the presence on our Site 1 of two additional graffiti may indicate the presence of two further tombs - on a site where sonar anomalies have been noted. Owing to the Valley’s stepped formation, the mystery of Wennefer’s graffiti can only be resolved when we are able to investigate beneath the adjacent tourist path - which, thanks to the generous loan of a bridge by Kajima Corporation of Japan to take tourist traffic, is now a viable proposition for the future.
Our second intriguing find is an ostracon bearing an ink-drawn cartouche of a previously unknown queen, Taiay, recovered from infill on Site 1 in 1999. Datewise, both the context and the quality of the drafting would suggest that the sketch had been prepared by a Ramessid master scribe - while the likely purpose will have been to serve as reference for workers decorating a tomb wall. If so, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that preparations had been under way to inter Queen Taiay somewhere in the vicinity - either in a known tomb whose decoration is now damaged at the crucial point or, more dramatically, in a tomb which is still waiting to be found. Again, our future excavations beside Site 1, beneath the tourist path, will hopefully provide a more definite answer.
The foregoing amply demonstrates, I trust, that the Amarna Royal Tombs Project, despite its name, is committed to the responsible excavation, recording and preservation of all periods of the site’s occupation - not merely the late 18th Dynasty phases. But the principal avowed aim of the project is the recovery of information on the Amarna era. What of Amarna-period finds? What, if anything, has ARTP brought to light from this fascinating period? You have been patient enough. We’ll turn now to one of the most surprising results of our work so far.
Bordering ARTP’s original site on the west, with its entrance shaft located just across the path from the tomb of Ramesses III, lies the undecorated tomb KV 56, first discovered by Edward Ayrton, Theodore Davis’s excavator, in 1908. Its wide, vertical shaft, when cleared, gave access to a large single chamber, of irregular shape but with walls neatly and expertly chiselled in a manner reminiscent of Tomb 55 and the tomb of Tutankhamun.
The condition of this chamber Ayrton subsequently described in Davis’s official publication of the find as `entirely filled with washed-in debris`. On the west this fill lay to a depth of 41 inches, of which a shadowy ghost may still be seen on the western wall. As Ayrton discovered, this fill consisted of two distinct strata:
- the first, an upper layer of `rubbish`, consisting of “limestone chippings and mud, evidently washed in by water”;
- the second, a `lower level` of `lighter dust consolidated by water`, lay some 6-12 inches above floor level, and upon and within this layer the finds had been deposited.
It was obvious to the excavators that KV56 been deluged more than once in its history - indeed, its position at the base of not one but several watercourses makes it one of the most prone to flooding of any tomb in the Valley of the Kings.
Despite the damage to perishable materials which the prolonged pooling of water had caused over the centuries, what survived to be recovered by Ayrton from KV 56 was quite extraordinary. As listed and recorded in Davis’s report, the excavator’s haul consisted of a circlet, earrings, several finger-rings, bracelets, a series of necklace ornaments and amulets, a pair of silver `gloves` and a tiny silver sandal. In addition, from a mass of fragments, the excavator was able to reconstruct three vases of calcite and a single vessel of faience.
Within KV56 Ayrton had clearly stumbled upon a find of the highest importance, the names associated with this assemblage being those of pharaoh Seti II and and the later-ruling Queen Tawosret. For Gaston Maspero, however, Director of the Cairo Museum, this was not a tomb proper, but merely a cache of materials salvaged from the burial equipment of Tawosret. Half a century later, Cyril Aldred came up with the current explanation - that Ayrton’s finds represented the remains of an essentially intact burial, that of a child, the organic components of which had rotted away to nothing.
Intrigued by the deposit, ARTP determined to take a closer look at the tomb and, from what the excavators might have missed, try to learn a little more about its original date and employment.
We began our investigation at the end of 1998. Our initial survey revealed that, since the discovery 90 years previously, further deposits of mud had built up close to the entrance within the tomb’s single chamber. These were now topped by a mass of post-1908 debris including a dead dog, shattered photographic plates, dozens of modern plastic water bottles - and scorpions. Further into the tomb, these modern layers petered out, to reveal the central space taken up by a quantity of rough limestone blocks - seemingly the remains of the original blocking of the tomb, which Ayrton had left in the tomb rather than trouble to remove.
A systematic re-excavation of the tomb was begun in the winter of 1999, with the chamber floor divided into a series of rectangular areas influenced by the chamber shape. Each of these areas was excavated in 5 cm deep layers, and each basket of material was carefully examined on the surface first with wide and then with narrow mesh sieves. The work was slow and painstaking, and would not be completed until spring 2002.
Though it proved an unbelievably dirty job, we would be well rewarded for our efforts. A number of interesting strays from the Davis burial were brought to light, including many faience wig-curls and a mass of gold foil similar to those fragments recovered by Ayrton and assigned by Aldred to the decayed coffin. Much of the gold was still embedded within chunks of the rock-hard mud matrix from which Ayrton had extracted the treasure in 1908. His men, after a cursory perusal, had dumped the chunks on the east side of the chamber as they were released from the matrix. In order that nothing should be missed during the modern reclearance, we reduced each of these ‘nuggets’ to mud by extended soaking in water, and many more pieces of crumpled gold foil were recovered as a result of the effort.
Virtually all of these pieces of gold were tissue paper-thin, delicate to the touch, lacking any decoration and not at all diagnostic--with a few notable exceptions. Gently trowelling through the layers within the chamber at the end of November 2000, our second season of actual clearance in the tomb, our archaeologist noticed a familiar yellow glint which brought the work to a temporary halt. On closer examination, the glint proved to come from a substantial piece of ancient jewellery—a rectangular plaque of sheet gold, the outer surface chased with two vertical cartouches of Seti II. To each corner of the plaque had been soldered a gold ring, and we recognized it at once as one of several similar pieces recovered by Ayrton in 1908 and now on display in the Cairo Museum. Clearly intended for funerary use, these plaques represent elements from the suspension chain of a pectoral ornament. Sadly, though, Ayrton and Davis recovered no such piece of jewellery - nor, despite our close sieving of the tomb debris, did we. Other jewellery elements were found, however - including beads and amulets.
All the time we worked we were turning over in our minds the peculiar architecture of this tomb. Had it actually been prepared for the late 19th Dynasty child-burial Davis found? The simple stratigraphy noted by Davis suggested not, and the evidence we have been able to recover during our re-clearance confirms us in that view.
The evidence in question is slight, but nonetheless highly suggestive: a canopic jar fragment of extremely fine quality and of the same distinctive milky-grey alabaster as the famous canopic jars from Tomb 55. More significant than the material, though, is the fact that a section of the outer surface of the KV56 jar has been systematically ground away - just like the Tomb 55 jars, where the name and titulary of their first owner, Kiya, had been deliberately removed to render the jars suitable for re-employment by Akhenaten himself. On analogy with the Tomb 55 jars, therefore, our fragment, too, was probably made for an Amarna notable and later reemployed for someone else - though sadly no traces of an original inscription may be discerned; nor, regrettably, has the fragment a wholly secure archaeological context, since it was found mixed in with the surface rubble of the chamber, and could, conceivably, have been washed into the tomb during a flash flood.
Nevertheless, we now believe, on the basis of the cutting and an analysis of the architecture that KV 56 is a tomb of 18th Dynasty rather than 19th Dynasty origin. Look at the present ground-plan, and at our suggested reconstruction of its intended form - a single pillar, as I have shown elsewhere, being the hallmark of an 18th Dynasty queen’s burial chamber. And recall also the similarities in cutting with Tomb 55 and Tutankhamun.
Despite the tantalising nature of our evidence, therefore, the possibility exists that KV56, the Gold Tomb, might actually be one of the Amarna-period tombs we set out to find, cut for the reburial of one of Akhenaten’s queens. Let us speculate on which. Nefertiti is clearly a candidate - though the shaft dimensions seem insufficient to have permitted access to a full set of coregent’s funerary shrines. There is also the fact that no fragments of Nefertiti’s final funerary equipment are known - which ought to be the case if her tomb had been cleared out during the 19th Dynasty.
Kiya is another candidate, and perhaps a more convincing one: the shaft of KV56 offers a perfect fit for the single shrine with which queens at this period seem to have been equipped; while there exists the intriguing thought that fragments of three ointment pots now in London and New York, inscribed with Kiya’s funerary titulary, might in some way be associated. Without any indication of provenance, but probably from Thebes, could they in fact have been displaced from KV56 when the tomb was emptied for reuse under Seti II?
Many questions, several possibilities, but as yet nothing definite. In order fully to fully convince ourselves, and certainly our colleagues, of Amarna-period activity on the site it was clear we needed something more. And, as if to order, this is what turned up as we continued our digging east of the KV56 shaft entrance at the end of the 2000 season.
The first Amarna pieces to come to light were fragments of pottery - blue-painted sherds, and significantly from a massive funerary storage jar of the late 18th Dynasty. Not much to look at, perhaps, but immensely welcome and crucially important for confirming the date of the relatively object-free lower levels adjacent to KV56. Our second find was rather more dramatic, and came in the same area a day or two later, just as we were contemplating closing down for the season.
This was a large slab of limestone, one among a million; but this particular rock was special. When we turned it over, it drew an audible gasp from everyone present: for here before us, sketched in charcoal on an unexpectedly large scale, was the unmistakable figure of an Amarna priest with shaven head, scrawny neck and pot belly, wearing characteristic Amarna dress, and with his arms raised in adoration. A sketch far more at home among the private tombs at el-Amarna than in the Valley of the Kings at Thebes.
Now since Amarna-period objects are exceptionally rare in the Valley, the finding of an Amarna-period canopic jar in KV56 and an Amarna-style ostracon and pottery in undisturbed layers adjacent to the tomb and not far distant from the burial of Tutankhamun and Tomb 55 represents an interesting and important development - the first clear evidence of significant late 18th Dynasty activity on ARTP’s primary site. Since it confirms the basic correctness of our suppositions so far, it is an immensely encouraging spur to further work in the area - for if we do now have Kiya, or the remains of her burial, in an area littered with Amarna material, then Nefertiti and Meketaten are presumably close by also.
The next seasons, I am certain, have many more `wonderful things` in store.
Thank you.
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