Tombs. Treasures. Mummies. Forward 2

and one is perhaps the best known archaeological discovery of all time, its lengthy clearance having held the world’s rapt attention for much of the decade of the 1920s.

Chapter One retells the story of the accidental finding by modern-day grave rob- bers of a cache-tomb in the cliffs just south of the famous mortuary temples at Deir el Bahari, which ultimately proved to house the rescued mummies of several of the great kings and queens of the New Kingdom. 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 decade 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 pub- lic) 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 Mai- herpri, Kings’ Valley 36. The first of these finds proved not only still to house the re- wrapped mummy of its royal owner (along with smashed fragments of his original grave furnishings) but also the cached rescued mummies of several ad-ditional 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). Al- though 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. Ap-pendix 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 grand- parents 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 funerary 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 dilet- tante 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 ex-cavation 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 amazing find, the never violated Tomb of Kha and Merit (Theban Tomb 8) at Deir el Medina, the story of which is the subject of Chapter Five. Kha, an architect liv- ing during the reigns of Amenhotep II, Thutmose IV and Amenhotep III, in all likeli- hood was the designer of the tombs of the latter two rulers, and probably worked on the sepulcher of the second Amenhotep as well. His wholly intact 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 accompani- ments 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 Di- ector-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 spon- soring institution.

Chapter Six is a recounting of one of the most debated and written about in-terments 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 make- shift 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 un- cleared 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 subsequent- tly published in his handsome-but-inadequate 1910 volume on the discovery. Interest- ingly, other accounts of the KV55 event, frequently conflicting in details, were pub- ished 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 Val- ley of the Kings — the major discovery of Egyptian archaeology, to be sure, and ar- guably the best known archaeological find ever made anywhere. The Tomb of Tut-ankhamen (KV62) is the subject of Chapter Seven and its three addenda, and of Ap-pendix Four. Every schoolchild probably knows at least the basic story of English arch- aeologist Howard Carter and his aristocratic patron, Lord Carnarvon, and of their tire-less 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 follow- ing his death, was largely intact, the royal mummy being the only one ever found rest- ing 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 des- cription of the major ones of the some 3,000 objects recovered therein) — the compli- cated 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 doc- umented as well, for those who wish to brave the fine print for the minutiae. The pho- tographs are, for the most part, archival.