Even Tut's was rifled more than once before the volatile British archaeologist Howard Carter entered it in 1922, climaxing an obsessive, two-decade search for the young monarch's resting place. No known tomb survived completely unscathed. The valley, once constantly policed, was looted repeatedly over nearly three millennia. After his death, the long-unified Egyptian state broke apart. The burials halted abruptly around 1100 b.c.-following the chaotic reign of Ramses XI. Egyptians filled the tombs with untold wealth, a grandeur only hinted at by the relatively modest grave of Tutankhamen, who died at around age 19 and whose tomb is small and unadorned compared with those of other Pharaohs. Instead of the usual mummies, the other coffins opened so far contain only a bizarre assortment of what appears to be debris and constitute a 3,000-year-old mystery: Why fill coffins and jars with rocks and broken pottery, then carefully seal them up? Why hew out a subterranean chamber only to turn it into a storeroom? And who went to all this effort? "It may not be the most glamorous find," says Betsy Bryan, an Egyptologist at Johns Hopkins University, "but it is a whole new kind of entombment-which raises all kinds of questions."įor 400 years beginning around 1500 b.c., the rulers of three powerful Egyptian dynasties built their tombs here in the Valley of the Kings, what they called "The Great and Majestic Necropolis." During the peak of ancient Egypt's wealth and influence, artists and masons carved and decorated miles of underground corridors for the afterlife of some five dozen kings, along with their wives, children and principal ministers. The child-size coffin in KV-63 held the flashiest artifact: a second, nested coffin coated in gold leaf. More remarkably, the artifacts appear to have been undisturbed for more than three millennia, not since one of Egypt's most fascinating periods-just after the death of the heretic king Akhenaten, who, unlike his predecessors, worshiped a single deity, the sun god Aten. Still, the discovery, announced in February, was trumpeted worldwide, because most archaeologists had long ago given up hope of finding significant discoveries in the valley. Despite the coffins, this probably isn't even a gravesite. Unlike Tut's, it contains neither gold statues and funerary furniture nor, as of early June, the mummified body of a long-dead Pharaoh. Just yards away, visitors in shorts and hats are lining up to get into King Tut's cramped tomb, named KV-62 because it was the 62nd tomb found in the Valley of the Kings.Īccordingly, Schaden's newly opened chamber is KV-63. Back up amid the heat and tourists, the 68-year-old archaeologist pulls out tobacco and bread crumbs, thrusting the first into a pipe and flinging the second onto the ground for some twittering finches. Until this past February, he had worked in obscurity, splitting his time between studying a minor Pharaoh's tomb nearby and playing bass fluegelhorn in a Chicago band. Nervous about bumping into someone-or worse, something-I make my way back out to the narrow shaft and climb to the surface with Otto Schaden, the dig's director. The 17-foot-long space, which has plain limestone walls, also holds a number of knee-high ceramic storage jars, most still sealed. Something resembling a pillow seems to bulge out of another casket. Deeper in the pile, a child-size casket is nestled between two full-sized ones. It was likely built for a woman men's faces were typically rendered a sunburned red. A couple of yards away, University of Chicago archaeological artist Susan Osgood intently sketches the serene yellow face painted on a partially intact coffin. Edwin Brock, an Egyptologist formerly at the American University of Cairo, is on his knees, cataloging the contents of a coffin filled with a strange assortment of pottery, rocks, cloth and natron-the powdery substance used to dry mummies. Termites have turned parts of some of them into powder, while others have suffered only a thin layer of dust. In a small chamber lit by fluorescent lamps, a half-dozen archaeologists are measuring, drawing and gently probing relics in the first tomb to be found in the Valley of the Kings, more than 400 miles up the Nile from Cairo, since the resting place of King Tutankhamen was discovered here 84 years ago.Ī jumble of seven wooden coffins of various sizes fills one corner of the room. Eighteen feet down a vertical shaft, the blazing Egyptian sun is gone, the crowd's hum is muted and the air is cool. I step over the tape and show my pass to a guard, who motions for me to climb down a wooden ladder sticking out of a small, nearly square hole in the ground. in the Valley of the Kings, and tourists are already milling just beyond the yellow police tape like passersby at a traffic accident.
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