 The Amarna Royal Tombs Project first started digging in the central part of the Valley of the Kings in 1998, in search of fresh evidence of Amarna-period activity in the area. It’s been a busy five years since, and in this lecture I should like to outline the background, bring you up to date on results, and offer some thoughts on the future potential of the site in the light of what we’ve discovered so far. Before I begin, however, I should like to express my thanks to Professor Rosalie David for inviting me to talk to you this evening. Rosalie was my first supporter in Egyptology, and it was on a tour organized by her in 1973-4 that I first saw Egypt. It’s a pleasure to be able to thank her now for her encouragement and support 30 years ago, and to express my admiration for everything she has been able to achieve here in Manchester during the time she’s been here.
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(1) Now, the subject of our talk this evening—the Valley of the Kings, situated in the Theban desert some 350 miles south of modern Cairo and Egypt’s premier archaeological site. Its tombs—currently 62 in number, with a sprinkling of unnumbered pits—have been targeted for more than three thousand years by robbers, adventurers, explorers and archaeologists alike. All have come looking for treasure—and some have found it. (2) Giovanni Battista Belzoni in 1816-17, identified a total of eight new tombs, including that of Seti I; (3) between 1898 and 1899, Victor Loret numbered a further 16, including that of Thutmose III, the second royal cache in the tomb of Amenhotep II, and the well-preserved burial of Maiherperi. (4) While between 1902 and 1912 Theodore Davis expanded the total by a further 40 burials and pits, including the tombs of Thutmose IV, Horemheb, Yuya and Tjuyu and Tomb 55. (5) Davis’s successors, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter, seen here, were both less and more fortunate: they would find only one tomb—but that tomb was Tutankhamun’s.
(6) The discovery of Tutankhamun was an awesome event, and the story loses none of its excitement. Early in the evening of 26 November 1922 Carter and Carnarvon pushed a lighted candle through a hole in the Antechamber’s sealed doorway, to change our perception of ancient Egypt for good. Their brief verbal exchange is now famous: ‘Can you see anything?’ ‘Yes, Wonderful things … Everywhere the glint of gold.’
(7) Tutankhamun’s tomb turned out to be the greatest archaeological find the world has ever seen. For future exploration in the Valley of the Kings, however, it would sound a death knell: with virtually all of Egypt’s kings now accounted for, the Valley was assumed to be dug out. Those few scholars who showed any interest at all in the site focused their attention on documenting those burials already to hand; the search for new tombs, it seemed, was over. (8) And then, in 1998, the Amarna Royal Tombs Project started the ball rolling again. Why? Not on a mere whim, but in the belief that there was, in the Valley, something quite specific still to be found. This conclusion was based on a close examination of two of the site’s most famous tombs, Tutankhamun, and KV55—as I’ll explain.
(9) The intriguing feature of Tutankhamun’s tomb, though it is never commented upon, is one of straightforward contradiction. The contradiction is as follows: if Tutankhamun had died unexpectedly, before there was time to dig a full-sized tomb for him, how, in the available 70 days between death and burial, had it been possible for his successor Ay to prepare such a rich and extensive burial equipment? (10) The answer is an interesting and unexpected one. For as a close inspection of the Tutankhamun’s treasures reveals, only the smallest proportion of this funerary equipment had in fact been prepared with the boy-king in mind; the bulk of pharaoh’s burial equipment was second hand.
Tutankhamun’s ‘recycling’ of old funerary gear reveals itself in a variety of ways:
*we see it in the over-provision of certain classes of burial equipment--such as (11) this ‘extra’ image of a striding king, a statue of a type already represented in the tomb by a matching pair;
*we see it in certain inappropriately-female physical characteristics among the burial’s various sculptures— (12) here in another royal image of gilded wood, with female (and not simply Amarna-style) breasts; (13) and here in the obvious feminine line of the hips of this large shabti figure;
*we see reuse in the occasional presence of the original owner’s name— (14) as in this ink ownership docket of Akhenaten on a shawl employed to wrap one of the tomb’s divine images;
*and it is attested by the insertion into an existing text of Tutankhamun’s name— (15) as demonstrated here in an altered pectoral (whose epithet suggests original ownership by Akhenaten); or (16) here in a detail of one of the composite bows originally prepared for Akhenaten’s co-regent, Nefernefruaten.
*We see evidence of recycling, too, in certain inappropriate facial features— (17) most strikingly in the second coffin, (17a) its en suite canopic coffinettes, (18) and the canopic stoppers; this is not the face of Tutankhamun;
*and we see it too in the complete physical reworking of certain objects—(19) most dramatically of all, the apparent insertion of an entirely new face into Tutankhamun’s gold head-piece—(20) look here at the inner surface, where traces of the adaptation are clearly visible—and (21) in the king’s outer coffin (which wears a (22) unique type of wig otherwise sported only by Akhenaten himself).
The conclusion is inevitable: Carnarvon and Carter’s tomb contained not the treasures of Tutankhamun at all, but a rag-bag selection of second-hand goods. I first came to this realization in 1997, and it prompted me to look afresh at the whole problem. Under what circumstances, I wondered, might Ay have come by these items? The answer would in fact be revealed by another tomb in the Valley— (23) KV55, discovered by Theodore Davis in 1907, just across the path from where Tutankhamun would turn up some fifteen years later. (24) When found Tomb 55 contained a similarly confused jumble of burial furniture belonging to a range of Amarna-period royals, together with the mummy of a 35 years old + man. The find has puzzled Egyptologists for decades.
I have my own views on the Tomb 55 deposit, which may be familiar to you. If we take a close look at the burial, two distinct groups of material may be isolated:
*in the first group we have—
-first, (25) the remains of a coffin originally prepared for Akhenaten’s secondary wife, Kiya, which was later altered for use by Akhenaten himself;
second, (26) a set of alabaster canopic jars (two seen here), again prepared for Kiya and similarly reused, presumably for Akhenaten;
and third, (27) a set of four ‘magical bricks’ of mud, whose incised spells still preserve the cartouche of their owner, who is again Akhenaten.
*(28) As for the tomb’s second grouping, this consists of the dismantled elements of a large sepulchral shrine of gilded wood and other small items inscribed for Queen Tiye, Akhenaten’s mother.
So far as I can see, Tomb 55 represents a reburial of Akhenaten and Tiye following their transfer from their original place of burial at el-Amarna, occupying the same relative positions they had taken up in the principal chamber of the great royal tomb (29), seen here. (30) Significantly, the date of this transfer can be established from several small seal impressions recovered from the Tomb 55 floor debris—to the period before or immediately after Tutankhamun’s death.
(31) Read in combination, the Tutankhamun find and Tomb 55 reveal precisely how the move from el-Amarna was managed—by Ay. How the Amarna dead had been brought to Thebes, how they had been stripped, and how their funerary equipment pooled; how a proportion of this funerary equipment was then reallocated for the use of Tutankhamun; and how what was left over was redistributed again among its original owners.
As an illustration of the process, consider the coffins from these two tombs. (32) It appears that at least one of Akhenaten’s coffins—the outermost—was taken over for Tutankhamun’s use; while the evidence from Tomb 55 reveals that the original owner was not left naked but (33) furnished for his reburial within KV55 with a replacement from the nest of two or more coffins belonging to Kiya.
(34) What we see in KV55 and KV62, in short, is the result of a pragmatic decision on the part of Ay to strip the Amarna royal dead of their funerary equipment in order to prepare an appropriate burial for Tutankhamun—and what this discovery carries in its wake is interesting. (35) For if the burial equipment of both Kiya, seen here, and (36) Nefertiti, shown here, had been available for re-allocation at Thebes in the immediate post-Amarna period, then it follows that the bodies of these two queens must have been buried at Thebes also. The problem is—despite what one reads in the Sunday Times—nothing has yet turned up. And so it was for evidence of these queenly tombs that ARTP first began to dig.
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(37) But where to look for Akhenaten’s ladies? The Valley of the Kings is a large site, but the central part, in the general area of Tutankhamun’s tomb and KV55, has always been the most promising and was where Howard Carter left off in 1922. (38) Picking up where he had left off, therefore, in a restricted area between The Gold Tomb (KV 56) and the tomb of Ramesses VI, ARTP began to dig. It was a site already highlighted as interesting (39) by an American sonar-survey from the 1970s, which had revealed two unexplained ‘anomalies’ in the area. Our own observation, that the ground plans of KV 56 and Tutankhamun (40) appeared deliberately to avoid the site, only heightened the mystery and the site’s appeal.
(41) Four years on, and as many metres down, we are still digging at this site—Site 1—, 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 the archaeological riches which have been revealed have frankly surprised us.
(42) The Project’s first four seasons have demonstrated that the Valley of the Kings remains a site of the greatest archaeological potential and importance. But our work has underscored the extent of its previous abuse at the hands of treasure-hunters, and the absolute necessity today for slow, patient and thorough work (43) employing the best modern archaeological technique to salvage what evidence still remains. The less information which survives, clearly the more carefully a site has to be dug, and to simply vacuum-clean the interior of a long-known tomb, or dig out the walls of a workman’s hut, and collect and publish those identifiable odds and ends which happen to have been left behind is no longer enough.
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(44) No matter how disturbed a context may seem, evidence is there to establish details of occupation use and historical sequence, if one can be bothered to look—and it is the archaeologist’s prime responsibility to do everything he can to note and recover that data. It is a sobering fact that, at the current rate of change in Egypt, our generation may be the last in a position to do so.
(45) The richness of the Valley even extends to the site’s spoil heaps, which have a mass of information to yield since they are packed with materials whose nature and origins may with considerable confidence be ventured. ‘Uncontexted finds’ in a closed site such as the Valley of the Kings are demonstrably not the same as ‘uncontexted finds’ on less focused archaeological sites. They all have their story to tell.
(46) As an example, here is a carved wooden foot from the upper layers of our Site 1, discovered in 1998. This in fact neatly completes a wooden baboon statue in the British Museum, (47) a stray from Davis’s Horemheb excavations of 1908 which was acquired by Budge on the Luxor antiquities market a short time after. We were able to recognize the nature of our fragment; we were familiar with other material of that class which has been recovered from the Valley; by making a join we were able to augment our knowledge of the Valley’s archaeological history at a particular point in time—who dug what and dumped where; and by establishing the origins of that dump we have been able to provide a likely working context for other items found there. The moral must be, always do your homework—know what you’re digging up.
Our understanding of the Valley of the Kings and of its employment and development have been greatly enhanced by four basic discoveries made since 1998.
(48) First, ARTP’s 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 or 5 metres lower than it currently stands, with the tomb entrances situated significantly higher in the cliff face where they were safe from the waters of the occasional flash flood. (49) 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 we should now be working to reinstate—though because of the vast amount of archaeological data the overlying debris still contains, hand in hand with controlled and detailed excavation.
(50) Second, we have discovered that the interior of the Valley, at the ancient ground level, was not open but divided into a series of self-contained sectors by several naturally occurring ‘walls’—as I would suggest, the famous but previously unexplained ‘5 walls of the Valley’ frequently referred to in the Deir el-Medina texts. 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. (51) A second ‘wall’ was located last season beneath the tourist path on Site 4, complete with its protective rock-cut shrine, and we may assume that there are further natural barriers still waiting to be uncovered at other key points beneath the scree.
(52) Here’s another photograph of the shrine from last season, fully cleared. (53) And here’s a close-up of the painted limestone stela with man worshipping Meretseger which was found still in situ within.
(55) Third, we have found that very significant areas of the Valley were occupied by workmen’s settlement—so much so that the site was at certain times in antiquity a veritable village, buzzing with activity, very much like the atmosphere today.
(56) 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 so far 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 clear 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—up to a thousand items a season—but the following, because of their potential for the future, are particularly noteworthy.
(57) First, ARTP’s work each season has brought to light a mass of unrecorded hieratic graffiti. Of these graffiti, none is more suggestive than two on the cliff between KV56 and the tomb of Ramesses VI on Site 1, which were exposed in 1998. (58) These roughly scratched texts are short, containing nothing more than the name and title of a late 20th Dynasty scribe named Wennefer. What is interesting, though, is that Wennefer’s modest graffiti appear to be restricted to this one particular stretch of gebel in the Valley—(59) running between the tomb of Amenophis II and the tomb of Ramesses VI. And what is particularly curious is that the man’s other known texts occur only above the entrances to tombs—the great tombs of Amenophis II and Horemheb, 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, the existence on our Site 1 of two additional graffiti should indicate the presence of two further tombs—on a site, please recall, where sonar and now radar anomalies have been noted. (60) This is the spot. If there are further tombs at this point, then because of the Valley’s stepped formation the mystery will only be resolved when we are able to investigate beneath the adjacent tourist path. For a century and more nothing has been allowed to disrupt tourist access, and these paths remain unexplored, preserving the most crucially important archaeological data for the history of the Valley. They have to be excavated properly, and slowly—and thanks to the (61) generous loan by Kajima Corporation of Japan of a bridge to take tourist traffic, their investigation is now a viable proposition for the future.
(62) Ostraca have been frequent finds from the very beginning, (63) and I show two here as illustration. One particularly intriguing example is this (63a), recovered from infill on Site 1 in 1999. The name within the cartouche is that of a king’s wife and lady of the two lands named Taiay—who is otherwise completely unknown to history. 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, it is hoped that future excavations beside Site 1, beneath the tourist path, will provide a solution to the mystery.
(64) Inevitably, ARTP’s excavations have shed new and fascinating light on the activities of its predecessors in the field, and on more than one occasion. In the case of Howard Carter, for example, we have evidence that he rebuilt structures he had dismantled in order to investigate beneath, leaving tell-tale indicators for future excavators in the form of cigarette papers placed between the reconstructed wall courses.
(65) Of the great Giovanni Battista Belzoni’s activities, too, we have found interesting traces. Our investigation of the western end of Site 3 in 2000 proved devoid of any evidence of ancient occupation, but was curiously rich in a range of ‘stray’ finds of various dates—(66) including a cache of 18 bright blue faience shabti figures of Seti I, seen here before cleaning, and here after (66a) (66b), (66c). Less glamorous finds from this area included (66d) alabaster and wood (66e) shabtis of Ramesses III and other rulers, sarcophagus and canopic chest fragments of Ramesses III, Ramesses IV and Ramesses VI, (66f) this stela, and the remains of a 22nd Dynasty intrusive burial first observed within the tomb of Ramesses III by the French Expedition in 1799.
(66g) Significantly, several of the wooden shabtis showed evidence of burning; one had clearly been employed as a torch. This last reminded us that it was within the tomb of Ramesses III that Belzoni had begun his work of exploration in the Valley in 1816, successfully extracting the king’s finely decorated sarcophagus box (now in Paris) and its superb lid (now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). (66h) The possibility of a direct Belzoni link came into sharp focus with the discovery among the Site 3 debris of three fragmentary pipe bowls of red clay—bowls from pipes identical to those seen in contemporary engravings of the great explorer. Together these scraps suggested an interesting possibility: that the site of Belzoni’s camp was in fact close to the entrance of KV11—where it would have been natural for him to gather together anything portable he found elsewhere in the Valley. ARTP’s Site 3, it seems very likely, is where Belzoni sorted his loot before carrying off what he liked, discarding the remainder for us to rediscover two centuries later.
(67) It will be clear by now, 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? We’ll turn now to one of the most surprising results of our work so far.
(68) Bordering ARTP’s Site 1 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. (68a) Its wide, vertical shaft, when cleared, gave access to a large single chamber, of irregular shape but with walls neatly and accurately chiselled in a manner reminiscent of Tomb 55 and the tomb of Tutankhamun.
(69) The condition of this chamber Ayrton subsequently described in Davis’s official publication of the find as ‘entirely filled with washed-in debris’. 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’;
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--the second, a ‘lower level’ of ‘lighter dust consolidated by water’, lay some 6-12 inches above floor level, and upon this layer the finds had been deposited.
Despite the damage to perishable materials which prolonged pooling of water had over the centuries caused, 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 comprised a fabulous collection of gold and silver jewellery, the highlights of which were (70) a circlet, (71) a magnicent pair of pendant earrings, (72) several finger-rings, (73) a pair of embossed silver bracelets, (74) a pair of silver ‘gloves’ and (75) a tiny silver sandal. In addition, from a mass of fragments, (76) the excavator was able to reconstruct several vases of calcite and faience.
Ayrton had clearly stumbled upon a find of the highest importance, the names associated with this assemblage being those of pharaoh Seti II and the later-ruling Queen Tawosret. For Gaston Maspero, at that time 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 a perhaps more plausible explanation—that Ayrton’s finds represented the remains of an essentially intact burial, that of a child of Seti II and Tawosret, the organic components of which had rotted away to nothing.
(77) 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 it.
We began our investigation of the single-chambered tomb at the end of 1998. Our initial survey revealed that, since the discovery 90 years before, 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. (78) 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 chamber rather than trouble to remove.
(79) 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 2-inch 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 intentionally slow and painstaking, and would not be completed until spring 2002.
Though it proved an unbelievably dirty job, we were to be well rewarded for our care. A number of interesting strays from the Davis burial were brought to light, including many faience wig-curls and masses of gold foil similar to those fragments recovered by Ayrton and assigned by Aldred to the decayed coffin. (79a) Much of the gold was found adhering to flakes of limestone, or still embedded within chunks of the rock-hard mud matrix from which Ayrton had extracted the treasure in 1908. It seems his men, after a cursory perusal, had dumped the chunks on the east side of the chamber, and in order that nothing should be missed during the modern reclearance we reduced each of these ‘nuggets’ to mud by extended soaking in water. As a result of this effort many more pieces of crumpled gold foil were recovered.
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—(80) a rectangular plaque of sheet gold still partially embedded in its mud matrix, 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 (81) 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. Curiously, though, Ayrton and Davis recovered no such pectoral—nor, despite our close sieving of the tomb debris, did we. Other jewellery elements were found, however—including beads of semi-precious stone and amulets and pendants in gold—two seen here (82), (82a).
(83) All the time work in KV56 was proceeding we turned 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 very basic stratigraphy noted by Davis suggested not, and the evidence we have been able to recover during our re-clearance now confirms us in that view.
The evidence in question is slight, but nonetheless suggestive: (84) a canopic jar fragment of extremely fine quality and of the same distinctive milky-grey alabaster as the famous canopic jars from Tomb 55. (84a) Here’s a photograph of the interior. More significant than the material, though, is the fact that a (85) section of the outer surface of the KV56 jar has been systematically ground away—just like the Tomb 55 jars, where the name and title of their first owner, Kiya, had been deliberately removed to render the jars suitably anonymous for re-employment by Akhenaten himself. On analogy with the Tomb 55 jars our canopic fragment, too, had probably been prepared for an Amarna notable and later reemployed for someone else. Sadly, though, no traces of an original inscription may be discerned; nor, regrettably, has the fragment an absolutely 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 some past flash flood.
(86) 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 date. Look at the present ground-plan, and (87) at this suggested reconstruction of its intended form—a single pillar, as I have argued elsewhere, being the hallmark of an 18th Dynasty queen’s burial chamber. And recall also the similarities in cutting with Tomb 55 and Tutankhamun.
The possibility struck us, therefore, that KV56 might actually be one of the Amarna-period tombs we had set out to find, cut for the reburial of one of Akhenaten’s queens. If so, then (88) Nefertiti is clearly a candidate—though the shaft dimensions seem insufficient to have permitted access to the full set of coregent’s funerary shrines which I believe would have been her due. Rather more significant, in my view, is the fact that no used fragments of Nefertiti’s Theban burial equipment are known—which one might perhaps expect if KV56 was her tomb and had been cleared out during the 19th Dynasty. (89) 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—we have Queen Tiye`s from KV55 to guide us on scale; while there exists the intriguing thought that t(90) 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 these jars in fact have been thrown out from KV56 when that tomb had been emptied for reuse under Seti II?
(91) Many questions, several possibilities, but as yet nothing definite. In order fully to 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.
(92) The first Amarna piece to come to light was a wooden fragment from the wig of a coffin identical in style to that made for Kiya and recovered from KV55. (A piece of her outer coffin, perhaps?) (92a) The second finds 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 crucially important for confirming the date of the relatively object-free lower levels adjacent to KV56. Our third discovery was 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 ten million and more such sherds; but this particular rock was special. (93) When we turned it over it drew an audible gasp from everyone present: (94) for here before us, sketched in charcoal on an unexpectedly large scale, (95) 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.
(96) 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, coffin fragment and pottery in undisturbed layers adjacent to this tomb, which itself lies close by the burial of Tutankhamun and Tomb 55, is 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 posible remains of her burial, in an area littered with Amarna material, then Nefertiti and Meketaten are presumably close by also.
(97) Finally, if this brief survey of why we are digging and what we have uncovered and learned in four short years has interested you, then I would solicit your support by inviting you to become a Friend of the Valley of the Kings Foundation—ARTP’s not-for-profit umbrella organization.
I urge you to help to make this work happen. The next few seasons, I suspect, have more ‘wonderful things’ in store.
Thank you.
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