by Jo Marchant
Under the Nineteenth Dynasty, ancient Egypt was at the peak of its power. But a series of weak kings in the Twentieth Dynasty left Thebes in the midst of civil war. As order crumbled, the memorial temples and tombs—including those of the Valley of the Kings—were robbed and vandalized. By this time, Egypt’s pharaohs had moved to the north of the country, in Memphis, and a family of high priests effectively ruled the south. The New Kingdom had come to an end.
These high priests of the Twenty-First Dynasty gradually brought Thebes back under control, but security in the Valley of the Kings remained lax, and they were unable to stop the royal tombs from being repeatedly looted. The Valley had been home to a thriving community of priests, guards, and workmen—the sacred resting place of Egypt’s rulers for five hundred years. But all that was now over, and with the valley left empty, thieves moved in. Repeated reburial commissions were set up to inspect and restore the ravaged tombs, rewrapping the royal mummies and sometimes moving them between tombs in an attempt to keep them safe. But the thefts continued, and the dead pharaohs were progressively stripped of their riches.
Eventually, around 975 BC, high priest Pinedjem II decided to remove the royal mummies from the Valley altogether. He collected them and stripped them of their remaining gold—a welcome addition to the declining state coffers—so they would no longer be a target for thieves. The bodies were (more or less) carefully rewrapped, and placed in plain wooden coffins.
It seems they were taken to the now-lost tomb of a long-dead queen called Inhapy, where they rested until 930 BC, when King Shoshenq I, of a new Twenty-Second Dynasty, moved them yet again, to Deir el-Bahri and the remote tomb that Pinedjem II had constructed for himself and his family. It was intended to be the pharaohs’ final journey and it very nearly was. After depositing their royal charges in the tomb’s outer corridors, Shoshenq’s reburial party sealed the door and climbed back up the shaft, the last people to know of its existence for nearly three thousand years, until the arrival of the Abd el-Rassuls.
IT WAS TIME, decided Maspero, to treat his royal mummies with a little more respect. He organized a series of grand unwrapping ceremonies, starting on June 1, 1886. The guests included the Khedive Tewfik, Egypt’s nominal head of state (the British were really in charge since storming Alexandria in 1882, though they left the antiquities service to the French), and other illustrious figures including the consul-general of Russia and Queen Victoria’s commissioner, Henry Drummond Wolf.
Proceedings began at ten minutes to ten in the morning with the illustrious Rameses II, identified by an inscription on his coffin written by Pinedjem II’s priests. The mummy was laid on a wooden trestle table in front of the crowd of spectators—the men in turbans or tarbooshes, the women in corsets and floral hats. It took Maspero and Brugsch just fifteen minutes to strip the king’s body bare, leaving the bandages in an exploded mess around them on the floor.
Underneath it all, they found a scrawny, old man, as to be expected after nearly seventy years of rule, still strikingly lifelike though, with a strong jaw, hook nose, and particularly satisfied expression. Perhaps that was to be expected too for a man who had eight wives and a harem of beautiful women. Maspero was relieved and pleased not to let his guests down. “The face of the mummy gives a fair idea of the face of the living king,” he wrote afterward.1 But like the previous unwrappings, the event doesn’t seem to have achieved much of scientific value. In Maspero’s time, archaeology was still more of a treasure hunt than a science.
Instead, the conclusions reached were highly subjective by today’s standards, with the king being judged rather like a student in school. One writer described Rameses II’s “somewhat unintelligent expression, slightly brutish perhaps, but haughty and firm of purpose,” adding that “his conduct at [the battle of] Khadesh* suggests a good trooper, but a dull general, and his mummy does nothing to cause a revision of the judgement.”2
Buoyed by this success, Maspero immediately brought out another, unidentified mummy. Once he had cut through an outer shroud of orange linen, inscriptions on the wrappings beneath revealed it was none other than Rameses III, considered the last New Kingdom ruler to wield any substantial authority over Egypt. The excited spectators abandoned their chairs and crowded round the investigators’ table. After numerous layers of canvas and linen, which Maspero and Brugsch cut through with scissors, they finally revealed the king’s head.
But it was a disappointment. Though the mummy was in good condition, the pharaoh’s face was completely covered with a mass of black resin. It was enough for the Khedive, who seems to have been unimpressed by meeting his illustrious predecessors. At twenty past eleven, he walked out.
Unwrapping of other inhabitants of the cache soon followed, and revealed various pieces of information. Seqenenre Tao (Ahmose I’s father, and the penultimate king of the Seventeenth Dynasty), was found to have been killed by a succession of dreadful wounds to the head, perhaps inflicted in battle by Egypt’s dreaded enemies, the Hyksos. Seti I turned out to have been great-looking, with a face that apparently amazed the investigators with its beauty.* One king not subjected to the procedure was Amenhotep I. His wrappings were in near-perfect condition, still adorned with blue flowers and even the fragile body of an ancient wasp. Maspero couldn’t bear to ruin the mummy, so he left it wrapped.
Overall, it was an amazing haul—talk about bringing history to life. These kings and queens, with fame that was almost legendary, had ruled the most powerful country on earth more than three thousand years before. Now, instead of being distant historical figures, they were real people, with bodies, faces, personalities, and weaknesses. In all of history, there had never been anything like it; no wonder Maspero, like Brugsch before him, sometimes had trouble believing it was real. “I am still wondering if I’m not really dreaming,” he said, “when I see and touch what were the bodies of so many characters of whom we thought we would never know more than their names.”3
I went forward with my candle and, horrible sight, a body lay there upon the boat, all black and hideous its grimacing face turning towards me and looking at me, its long brown hair in sparse bunches around its head.
—VICTOR LORET, 18984
IT WAS OVER A DECADE before any more royal mummies were unearthed. But when they were, the find was just as dramatic. By this time, the antiquities service had a new director, another Frenchman (it was the 1950s before the service was headed by an Egyptian) called Victor Loret, who cut a distinguished figure with wire-rimmed glasses and a pointed goatee. During his three-year tenure, he discovered a total of sixteen tombs, but is remembered for one of them in particular.
Work in the Valley of the Kings had been continuing, though no more pharaohs’ tombs had been found since Belzoni’s discoveries in 1817. In February 1898, Loret discovered the tomb of Thutmose III, the original resting place of the battered mummy unwrapped by Brugsch. The tombs in the Valley were given numbers, starting with KV1,* according to the order of their discovery, and this one became KV34. Like all the previous finds, it had been heavily robbed in antiquity. All that remained were a few odds and ends—boxes of veal and beef, plants, alabaster jars, and some model boats.
That March, when Loret came across the doorway of the Valley’s thirty-fifth tomb, he didn’t expect anything different. His workmen cleared away the stones that covered KV35 until there was a hole big enough for Loret and his foreman to clamber into a steeply descending corridor. After coming to a deep well, which they had to cross with a ladder, they ended up in a large chamber supported by two square pillars.
The floor was covered with smashed up funerary equipment and broken pieces of wood. The tomb had clearly been robbed in antiquity, but didn’t seem to have been entered since then. Then, deep inside the chamber, Loret saw by candlelight what must rank as one of the most scary-looking boats in history. The wooden vessel was topped by a hideous corpse, lying on its back with its head turned toward the entrance, teeth bared as if in a gruesome warning. It turned out to
be a mummy, robbed while the oils and resins poured on it were still fresh, then thrown across the room, where it had stuck to the top of the boat.
Undeterred, Loret picked his way through a series of further stairs and chambers, stepping carefully over the rubbish—pottery, glass, ancient garlands, splintered wood—that covered the floor. Eventually he came to a crypt, centered on a hefty stone sarcophagus. It held a coffin with the royal titles of an Eighteenth-Dynasty king: Amenhotep II. The body was still inside.
That wasn’t all. In a side chamber, Loret found three near-naked mummies—two women and a boy. Rigid as wood, they were lying in a neat row on the floor, their feet pointing toward the door. Another side chamber was piled high with nine coffins, all coated with a thick layer of dust. Loret leaned over the nearest and blew on it to reveal the name. It was another king: Rameses IV. He went from coffin to coffin and found royal titles, called cartouches, on eight of them, including Siptah, Seti II, and Thutmose IV. All were well-known rulers from the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Dynasties. He had stumbled across another royal cache, just like the one at Deir el-Bahri.
Inscriptions on their wrappings subsequently told a similar story. These pharaohs, including Amenhotep II in his sarcophagus, had been stripped and rewrapped during the Twenty-First Dynasty and hidden in the tomb for safety. When Pinedjem II emptied the Valley of its royal occupants, he had left this group behind. Put together with the Deir el-Bahri mummies, they formed almost a full house of New Kingdom kings.
Loret cleared the tomb but was ordered by Sir William Garstin, the minister for public works, to leave the mummies where they were found. Garstin feared that moving them might stoke the already prevalent belief among locals that foreigners were robbing Egypt’s royal tombs. Most Egyptians felt that once buried, kings should not be disturbed, so the tomb was barred and bolted, and the mummies left in peace.
IN 1900, THE BRITISH CONSUL-GENERAL, Lord Cromer, effectively Egypt’s ruler, removed Loret as head of the antiquities service and reinstated Maspero, who put a rising young archaeologist in charge of the monuments of Upper Egypt. His name was Howard Carter.
Carter had come to Egypt when he was seventeen to help record the extensive artwork being uncovered in tombs and temples at various sites. But he soon showed great promise as an archaeologist in his own right, learning rigorous methods from Flinders Petrie—who pretty much invented the idea of archaeology as a science, and is today perhaps the only Egyptologist who can rival Carter’s fame.
In his new post at Thebes, Carter supervised much clearing and restoration work, installed iron doors and electric lights in many tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and made several important finds, including the Eighteenth-Dynasty tombs of Hatshepsut and Thutmose IV.
Meanwhile, Maspero removed the cached kings and queens from tomb KV35 and took them to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo,* arguing that they were at risk from looters, and that as they had been moved in antiquity anyway, there was no reason to leave them undisturbed. He left Amenhotep II in his tomb, along with the boat body and the three stripped mummies—he assumed they were all lesser figures who had formed part of the king’s original burial, as family members or perhaps even human sacrifices. I expect the Frenchman would be rather surprised to hear that a century later, those lowly mummies from the side-room floor, especially the two women, are among the most talked about individuals in the whole royal mummy saga—TV stars with famous faces and glamorous suggested identities that range from famed beauty Nefertiti to the female pharaoh Hatshepsut.
Leaving anything in the tomb at all turned out to be a bad idea. A few months later, Carter, while working at a temple south of Thebes, was summoned to the Valley of the Kings by telegram. KV35 had been broken into. The boat was stolen, its mummy smashed, and the king stripped of his fine bandages and broken open in a fruitless search for jewelry.
Carter was incensed. He set about tracking the culprits with all the cunning and determination of Sherlock Holmes (he later noted that if he hadn’t become an archaeologist, he might have made a competent detective5). He took plaster casts of footprints by the tomb door, identified the instrument used to break open the lock, and traced both to none other than the Abd el-Rassuls. When searched, their white house was found to be full of stolen artifacts from other tombs. Mohammed Abd el-Rassul was put on trial, but the court wasn’t persuaded by Carter’s evidence, and the accused went free.
In 1904, Maspero transferred Carter into the job of chief inspector of the antiquities of Lower Egypt, a prestigious posting that included responsibility for the Great Pyramids, near Cairo. He didn’t last long. A few weeks later, a party of drunken French tourists tried to force their way onto a site and attacked one of the Egyptian guards. Carter told his men to defend themselves, and the situation descended into a rowdy fight with sticks and chairs, with men on both sides left beaten and unconscious.
It caused a minor diplomatic storm that Carter should have encouraged mere Egyptians to strike Frenchmen, regardless of the provocation. Maspero and then the mighty Cromer asked him to apologize, but to Carter—principled, stubborn, with a general distrust of authority—the idea was unthinkable. He refused, and was later transferred to the remote northern town of Tanta.
Carter hated it there and, despite Maspero’s efforts to convince him otherwise, he resigned—the end of a promising career with the service. He eventually moved back to Luxor, where he scraped a living as an artist, as well as by selling an antiquity or two.
He dreamed of excavating in the Valley of the Kings, convinced there was still an intact—un-looted—royal tomb hidden there, and that he could track it down where everyone else had failed. But he could only stand by and watch as others made a series of impressive finds. The antiquities service was increasingly strapped for cash, so Maspero started working with rich amateurs who funded excavations in return for a share of the antiquities they unearthed. The process was organized by concession, meaning that only one person could dig in each area at a time. Once you had the concession for a particular area, it was yours until you decided to give it up.
The man who won the coveted concession for the Valley of the Kings was Theodore M. Davis, a retired lawyer from New York. He was short, aggressive, very rich, and had no patience for any kind of scientific procedure—the polar opposite of a careful archaeologist like Carter. He was in this game for the treasure.
In February 1905, he found it: the most intact tomb yet in the Valley. It belonged to an elderly couple called Yuya and Tjuiu. They weren’t royal (the Valley of the Kings hosted the tombs of various high-status nobles and courtiers as well as the pharaohs themselves), but their daughter Tiye had been a queen—wife of the powerful Eighteenth-Dynasty King Amenhotep III. The tomb had suffered some thefts in antiquity but hadn’t been touched since, and was still packed full. Davis entered with the elderly Maspero and a British archaeologist called Arthur Weigall, who had taken over Carter’s old job as inspector general at Thebes.
“The chamber was dark as dark could be and extremely hot,” wrote Davis afterward. “We held up our candles but they gave so little light and so dazzled our eyes that we could see nothing except the glint of gold.”6
Once their eyes adjusted, they saw that although the tomb was small and undecorated, its contents were gorgeous, including two gold-covered carved armchairs complete with cushions, two beds fitted with springy string mattresses, a wicker trunk, some lovely alabaster vases, and a chariot. Weigall later compared the stuffy, stiff feeling of the tomb to that of a town house closed for the summer. And lying peacefully in their coffins were the occupants—the wonderfully preserved, smiling mummies of Yuya and Tjuiu themselves.
In January 1907, Davis found another tomb close to Yuya and Tjuiu’s that had been sealed since ancient Egyptian times. But this one—KV55—was a chaotic and confusing sight. Piles of stone chippings almost filled the entrance passage. Inside, water dripping from the ceiling had seriously damaged the contents, which seemed to be a random and sca
ttered collection of burial goods, including dismantled parts of a gilded wooden shrine plus smaller items such as jars, mud bricks, and beads.
In the center of the tomb, a gold-covered coffin lay on the floor where the wooden bier beneath it had rotted and collapsed. Its lid had come off in the fall, revealing a royal mummy covered with gold jewelry, including a vulture-shaped collar that had been crudely bent around its head as a crown. Someone had disturbed this burial in antiquity, but it didn’t look like thieves.
In a perfect demonstration of what not to do when you find a royal mummy, Davis, along with Maspero and an artist called Lindon Smith, who it seems just happened to be around, stripped the body. Together, they pulled away sheets of gold from on top of the mummy, and peeled gold foil bracelets from its arms. The mummy initially looked intact, until Davis very effectively determined otherwise: “Rather suspecting injury from the evident dampness, I gently touched one of the front teeth (3,000 years old), and alas! it fell into dust, thereby showing that the mummy could not be well preserved. We then cleared the entire mummy. . . .”7
By the time the three were done, the mummy was reduced to a bare skeleton, which you can see today in the Egyptian Museum: looking strangely like it’s in bed, with its large, dark-stained skull resting on a comfy-looking brown shroud and a smart, cream sheet tucked under its chin. We’ll never know what the mummy looked like originally, as no one thought to draw or photograph it before Davis and the others pulled it apart. But an account written by one eyewitness* describes its “dried-up face, sunken cheeks and thin leathery-looking lips.”8
There was confusion too over the identity of this royal figure. The name on the coffin had been hacked away, and its golden face violently ripped off, leaving bare wood beneath—someone had obviously been very keen to obliterate this person’s identity.