Until the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in the Eastern Valley last November it was believed (by Sir Gaston Maspero and others) that it would be found in the Western Valley. Until then Ay’s was the earliest royal tomb, after that of Amenhotep III, to be discovered, and as they were in the Western Valley, it seemed probable that Ay’s predecessor Tutankhamen had also been buried there. But when making the secondary tomb for Akhenaton in the Eastern Valley he seems to have made his own tomb there also, and so resumed the old practice, which was observed by all his successors for two and a half centuries with the exception only of his successor Ay.
This wonderfully impressive gorge (Fig. 10, p. 66) is known to the modern Egyptians as the Bab (or Biban) el Moluk, the Gate (or Gates) of the Kings. It was known to travellers ever since it was made into the royal necropolis, and Greeks and Romans marvelled at the wonderful tunnel-like tombs there, as generations of tourists have done ever since. Strabo mentions his having seen forty of these tombs, but it is not clear from his account whether he did not include those of the Western Valley and perhaps the Tombs of the Queens and others.
Modern research was inaugurated by the traveller Belzoni who opened the tomb of Seti I in 1819 and described the pictures on its walls (Fig. 20 is copied from his notebook) before they were damaged or destroyed. He brought to London the magnificent “alabaster” sarcophagus of this pharaoh, which is now in Sir John Soane’s museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
The year 1881 will always be memorable for the earliest discovery of Royal mummies. Five years later, when the wrappings were removed from such pharaohs as Seti I and Rameses II, modern men had the novel experience of gazing upon the actual faces of these famous rulers of the remotely distant past, whose exploits had resounded through the civilized world for thirty centuries and more. On several occasions in former years the discovery of Royal mummies had been reported; but in every case further investigation failed to justify such claims, for they proved to be merely intrusive burials of unknown people belonging to times much later than the rifled tombs in which they were found. Examples of such mistakes in identification are the eighteenth dynasty mummy, now in the Cairo Museum, which was found in a pyramid at Sakkara, and at one time was supposed to be the son of King Pepi, of the sixth dynasty; and the skeleton (not a mummy) in the British Museum from the pyramid of Mykerinus, which has repeatedly been referred to as the bones, or even as the mummy, of that pharaoh.
The discoveries made in the famous cache at Deir el Bahari in 1881, and in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings during the decade 1898-1908, revealed the only actual mummies of members of the royal family so far recovered, although the skeletons of much earlier members of the ruling house were found by M. de Morgan in the pyramids of Dashur nearly thirty years ago.
Long before the recovery of the actual bodies of these famous rulers the statues and bas-reliefs of some of them had familiarized us with their appearance; and inscriptions on their monuments and the ancient writings of the Egyptians and their neighbours had made us acquainted with certain of their exploits. The plundered tombs of some of the great kings of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties have been known and visited by tourists from the times of the Greek domination of Egypt, and contemporary documents refer to others. Moreover, twenty years before the mummies themselves were revealed, the dealers in antiquities began to offer for sale a series of papyri (most of which came to this country) giving accounts of the desecration of the royal Theban tombs.
Fig. 12.—An old photograph of the great cliffs behind Deir el Bahari, showing this temple as it was in 1881 before it was excavated. The royal mummies were hidden in a cleft in these cliffs.
Tomb-robbers’ Confessions
In the late Lord Amherst’s collection, which was recently sold in London, there was a judicial papyrus of the reign of Rameses IX (about 1125 b.c.), reporting the trial of eight “servants of the High Priest of Amen,” who were arraigned for plundering the tomb of King Sebekemsaf of the thirteenth dynasty. The written depositions of the prisoners set before the pharaoh by the vizier, the lieutenant, the reporter, and the mayor of Thebes were translated by Professor Percy Newberry in these terms: “We opened the coffins and their wrappings, which were on them, and we found the noble mummy of the king. There were two swords and many amulets and necklaces of gold on his neck: his head was covered with gold. We tore off the gold that we found on the noble mummy of this god [i.e. the dead king who was identified with Osiris]. We found the royal wife also. We tore off all that we found from her mummy likewise, and we set fire to their wrappings. We took their furniture of gold, silver and copper vases, which we found with them.” The prisoners who made this confession were found guilty, and sentenced “to be placed in the prison of the temple of Amen,” to await “the punishment that our lord the pharaoh shall decide.” There are several other famous papyri reporting trials of desecrators of the royal tombs. In the Abbott papyrus (in the British Museum) inspectors submit a report on the tombs that were said to have been plundered, but the only one that had actually been robbed was that referred to in the confession just quoted from the Amherst papyrus. The two Mayer papyri in the Liverpool Free Public Museums relate to plundering in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings. One of these is of special interest at the present moment because it relates to the violation of the tomb of Rameses VI, which is immediately above that of Tutankhamen. The robbers were discovered as the result of quarrels among themselves about the division of the spoil. This was one of the most disgraceful incidents in the whole history of tomb-plundering. The robbers, in their haste to get at the gold and jewels upon the mummies, usually chopped through the bandages, and mutilated the mummy in the process. But when, in 1905, I removed the wrappings from the mummy of Rameses VI (which in ancient times had been removed to the tomb of Amenhotep II, where it was discovered by M. Loret in 1898), the body was found to be hacked to pieces. This was no mere accidental injury, but clearly intentional destruction of a malicious nature. It makes one realize the sort of vandalism Tutankhamen’s tomb so narrowly escaped.