Tombs. Treasures. Mummies. Forward 1

gyptomania. What is it about ancient Egypt that has fascinated many of the world’s peoples for the past 200 years? Certainly there are the ruins up and down the Nile of once magnificent stone buildings which can be visited yet to-day and which continue to awe us with their scale and scope, even with the technology of their construction. There is the monumental art still in place and on dis-play in countless museums around the planet: untallied thousands of examples of stone statuary, pictorial reliefs and inscriptions, the latter in a complicated writing form that only the specially trained can read. But numerous other Old and New World cultures of antiquity left behind equivalent evidence of their existences: the Mesopotamians, peo-ples of the Indus Valley, Bronze Age Chinese, the Minoans, Greeks and Romans, the high cultures of the New World, among several others. Yet only the seemingly insati-able universal enthrallment with the 3,000-year-long culture of the people living beside the Nile below the First Cataract has been labeled as an “obsession”: Egyptomania.

Perhaps the underlying reason for this can be summed up in a single word: tombs. To be sure, the elite of other ancient peoples made monumental burial places for themselves, rock cut or stone built; but none of these did so on the scale and with the persistence over so long a period of time as did the dynastic Egyptians. And because the Nile Valley has a desert climate, more ancient Egyptian sepulchers have survived into the modern era than those of other cultures of antiquity — most of these thor-oughly violated long ago, to be sure, but a surprising number having been discovered by archaeologists still housing their original occupants and with some grave goods yet intact, and even a few officially found wholly untouched by ancient or more recent tomb robbers.

Because the dynastic Egyptians believed that they could “take it with them” to the Afterlife, they stocked their final earthly resting places with those tangibles which were important to them dur-ing their mortal existence. Consequently, a great many more of the “everyday” things of the an-cient Egyptian culture have survived than is the case for other peoples of antiquity. It is because there are whole museum (and even many private) collections of this abundance of furniture, utensils and tools, ceramics, stoneware and glassware, basketry, toiletries, toys and games, linens, clothing, sandals, jewelry and other personal adornments, preserved foodstuffs, etc., that we moderns feel intimately familiar with the personal lifestyle of the ancient Nile dwellers, confirmed by the hard and fast evidence of this to be found in countless display cases from Berlin to Boston, Cairo to Copenhagen, Toronto to Tokyo. It is one thing to view a two-dimen-sional chair in a colorful tomb fresco, and quite another to see exhibited in a vitrine of the Metropolitan Museum of Art an actual chair on which particular living Egyptians really sat 3,300 years ago.

In addition to the mundane things of daily life found in the tombs of the dynastic Nile dwellers, there are, of course, those grave objects surviving to the present day which are strictly funerary (i.e. magical) in nature, but which do not exist (at least in any quantity) from other ancient peoples: large sarcophagi of stone and wood; rectang-ular and anthropoid wooden coffins that are painted and/or gilded; funerary masks of painted and gilded cartonnage; so-called canopic chests and ves-sels for the preserved viscera of the deceased; miniature protective amulets of dozens of types; model river vessels and daily-life scenes; and carved mummiform statuettes (in a variety of mater-ials) of Afterlife worker-substitutes called ushabtis.

Considering the vast numbers of utilitarian and strictly funerary “treasures” which have been recovered from ancient Egyptian tombs, it is sobering to consider that the whole lot represents only a relatively small percentage of what originally was put into elite-status graves between the founding of the Egyptian state around 3,000 BC and the end of the Dynastic Period some 2,970 years later. All the rest was destroyed (or recycled) long ago, or else yet waits to be discovered one day in the future.

At the core of every ancient Egyptian burial was, of course, the deceased. Those individuals who were interred in antiquity and whose mortal remains have survived to the present are not — for the most part — the disarticulated skeletons found in the graves and tombs of other ancient peoples. Instead, we have the some-times amazingly well-preserved artificially desiccated human remains known today as mummies (from the Persian mummia, “bitumen”). Since the ancient Egyptians believed from earliest times that the revivified mortal body was necessary for housing the deceased’s soul (ka) in the Afterlife, ways were evolved over time to keep cadavers from putrefying to mere bones. While vast numbers of Egyptian mummies were wantonly destroyed in the last century (and certainly earlier) — for their presumed medical properties, and even as fuel, it seems — a great many have survived and now are in world-wide museum col- lections (and some private ones). Even though when unwrapped from their obligatory linen bandaging their appearance is generally horrific, these remaining mummies ne- vertheless evoke a fascination in all but the most squeamish, whether viewed directly or only in photographs. Perhaps this is because these still-recognizable withered, leathery corpses were, in fact, once living human beings who walked, talked, laughed, cried, ate, drank, made love and gave birth; and that they somehow have lasted the millennia cannot help but awe us somewhat today, despite their frequent grotesquery. They are, ultimately, silent reminders of our own fragile mortality. Whether they should be con- sidered more than human artifacts is for moralists and the religious to decide, for them- selves. Certainly they are due the same conservation and preservation all fragile “anti- quities” deserve; whether they should be put on public display and stared at like any other object surviving from the distant past is another matter altogether.

Since archaeologists began seeking, excavating and “clearing” ancient grave sites and sepulchers throughout modern-era Egypt, voices of the self-righteous have been raised charging that these formal and government-approved activities are little more than contemporary tomb robbing in the name of science, basically no different than the looting and desecration undertaken by those ancient thieves who showed scant or no respect for the dead and buried. Archaeologists always have rationalized their tomb work as salvaging the past, saving for posterity’s admiration and study the precious ar- tifacts of a long-vanished culture, which would otherwise likely be wholly lost or de- stroyed — or at the very least secreted away and ultimately sold — by their unscrupu- lous contemporaries who have absolutely no regard for the past, except how its left- overs ultimately can line their pockets for profit.

From the viewpoint of the ancient Egyptians themselves, it might be supposed that they would be perfectly content with their mortal remains and surviving tomb con- tents being “salvaged” today and placed together in museum contexts. Since living throughout eternity was their one reason for having well-stocked their grave sites in the first place, it is likely that — if they were aware it is so — the New Kingdom royal-tomb architect Kha and his wife Merit would be quite pleased to be residing now, along with their valued possessions from life, in a comfortable side gallery of the Museo Egi- zio in Torino, Italy. And royal in-laws Yuya and Thuyu would probably not object at all to having been removed — along with their plentiful, once-ransacked grave goods — from the dark humble cave-like space hewn in the bedrock of the Valley of the Kings, which they occupied for 3,300 years, to a spacious open area on the second floor of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. In both instances the mummies of the individuals in que- stion are not on view — resting as they do in their innermost anthropoid coffins — and so are spared being gawked at by the modern-day curious, who instead behold those objects which the two couples valued in life, plus the elaborate funerary equipage they specially prepared for their interment, and who are thereby suitably impressed. Addi- tionally, Kha and Merit and Yuya and Thuyu were totally forgotten not so very long after their deaths in the mid-Eighteenth Dynasty; three-plus millennia later their names are known throughout a world that they themselves never could have imagined existed. Truly they have achieved some degree of the eternal life they took such pains and ex- pense to ensure for themselves.

So, tombs and the “treasures” and mummies which a few of them have been found still to contain are part and parcel of the seemingly universal attraction of the almost mythical and at the same time so-real place called “ancient Egypt.” Seven of these sepulchers — all of them discovered in the Theban area over a period of a half century, with at least some treasure and a mummy or more remaining — are the sub- jects of the following chapters, addenda and appendices. They are, inarguably, among the most famous (and infamous) discoveries made by archaeologists working in Egypt; Known popularly as the Royal Mummies Cache, and formally as Deir el Bahari Tomb 320 (DB320 for short), this important site — unofficially discovered in 1871 and officially and hastily cleared a de-cade later — was itself, however, never formally documented and published; it apparently has not been entered since 1919 and today is totally inaccessible. The Egyptological (and public) interest in DB320 has focused not on the site but on its amazing human-remains contents. Appendix Two of the present work presents the complete catalogue of the mummified royalty (and others) of the Deir el Bahari cache.

Chapters Two and Three tell of two of the important early discoveries made in the famous Valley of the Kings by French littérateur-turned-archaeologist Victor Loret: the mostly robbed Tomb 35, that of Amenhotep II; and the almost intact Tomb of Maiherpri, Kings’ Valley 36. The first of these finds proved not only still to house the rewrapped mummy of its royal owner (along with smashed fragments of his original grave furnishings) but also the cached rescued mummies of several additional rulers of the New Kingdom, along with the remains of some anonymous individuals. Thus KV35 came to be known popularly as the Second Royal Mummies Cache (or Cachette). Although ransacked and minimally robbed in antiquity, the burial of the royal fan bearer Maiherpri ranks as the first largely intact private burial discovered in the Theban royal necropolis. Regrettably, Loret never formally published either of his discoveries, one of Egyptian archaeology’s greater losses. Appendix Three is a catalogue of the mummies, kingly and otherwise, recovered from KV35.

Chapter Four and its several addenda recount the 1905 finding, contents thereof and rushed clearance of, arguably, the second most famous tomb ever discovered in Egypt, that of figures from the sidelines of pharaonic history: Yuya and Thuyu, the commoner in-laws of the great Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh Amenhotep III and grandparents of the infamous Heretic, Akhenaten. Like the Tomb of Maiherpri, that of Yuya and his wife (Kings’ Valley 46) had been entered and minimally robbed in the years not long after the couple’s interment. Their impressive multiple gilded anthropoid coffins of near-kingly quality (from a royal workshop, no doubt) were the first such impressive fu-nerary equipage to be discovered fully intact; and their amazingly well-preserved and undamaged mummies remain today the best and most attractive surviving examples of the ancient embalmer’s craft. The discovery of Tomb 46 brought to the forefront one of the truly controversial figures in Egyptian archaeology, American millionaire and dilettante digger Theodore M. Davis, who also plays a central role in Chapter Six. While Davis did formally (if inadequately) publish his 1905 find — and an entire volume of the Egyptian Museum’s Catalogue Général series was subsequently devoted to the KV46 objects and mummies — it is regretted today that, in the haste to empty the tomb (so that Davis could end his excavation season according to his personal schedule), no photography was made of the contents in situ, thus leaving the archaeological record sadly incomplete.

Only a year later, in 1906, Italian excavator Ernesto Schiaparelli made an almost equally amaz-interment (and that of his wife, who would seem to have predeceased him) is the textbook example of what an elite-status Egyptian of the mid-Eighteenth Dynasty regarded as essential accompaniments for the Afterlife. While Schiaparelli had the good sense to at least minimally photograph the TT8 burial chamber with its contents still in place, he waited over twenty years to formally publish his discovery, and the resulting over-sized volume in Italian — while well-illustrated with many adequate photographs of the tomb objects — is an often rambling account that falls woefully short of being “scientific,” including no measurements and not even giving the exact date of the discovery. Theban Tomb 8 is also unique (in addition to its fully intact state) for being the only major archaeological discovery in Egypt that has almost no presence in that country today (aside from the currently inaccessible tomb site itself), inasmuch as Schiaparelli was permitted by Director-General of the Egyptian Museum Gaston Maspero, for reasons never elucidated, to remove all but one of the tomb’s many objects (a floor lamp) — and the couple’s coffins and mummies — from Egypt to the Museo Egizio in Turin, the Italian’s sponsoring institution.

Chapter Six is a recounting of one of the most debated and written about interments ever discovered in Egypt, Kings’ Valley Tomb 55, more popularly known as the “Amarna Cache.” This sepulcher was found in January 1907 by Edward Ayrton, a young English archaeologist excavating in the employment of the difficult Theodore M. Davis. The anciently violated interment was not a “proper” burial, but rather the makeshift caching of a royal individual of the controversial Amarna period, whose identity is problematic, and whose sex and age at death have been much argued about as well. The ransacked and water-damaged condition of KV55 when discovered would have made its clearance an archaeological challenge in the best of circumstances; the impatient Davis succeeded in creating the worst of circumstances by wilfully permitting the uncleared tomb to become a sightseeing treat for his visiting friends, and simultaneously requiring his relatively inexperienced archaeologist, Ayrton, to work under the pressure of a hurried schedule (once again, Davis required that the dismantlement be finished by the fast-approaching end of his 1906-1907 excavation season). Although he permitted photography this time, only seven views of the tomb’s in situ interior were subsequently published in his handsome-but-inadequate 1910 volume on the discovery. Interestingly, other accounts of the KV55 event, frequently conflicting in details, were published by participants in and onlookers at the opening and clearance of the tomb, making it the Rashomon of Egyptological literature.

Fifteen years were to pass before another major discovery occurred in the Valley of the Kings — the major discovery of Egyptian archaeology, to be sure, and arguably the best known archaeological find ever made anywhere. The Tomb of Tutankhamen (KV62) is the subject of Chapter Seven and its three addenda, and of Appendix Four. Every schoolchild probably knows at least the basic story of English archaeologist Howard Carter and his aristocratic patron, Lord Carnarvon, and of their tireless search for and eventual “final season” discovery of the treasure-filled, gold-rich burial of the boy-king Tutankhamen — which, though twice robbed in the years following his death, was largely intact, the royal mummy being the only one ever found resting wholly undisturbed, just as it had been left by the necropolis officials thirty-three centuries before. Retelling the story here focuses on the archaeological aspects of the event (the careful clearance of the tomb’s four chambers over eight years, and a description of the major ones of the some 3,000 objects recovered therein) — the complicated politics surrounding and impeding Carter, Carnarvon and their discovery being dealt with separately in Addendum One. Although Carter never got around to formally publishing KV62, his three-volume “popular” story of the discovery and its “treasures” certainly has been — and continues to be — read by more persons worldwide than any other archaeological account ever written.

In Tombs. Treasures. Mummies. I have attempted to present these “Seven Great Discoveries of Egyptian Archaeology” as narratives that can be enjoyed without any prior knowledge of the subjects on the part of the reader. But each chapter is fully documented as well, for those who wish to brave the fine print for the minutiae. The photographs are, for the most part, archival.