The subsequent history of these mummies, their discovery and examination, medical investigations and final disposition, is a history remarkable in itself but in this narrative I can only record the humbling effect of many pilgrimages to the Cairo Museum to look upon of the faces of the greatest Pharaohs of the New Kingdom. There they lie – Seti I, Ramesses the Great, Amenhotep III, Thutmosis II and the others – quietly regal, though desiccated, semblances of their former selves when they bestrode Egypt as the children of the gods and lords of the Nile.
Coming again to the discoveries with a fresh perspective left me with many questions. I must admit that during my student days, testing the virtue of female students and attending boozy parties were subjects of much greater interest than the somewhat dry dissertations of my lecturers. Now I found myself making extensive notes, replete with question marks and I rather hoped I could get answers after my arrival in Egypt as many of my questions were technical in nature and answers could be found by field work. However, I had become slightly obsessed with the whole issue of tomb robberies. My father’s question put to me over lunch, together with what I had learned about the great pillage, intrigued me deeply.
Some months later, when resident in Luxor, I invited Yousef over for a casual meal. He was in the city on business and admitted to being tired of living in the desolation of another sterile hotel room. After dinner, as the night was chilly, I lit the fire, poured myself another drink, grabbed my notepads, stretched out on the floor and began to read. Yousef opened his briefcase, politely refused the offer of wine and proceeded to wade into a mountain of official paperwork. After a half hour or so of reading, I sat up and queried if I could disturb him.
“Anything to break the monotony of paperwork. There are times I suspect the greatest legacy the ancient Egyptians left us was the mentality of the scribes. We bureaucrats generate enough paperwork to bury a pyramid.”
“I have a note here about what may have been water diversion devices around the tomb of Tuthmosis III. The Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs appear to have gone to some trouble hiding the entrances to their tombs. Why did the practice change in the next dynasty?”
“Possibly a lack of rain falls with the reforms initiated by Horemheb lulled him and his successors into a false sense of security. At least Tuthmosis’ tomb did not suffer water damage. Structurally, it is quite sound despite being built under what is, effectively, a waterfall in times of torrential downpours. Have you visited KV34, Dennis?”
“Yes. The ceilings are quite dazzling and there is simplicity in the style of the figures painted onto the walls. The sarcophagus is quite a work of art, isn’t it? The location of the entrance is somewhat puzzling. I walked around the terrace above the entrance and saw that rain water would have concentrated there when it flowed off the higher hills and the mouth of his tomb would have been right in the pathway of a torrent of water. I wonder if his builder knew that and saw it as an advantage? By carefully blocking up the natural shaft above the entrance, he may have anticipated floodwater borne soil to consolidate the backfilling of the tomb’s entrance and completely cover the entrance in the future.”
“If that was his strategy to hide the entrance, it was only partially successful. What he could not have foreseen, or even countenanced, was the systematic plunder of the tombs. If it wasn’t for that blasphemous episode, the tomb would have lain buried for 1,320 years.” Playing with his calculator, Yousef worked out another figure. “About three hundred and sixty years elapsed from the time of his burial until the pillaging of the necropolis.”
I replied with a question.”If you are right and the builder tried to disguise the entrance, then someone was keeping records of the locations of the older tombs. If there was a record, why did robbers miss Tutankhamen’s crypt when they were ripping open every other tomb with alacrity?”
“Given the less than regal nature of his tomb and the variety of pharaonic names on some of the contents, I believe his burial was intentionally shrouded in secrecy. He was the son of the heretical Akhenaten, possibly feeble-minded and only reluctantly accepted as the king by virtue of his birth. When he died, his remains were preserved without any great care and his body hastily entombed. Our ‘record keeper’ could have intentionally kept his name out of the secret register, lest his grave become the site of veneration by the followers of Aten. I guess we will never know the answer to that little mystery.”
Sensing Yousef had lost all desire to return to his paperwork, I queried again, “Can you imagine the thrill of making a discovery like the one Loret made in KV35? Imagine stumbling into a room filled with the mummies of some of the greatest New Kingdom rulers. I get a thrill if I am lucky enough to find a broken mason’s lamp in the tombs we are inspecting.”
Yousef looked at me, a forlorn expression on his face. “You know, Dennis, I have been working for the CEA for over thirty years. I have witnessed some very interesting finds in my time but I have been stuck in an office pushing papers across a desk for most of those years. True, as soon as a significant discovery is made, I am called in as the conservation expert and I can get some sense of the moment of discovery but just once before I die and meet Allah, I would dearly love to be there when something important is found untouched and be able to savour the moment of discovery for myself.”
He looked down at the files on the desk. I noted his cry of anguish in my mind, not that I thought we would discover anything more exciting than a cobra in an empty sarcophagus. “I am sure Loret would have been elated to unearth a tomb that was not pillaged. It must have been completely frustrating for an explorer to go to the trouble of locating royal tombs, only to find them robbed and despoiled.” he said.
“At least they did not have to suffer the anguish of finding a tomb like Tutankhamen’s and realise just how amazing it would have been to find the untouched grave of a truly great pharaoh. Can you imagine the wealth of funerary goods in the tombs of rulers like Amenhotep III and Ramesses II? They must have been veritable Aladdin’s caves.”
At this point, I paused in reflection. With our staff drawing heavily on the resources of the Council and Society, our knowledge of the exploration of the Valley and specific excavations was quite extensive. Files bulged with data on the array of excavations whether they were in tombs, pits or mere shafts. Dossiers recorded who had done what and when, yet it still continued to amaze me just how little has been achieved when measured against the historical significance of the Valley. Tomorrow, we would assess a tomb last surveyed in 1899, more than a century after its initial exploration. The tomb, an Eighteenth Dynasty small masterpiece, had not warranted a serious research project in all that time.
This lack of scholarly attention was not the fault of an archaeological community which was constrained by funding thinly spread over a rich menu of worthy projects. Nor was it a failure by the Egyptian Government, which worked under economic limitations. But surely somewhere, someone or some organisation could be engaged to extract money from the corporate world and foreign governments. Serious money would allow multi-disciplinary teams to work the Valley before more of its integrity suffered.
At night, in my London apartment, I was driven to distraction by some disembodied voice on the phone soliciting for a charity, advising me I had won a holiday I knew nothing about or trying to sell me something I didn’t want. Was there no-one motivated to use the same technique to raise money for something more ephemeral than Tulip Day or the East End Home for Cats? Maybe I was getting too emotionally involved with my work or had my father’s money gathering success created the sparks of a future activity? I shared my agitation with Yousef, who shrugged his shoulders with the wry comment “If you want to be a paper shuffler, I can accommodate you.”
My watch told me it was nearing midnight, Yousef was tired and the effects of the alcohol were beginning to tell so we decided to call it a night as we faced an early meeting with Abdullah. The morning dawned brightly, too brightly. I found a need to swallow some aspirins and don sunglass
es as I made my way to the CEA offices in Luxor. I would have to watch my intake of wine, inwardly noting again that my capacity to imbibe alcohol, without deleterious effect, was diminishing with each passing year. However, the urgency to discuss and resolve some of my questions remained fresh in my mind. Once we had settled into our chairs and coffee was served, I queried my colleagues, “I have a theory I would like to discuss”.
Abdullah issued a riposte “You would make a wonderful Egyptian bureaucrat, Dennis. I thought we are here to resume discussions about what tombs you and your team may finally get around to repairing. I assume that is not the matter you wish to bring to the table?” Yousef grinned. “The infidel comes fresh from the fields of academia with many notepads stuffed with weighty matters, Abdullah. I think we should humour our young Englishman as he will return to the notepads sooner or later and the day is but young. Without doubt, he is motivated by the knowledge he holds captive two of the greatest minds in the entire nation.”
“Yousef, you should apply to join the Tourism Minister’s staff. I am sure there is a desk for another outrageous flatterer somewhere in his administration. All right, Dennis, tax the brilliance of our minds.”
“Every account I read about the discovery of tombs all report the same thing. Leaving aside the rare, mostly intact tombs, like Tutankhamen and Mahirpra, almost everything found in every tomb, including many sarcophagi, was found smashed to pieces. We know of the conflict between the Viceroy of Kush and the high priest. The unholy alliance between his successors defines the period when the systematic robbery of tombs took place under the guidance of the necropolis scribe, Butehamun. Robbers moved through the tombs like a plague of locusts stripping out anything of value they could find and this is where I have a problem.”
“We know the history. What is your problem?” asked Abdullah.
“Well actually, I have several difficulties with the entire subject of the temple inspired robberies. Obviously, the high priests were morally bankrupt as their conduct broke every rule in the book. They destroyed the sanctity of tombs. They sanctioned the desecration of the remains of the dead which their religion taught were essential for the eternal future of the soul. Why they rejected the fundamentals of their beliefs is perplexing. Egyptologists make much of Akhenaten and his attempts to revolutionise the state religion but what happened at the end of the Twentieth Dynasty was infinitely worse. It was a greater offence than having a Pope strip the Vatican of all of its religious icons and burning them. Compare it to European religious history. What happened in Thebes was a more heinous offence than Henry VIII’s attack on the property of the Catholic Church. The wholesale destruction of the monasteries in England was a much greater act of vandalism than the pillaging of tombs in Thebes but I doubt if Henry permitted the desecration of the dead.”
“I have never considered our history in the light of similar acts in other countries. You make a valid point. There are many examples where the armies of Islam and Christianity wreaked destruction on each other’s religious buildings and artefacts.” said Yousef. “Even you infidels have turned on each other. You will remember when Crusaders, en route to the Holy Land, plundered Constantinople, the centre of Eastern Orthodoxy, well before the Reformation swept Christendom.” He smiled.
“Many virtues get lost amidst the passions of war. Meanwhile, back in Thebes, the high priest needs funds to finance the campaigns against the vizier in his little power game. His scribe is busy organising the pillage and I doubt he had any problem finding men willing to do his dirty work. However, my first question. What did the criminal masterminds do with the loot pouring into the temple’s treasure rooms?”
Abdullah said “I begin to see your point. Unlike the situation today were I could sell a valuable antiquity in a minute, who would buy of a shrine or coffin bearing the cartouche of a king? Some of the local nobility would have been happy to get their hands on items they could use in their houses, like furniture and ornamental items, but the flood of material coming out of the tombs would have been considerably more than the market could absorb.”
Yousef offered. “Probably much of the worked gold was melted down and converted into a negotiable medium. All the evidence shows gold was stripped off everything it was applied to. Let’s assume precious metal, fine jewellery, furniture and a range of small objects became barter goods.”
“Yes, I am sure that’s what happened. Nevertheless, tombs of royalty contained masses of items that could not, for want of a better word, be ‘sold’. I should imagine having the viscera chest of a dead pharaoh as a footstool was not an acceptable form of interior decoration nor would displaying a statue of a king in your living room have been considered good form. Therefore, there must have been a mountain of funerary goods with no tradeable value. They couldn’t be turned into a convertible commodity. This meant hundreds of items were, in modern parlance, non-negotiable and this is the crux of my second problem.”
“Go on, Dennis. I am intrigued.” said Yousef.
“Why smash everything that could not be traded? If we assume the majority of tombs were pillaged, there must have been quite large gangs involved in the looting and a small army of labourers physically taking grave goods to the temples or wherever they were being fenced or melted down. Remember, almost everything found by modern archaeologists and explorers had been smashed, almost with savagery but wall decorations were not touched. Are we to believe the robbers were afraid to deface wall decorations after just plunging their hands into the chest cavity of a dead king to steal his heart scarab? It is possible the robbers took everything of value, breaking open items like sarcophagi and coffins to get to the gold and jewellery but left everything else undamaged. Thrown around in confusion like the contents of Tutankhamen’s tomb, yes, but smashed to pieces I doubt.”
“Your point, Dennis?”
“I cannot find any explanation or justification for the degree of damage inflicted on the contents of tombs, and this continues to puzzle me. If you are working by torchlight, why would you waste time in a hot, confined area by breaking everything up? And I don’t know why decorations were not defaced. If you are going to smash statues, why not destroy paintings on the walls?”
Abdullah said “We will probably never know the true reason but, Inshallah. I hope those who committed the atrocities and ruined so much beauty were judged harshly by a god when they died. Let us move on to practical matters.”
We returned to the reason for the meeting. High on the agenda was the protection of tombs outside the public arena. We acknowledged the importance of preserving the integrity of the lesser known or unsafe tombs from further deterioration, though I saw a problem with the conservative Minister of Tourism and our plans to install protective canopies over the majority of tombs. Abdullah said he would handle the Minister, who wanted to maintain the existing perspective of the Valley with its gaping entrances. “I will take the Minister, who shares your claustrophobia, down into a debris-filled tomb and hand him a spade, pickaxe and bucket. I think a few hours of honest toil at the rock face might cure him of his objections to sealing tombs against further damage.”
We spent the rest of the day considering a variety of issues relevant to the project. I briefed them on the results of the tomb survey so far and we moved closer to a consensus about which tombs would find their way into the final presentation. Later that night, I found, on reflection, that I had developed a profound respect for the achievements of all those men, now long dead - greedy, honourable, naïve, scholarly, dilettante, aristocratic or artistic - who had trodden the dust of the Valley in their quest for the secrets of the past. It was exciting to think that I would soon leave my own imprint on the Valley and join that illustrious band of brothers.
Chapter 8 - THE SAD TOMB LIST
Egypt – Present day
The BEAS-CEA agreement called for a register of all the tombs in which we identified structural defects and our proposed solutions. The Boards of both organisations would then mutually establish pr
iorities, approve repairs and assign non-structural issues to other specialists as our team made no pretence to being archaeologists, excavators or restorers. Our brief was limited to assignments as simple as repairing broken stairways or as complex as the solidification of Esna shale. It encompassed the repair or replacement of damaged pillars, reinforcing ceilings, strengthening walls that could fracture or fail, in fact, the whole gamut of problems inherent in rock cut tombs. All very simple, deceptively so, as we would discover. Early in the negotiations, despite pressure from a handful of Society directors and the Egyptian Minister of Tourism, it was further agreed an investigation of tombs in the Valley of the Queens would be deferred as it was thought we should demonstrate our skills before taking on the whole of Egypt’s engineering problems.
Within two months of my arrival in Egypt, the rest of the team reached Luxor, settled into their accommodation, did a little sightseeing and found all the bars and nightclubs the city had to offer. I had personally selected Richard Lewis as our Site Manager, with the recruitment of the other three engineers being processed through the Human Resources Director in London. The minimum criterion called for university graduate mining or civil engineers with field experience in refurbishment projects at historic sites. Roger McKenzie, a Scot, had worked on the restoration of an Islamic mosque in Turkmenistan. Wilson Sinclair, a New Zealander, dirtied his hands in Aztec and Mayan ruins and Michael Davidson crushed a few fingers working at Angkor Wat, the ancient Khmer temple in Cambodia. None professed any problems with claustrophobia, all were single and, most importantly, they had worked with indigenous labour. As Roger commented ‘working in the Valley would be a piece of cake after the rigours of Turkmenistan labour disputes, which had occasionally been resolved with Kalashnikovs’.
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