Fired up by what I’d been able to discover by looking at excavated material for myself, I was more determined than ever to go back to the Valley and see the three anonymous mummies with my own eyes. But until that time came it was a matter of reading all I could about the tomb, from its discovery by Victor Loret in 1898 to the dramas of the next few years when the mummies played a leading role in the political manoeuvrings of the British and French authorities. Taken out of the tomb, then put back in again, they were also silent witnesses in a detective drama starring Howard Carter and the local Qurnawis. This eventful period was followed by almost a century of comparative peace punctuated by a brief visit from American and Egyptian scientists in the 1970s and the occasional check to monitor their condition, before our arrival in 2002.
To try to work out just what had happened, and why the three mummies had eventually been left where they were, I planned to assemble all the evidence I could, from journal articles, books and old photographs to the diaries of these involved and the first-hand account of one of the handful of people who had seen the three bodies in recent times. But first I had to understand who had found the tomb and how they had done so.
After the retirement of the great Gaston Maspero as Director General of the French-run Egyptian Antiquities Service in 1886, he was succeeded by several men whom Petrie regarded as unsuited to the job. The first of them was a French civil engineer, Jacques de Morgan, whom Petrie described as ‘the son of Jack Morgan, a Welsh mining engineer . . . he knew nothing whatever about Egypt but, as a capable business man, made the most reputable head that the French could find’, a comment which reveals something of Anglo-French relations in Egypt at that time. In 1897 de Morgan left Egypt and the Parisian Egyptologist Victor Clément Georges Philippe Loret was appointed in his place. Petrie continued to do his bit for Franco-British relations by reporting that ‘de Morgan was but a small devil, but Loret is twenty devils’.
Despite the photograph accompanying Loret’s entry in Who Was Who in Egyptology, which shows a rather kindly looking old gent with receding white hair, pince-nez and a polka-dot cravat, Loret had arrived on his first visit to Egypt as an energetic twenty-two-year old with a shock of black hair, and, in terms of appearance, was far more believable as the multiple devil he was said to be. Although his subsequent stint as Director lasted a mere two years he managed to make a series of great discoveries during his systematic excavations there, adding to the list of those then known an astonishing eleven new tombs – including KV.39, where I had my own first experience of working in the Valley.
Having begun work in the Valley of the Kings in 1883 copying inscriptions in the tombs so far discovered, Loret had familiarised himself with the landscape and no doubt would have identified some of the most likely places to dig. Like all good archaeologists he also kept his eyes and ears open. He seems to have been aware that the Abd el-Rassul family of Qurna were claiming to know the whereabouts of another royal tomb after their great success discovering the first cache of royal mummies at Deir el-Bahari in 1871, a full ten years before the authorities came along and ‘discovered’ it.
Loret’s achievements must also have owed much to his knowledgeable Egyptian head workman or, reis, literally ‘the boss’, Ahmed Girigar. After setting Girigar and his men to work in February 1898 at the southernmost end of the Valley, under the watchful eye of the local Qurna inspector, Loret left for Aswan. Here he received a telegram from the inspector to inform him of a new discovery, and nine days later was back in the Valley to inspect the newly revealed tomb of Tuthmosis III, the first royal tomb in the valley to have been decorated.
With the pungent odour of cedarwood filling the air, Loret and his men discovered that the tomb had been well and truly robbed in antiquity, its contents, including the fragment cedar-wood furniture, stripped of their gold and smashed to bits. Yet the king’s mummy had been salvaged by the ancient inspectors, and eventually reburied over the hill in the cache at Deir el-Bahari. Because the route between the two places passes right by KV.39, a tomb filled with mummy wrappings and embalming material as well as the gold ring bearing one of Tuthmosis’ names, it seems quite possible that his mummy could have been refitted there before reburial.
While Loret himself set to work on the careful clearance of Tuthmosis III’s tomb, he sent workmen back down the Valley to explore another area at the base of the western cliffs. After digging a whole series of small test pits over the next few weeks they came to a large pile of loose boulders, and on 8 March they uncovered the beginnings of a rock-cut doorway. When pieces of broken pottery were found in the debris around the tomb entrance, together with a funerary statuette of Amenhotep II, it looked as though this was another plundered tomb. Yet they persevered, and by 7pm on the following day, enough of the doorway had been cleared to allow Girigar and then Loret to enter the black depths of the tomb.
Making their way as best they could down the steep entrance passageway, picking their way over piles of ancient debris as their candle flames leaped and spluttered in the stale and increasingly warm air, they eventually came to a stop at the edge of a deep well shaft. In no mood to turn back, Loret decided to work through the night and, calling for a ladder, edged his way forward into the black void.
After reaching the other side and emerging into the blackness of the room beyond, the two men, joined by a couple of local inspectors, found themselves in a pillared chamber, surrounded by the broken remains of cedarwood furniture, alabaster vessels, a large coiled wooden serpent and three large model funerary boats in bright colours. Stepping forward between the two columns to examine one of the boats more closely, Loret held up his candle and
spectacle effroyable [a terrifying sight], a corpse lay there upon the boat, all black, hideous, its grimacing face turning towards me and looking at me, its long brown hair in sparse curls around its head. I did not dream for an instant that this was simply an unwrapped mummy. The legs, the arms seemed to be bound. A hole exposed the sternum, there was an opening in the skull. Was this a victim of a human sacrifice? Was this a thief murdered by his companions, in a bloody division of the loot, or perhaps he was killed by soldiers or police interrupting the pillaging of the tomb?
Having just found an unexpected corpse late at night in the depths of an ancient tomb, Loret could be forgiven for letting his imagination run away from him. In fact the body was an unwrapped mummy, most likely that of Amenhotep II’s son, Prince Webensenu, whose small wooden funerary figurines, along with fragments of canopic equipment, Loret would soon find further inside the tomb. After the mummy had been dragged up into this small chamber in ancient times to be unwrapped and stripped of its valuables it had been left where it was found by Loret, lying full length in one of the king’s funerary boats, with the remains of its resin-soaked wrappings hanging down over the prow.
The Frenchman composed himself after his fright and continued forward down a set of stone-cut steps towards a doorway which ‘opened into blackness. We advanced, the light grew brighter, and with stupefaction we saw an immense hall, entirely decorated, supported by two rows of three pillars on which were painted life-sized groups of a king in the presence of a god. It was really him! It was Amenhotep II.’ Having checked the king’s two name cartouches, Loret declared, ‘There was no more doubt. It was the son of Tuthmosis III,’ whose tomb he had found only weeks before.
The floor was covered in the debris left by the ancient looters – a thick layer of broken objects, beautifully summed up by Loret’s terse description of ‘un pêle-mêle unimaginable’. Over there was a large black wooden statue of the lioness goddess Sekhmet, and here a painted wooden head of her more benign bovine counterpart, Hathor, together with Anubis and several other gods. Scattered funerary figurines of alabaster and wood again named Amenhotep II and his son Webensenu, whilst portions of the king’s canopic jars of alabaster still contained some of the mummified royal entrails. Loret also described shreds of the warrior pharaoh’s red leather armour, blue-glazed throw-sticks, part of a funerary text inscribed on a papyrus roll, pieces of pottery and large quantities of coloured glassware, which at the time of the king’s burial had been all the rage. In fact more than two thousand items lay strewn before Loret in the same chaotic state in which they had been left some three thousand years before.
Delicately criss-crossing the floor, trying not to crush the debris beneath his feet, Loret eventually reached the furthest part of the great hall. Parallel with the last set of stone pillars he came to a flight of wide steps which led him down into the most low-lying part of the tomb, the crypt, and the king’s quartzite sarcophagus. As he stood nervously before it, he could see
the sarcophagus, open, but was it empty? I couldn’t dare to hope for the contrary, because no one found pharaohs in the necropolis of the Valley of the Kings, all the royal mummies having been removed in antiquity to a safe place. I reached the sarcophagus with difficulty, being careful not to break anything underfoot. I could partially read the two names of Amenhotep II. I leant over the edge, bringing the candle a little nearer. Victory! A dark coffin lay in the bottom, at its head a bunch of flowers and at its feet a wreath of foliage...
It was a momentous occasion. Although the tomb had clearly been robbed of all its saleable treasures in ancient times, the tomb owner himself, Amenhotep II, remained where he had been buried. Yet as Loret could see, the king was not in the same state in which he had been interred. A single coffin of cheap cartonnage – ancient papier mâché – now stood in for the original nest of golden coffins.
Withdrawing from the pharaoh’s presence, Loret turned his attentions to the four small side chambers which led off from the main hall, two on the left and two on the right. To the left of the sarcophagus was a chamber containing numerous large jars emptied out by the robbers, and a supply of carefully wrapped provisions including a shoulder of beef, dried meats and boxes of preserved ducks, pigeons, quails and olives – a sumptuous feast for Amenhotep’s Afterlife. In the next chamber, to the left of the entrance, he found piles of broken bright blue pottery vases and vessels and ankh-shaped amulets, which he had seen the gods holding up to Amenhotep’s face on the columns all around. Also there were the black wooden figure of a lithe panther and a mummified human toe.
Then Loret entered the first of the two rooms on the right, the one closest to the entrance. The right side of the chamber was strewn with resin-covered wooden funerary statuettes which had been emptied out of their original small coffins and appeared to have been swept to one side. But on the left side of the room was un spectacle inouï, something unheard of:
Three corpses lay side by side at the back, in the left corner, their feet towards the door . . . We approached the three bodies. The first seemed to be that of a woman. A thick veil covered her forehead and left eye. A broken arm had been placed at the side, nails in the air. Torn cloth, ripped apart, scarcely covered her body. Abundant black hair, in waves, spread over the limestone floor, at each side of her head. The face, admirably preserved, had a noble and majestic gravity.
Black-and-white photographs taken on Loret’s orders confirmed the woman’s incredible appearance. Yet I could see no sign of the broken arm and, cross-checking Smith’s Elder Lady Woman, as he called her, I confirmed that both her arms were present.
Leaning forward with his candle, Loret started to examine the middle of the three bodies. He described this second mummy as that of a child of about fifteen years. He was naked with the hands joined to the abdomen. At first, the head appeared totally bald, but, on closer examination, one saw that the head had been shaved, except to the right, on the right side of the temple, from which grew a magnificent tress of black hair. This was the coiffure of the royal princes, and I thought immediately of the royal prince Webensennu, this so far unknown son of Amenhotep II, whose funerary statue I had noticed in the great hall, and later I would find fragments of his canopic jars. The face of the young prince was laughing and mischievous; not at all did it evoke the idea of death.
The third body, the one nearest to the left-hand wall,
seemed to be that of a man. His head was shaved, but a wig lay on the ground not far from him. The face of this person displayed something horrible yet amusing at the same time. The mouth, running obliquely from one side nearly to the middle of the cheek, bit on a pad of linen whose two ends hung from the corner of the lips. The eyes, half-closed, expressed a strange amusement. This was perhaps unfortunate, as he could have died choking on a gag: he looked like a playful little cat snatching at a piece of cloth. Death, which had respected the severe beauty of the woman and the rebellious charm of the boy, seems to have amused itself with the man and had turned in derision.
It was an oddly moving description and, although the body had proved to be clearly female, I tried to put myself in Loret’s position. Working in the darkness by candlelight, and clearly confused by the shaven head, he was not the first nor indeed would be the last to mistake the gender of the individual I believed might just be Nefertiti.
With only the fourth side chamber left to inspect, Loret must by then have been exhausted. Having hauled himself up to see over the top of the perilously balanced limestone blocks still sealing the entrance he held his candle aloft, although the room was so large that its flame made little impact. Then, slowly, as his eyes adjusted to the murky darkness,
I distinguished nevertheless nine coffins laid out on the ground, six at the back, occupying all the space, three in the front, leaving to the right a bit of empty space. There was only room, in the length of the chamber, for two coffins, in the width for six, so that the mummies touched at their shoulders, feet and head. Five coffins had lids. Four were without. It was not, at that moment, possible to think of entering the room and looking at the coffins more closely. I said to myself that they were probably members of the royal family.
He meant the family of Amenhotep II, an assumption based purely on the fact that they, like the three next door, had been found in this king’s tomb.
Having satisfied himself of the contents, Loret and the three Egyptians accompanying him left the tomb, the whole experience having been something of an emotional roller coaster. ‘Such were the impressions from my first visit to the tomb of Amenhotep II, impressions of an intensity I would never forget, dominated above all by the horror of seeing the corpse stretched out on the boat, and the joy of having contemplated, in its ancient position, the unhoped for coffin of the king.’
It was only when the tomb of Tuthmosis III had been cleared that Loret could return and begin to remove, one by one, the many hundreds of items in Amenhotep II’s tomb, using a grid system to make a careful record of the exact position of each item. And only once these had all been packed up for eventual removal to the Cairo Museum could he finally look again at the mummies.
The body on the boat which had at first so scared him required delicate handling, since its bitumen-like coating had stuck tightly on to the boat, giving him the same problem Carter would experience a quarter of a century later when trying to move the resin-covered mummy of Tutankhamen. In the end Loret decided to move the whole thing together rather than risk damaging the mummy. Then he turned his attention to the three anonymous mummies, and at this point in my reading my heart beat a little faster.
Judging by the drawings made at the time, Loret’s artist, Félix Guilmant, had sketched the three lying in their original position on the floor of the tomb. After commenting that the three together had given him far less trouble than the sticky lad on the boat, Loret described constructing for each mummy a made-to-measure wooden board, covered in linen and stuffed with cotton. Then ‘the mummies, rigid as wood, were carefully lifted up and the boards slid beneath them’, and each one was placed inside a long wooden packing case.
I couldn’t understand this, and read it through again. I thought the mummies were still in the side chamber, so why had Loret packed them up? I read on, still looking for answers, but Loret had now shifted his focus to the king, whose body still wore a floral garland around its neck and a small bouquet of mimosa on its chest, which covered the name written on the wrappings.
There remained only the nine mummies in the final side chamber. Surrounded by broken figurines and discarded mummy garlands were the grey, dust-shrouded coffins. Approaching the nearest one Loret blew along the surface to try to read the names, which revealed themselves as those of Ramses IV, a king known to have died 253 years after Amenhotep II. ‘Was I in the midst of royal coffins?’ he wrote. ‘I blew away the dust of the second coffin, a cartouche showed itself, illegible for an instant, painted in matt black on a shiny black background. I went over to the other coffins. Everywhere cartouches!’ And as Loret moved around, blowing away the dust of millennia before him, he discovered a whole series of ancient pharaohs’ names – in fact most of those who had been missing from the earlier cache at Deir el-Bahari.
The coffins were carefully lifted out into the now empty burial chamber, their lids removed and each mummy closely studied. Despite the fact that the coffins didn’t necessarily belong to their current owner, those who had rewrapped the bodies had written the relevant names on the replacement wrappings. As Loret copied these out by candlelight he found the identities of Amenhotep II’s son and successor, Tuthmosis IV, and his son and successor in turn, the great Amenhotep III. Then came Merenptah – although Loret at first read this as ‘Akhenaten’, who he described as ‘the most quaint of all the pharaohs of Egypt’. He was followed by Seti II, Siptah, three of the kings named Ramses (numbers IV, V and VI), and finally an unknown woman with superbly curled hair, who some have since wondered might be the later female pharaoh Tawosret.
The shroud inscriptions also provided details of when these royal mummies had been restored. For instance, the inscription across the chest of Amenhotep III read, ‘Year 12, fourth month of winter, day six. On this day renewing of the burial of Nebmaatra [Amenhotep III] by the High Priest of Amen-Ra, Pinudjem.’ And since Pinudjem held office during the reign of King Smendes, this shroud could be dated to 1057 BC and the mummies would presumably have been placed in the tomb some time around that date.
All the mummies were then measured, recorded and photographed in the bright white light generated by magnesium flares, Loret’s photographs of the three anonymous bodies next door showing them within their packing cases. He also declared his intention to have them all X-rayed once they arrived in Cairo. At the end of three weeks’ work the tomb lay empty and, as the last packing case was nailed shut, all the material was made ready for the long sail north to Cairo. It included the three mummies from the side chamber who, like all the others, had been manoeuvred back up through the tomb’s long corridors and finally out into the sunlight. Having been carried back down the Valley in a kind of rewind of the funeral service, they were taken along the four-mile track to the Nile, carried up the gangplank and placed inside the Antiquities Service’s waiting boat.
So, according to Loret, the three anonymous mummies had left the tomb after all. But apparently politics had then intervened. The French-run Antiquities Service came under the control of the British-run Ministry of Public Works, headed by Sir William Garstin. With the rise of Egyptian nationalism, there was a growing feeling that foreigners were robbing Egypt’s royal dead, so Loret was ordered to return all the mummies to the tomb. The only comment he made about this in his report was a rather pointed exclamation mark before he changed the subject. Most of the material I read, including Loret’s own account, suggested that he replaced the mummies right away before the boat had even left its moorings. Certainly The Times had concluded its report – headlined ‘Important Discovery at Thebes’ – by saying that Garstin and the Ministry ‘requested M. Loret to remove only the smaller objects and leave the mummies and the bodies in their present place’.
Elsewhere in the newspaper’s account it was stated that the three mummies in the side chamber, a man, a woman and a boy, had not in fact been mummified but had simply dried out in the atmosphere of the tomb. Despite the fact that large chunks were missing from their torsos and one of them had had its face bashed in, they were said to be ‘in a most complete state of preservation, with the features perfect’, and the writer asserted that ‘the hair upon each is luxuriant’ – except of course for the Younger Woman, who had no hair at all! Finally, the newspaper report declared the three ‘evidently met with violent deaths’, and the unnamed correspondent hoped their discovery ‘may throw some light on the vexed question of human sacrifices which now divides Egyptologists’.
Although Loret continued as head of Antiquities Service for a further year, finding yet more tombs in the valley, the British wanted to streamline the Antiquities Service. So they replaced him with the more cooperative Gaston Maspero, brought out of retirement in France to resume his old position. Maspero was given a staff of five Chief Inspectors, each taking a district of Egypt. The twenty-five-year-old Howard Carter was appointed first Chief Inspector of Upper Egypt, an area that included Luxor and its Valley of the Kings.
Long fascinated by Carter and his incomparable knowledge of the region, I decided to consult his handwritten notebooks in Oxford to see if he had any information about just what had happened to the mummies from Amenhotep II’s tomb. And Carter certainly had plenty to say.
Reading his words, wearing the regulation cotton gloves as I turned the precious pages, I became completely absorbed. Beginning with a long account of ‘The Valley and the Royal Tombs’, he described ‘The Valley of the Tombs of the Kings – the very name is full of Romance, and of all Egypt’s wonders, there is none that makes a more instant appeal to the imagination.’ As I read on, all about ‘the ultimate fate of the Theban necropolis and the destiny of the Royal Mummies’, he said that the Royal Valley had been reasonably secure under the great pharaohs of the New Kingdom until a succession of ‘worthless successors’ and ‘arrogant weaklings’ saw a decline in security which ‘gave rise to an orgy of temple and tomb robbing’, for which he largely blamed the priests.
Twenty-five pages later he finally got on to the events of 1898 – the discovery of Amenhotep II’s tomb and its cache of royal mummies. He wrote of the three bodies in the side chamber, and, contrary to Loret’s belief that the shaven-headed body was that of a man, described them as ‘two nameless women and a boy . . . found lying naked on the floor of one of the side Treasuries’. In Carter’s version of events the mummies were indeed loaded on to Loret’s boat, although it soon appeared that they had rather more of an adventure than was revealed by the official sources: ‘Very rightly the Egyptian government, at the representation of Sir William Garstin, then under-secretary of state for the public works department, decided against their removal. M. Loret, however, did not think this prudent. He disregarded these orders, carefully packed the mummies, embarked them upon his dahabêyah (sail boat) and took them to the museum at Ghizah [Giza]’, site of the first Cairo Museum.
There it was in Carter’s hand: the three mummies had apparently set sail with their fellow royal mummies and reached Cairo. As a result, ‘an administrative question arose and [Loret] received orders to replace them in the tomb. This he did, but left them still in their packing cases. Here they remained for two years. Under the directorship of M. Maspero, I replaced the mummy of Amenophis in his sarcophagus, with the flowers and foliage upon him as they were originally discovered’, and the king’s body was raised on trestles to allow him to be clearly seen by visitors.
Carter also returned the mummy on the boat to the ante-chamber, surrounding it with chicken wire to stop inquisitive visitors getting too close, whilst ‘the three naked mummies I put back in the side treasury where they were found’. However, an early postcard photograph discovered in the late 1970s in a pile of old photographs in a Luxor shop shows that Carter replaced the three in a different order. After swapping the two female bodies around, he also placed the tops of their padded boards on a short trestle, making the three appear to be rising up and looking straight at the chamber’s entrance.
However, when it came to the other nine mummies, who had also been returned to their side chamber next door, Maspero had a change of heart. According to Carter, ‘the original plan was changed. It was decided to transport them on special government steamer [back] to the Ghiza Museum, near Cairo’, and there they arrived for the second time in 1900. Maspero had persuaded the government officials that the nine named royals had been placed in the tomb only ‘by accident’ in ancient times, although he agreed that Amenhotep II should certainly stay in his own tomb. So too, he felt, should the body on the boat and the three anonymous bodies, all considered to have been buried with the king as ‘victims of human sacrifice’, a somewhat farfetched notion which would nevertheless do wonders for tourist numbers. With the five mummies back home inside the tomb, Carter was ordered to make it ‘accessible to the public, who were naturally eager to see this new discovery. The tomb’, he wrote, ‘I made secure with a steel gate and I placed a special guard over it’– although, as events would prove, even this would not be enough.
In his very personal account of what happened next, Carter confided that
as the reader will have noticed, I have been hurling boomerangs at those ancient Egyptian priest kings for their unskilful government. One of those missiles swerved, returned, and hit me – very, very hard. What happened was this. To stimulate popular sympathy towards Amenophis II, I purposefully gave us much publicity as possible to the fact that this mummy had been robbed in ancient times, and there was nothing of value left upon it. Perhaps that is where I made my mistake. For in spite of the fact, a modern tomb robber, possibly in connivance with the guard, forced upon the steel gate of the tomb and subjected Amenophis to another rifling.
The tomb guards told Carter that during the evening of 24 November 1901 a band of masked robbers threatened to shoot them, some of their number standing guard over them while the remainder broke into the tomb and robbed it. When Carter arrived, he found that the mummy on the boat had been forcibly removed from the boat, the broken body parts strewn about the floor and the boat itself stolen.
I breathed a sigh of relief with Carter that at least the three mummies in the side chamber had not been touched – their visibly unwrapped state clearly hid no valuables. But sadly there was more to come. The king’s body had been pulled from his sarcophagus, and his wrappings cut through with a sharp blade. From his years of experience Carter realised that this was the work of ‘an expert hand’, and decided he would put all his energies into catching the culprits. First he needed evidence, and he ‘therefore focussed my energies upon a thorough examination of the tomb itself’. As Carter turned detective, he examined broken locks and took casts of the footprints in the dust around the mummy. He already suspected the infamous Abd el-Rassul family, and when the tracks from the tomb led straight up to their front door he had three of the family arrested. When they were later released without charge, a fuming Carter turned his attentions to the one item he knew had been stolen, and
for eighteen months I made every possible search throughout Egypt for the boat. I employed secret police, port and frontier officials were supplied with photographs and were advised to prevent, if possible, the boat being exported by dealers or collectors. I am, however, happy to say that eventually I did find the boat; – but where? In a glass case in the Cairo Museum. It was purchased from an antiquity dealer out of state funds by an authority in the museum, but he never advised me of the fact. Subsequently it was revealed that Mohamed Abd-é-Rasool [had sold it] to a dealer al-Ghiza, near Cairo [sic].
Following the robbery, the tomb was treated as a crime scene and sealed until Maspero arrived with Carter to inspect the king’s body in January 1902. Also in the party was Emma Andrews, variously described as the sister or cousin of a wealthy American businessman, Theodore Davis of Rhode Island, who had funded excavations in the Valley between 1903 and 1912. Accompanying her relative on his travels between 1889 and 1911, Andrews not only ‘kept house for him on his boat at Luxor’ but wrote a journal which provides valuable information on events at the time. After this visit to the royal tomb, she described how Amenhotep II’s ‘coffin and cartonnage had been lifted from the sarcophagus, laid on the floor, and the wrappings ripped from the feet to the head – and in a state of utter ruin...’ After briefly examining the king’s mummy, the two men replaced it in its sarcophagus with the wrappings arranged to reveal its face and chest. As part of plans to make the Valley more tourist-friendly, Maspero and Carter also brought electric lighting to five of the most popular tombs, including that of Amenhotep II.
As Andrews described on her next visit, the electric lights were a great advantage, resulting in ‘no more stumbling about amongst yawning pits and rough staircases, with flickering candles dripping wax all over one’ – and presumably, also, over the things being looked at. She went on to state that the king’s ‘rifled mummy has been restored to his sarcophagus, and decently wrapped with the torn mummy cloths – and Carter has arranged the thing most artistically. A shrouded electric light is at the head of the sarcophagus, throwing the fine face into splendid relief – and when all the other lights were extinguished the effect was solemn and impressive.’
A contemporary painting shows a crowd of European and American tourists, the men in flat caps or homburgs, the long-skirted ladies in large-brimmed hats and buttoned-up jackets, gazing intently down at the king’s mummy from the top of the stairs. And no doubt they also paid the same close attention to the three ‘sacrificial victims’ in the side chamber – a regular freak show who even appeared on postcards. Yet tourists’ attentions were soon diverted by events a short distance away across the Valley.
Following Loret’s spectacular discovery of the tomb with its hidden collection of royal mummies Maspero gave Davis permission to organise a dig in the Valley, his money funding a set of equally astonishing discoveries over the next few years. With Carter supervising the workmen, in 1903 they discovered the tomb of Tuthmosis IV, the king’s mummy having already been found by Loret in the tomb of Amenhotep II (KV.35). Then they excavated the long-known tomb of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, although her remains had long since vanished. As Carter ominously declared, ‘A king she would be, and a king’s fate she shared.’
Carter’s chequered career took him away from the Valley for a while, and Davis’s excavations then involved Arthur Weigall. They literally struck gold with the discovery of the tomb of Queen Tiy’s parents Yuya and Tuya (KV.46), stuffed full of wonderful things. Next came the young Englishman Edward Ayrton, who in 1907 discovered on Davis’s behalf the controversial tomb known as KV.55. But with so many people involved in the tomb’s excavation and clearance it had become very diffi-cult to work out just what was found in there, and this has become the subject which Egyptologists love to argue about more than anything else.
After Ayrton found the doorway, fragments of alabaster and gold foil scattered beyond the partly blocked entrance showed that it had been robbed in ancient times. Firmly wedged in the small entrance corridor were also portions of a gilded shrine, and as Ayrton, Davis and Weigall looked more closely they could see that the shrine was decorated with the figure of a queen and a second figure who had been carefully erased, both of them standing beneath the rays of the Aten sun disc. When he saw the accompanying inscription which confirmed that the shrine had been made for the king’s mother, Queen Tiy, Davis was ecstatic. ‘By Jove! Queen Tyi [sic], and no mistake!’ He later stated that ‘It is quite impossible to describe the surprise and joy of finding the tomb of a great queen and her household gods, which for these 3,000 years had never been discovered.’
Queen Tiy herself was then very much in the public eye following the discovery of two superb likenesses, a small steatite stone head found in Sinai in 1904, and a second of wood discovered the following year in the Fayum oasis region. Both perfectly captured the determined pout of this amazing woman, who had surely taught Nefertiti everything she knew. Yet the burial chamber itself was a complete mess, strewn with rubble and debris. Water had seeped down through a great long crack in the ceiling during the flash floods which thunder through the Valley every few years, and the damp had caused the gilded shrine panels to decay. As the outside breeze blew gently round the tomb for the first time in thousands of years, tiny fragments of gold leaf began to swirl up through the air like a well-shaken toy snowstorm, sticking to the hair of those present. Davis’s steady stream of visitors included one wit who sneezed and apparently ‘found seven and six in his handkerchief’.
Having treated the shrine with paraffin wax in an attempt to keep the gold in place, Davis employed an artist to draw the figures of Queen Tiy and her carefully erased son Akhenaten, together with other material from the tomb. This artist, Harold Jones, is always described as a Welshman, but he was actually born in my home town, Barnsley, where his father was head of the local art school. After winning a scholarship to London’s Royal College of Art Harold Jones had gone out to Egypt in 1903 as an archaeological artist. Following a stint at Hierakonpolis he began working for Davis in the Valley of the Kings, writing home: ‘I expect I shall be here a week living at the tombs of the Kings.’ In fact he remained there for the rest of his short life until his death from TB in 1911, working as Davis’s official artist in place of Howard Carter, who was now employed by Lord Carnarvon.
Caught up in the general excitement of the tomb discovery, Jones told his family, ‘I stayed till 10 o’clock having a fine time looking over the things [Davis] had found – gold diadem, canopic jars with beautiful portraits of Queen Thiy [sic] etc.’ Amongst the numerous small items hidden in the debris were bits of jewellery, beads and amulets, only later recognised as exact parallels to those that had been found in the Royal Tomb at Amarna and suggesting a close connection. Yet much of the evidence was lost as a result of Davis allowing his endless stream of visitors to take small items as ‘souvenirs’, so when Jones asked if he too might take a handful of debris he was told, ‘Certainly, take two!’
In the midst of the wreckage was a magnificent gilded coffin covered in a feathered design of carnelian and blue glass, ‘so decorated that it looked as if a great mother bird had wrapped her wings around it from head to foot’. Although its golden face had been savagely ripped off, the blue inlay of part of the right eye remains, together with a blue and gold false beard; the arms were crossed at the chest. A protective uraeus snake was fixed over the brow, atop an amazingly constructed wig whose fringed layers were skilfully carved into individual ringlets to form the Nubian wig, the same style worn by the head-shaped stoppers of the four alabaster canopic jars which had once held the mummy’s internal organs.
In the dampness of the tomb the lion-footed funerary bed beneath the coffin had collapsed, crashing to the ground, which knocked its lid aside to reveal the mummy within. Weigall could see bones ‘protruding from the remains of the linen bandages and from the sheets of flexible gold-foil in which, as we afterwards found, the whole body was wrapped’. When the body was lifted from the coffin it soon began to fall to pieces.
Although the identity of this individual has been highly controversial ever since its discovery, whoever it was had been buried wearing a significant amount of jewellery. The damaged head was found partly covered with a golden vulture collar, dislodged from the chest when the bier collapsed and initially mistaken for a crown. Around the neck hung a broad collar made up of ‘gold pendants and inlaid plaques connected by rows of minute beads, and ending in large lotus flowers of gold’. The left arm was bent with the hand on the breast, and the upper arm revealed ‘three broad bracelets of very thin gold of fragile nature; the right arm was laid straight down by the side, the hand resting on the thigh, and remains of three similar bracelets round the wrist; no rings or other jewellery were found with the mummy’.
First examined in situ, the body was laid out in the pose associated with women, the right arm down by the side and the left laid across the chest. Needing a medical opinion, Davis was in luck and found two surgeons touring the Valley, an unnamed obstetrician and a certain Dr Pollock, who both declared the pelvis to be ‘evidently that of a woman’.
Eventually all the small amulets, ritual implements, vessels of glass and stone, and canopic jars were packed up and taken to Davis’s boat on the Nile. After passing round the objects to show to distinguished guests, the party set sail for Cairo. Only the body, by now ‘nothing but a mass of black dust and bones’, remained behind.
After he had ‘soaked the bones in paraffin wax so as to preserve them’, Weigall placed them in a sealed basket and sent them, presumably by rail, to Elliot Smith in Cairo for examination. Unpacking what remained of the ‘considerably damaged’ body once it had arrived at the Medical School, Smith was clearly confused and immediately wrote to Weigall: ‘Are you sure that the bones you sent me are those which were found in the tomb? Instead of the bones of an old woman, you have sent me those of a young man. Surely there must be some mistake.’ But there seems to have been no mistake.
After examining them, Smith declared that the skull ‘exhibits in an unmistakable manner the distortion characteristic of a condition of hydrocephalus [water on the brain]’ whilst the bones ‘formed the greater part of the skeleton of a young man, who, judged by the ordinary European standards of ossification, must have attained an age of about twenty-five or twenty-six years at the time of his death . . . without excluding the possibility that he might have been several years older’. Davis was stunned. Although he still went on to publish the find in 1910 as ‘The Tomb of Queen Tiyi’, based partly on the fact that Tiy’s golden funerary shrine had been found in the tomb, he nevertheless accepted Smith’s view that the body was that of a man and declared that ‘the surgeons were deceived by the abnormal pelvis and the conditions of the examination’.
But Smith hadn’t finished yet. After further examinations which revealed that the body might even be as old as thirty, he announced that the body was that of Akhenaten himself. ‘The mummy . . . was found in its original wrappings, upon which were gold bands bearing the name of Akhenaten. It is hardly credible that the embalmers of the Pharaoh’s mummy could have put some other body in place of it. Thus we have the most positive evidence that these bones are the remains of Akhenaten.’
Certainly there was no mention of Tiy anywhere on the coffin or the mummy, and although the cartouches had been carefully removed, the remaining titles and epithets on the coffin and gold bands were indeed those of Akhenaten, as were those on the ritual implements placed in the tomb. The coffin and canopic jars certainly displayed the Nubian wig hairstyle associated with royal women, and are now generally thought to have been made for Akhenaten’s secondary wife Kiya, the ‘other woman’; but it seems they were later adapted for a royal male, presumably Akhenaten, who had originally been buried in the Royal Tomb at Amarna. Then, after the Amarna Period when the court came back to Thebes, the bodies of both Akhenaten and his mother Tiy were brought back for burial in the Valley of the Kings during the reign of Tutankhamen, whose seals had been found on KV.55’s blocked doorway.
It seems that the ancient tomb builders, when working in the area some two hundred years later, must have stumbled across KV.55 and presumably alerted the authorities responsible for security in the valley. These were none other than the priests of Amen, whose inspectors and police force regularly did the rounds, keeping a record of each tomb and checking for signs of robbery. If any was detected, as we know from surviving records, the matter would be investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice on the end of a very sharp spike. On hearing that one of the ancient tombs had been uncovered, the authorities must have consulted their records from which they would surely have identified whose burial place this was – something which they could indeed confirm by reading the inscriptions on the coffins and shrine. It was the name of the despised ‘Great Criminal’ himself!
Since he was lying beside his mother, Queen Tiy, whose husband, Amenhotep III, was still held in great esteem, the ancient authorities would have decided to remove and rebury her body. And if the Elder Woman is Tiy, then this reburial site was close to her husband and other rescued royals in the nearby tomb of Amenhotep II (KV.35). But, as a leading Egyptologist has pointed out, when they tried to remove her large gilded shrine in one piece, rather than patiently dismantling it, it got stuck in the entrance corridor and they simply left it where it was.
But her son, whose catastrophic policies had done so much damage to their livelihoods as well as to the country in general, must have been regarded as a different matter entirely. Akhenaten’s image was excised from his mother’s shrine, together with his name, and all trace of the original inscriptions was removed from the canopic jars and the gilded coffin. Having been rendered anonymous and impotent in the Afterlife, the coffin’s gold face mask was then ripped off and it appears that a stone may have been used to partly crush the head within, presumably before the tomb was sealed up once and for all – or at least for 3032 years until it was again uncovered by workmen and the can of worms was opened up once more.
Although Smith and Weigall were both convinced that the body found in tomb KV.55 was that of Akhenaten, the coffin was soon seized upon in the ongoing hunt for evidence of Akhenaten’s effeminate ‘son-in-law’ Smenkhkara, who was now popping up all over the place on conveniently uninscribed artwork and artefacts. If the coffin could be that of the young man, what about the body found inside it?
So Smith’s successor, Douglas Derry, was asked to re-examine the bones. When he had done so he stated that they ‘may be those of a man of not more than 23 years of age’. Rearranging the broken skull fragments and gluing them back together, Derry also found evidence for ‘the very reverse of the shape produced by hydrocephalus’, and stated that ‘in width it exceeded any skull ever measured by the writer in Egypt’.
Derry had recently autopsied the mummy of Tutankhamen for Howard Carter, and, struck by the strong similarity between their two skulls, concluded that ‘Smenkhkara’, the individual from KV.55, and Tutankhamen had been brothers. More recent tests revealed that Tut and this body from KV.55 even shared the same blood group, confirming their close family relationship. This, of course, would also exist between father and son – Akhenaten and Tutankhamen. When the body was X-rayed in the late 1980s it was described as a male of ‘rather fragile constitution’ who was a close relative of Tutankhamen. But the teeth were now aged to the mid-thirties, whilst the ‘long bones’ in the limbs suggested an age ‘in excess of’ thirty-five.
So, as one leading Egyptologist said, ‘Unless the anatomists change their minds yet again, it seems the impasse has at last been broken – in which case Akhenaten is found.’ Inevitably, they did change their minds, and in January 2000 I was present when the body was re-examined yet again, this time by a human remains expert who declared it to be ‘a man between the ages of twenty and twenty-five years’. From female to male, from old to young to old and back again, the burial remains ‘Egyptology’s most controversial archaeological find’, with no fewer than thirty-one interpretations between 1907 and 2001, and many more since!
The main problem was that tomb KV.55 had contained material relating to more than one royal burial, and Egyptologists had argued among themselves that the body and the coffin could have belonged to no fewer than seven people. The usual suspects are Tiy, Akhenaten, Smenkhkara, Kiya, Meketaten, Meritaten and even Nefertiti – quite a list, which could well be narrowed down with help from the anonymous three walled up in the side chamber of nearby tomb KV.35.
The fact that the bones from KV.55 have been interpreted in so many different ways by so many different people has proved incredibly frustrating. It is all connected with the way in which ancient remains are aged, particularly with the age at which certain bones fuse or ‘ossify’, since each expert suggests something different. As Elliot Smith explained, ‘The ages assigned by different anatomists as the times when the epiphyses [the ends of long bones] join and become consolidated present a considerable range of variation . . . this condition may indicate an age of not more than 30 years, or than 25 or even 20 years, according to different authorities.’ Such a wide fluctuation becomes even more problematic when dealing with bodies from ancient Egypt, where the average life expectancy was somewhere between thirty and thirty-five.
Smith also stated that he worked out the ages of ancient bodies using ‘the ordinary European standards of ossification’, which is not perhaps the most appropriate means of studying bones several thousand years old and from an entirely different part of the world. Indeed, as the American scientists explained during the second major study of the royal mummies in the 1970s, ‘a comparison of our results . . . reveals that the pharaohs’ ages at death as determined by the biologists are generally younger than what the written sources suggested. Part of this disparity may be attributed to a somewhat slower maturation in antiquity – as it is among modern Nubians, who reach puberty two to three years later than modern Americans.’ But then along came another expert who looked at Tutankhamen’s remains and contradicted all this, saying that ‘it is recognized that among Eastern peoples maturation tends to take place earlier’.
In a recent work, published in 2001, which talks about the methods used to age bones it was stated that ageing children is
relatively easy and, at least when carried out using tooth eruption, a reliable chronological age can be arrived at. Once the epiphyses have fused, however, things change markedly for the worse, and for adults many bone specialists will talk about determining biological, as opposed to chronological age. This is because the ageing of adult skeletons depends upon the changes which take place in the morphology of the skeleton with advancing age and there is no a priori reason why these changes should proceed at the same pace in all individuals.
This was also repeated in a discussion at the Archaeological Science conference in Oxford in 2003, when a leading expert on ancient remains admitted that, whilst bones can certainly be aged as they are growing, it was ‘not possible to be able to differentiate the ages of adults’.
Little wonder, then, that the widely varying ages given for the royal mummies are treated with caution. The situation has been well summed up by one leading Egyptologist:
whilst it is tempting to assume that the estimated ages of death of the royal mummies can be used as a starting point for establishing chronology, it appears that we must accept that not only the estimates given by Maspero and Smith, but also those based on recent scientific examination are not accurate enough to be used absolutely for this purpose, and that no historical or chronological arguments based solely on evidence of age at death of a mummy can be considered valid. It remains to be resolved as to how far such evidence should be allowed at all. Certainly, if it goes against what can be deduced from other sources, priority should be given to the latter.
This certainly seems to be true of the body from KV.55. Yet, clinging stubbornly to the belief that Smenkhkara was more than simply Nefertiti’s throne name, many authorities still think that the body from KV.55 must be the tangible remains of the effeminate young royal ‘himself’, even though it has been pointed out that the name ‘Smenkhkara’ occurs nowhere at all in tomb KV.55.
Having looked at these most controversial of bones, Elliot Smith was then invited to examine the mummies that remained in the tomb of Amenhotep II. When at last he found a day to spare he ‘made a hasty examination’ of the king and the three anonymous mummies in the side chamber, assisted by Weigall, and reporting his findings in the royal mummies catalogue which had so inspired me in the first place. Estimating the Younger Woman’s age at ‘around 25’, he admitted that the exact age couldn’t be determined, adding that it wasn’t practical to X-ray a body in such a remote location.
I was sure Amenhotep II was now in Cairo Museum, and began to wonder when exactly he had been moved from his tomb. In a subsequent publication Smith reported that he was still in his tomb in 1924, and again in an article published in 1934 it was stated that the king ‘still lies in state beneath the glow of an electric lamp’. In fact this was no longer the case. With increasing sensitivity still surrounding the way in which Egypt’s ancient dead were displayed, or at least how dead royals were displayed, the Government decided to take them all off display and place them in a huge mausoleum. Needing more details, I returned to Carter’s diaries and once again found the information I was looking for. Apparently the mausoleum in question had been built for the great Egyptian statesman Saad Zaghlul Pasha, who died in 1927. The Government then decided that other notable Egyptians should be buried alongside him, but his widow refused permission. Unable to leave such an expensive monument so empty, the Government decided to turn the place into a Pantheon of Ancient Egypt, filling it with all the royal mummies, both from the Cairo Museum and from the tomb of Amenhotep II. But whilst the illustrious mummy of Amenhotep II was taken north by train to Cairo in 1931, apparently on the top bunk of a first-class sleeping car, the three mummies in the side chamber, presumably considered ‘unworthy’ of such a privileged burial, were left where they were, walled up for their own safety behind a sealed doorway.
Even that wasn’t the end of the saga. Although Amenhotep II and all the rest of the royal mummies were transferred to the mausoleum in great secrecy in 1932, plans changed again a few years later. When Saad Zaghlul Pasha was finally interred in his purpose-built mausoleum in January 1937 the royal mummies, now superfluous to requirements, were returned to the Cairo Museum. And there has been ‘Since then a marked silence.’
This was certainly true for the anonymous three walled up in the side chamber. Their peace was only briefly interrupted in 1975 when a sample of hair from the Elder Woman was taken to compare with the one labelled with the name of Queen Tiy found in Tutankhamen’ tomb. Also during this inspection X-rays were taken of the Elder Woman’s skull, from which the structure of her facial bones – her ‘craniofacial morphology’ – was declared to be closest to that of the mummy of Tuya, mother of Queen Tiy.
Tuya’s mummy had been found with that of her husband Yuya in their small joint tomb (KV.46) in the Valley of the Kings. Their son-in-law Amenhotep III had honoured them with a grand burial, filling the tomb with fabulous gold coffins and death masks, a gilded chariot, inlaid furniture, well-stuffed cushions, a jewel casket and wig box, perfume jars and sandals. When it was discovered largely intact in 1905, with bouquets of flowers still as they were left in the entrance passage, the Valley’s inspector, Arthur Weigall, told his wife, ‘I really nearly fainted . . . The room looked just as a drawing room would look in a London house shut up while the people were away for the summer.’
Since their son-in-law’s reign had marked a high point in the art of embalming, the mummies of Yuya and Tuya are without doubt the most technically perfect examples to have survived from ancient Egypt. Yuya in particular is regarded as the best-preserved Egyptian mummy, ‘his eyes peacefully closed and his mouth a little open’. Both he and his wife also have bright yellow hair, originally taken as evidence for their supposed foreign origins; equally, perhaps, it may have been the effect of embalming fluids on their otherwise white hair, or evidence of a pale henna rinse.
Yuya and Tuya were taken off to the Cairo Museum, where the Americans X-rayed them both and announced that they were satisfied that the Elder Woman was their daughter, the great Queen Tiy. They also X-rayed the prince in the tomb, assuming he must be a son of Amenhotep II. But for some reason the mysterious shaven-headed Younger Woman was left alone, her secrets intact.
Although the identification of Tiy was accepted at first, some felt the evidence was not conclusive. And since no one else had actually seen the three mummies – just the head shots which appeared in Smith’s royal mummies catalogue back in 1912, and X-rays of the heads of the Elder Woman and Boy taken in the 1970s – many still felt all three were probably the relatives of Amenhotep II. After all, they had been found in his tomb and according to Smith had been mummified by the same techniques as those used on the body of the king himself.
One of the few alternative suggestions was made by Egyptolo-gist Elizabeth Thomas in 1966. Discussing the shaven-headed state of the Younger Woman, she noted that ‘such treatment of the head is noted elsewhere only for Tutankhamen, the other women having abundant hair as a rule and even supplementing it with a wig if necessary’. This was one of the factors which made her doubt that the Younger Woman could be either the mother or wife of Amenhotep II, and when describing the equally shaven-headed Tutankhamen she went further, asking: ‘Does this feature suggest relationship in time with the lady?’
Although few seem to have picked up on this, Thomas’s comment gave me real encouragement in challenging the accepted notion that the three were all related to Amenhotep II just because they had been found in his tomb. Some of the kings buried there had clearly died several centuries later, and as I read through Smith’s examination reports I wasn’t convinced that the mummification techniques used on the three were necessarily the same as those which had been used to prepare the body of Amenhotep II.
Nor did this explain the three’s anonymity, the obvious lack of rewrapping when compared to the other mummies in the tomb, and the fact that they’d been placed in their own side chamber directly on to the floor and with such little care. And, of course, in the case of the Younger Woman, Loret had found the remains of that short wig; there was terrible damage to the face and the right arm had been ripped off. Smith clearly stated that this right arm was once bent up, which would be the pose of a king, and with its fingers still clutched around something, quite possibly a sceptre. It all suggested a woman who may once have wielded kingly powers.