How did it happen that the seeming
misidentifications occurred in the first place? When the rulers
of the Twenty-first Dynasty made the decision to dismantle the
plundered interments in the Great Place (Valley of the Kings),
the accomplishment of this did not happen overnight, but
evidently over several years. When the royal tombs were entered
by those assigned to recover the human remains therein and to
collect whatever was salvageable or recyclable (bullion-wise)
from the vandalized funerary furnishings that remained, they
were confronted by much the same scenes as Victor Loret found
in KV35 when he first entered it in 1898: total chaos.
Certainly the mum- mified royal occupant(s) in each tomb had
been rapaciously denuded of their trappings and often were
found with a limb or two detached, the body cavity broken open,
even the head severed in some instances. Anything that might
have borne the name(s) of the tomb owner had been stripped from
the body and carried off, leaving the mummy(ies) in question
essentially anonymous, save for the context of the sepulcher
itself.
It
appears that the probably never-used tomb of Rameses XI (the
latter having been interred in the Delta in all likelihood)
served as a makeshift workshop wherein paper-thin gilding was
stripped with some effort from furniture parts and coffin frag-
ments, etc. The recovered human remains were carried up out of
the Valley of the Kings and across the flood plain to the
Mortuary Temple of Rameses III, where nec- ropolis priests set
about reassembling (as necessary) each body, rewrapping it —
often without great care, frequently incorporating some of the
original bandaging — and in- scribing in inked hieratics
on the outer shroud the nomen and/or prenomen of the pre- sumed
ruler before them. The reconstituted mummy bundle was then
placed in a coffin at hand (these for the most part salvaged
from various plundered burials, not necessarily royal and —
with a couple of exceptions — not original to the
individual being enclos- ed within). The replacement coffin
then was itself inscribed in ink with its new occu-
pant’s name(s), and very probably put in storage at the
temple, its reinterment to be dealt with at some later time — when
it was moved, eventually, to either the family cache of
Priest-King Pinudjem I or to the Tomb of Amenhotep II (or some
other yet-to-be-found place) where, hopefully, it would be safe
for all time to come.
Further resolution of the actual identities of the several
disputed Royal Mum-mies awaits two future developments: (1)
refinement of DNA testing, whereby ac-curate results can be
gotten from mummified tissues (samples of same for the Royal
Mummies being presently in sterile storage in Cairo); and (2)
discovery of the Third Royal Mummies Cache, which likely will
be found to house many — if not all — of the
still-missing New Kingdom rulers: Ahmose I (?), Hatshepsut,
Amenhotep III (?), Akhenaten (?), Horemheb, Ay, Rameses I, Seti
II, Tausret (?), Setnakht, Rameses VII-VIII-X-(?)XI and
Herihor; plus any number of royal wives, princes and princesses
of the period, including Neferure, Mutemwiya, Nefertiti,
Meritaten, Ankhesenamen, Nef- ertari, Isetnofert, etc.; and
unaccounted for Pinudjem family members, particularly the
high-priests Piankh, Menkheperre and Nesbanebdjed (Smendes) II.
Dennis C. Forbes