 The Valley of the Kings, situated in the Theban desert cliffs some 350 miles south of modern Cairo, is perhaps the most famous cemetery site in the world--and rightly so. Once, more than three thousand years ago, its desert cliffs contained the greatest concentration of bullion-rich burials the world has ever seen; and since the start of the 19th century, scholars and adventurers have been drawn to it like bees to the proverbial honeypot. All were looking for hidden tombs--and some would find them.
Gianbattista 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 supplement the growing total with the remains of a further 40 burials and pits. Their successor, Howard Carter, found only the one.
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 the hole they had made in the still-sealed blocking.
’At first I could see nothing’, Carter later 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 one tomb turned out to be the greatest archaeological discovery the world has ever seen--a tomb filled with the unparallelled riches of a king who had lived and died during one of the most magnificent periods of Egyptian history. The extent of pharaoh’s buried wealth becomes apparent when it is recognized that the tomb had been robbed not just once in antiquity but twice; the activities of the thieves made hardly a dent. And when it is realized that Carter now had ten years of hard work ahead of him before the tomb was fully emptied.
By 1922, Egyptology had been experiencing a steady, popular decline for some years. Tutankhamun’s tomb would change all that for good, with the subject now generally recognized as one of the more glamorous branches of archaeology. But for exploration in the Valley of the Kings itself, Carter’s magnificent find proved the kiss of death. That, it seemed, was that. With all of Egypt’s kings now accounted for, everyone assumed the Valley to be dug out. Scholars, if they showed any interest in the site at all, turned their attention to the documentation and re-excavation of those burials already to hand; the search for new tombs, it seemed, was over. Or at least it was over—until, at the end of 1998, the Amarna Royal Tombs Project was given permission to continue where Carter had left off.
Why should we wish to revisit this supposedly worked-out cemetery-site?
The story is a complicated one, and begins far from Thebes, around three thousand five hundred years ago, with the birth of a royal child. Tutankhaten, as this child was originally known, was son of the heretic king Akhenaten, who had abandoned Egypt’s traditional religion to force upon his subjects the worship of a single god—the solar disc, or Aten. As a suitable 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’, a city created from nothing and intended to flourish for eternity. The Valley of the Kings, burial place of Akhenaten’s ancestors, was forgotten. Preparations were made for Egypt’s royal dead to be buried henceforth in a single but complex tomb on el-Amarna’s east bank as the literal focus of pharaoh’s new cult.
As things turned out, Akhenaten’s dream was to endure for no more than a dozen years, and by the end the king had chosen to share the throne with his beautiful queen, Nefertiti. As co-regent, Nefertiti adopted a kingly name: Ankhkheprure Nefernefruaten. And when Akhenaten died, during his 17th regnal year, Nefertiti seems to have succeeded to the throne in her own right under the name Ankhkheprure Smenkhkare. The old view, by which ‘Smenkhkare’ was recognized as a young man, perhaps Akhenaten’s elder son, is today strongly challenged. So far as we can tell, Nefertiti had provided her king only with daughters.
Tutankhaten, the future Tutankhamun, seems to have been the child of a shadowy lesser wife--the lady Kiya, whose prominence at court for a brief moment outshone even pharaoh’s principal queen. But then Kiya disappears--victim, perhaps, of the jealous Nefertiti, or simply dying in childbirth as a scene in the Amarna royal tomb might suggest.
The fate of Kiya’s son during the interval between his birth around year 12 of Akhenaten’s reign and his accession some five to seven years later is unknown. Though Tutankhaten was his father’s rightful heir, power for the moment was firmly in the hands of Nefertiti, the woman manipulating her ward in the same way that Queen Hatshepsut had manipulated her step-son, Tuthmosis III, over a century before. But Akhenaten’s widow would not hold on to power for very long.
What we know of Nefertiti’s fall we know thanks to a find made a hundred years ago in distant Anatolia—modern Turkey—at Boghaz Koy, site of the ancient Hittite capital. The find was a clay tablet inscribed with the annals of an ancient Hittite king, Suppiluliuma, pharaoh’s powerful rival in the Near East at this time. And the text recalls how the Egyptian queen had sued for peace--but no ordinary peace: ‘My husband has died’ the queen wrote, ‘and a son I have not ... If you give me a son of yours, I will make him my husband’.
In the older histories the royal lady is identified as Ankhesenamun, the newly bereaved consort of Tutankhamun himself. But there are strong reasons for doubting the identification, and for recognizing in this text a reference to the period immediately after Akhenaten’s death.
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It was, in any case, 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. Nefertiti-Smenkhkare disappears from view, doubtless as a result of her treason. Buried either close to Kiya, in the family vault at el-Amarna, or in an independent tomb in the Thebes Akhenaten’s widow had by now made her home, Tutankhaten, still a small child, comes to power at last.
The boy-king’s reign was 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 actual fact, little of this fell to pharaoh’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 definitely, but not improbably, Nefertiti’s father.
All went well until pharaoh—his name now fluctuating between Tutankhaten and Tutankhamun to reflect his new accommodation of the old religion—reached adolescence. And then—the end—Tutankhamun is dead. According to some, the king’s skull shows damage consistent with a blow to the head. Quite likely the boy was murdered—and probably Ay, a man with more to gain than most, was behind the plot. As to motive, we can only speculate: as an adolescent, clearly, he had begun to have a mind of his own. And perhaps he was turning out truly to be his father’s son, with views and a wilfulness just as dangerous.
But with Tutankhamun dead, Ay was faced with a serious dilemma. Because of pharaoh’s youth, no funerary arrangements had yet 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 we may guess had emptied the royal coffers.
Finding a tomb was the first and easiest part, with a small, private sepulchre in the Valley of the Kings hastily adapted and pressed into service. But how—in the seventy days available between death, mummification and burial—was Ay going to fill it?
The answer Ay came up with was an imaginative one, as a close scrutiny of Tutankhamun’s treasures reveals: for it is now abundantly clear that only the smallest proportion of Tutankhamun’s treasures had ever been prepared with him in mind; the bulk of pharaoh’s burial equipment, in other words, was second hand. 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;
- and 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 also:
- 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;
- by the insertion into an existing text of a new name—as demonstrated here in an altered pectoral (which, as the epithet HqA nfr suggests, was originally made for Akhenaten); or here in one of the composite bows originally prepared for Ankhkheprure Nefernefruaten;
- by inappropriate facial features—seen most strikingly in the second coffin, its en suite canopic coffinettes, and the canopic stoppers;
- and finally by complete physical reworking of an object, today barely discernible—most dramatically of all, with the apparent insertion of an entirely new face both in Tutankhamun’s gold head-piece (where traces of the adaptation are clearly visible on the inner surface) and in the case of the king’s outer coffin (which wears a unique type of wig otherwise sported only by Akhenaten himself).
To appreciate how extensive was Tutankhamun’s takeover of older material, we need to take a closer look at the ‘core’ burial equipment—those items associated with the body itself. Here, it is possible to detect clear evidence of substantive change in a staggering eighty percent of the pieces, most notably:
- 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 alteration in the 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 evidence for a replaced face;
- and in various of the trappings of the mummy, where the names of the original owner are still clearly in evidence or have been replaced.
Tutankhamun’s treasures, it turns out, are not his at all, but the treasures of his ancestors.
How, practically, did Ay come by these items? To understand 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. Tomb 55 proved a puzzle from the very start, containing a confused jumble of burial furniture belonging to a range of Amarna-period royals, and a mummy whose age and sex over the years has seemed to change with the weather. More has been written on Tomb 55 than probably any discovery in the history of Egyptian archaeology, and little consensus has yet been reached. But let’s take a closer look.
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Among the debris of the tomb’s single chamber, four principal items or groups of items may be recognized:
- first, the rotted remains of an exquisite coffin. As we now know from the distinctive formulae of its inscriptions, this had originally been prepared for Akhenaten’s secondary wife, Kiya. It has subsequently been altered for kingly use, and was finally vandalised in antiquity by ripping away its portrait mask and by cutting out its cartouches. The aim of this action, clearly, was to deny both the final occupant his identity and the prospect of any future well-being;
- second were the dismantled panels of a large sepulchral shrine of gilded wood, inscribed for Queen Tiye, widow of Amenophis III and Akhenaten’s mother. Here the images and cartouches which had been erased were those of Akhenaten;
- third, 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 not at the same time as the damage done to the coffin and shrine but prior to their reburial within KV55;
- fourth was a set of four ‘magical bricks’ of mud, the incised spells carried by at least two of these incorporating the cartouche of their intended owner, Akhenaten.
Close scrutiny of the layout of Tomb 55 as found reveals that the single chamber originally contained two burials, positioned side by side. One of these—the mummy in the coffin—is variously identified as a male between 25 and 35+ years of age. Though the older view has it that these are the remains of Tutankhamun’s putative elder brother, Smenkhkare, the archaeology argues strongly that the Tomb 55 body is that of Akhenaten himself. The identification seems to be confirmed by the name on the magical bricks which had anciently been arranged around the coffined body and to identify and protect it. A second burial within this tomb--that of Queen Tiye--is attested by the dismantled sections of her large funerary shrine. The lady’s body had evidently been removed when the deposit was inadvertently stumbled upon by 29th Dynasty workers quarrying the overlying tomb of Ramesses IX.
So what does Tomb 55 tell us? Having established the second-hand origin of much of Tutankhamun’s burial equipment, the significance of Tomb 55 at last comes into focus.
First of all, the fragmentary wall decoration and the shattered remnants of their sarcophagi in the great royal tomb tell us that both Tiye and Akhenaten were originally buried at el-Amarna, side by side in the principal burial chamber. Tomb 55, therefore, was a reburial of the two Amarna royals. And from the evidence of several small seal impressions recovered by Davis’s excavator from the Tomb 55 floor debris, we can establish that this transfer from Amarna to Thebes had been accomplished under Tutankhamun—or at least, before Ay had formally ascended the throne.
Secondly, the Tutankhamun find and Tomb 55 studied in combination reveal crucial details as to how this move was managed—and how, when the Amarna dead were brought to Thebes, they were stripped and their funerary equipment pooled and reallocated. (It was a process destined to be repeated three centuries later, when the Valley of the Kings itself was dismantled and much of its contents taken over for the burials of the 21st Dynasty kings at Tanis.) Tutankhamun’s burial reveals that at least one of Akhenaten’s coffins was lost at this time to the boy-king; while Tomb 55 demonstrates that the heretic was not left naked, but furnished with a replacement from the nest of coffins belonging to Kiya.
In short, what we see in Tomb 55 is the result of Ay’s pragmatic decision to strip the Amarna royal dead of their funerary tackle in order to prepare an appropriate burial for Tutankhamun. And this policy has interesting ramifications for Egyptology today. For, since the burial equipment of both Kiya (recovered from within Tomb 55) and Nefertiti (adapted for re-use in the tomb of Tutankhamun) had been available for re-allocation at Thebes, the bodies of these two queens must, in the immediate post-Amarna period, have been present at Thebes also; and, 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 this is so, then Nefertiti, Kiya and other members of the Amarna crew still await discovery--for not a trace of their reburial has yet come to light.
So much for our quarry—but where to look? The central part of the Valley seemed a likely spot. We decided to begin where Howard Carter had left off—in a restricted area between The Gold Tomb (KV 56) and the tomb of Ramesses VI (KV 9)—a site already highlighted by an American sonar-survey team in the 1970s on account of two unexplained ‘anomalies’. Our own observation that the ground plans of KV 56 and Tutankhamun appeared deliberately to avoid the area seemed only to heighten the mystery.
Three years later and 5 metres down we are still digging. I’ll be returning later to consider what from the Amarna era has so far been revealed to us; but before that we must consider what we’ve encountered, and learned, along the way.
Thank you.
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