 Section 5 of The Tomb of Tutankhamun by Howard Carter. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Avahi in May 2019. Chapter 2. The Valley and the Tomb. The valley of the tombs of the kings. The very name is full of romance, and of all Egypt's wonders there is none, I suppose, it makes a more instant appeal to the imagination. Here in this lonely valley head, remote from every sound of life, with the horn, the highest peak in the Theban Hills, standing sentinel like a natural pyramid above them, lay thirty or more kings, among them the greatest Egypt ever knew. Thirty were buried here. Now probably but to remain, Amun Hoteb, the second, whose mummy may be seen by the curious lying in his sarcophagus, and Tutankhamun, who still remains intact beneath his golden shrine. There, when the claims of science have been satisfied, we hope to leave him lying. I do not propose to attempt a word picture of the valley itself, that has been done too often in the past few months. I would like, however, to devote a certain amount of time to its history, for that is essential to a proper understanding of our present tomb. Tucked away in a corner at the extreme end of the valley, half concealed by a projecting bastion of rock, lies the entrance to a very unauthentitious tomb. It is easily overlooked and rarely visited, but it has a very special interest as being the first ever constructed in the valley. More than that, it is notable as an experiment in a new theory of tomb design. To the Egyptian it was a matter of vital importance that his body should rest in violet in the place constructed for it, and these the earlier kings had sought to ensure by erecting over it a very mountain of stone. It was also essential to a mummy's well-being that it should be fully equipped against every need, and, in the case of a luxurious and display-loving oriental monarch, this would naturally involve a lavish use of gold and other treasure. The result was obvious enough. The very magnificence of the monument was its undoing, and within a few generations at most the mummy would be disturbed and its treasure stolen. Various expedients were tried. The entrance passage, naturally the weak spot in a pyramid, was plugged with granite monoliths weighing many tons. False passages were constructed, secret doors were contrived, everything that ingenuity could suggest or wealth could purchase was employed. Vain labour all of it, for bypatience and perseverance to tomb robber in every case surmounted the difficulties that were set to baffle him. Moreover the success of these expedients, and therefore the safety of the monument itself, was largely dependent on the goodwill of the mason who carried out the work and the architect who designed it. Careless workmanship would leave a danger point in the best-planned defences, and, in private tombs at any rate, we know that an ingress for plunderers was sometimes contrived by the officials who planned the work. Guards to secure the guarding of the royal monument were equally unavailing. A king might leave enormous endowments, as a matter of fact each king did, for the upkeep of large companies of pyramid officials and guardians, but after a time these very officials were ready enough to connive at the plundering of the monument they were paid to guard, while the endowments were sure, at the end of the dynasty at latest, to be diverted by some subsequent king to other purposes. At the beginning of the 18th dynasty there was hardly a king's tomb in the whole of Egypt that had not been rifled, a somewhat grisly thought to the monarch who was choosing the site for his own last resting place. Tothmas first evidently found it so, and devoted a good deal of thought to the problem, and as a result we get the lonely little tomb at the head of the valley. Secrecy was to be the solution to the problem. A preliminary step in this direction had been taken by his predecessor, Amun Hattab I, who made his tomb some distance away from his funerary temple on the summit of the Drach Abul-Negah foothills hidden beneath a stone, but this was carrying it a good deal further. It was a drastic break with tradition, and we may be sure that he hesitated long before he made the decision. In the first place his pride would suffer, for a love of ostentation was ingrained in every Egyptian monarch, and in his tomb more than anywhere else he was accustomed to display it. Then too the new arrangement would seem likely to cause a certain amount of inconvenience to his mummy. The early funerary monuments had always, in immediate proximity to the actual place of burial, a temple in which the due ceremonies were performed at the various yearly festivals and daily offerings were made. Now there was to be no monument over the tomb itself, and the funerary temple in which the offerings were made was to be situated a mile or so away on the other side of the hill. It was certainly not a convenient arrangement, but it was necessary if the secrecy of the tomb was to be kept, and secrecy King Tothmas had decided on as the one chance of escaping the fate of his predecessors. The construction of this hidden tomb was entrusted by Tothmas to Ineni, his chief architect, and in the biography which was inscribed on the wall of his funerary chapel Ineni has put on record the secrecy with which the work was carried out. I superintended the excavation of the cliff-tomb of his majesty, he tells us, alone, no one seeing, no one hearing. Unfortunately he omits to tell us anything about the workmen he employed. It is sufficiently obvious that a hundred or more laborers with the knowledge of the King's dearest secret would never be allowed at large, and we can be quite sure that Ineni found some effectual means of stopping their mouths. Conceivably the work was carried out by prisoners of war who were slaughtered at its completion. How long the secret of this particular tomb held we do not know, probably not long for what secret was ever kept in Egypt. At the time of its discovery in 1899 little remained in it but the massive stone sarcophagus, and the king himself was moved, as we know, first of all to the tomb of his daughter Hatshep Soot, and subsequently was the other royal mummies to Der El-Bahari. In any case, whether the hiding of the tomb was temporarily successful or not, a new fashion had been set, and the remaining kings of this dynasty, together with those of the 19th and 20th, were all buried in the valley. The idea of secrecy did not long prevail. From the nature of things it could not, and the later kings seemed to have accepted the fact, and gone back to the old plan of making their tombs conspicuous. Now that it had become the established custom to place all the royal tombs within a very restricted area, they may have thought that tomb robbery was securely provided against, seeing that it was very much to the reigning kings' interest to see that the royal burial site was protected. If they did, they mightily deceived themselves. We know from internal evidence that Tutankhamun's tomb was entered by robbers within ten or at most fifteen years of his death. We also know, from graffiti in the tomb of Tothmes IV, that that monarch too had suffered at the hands of plunderers within a very few years of his burial. While we find King Horemherd been the eighth year of his reign, issuing instructions to a certain high official named Maaya to renew the burial of King Tothmes IV, justified in the precious habitation in western Thebes. They must have been bold spirits who made the venture. They were evidently in a great hurry, and we have reason to believe that they were caught in the act. If so, we may be sure they died deaths that were lingering and ingenious. Strange sights the valley must have seen, and desperate the ventures that took place in it. One can imagine the plotting for days beforehand, the secret rendezvous on the cliff by night, the bribing or drugging of the cemetery guards, and then the desperate burrowing in the dark, the scramble through a small hole into the burial chamber, the hectic search by a glimmering light for treasure that was portable and the return home at dawn laden with booty. We can imagine these things, and at the same time we can realize how inevitable it all was. By providing his mummy with the elaborate and costly outfit which he thought essential to its dignity, the King was himself compassing its destruction. The temptation was too great. Both beyond the dreams of avarice lay there at the disposal of whoever should find the means to reach it, and sooner or later the tomb robber was bound to win through. For a few generations, under the powerful kings of the 18th and 19th centuries, the valley tombs must have been reasonably secure. Plundering on a big scale would be impossible without the connivance of the officials concerned. And the 20th dynasty it was quite another story. There were weaklings on the throne, a fact of which the official classes, as ever, were quick to take advantage. Cemetery guardians became lax and venial, and a regular orgy of grave robbing seems to have set in. This is a fact of which we have actual first-hand evidence, for they have come down to us, dating from the reign of Ramesses the Ninth, a series of papyri dealing with this very subject, with reports of investigations into charges of tomb robbery and accounts of the trial of the criminals concerned. They are extraordinarily interesting documents. We get from them, in addition to very valuable information about the tombs, something which Egyptian documents as a rule singularly lack, a story with a real human element in it, and we are enabled to see right into the minds of a group of officials who lived in Thebes 3,000 years ago. The leading characters in the story are three, Cam Wies, the Vizier or a governor of the district, Pazer, the mayor of that part of the city which lay on the east bank, and Pueiro, the mayor of the western side, ex-officio guardian of the necropolis. The two letters were evidently, one might say, naturally on bad terms, each was jealous of the other. Consequently Pazer was not ill-pleased to receive one day reports of tomb plundering on an extensive scale that was going on on the western bank. Here was a chance to get his rival into trouble, so he hastened to report the matter to the Vizier, giving, somewhat foolishly, figures as to the tombs which had been entered, ten royal tombs, four tombs of the priestesses of a moon, and a long list of private tombs. On the following day Cam Wies sent a party of officials across the river to confer with Pueiro and to investigate the charges. The results of their investigations were as follows. Of the ten royal tombs one was found to have been actually broken into, and attempts had been made on two of the others. Of the priestesses tombs two were pillaged and two were intact. The private tombs had all been plundered. These facts were held by Pueiro as a complete vindication of his administration, an opinion which the Vizier apparently endorsed. The plundering of the private tombs was cynically admitted, but what of that? To people of our class what do the tombs of private individuals matter? Of the four priestesses tombs two were plundered and two were not. Balanced to one against the other, and what cause has anyone to grumble? Of the ten royal tombs mentioned by Pézer, only one had actually been entered, only one out of ten. So clearly his whole story was a tissue of lies. Thus Pueiro, on the principle, apparently that if you are accused of ten murders and are only found guilty of one, you leave the court without a stain on your character. As a celebration of his triumph, Pueiro collected next day the inspectors, the necropolis administrators, the workmen, the police, and all the laborers of the necropolis, and sent them as a body to the east side, with instructions to make a triumphant parade throughout the town generally, but particularly in the neighborhood of Pézer's house. You may be sure they carried out this latter part of their instructions quite faithfully. Pézer bore it as long as he could, but at last his feelings got too much for him, and in an altercation with one of the western officials he announced his attention in front of witnesses of reporting the whole matter to the king himself. This was a fatal error of which his rival was quick to take advantage. In a letter to the Vizier he accused the unfortunate Pézer, first of questioning the good faith of a commission appointed by his direct superior, and secondly of going over the head of that superior and stating his case directly to the king, a proceeding at which the virtuous Pueiro threw up his hands in horror, as contrary to all custom and subversive of all discipline. This was the end of Pézer. The offended Vizier summoned a court, a court in which the unhappy man, as a judge, was bound himself to sit, and in it he was tried for perjury and found guilty. That, in brief, is the story. It is told at full length in Volume 4, paragraph 499 and follows of Brested's Ancient Records of Egypt. It is tolerably clear from it that both the mayor and the Vizier were themselves implicated in the robberies in question. The investigation they made was evidently a blind, for within a year or two of these proceedings we find other cases of tomb robbing cropping up in the court records, and at least one of the tombs in question occurs in Pézer's original list. The leading spirits in this company of cemetery thieves seem to have been a gang of eight men, five of whose names have come down to us, the stone-cutter Ha'pi, the artisan Iramen, the peasant Amunamheb, the water-carrier Ken Wees, and the negro-slave Ahenefer. They were eventually apprehended on the charge of having desecrated the royal tomb referred to in the investigation, and we have a full account of their trial. It began, according to custom, by beating the prisoners with a double rod, smiting their feet and their hands to assist their memories. Under the stimulus they made full confession. The opening sentences in the confession are mutilated in the text, but they evidently describe how the thieves tunneled through the rock to the burial chamber, and found the king and queen in their sarcophagi. We penetrated them all, we found her resting likewise. The text goes on. Quote, We opened their coffins and their coverings in which they were. We found the august mummy of this king. There was a numerous list of amulets and ornaments of gold at his throat. Its head had a mask of gold upon it. The august mummy of this king was overlaid with gold throughout. Its coverings were wrought with gold and silver, within and without, inlaid with every costly stone. We stripped off the gold which we found on the august mummy of this god, and its amulets and ornaments which were at its throat, and the covering were inadrested. We found the king's wife likewise. We stripped off all that we found on her likewise. We set fire to their coverings. We stole their furniture, which we found with them, being bases of gold, silver and bronze. We divided and made the gold which we found on these two gods, on their mummies and the amulets, ornaments and coverings, into eight parts. On this confession they were found guilty, and removed to the house of detention, until such time as the king himself might determine their punishment. In spite of this trial, and a number of others of similar character, matters in the valley went rapidly from bad to worse. The tombs of Amun Hattep III, Seti I and Ramesses II are mentioned in the court records as having been broken into, and in the following dynasty all attempts at guarding the tombs seem to have been abandoned, and we find the royal mummies being moved about from sepulchre to sepulchre in a desperate effort to preserve them. Ramesses III, for instance, was disturbed and reburied three times, at least in this dynasty, and other kings known to have been transferred include Ames, Amun Hattep I, Tothmes II and even Ramesses the Great himself. In this last case the docket states, Year 17, third month of the second season, day six, day of bringing Osiris, King Uzammare Setebneri, Ramesses II, to bury him again in the tomb of Osiris, King Menmares Seti, the first, by the high priest of Amun, Paynesm. Arraynoi II later we find Seti the first and Ramesses the second being moved from this tomb and reburied in the tomb of Queen Inhappi, and in the same reign we get a reference to the tomb we have been using as our laboratory this year. Day of bringing King Menpehti rei, Ramesses the first, out from the tomb of King Menmares Seti the second, in order to bring him into the tomb of Inhappi, which is in the great place, wherein King Amun Hattep rests. No fewer than 13 of the royal mummies found their way at one time or another to the tomb of Amun Hattep the second, and here they were allowed to remain. The other kings were eventually collected from their various hiding places, taken out of the valley altogether, and placed in a well-hidden tomb cut in the Dar-El-Bahari cliff. This was the final move, for by some accident the exact locality of the tomb was lost, and the mummies remained in peace for nearly 3,000 years. Throughout all these troublesome times in the 20th and 21st dynasties, there is no mention of Tutankhamun and his tomb. He had not escaped altogether, his tomb, as we have already noted, having been entered within a very few years of his death, but he was lucky enough to escape the ruthless plundering of the later period. For some reason his tomb had been overlooked. It was situated in a very low-lying part of the valley, and a heavy rainstorm might well have washed away all trace of its entrance. Or again it may owe it safety to the fact that a number of huts, for the use of workmen who were employed in excavating the tomb of a later king, were built immediately above it. With the passing of the mummies the history of the valley, as known to us from ancient Egyptian sources, comes to an end. Five hundred years had passed since Tothmes I had constructed his modest little tomb there, and surely in the whole world's history there is no small plot of ground that had five hundred years of more romantic story to record. From now on we are to imagine a deserted valley, spirit haunted, doubtless to the Egyptian, its cavernous galleries plundered and empty, the entrances of many of them open, to become the home of fox, desert owl or colonies of bats. Yet plundered, deserted and desolate, as were its tombs, the romance of it was not yet wholly gone. It still remained the sacred valley of the kings, and crowds of the sentimental and the curious must still have gone to visit it. Some of its tombs, indeed, were actually reused in the time of Ozorkon I, about 900 B.C., for the burial of priestesses. References to its rock-hewn passages are numerous in classical authors, and that many of them were still accessible to visitors in their day is evident from the reprehensible manner in which, like John Smith, 1878, they carved their names upon the walls. A certain Filet Tyros, son of Amonius, who inscribed his name in several places on the walls of the tomb in which we had our lunch, intrigued me not a little during the winter, though perhaps it would have been better not to mention the fact, lest I seem to countenance the beastly habits of the John Smiths. One final picture, before the mist of the Middle Ages settles down upon the valley and hides it from our view. There is something about the atmosphere of Egypt, most people experience it, I think, that attunes one's mind to solitude, and that is probably one of the reasons why, after the conversion of the country to Christianity, so many of its inhabitants turned with enthusiasm to the hermit's life. The country itself, with its equitable climate, its narrow strip of cultivable land, and its desert hills on either side, honeycombed with natural and artificial caverns, was well adapted to such a purpose. Shelter and seclusion were readily obtainable, and that within easy reach of the outer world and the ordinary means of subsistence. In the early centuries of the Christian era, there must have been thousands who forsook the world and adopted the contemplative life, and in the rock-cut sepulchres upon the desert hills we find their traces everywhere. Such an ideal spot as the valley of the kings could hardly pass unnoticed, and in the second to fourth centuries AD we find a colony of anchorites in full possession, the open tombs in uses cells, and one transformed into a church. This, then, is our final glimpse of the valley in ancient times, and a strange incongruous picture it presents. Magnificence and royal pride have been replaced by humble poverty. The precious habitation of the king has narrowed to a hermit's cell. End of Section 5 Section 6 of The Tomb of Tutankhamun by Howard Carter This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Avae in June 2019 Chapter 3 The Valley in Modern Times For our first real description of the valley in modern times we must turn to the pages of Richard Pocoke, an English traveller, who in 1743 published a description of the east in several volumes. His account is extremely interesting, and, considering the hurried nature of his visit, extraordinarily accurate. Here is his description of the approach to the valley. Quote We then turned to the northwest, entered in between the high rocky hills, and went in a very narrow valley. We after turned towards the south, and then to the northwest, going in all between the mountains about a mile or a mile and a half. We came to a part that is wider, being a round opening like an amphitheatre, and ascended by a narrow step passage about ten feet high, which seems to have been broken down through the rock, the ancient passage being probably from the memoriam under the hills, and it may be from the grottoes I entered on the other side. By this passage we came to Biban el-Maluk, or Bab el-Maluk, that is, the gate or court of the kings, being the sepulchres of the kings of thieves. End quote. The tradition of a secret passage through the hills to the Der El-Bahari side of the cliff is still to be found among the natives, and to the present day there are archaeologists who subscribe to it. There is, however, little or no basis for the theory, and certainly not a vestige of proof. Pocock then goes on to an account of such of the tombs as were accessible at the time of his visit. He mentions fourteen in all, and most of them are recognizable from his description. Of five of them, those of Ramesses IV, Ramesses VI, Ramesses XII, Seti II, and the tomb commenced by Ta-Uzert, and finished by Set-Nect, he gives the entire plan. In the case of four, Meren Ptah, Ramesses III, Amenmesis, and Ramesses XI, he only planned the outer galleries and chambers, the inner chambers evidently being inaccessible, and the remaining five he speaks of as stopped up. Footnote. From the evidence of graffiti these same tombs were opening classical times. The Greek authors refer to them as syringes from their read-like form. End footnote. It is evident from Pocock's native that he was not able to devote as much time to his visit as he would have liked. The valley was not a safe spot to linger in, for the pious anchorite we left in possession had given place to a horde of bandits who dwelt among the Kerner hills and terrorized the whole countryside. The shake also was in haste to go, he remarks, being afraid, as I imagine, lest the people should have opportunity to gather together if we stayed out long. These Theban bandits were notorious, and we find frequent mention of them in the tales of 18th-century travellers. Norden, who visited Thebes in 1737, but who never got nearer the valley than the Ramessaeum, he seems to have thought himself lucky to have got so far, describes them thus. Quote. These people occupy at present the grottoes which are seen in great numbers in the neighbouring mountains. They obey no one, they are lodged so high that they discover at a distance if anyone comes to attack them. Then, if they think themselves strong enough, they descend into the plain to dispute the ground. If not, they keep themselves on the shelter in their grottoes, or they retire deeper into the mountains, whether you would have no great desire to follow them. End quote. Bruce, who visited the valley in 1769, also suffered at the hands of these bandits, and puts on record a somewhat drastic but fruitless attempt made by one of the native governors to curb their activities. Quote. A number of robbers who much resemble our gypsies live in the halls of the mountains above Thebes. They are all outlaws, punished with death if else were found. Osman Bey, an ancient governor of Gargi, unable to suffer any longer the disorders committed by these people, ordered a quantity of dried faggots to be brought together, and, with his soldiers, took possession of the face of the mountain, where the greatest number of these riches were. He then ordered all their caves to be filled with this dry brushwood, to which he set fire, so that most of them were destroyed, but they have since recruited their numbers without changing their manners. End quote. In the course of this visit Bruce made copies of the figures of Harper's in the Tomb of Ramesses III, a tomb which still goes by his name, but his labours were brought to an abrupt conclusion, finding that it was his intention to spend the night in the tomb, and continue his researches in the morning, his guides were seized with terror. With great clamour and marks of discontent they dashed their torches against the largest harp, and made the best of their way out of the cave, leaving me and my people in the dark, and all the way as they went they made dreadful denunciations of tragical events that were immediately to follow upon their departure from the cave. That their terror was genuine and not ill-founded Bruce was soon to discover, for as he rode down the valley in the gathering darkness he was attacked by a party of the bandits who lay in wait for him, and hauled stones at him from the side of the cliff. With the aid of his gun and his servants blunt the busts he managed to beat them off, but, on arriving at his boat, he thought it prudent to cast off at once, and made no attempt to repeat his visit. Nor did even the magic of Napoleon's name suffice to curb the arrogance of these Theban bandits, for the members of his scientific commission who visited Thebes in the last days of the century were molested and even fired upon. They succeeded, however, in making a complete survey of all the tombs then open, and also carried out a small amount of excavation. Let us pass on now to 1815 and make the acquaintance of one of the most remarkable men in the whole history of Egyptology. In the early years of the century a young Italian giant, Belzoni by name, was earning a precarious income in England by performing feats of strength at fairs and circuses. Born in Padua, of a respectable family of Roman extraction, he had been intended for the priesthood, but a roving disposition, combined with the internal troubles in Italy at that period, had driven him to seek his fortune abroad. We happened recently upon a reference to him in his pre-Egyptian days, in one of Rainy Day Smith's books of reminiscences, where the author describes how he was carried round the stage with a group of other people, but a strong man, Belzoni. In the intervals of circus work, Belzoni seems to have studied engineering, and in 1815 he thought he saw a chance of making his fortune by introducing into Egypt a hydraulic wheel, which would, he claimed, do four times the work of the ordinary native appliance. With this in view, he made his way to Egypt, contrived an introduction to Mohamed Ali the Bashar, and in the garden of the palace actually set up his wheel. According to Belzoni it was a great success, but the Egyptians refused to have anything to do with it, and he found himself stranded in Egypt. Then, through the traveller Burkhard, he got an introduction to Salt, the British consul-general in Egypt, and contracted with him to bring the colossal Memnion Bast, remises the second now in the British Museum, from Luxor to Alexandria. This was in 1815, and the next five years he spent in Egypt, excavating and collecting antiquities, first for Salt, and afterwards on his own account, and quarrelling with rival excavators, notably Drovetti, who represented the French consul. There was what a great days of excavating. Anything to which a fancy was taken, from a scarab to an obelisk, was just appropriated, and if there was a difference of opinion with a brother excavator, one laid for him with a gun. Belzoni's account of his experiences in Egypt, published in 1820, is one of the most fascinating books in the whole of Egyptian literature, and I should like to quote from it at length, how, for instance, he dropped an obelisk in the Nile and fished it out again, and the full story of his various squabbles. We must confine ourselves, however, to his actual work in the valley. Here he discovered and cleared a number of tombs, including those of I, meant to her, Kepish, F, remises the first, and Seti the first. In the last named he found the magnificent alabaster sarcophagus, which is now in the Sone Museum in London. This was the first occasion on which excavations on a large scale had ever been made in the valley, and we must give Belzoni full credit for the manner in which they were carried out. There are episodes which give the modern excavator rather a shock, as, for example, when he describes his method of dealing with sealed doorways, by means of a battering ram, but on the whole the work was extraordinarily good. It is perhaps worth recording the fact that Belzoni, like everyone else who has ever dug in the valley, was of the opinion that he had absolutely exhausted its possibilities. It is my firm opinion, he states, that in the valley of Beban el Malouk there are no more tombs than are now known, in consequence of my late discoveries. For, previously to my quitting that place, I exerted all my humble abilities in endeavouring to find another tomb, but could not succeed. And what is still greater proof, independent of my own researches, after I quitted the place, Mr. Salt, the British consul, resided there four months, and laboured in like manner in vain to find another. In 1820 Belzoni returned to England and gave an exhibition of his treasures, including the alabaster sarcophagus and a model of the tomb of Seti, in a building which had been erected in Piccadilly in 1812, a building which many of us can still remember, the Egyptian Hall. He never returned to Egypt, but died a few years later on an expedition to Timbuktu. For twenty years after Belzoni's day the valley was well exploited, and published records come thick and fast. We shall not have space here to do more than mention a few of the names, Salt, Champouillon, Burton, Haye, Head, Rossellini, Wilkinson, who numbered the tombs, Rollinson, Reind. In 1844 the great German expedition under lepsius made a complete survey of the valley and cleared the tomb of Rameses II and part of the tomb of Meryon Tarr. Here after comes a gap, the German expedition was supposed to have exhausted the possibilities, and nothing more of any consequence was done in the valley until the very end of the century. In this period however, just outside the valley, there occurred one of the most important events in the whole of its history. In the preceding chapter we told how the various royal mummies were collected from their hiding places and deposited all together in a rock cliff at their El Bahari. There, for nearly three thousand years they had rested, and there, in the summer of 1875, they were found by the members of a Kurnar family, the Upt El Rasals. It was in the thirteenth century B.C. that the inhabitants of this village first adopted the trade of tomb robbing, and it is a trade that they have adhered to steadfastly ever since. Their activities are curbed at the present day, but they still search on the sly in out-of-the-way corners, and occasionally make a rich strike. On this occasion the find was too big to handle. It was obviously impossible to clear the tomb of its contents, so the whole family was sworn to secrecy, and its heads determined to leave the find where it was and to draw on it from time to time as they needed money. Incredible, as it may seem, the secret was kept for six years, and the family, with a banking account of forty or more dead pharaohs to draw upon, grew rich. It soon became manifest from objects which came into the market that there had been a rich find of royal material somewhere, but it was not until 1881 that it was possible to trace the sale of the objects to the Abdel Rasul family. Even then it was difficult to prove anything. The head of the family was arrested and subjected by the mudir of Kenne, the notorious Dawoud Pasha, whose methods of administering justice were unorthodox but effectual to an examination. Naturally he denied the charge, and equally naturally the village of Korna rose as one man, and protested that in a strictly honest community the Abdel Rasul family were of all men the most honest. He was released provisionally for lack of evidence, but his interview with Dawoud seems to have shaken him. Interviews with Dawoud usually did have that effect. One of our older workmen told us once of an experience of his in his younger days. He had been by trade a thief, and in the exercise of his calling had been apprehended and brought before the mudir. It was a hot day, and his nerves were shaken right at the start, by finding the mudir had taken his ease in a large earthenware jar of water. From this unconventional seat of justice Dawoud had looked at him, just looked at him, and as his eyes went through me I felt my bones turning to water within me. Then very quietly he said to me, this is the first time you have appeared before me. You are dismissed, but be very, very careful that you do not appear a second time. And I was so terrified that I changed my trade and never did. Some effect of this sort must have been produced on the Abdel Rasul family. For a month later one of its members went to the mudir and made full confession. News was telegraphed at once to Cairo. Emil Brugsch Bay of the Museum was sent up to investigate and take charge, and on the 5th of July 1881 the long kept secret was revealed to him. It must have been an amazing experience. There, huddled together in a shallow ill-cut grave, lay the most powerful monarchs of the ancient east, kings whose names were familiar to the whole world but whom no one in their wildest moments had ever dreamt of seeing. There they had remained, where the priests in secrecy had hurriedly brought them that dark night three thousand years ago, and on their coffins and mummies, neatly docketed, were the records of their journeyings from one hiding place to another. Some had been rewrapped, and two or three in the course of their many wanderings had contrived to change their coffins. In forty-eight hours, we don't do things quite so hastily nowadays, the tomb was cleared, the kings were embarked upon the museum barge, and within fifteen days of Brugsch Bay's arrival in Luxor they were landed in Cairo and were deposited in the museum. It is a familiar story, but worth repeating, that as the barge made its way down the river, the men of the neighbouring villages fired guns as for a funeral, while the women followed along the bank, tearing their hair and uttering that thrill-quavering cry of mourning for the dead, a cry that has doubtless come right down from the days of the pharaohs themselves. To Return to the Valley In 1898, acting on information supplied by local officials, Monsieur Loray, then direct the general of the service of antiquities, opened up several new royal tombs, including those of Tothmes I, Tothmes III and Amenhetepe II. This last was a very important discovery. We have already stated that in the 21st dynasty thirteen royal mummies had found sanctuary in this Amenhetepe's tomb, and here in 1898 the thirteen were found. It was but their mummies that remained. The wealth, which in their power they had lavished on their funerals, had long since vanished, but at least they had been spared the last indignity. The tomb had been entered, it is true, it had been robbed, and the greater part of the funeral equipment had been plundered and broken, but it had escaped the wholesale destruction that the other royal tombs had undergone, and the mummies remained intact. The body of Amenhetepe himself still lay within its own sarcophagus, where it had rested for more than three thousand years. Very rightly the government, at the representation of Sir William Garstein, decided against its removal. The tomb was barred and bolted, a guard was placed upon it, and there the king was left in peace. Unfortunately there is a sequel to this story. Within a year or two of the discovery the tomb was broken into by a party of modern tomb robbers, doubtless with the connivance of the guard, and the mummy was removed from its sarcophagus and searched for treasure. The thieves were subsequently tracked down by the chief inspector of antiquities and arrested, although he was unable to secure their conviction at the hands of the native court. The whole proceedings, as said forth in the official report, remind one very forcibly of the records of ancient tomb robbery described in the preceding chapter, and we are forced to the conclusion that in many ways the egyptian of the present day differs little from his ancestor in the reign of Ramesses IX. One moral we can draw from this episode, and we commend it to the critics who call us vandals for taking objects from the tombs. By removing antiquities to museums we are really assuring their safety. Left in situ they would inevitably, sooner or later, become the prey of thieves, and that, for all practical purposes, would be the end of them. In 1902 permission to dig in the valley under government supervision was granted to an American, Mr Theodore Davis, and he subsequently excavated there for twelve consecutive seasons. His principal finds are known to most of us. They include the tombs of Tothmes IV, Hatshepsut, Sipta, Yuwa and Thua, great-grandfather and grandmother, these of Totham Khamun's queen, Horemheb, and a vault, nor the real tomb, devised for the transfer of the burial of Ankenetun from its original tomb at Tel El Amarna. This cache comprised the mummy and coffin of the heretic king, a very small part of his funerary equipment, and portions of the sepulchral shrine of his mother Taiyi. In 1914 Mr Davis' concession reverted to us, and the story of the tomb of Totham Khamun really begins. End of section 6 Section 7 of The Tomb of Totham Khamun by Howard Carter This Librivox recording is in the public domain, recording by Avahi in June 2019. Chapter 4 Our Prefectory Work at Thebes Ever since my first visit to Egypt in 1890, it had been my ambition to dig in the valley, and when, at the invitation of Sir William Garstyn and Sir Gaston Maspero, I began to excavate for Lord Carnarvon in 1907, it was our joint hope that eventually we might be able to get a concession there. I had, as a matter of fact, when Inspector of the Antiquities department found and superintended the clearing of two tombs in the valley for Mr Theodore Davis, and this had made me the more anxious to work there under a regular concession. For the moment it was impossible, and for seven years we dug with varying fortune in other parts of the Theban Necropolis. The results of the first five of these years have been published in five years explorations at Thebes, a joint volume brought out by Lord Carnarvon and myself in 1912. Chapter 4 In 1914 our discovery of the tomb of Amun Hattep, the first, on the summit of the Dra-Abul-Negah foothills, once more turned our attention valley words, and we awaited our chance with some impatience. Mr Theodore Davis, who still held the concession, had already published the fact that he considered the valley exhausted, and that there were no more tombs to be found. A statement corroborated by the fact that in his last two seasons he did very little work in the valley proper, but spent most of his time excavating in the approach there, too, in the neighboring North Valley, where he hoped to find the tombs of the priest-kings and of the 18th Dynasty queens, and in the mounds surrounding the temple of Medinet Habul. Nevertheless he was loathed to give up the site, and it was not until June 1914 that we actually received the long coveted concession. Sir Gaston Maspero, director of the Antiquities Department, who signed our concession, agreed with Mr Davis that the site was exhausted, and told us frankly that he did not consider that it would repay further investigation. We remembered, however, that nearly a hundred years earlier Bill Zoni had made a similar claim and refused to be convinced. We had made a thorough investigation of the site, and were quite sure that there were areas covered by the dumps of previous excavators which had never been properly examined. Clearly enough we saw that very heavy work lay before us, and that many thousands of tons of surface debris would have to be removed before we could hope to find anything. But there was always the chance that a tomb might reward us in the end, and even if there was nothing else to go upon, it was a chance that we were quite willing to take. As a matter of fact we had something more, and at the risk of being accused of post-actum prescience I will state that we had definite hopes of finding the tomb of one particular king and that king Tutankhamun. To explain the reasons for disbelief of ours, we must turn to the published pages of Mr Davis' excavations. Towards the end of his work in the valley he had found, hidden under a rock, a faience cup which bore the name of Tutankhamun. In the same region he came upon a small pit tomb in which were found an unnamed alabaster statuette, possibly of eye, and a broken wooden box in which were fragments of gold foil, bearing the figures and names of Tutankhamun and his queen. On the basis of these fragments of gold he claimed that he had actually found the burial place of Tutankhamun. The theory was quite untenable, for a pit tomb in question was small and insignificant, of a type that might very well belong to a member of the royal household in the Ramised period, but ludicrously inadequate for a king's burial in the 18th dynasty. Obviously the royal material found in it had been placed there at some later period, and had nothing to do with the tomb itself. Some little distance eastward from this tomb he had also found in one of his earlier years of work, 1907-08, buried in an irregular hole cut in the side of the rock, a cache of large pottery jars, with sealed mouths and heretic inscriptions upon their shoulders. A cursory examination was made of their contents, and as these seemed to consist merely of broken pottery, bundles of linen, and other oddments, Mr. Davis refused to be interested in them, and they were laid aside and stacked away in the storeroom of his valley house. There, some while afterwards, Mr. Windlock noticed them, and immediately realised their importance. With Mr. Davis's consent the entire collection of jars was packed and sent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and there Mr. Windlock made a thorough examination of their contents. Extraordinarily interesting they proved to be. There were clay seals, some bearing the name of Tutankhamun, and others the impression of the royal necropolis seal, fragments of magnificent painted pottery vases, linen hedgeholes, one inscribed with the latest known date of Tutankhamun's reign, floral collars of the kind represented as worn by mourners in burial scenes, and a mass of other miscellaneous objects, the whole representing, apparently, the material which had been used during the funeral ceremonies of Tutankhamun, and afterwards gathered together and stacked away within the jars. We had thus three distinct pieces of evidence. The fine's cup found beneath the rock, the gold foil from the small pit tomb, and this important cache of funerary material, which seemed definitely to connect Tutankhamun with this particular part of the valley. To these must be added a fourth. It was in the near vicinity of these other finds that Mr. Davis had discovered the famous Ankhunatun cache. This contained the funerary remains of heretic royalties, brought hurriedly from Tel El Amarna and hidden here for safety, and that it was Tutankhamun himself who was responsible for their removal and reburial, we can be reasonably sure from the fact that a number of his clay seals were found. With all this evidence before us, we were thoroughly convinced in our own minds that a tomb of Tutankhamun was still to find, and that it ought to be situated not far from the center of the valley. In any case, whether we found Tutankhamun or not, we felt that a systematic and exhaustive search of the inner valley presented reasonable chances of success, and we were in the act of completing our plans for an elaborate campaign in the season of 1914 to 15 when war broke out, and for the time being all our plans have to be left in abeyance. War work claimed most of my time for the next few years, but there were occasional intervals in which I was able to carry out small pieces of excavation. In February 1915, for example, I made a complete clearance of the interior of the tomb of Amun Hattep, the third partially excavated in 1799 by Monsieur de Villiers, one of the members of Napoleon's Commission d'Egypt, and re-excavated later by Mr Theodore Davis. In the course of this work, we made the interesting discovery from the evidence of intact foundation deposits outside the entrance, and from other material found within the tomb, that it had been originally designed by Tothmes IV, and that Queen Tai Yi had actually been buried there. The following year, while on a short holiday at Luxor, I found myself involved quite unexpectedly in another piece of work. The absence of officials owing to the war, to say nothing of the general demoralization caused by the war itself, had naturally created a great revival of activity on the part of the local native tomb robbers, and prospecting parties were out in all directions. News came into the village one afternoon that a find had been made in a lonely and unfrequented region on the western side of the mountain above the valley of the kings. Immediately a rival party of diggers armed themselves and made their way to the spot, and in the lively engagement that ensued, the original party were beaten and driven off. Vowing vengeance. To avert further trouble the notables of the village came to me and asked me to take action. It was already late in the afternoon, so I hastily collected the few of my workmen who had escaped the army labour levies, and with the necessary materials set out for the scene of action, an expedition involving a climb of more than one thousand eight hundred feet over the Kerner hills by moonlight. It was midnight when we arrived on the scene, and the guide pointed out to me the end of a rope which dangled sheer down the face of a cliff. Listening we could hear the robbers actually at work, so I first severed their rope, thereby cutting off their means of escape, and then, making secure a good stout rope of my own, I lowered myself down the cliff. Shining down a rope at midnight into a nest full of industrious tomb robbers is a pastime which at least does not lack excitement. There were eight at work, and when I reached the bottom there was an awkward moment or two. I gave them the alternative of clearing out by means of my rope, or else of staying where they were without a rope at all, and eventually they saw reason and departed. The rest of the night I spent on the spot, and, as soon as it was light enough, climbed down into the tomb again to make a thorough investigation. The tomb was in a most remarkable situation. Its entrance was contrived in the bottom of a natural water-worn cliff, one hundred thirty feet from the top of the cliff, and two hundred twenty feet above the valley bed, and so cunningly concealed that neither from the top nor the bottom could the slightest trace of it be seen. From the entrance a lateral passage ran straight into the face of the cliff, a distance of some fifty-five feet, after which it turned at right angles, and a short passage cut on a sharp slope led down into a chamber about eighteen feet square. The whole place was full of rubbish from top to bottom, and through this rubbish the robbers had burrowed a tunnel over ninety feet long, just big enough for a man to crawl through. It was an interesting discovery, and might turn out to be very important, so I determined to make a complete clearance. Twenty days it took, working night and day with relays of workmen, at an extraordinarily difficult job it proved. The method of gaining access to the tomb by means of a rope from the top was unsatisfactory, for it was not a very safe proceeding at best, and it necessitated, moreover, a stiff climb from the valley. Obviously means of access from the valley bottom would be preferable, and this be contrived by erecting shears at the entrance to the tomb, so that by a running tackle we could pull ourselves up, or let ourselves down. It was not a very comfortable operation even then, and I personally always made the descent in a net. Excitement among the workmen ruled high as the work progressed, for surely a place so well concealed must contain a wonderful treasure, and great was their disappointment when it proved that the tomb had neither been finished nor occupied. The only thing of value it contained was a large sarcophagus of crystalline sandstone, like the tomb unfinished, with inscriptions which showed it to have been intended for Queen Hatshepsut. Presumably this masterful lady had had a tomb constructed for herself, as wife of King Tothmas II. Later when she seized the throne and ruled actually as a king, it was clearly necessary for her to have her tomb in the valley, like all the other kings. As a matter of fact I found it there myself in 1903, and the present tomb was abandoned. She would have been better advised to hold to her original plan. In this secret spot her mummy would have had a reasonable chance of avoiding disturbance. In the valley it had none. A king she would be, and a king's fate she shared. In the autumn of 1917 our real campaign in the valley opened. The difficulty was to know where to begin, for mountains of rubbish thrown out by previous excavators encumbered the ground in all directions, and no sort of record had ever been kept as to which areas had been properly excavated, and which had not. Clearly the only satisfactory thing to do was to dig systematically right down to Bedrock, and I suggested to Lord Carnarvon that we take as a starting point the triangle of ground defined by the tombs of Rameses II, Merenptah, and Rameses VI, an area in which we hoped the tomb of Tutankhamun might be situated. It was rather a desperate undertaking, the site being piled high with enormous heaps of thrown out rubbish, but I had reason to believe that the ground beneath had never been touched, and a strong conviction that we should find a tomb there. In the course of the season's work we cleared a considerable part of the upper layers of this area and advanced our excavations right up to the foot of the tomb of Rameses VI. Here we came on a series of workman's huts, built over masses of flint boulders, the letter usually indicating in the valley the near proximity of a tomb. Our natural impulse was to enlarge our clearing in this direction, but by doing this we should have cut off all access to the tomb of Rameses above to visitors one of the most popular tombs in the whole valley. We determined to await a more convenient opportunity. So far the only results from our work were some ostraca, interesting but not exciting. We resumed our work in this region in the season of 1990-20. Our first need was to break fresh ground for a dump, and in the course of this preliminary work we lighted on some small deposits of Rameses IV near the entrance to his tomb. The idea this year was to clear the whole of the remaining part of the triangle already mentioned, so we started in with a fairly large gang of workmen. By the time Lord and Lady Carnarvon arrived in March the whole of the top debris had been removed, and we were ready to clear down into what we believed to be verging ground below. We soon had proof that we were right, for we presently came upon a small cache containing thirteen alabaster jars bearing the names of Rameses II and Merem Tha probably from the tomb of the latter. As this was the nearest approach to a real find that we had yet made in the valley we were naturally somewhat excited, and Lady Carnarvon, I remember, insisted on digging out these jars, beautiful specimens they were, with her own hands. With the exception of the ground covered by the workmen's huts we had now exhausted the whole of our triangular area, and had found no tomb. I was still hopeful, but we decided to leave this particular section until, by making a very early start in the autumn, we could accomplish it without causing inconvenience to visitors. For our next attempt we selected a small lateral valley in which the tomb of Tothmes III was situated. This occupied us throughout the whole of the two following seasons, and, though nothing intrinsically valuable was found, we discovered an interesting archaeological fact. The actual tomb in which Tothmes III was buried had been found by Loré in 1898, hidden in a cleft in an inaccessible spot, some way up the face of the cliff. Excavating in the valley below we came upon the beginning of a tomb, by its foundation deposits originally intended for the same king. Presumably, while the work on this low-level tomb was in progress, it occurred to Tothmes, or to his architect, that the cleft and the rock above was a better sight. It certainly presented better chances of concealment, if that were the reason for the change, though probably the more plausible explanation would be that one of the torrential downpours of rain, which visit Luxor occasionally, may have flooded out the lower tomb, and suggested to Tothmes that his mummy would have a more comfortable resting place on a higher level. Nearby, at the entrance to another abandoned tomb, we came upon foundation deposits of his wife, Mary Dre Hadchip Soot, sister of the great queen of that name. Whether we are to infer that she was buried there is a moot point, for it would be contrary to all custom to find a queen in the valley. In any case, the tomb was afterwards appropriated by the Theban official Sen Nefer. We had now dug in the valley for several seasons with extremely scanty results, and it became a much debated question whether we should continue the work or try for a more profitable site elsewhere. After these barren years were we justified in going on with it? My own feeling was that so long as a single area of untouched ground remained, the risk was worth taking. It is true that you may find less in more time in the valley than in any other site in Egypt, but on the other hand, if a lucky strike be made, you will be repaid for years and years of dull and unprofitable work. There was still, moreover, the combination of flint-boulders and workmen's huts at the foot of the Tomb of Ramesses VI to be investigated, and I had always had a kind of superstitious feeling that in that particular corner of the valley one of the missing kings, possibly Tutankhamun, might be found. Certainly the stratification of the debris there should indicate a tomb. Eventually we decided to devote a final season to the valley, and by making an early start to cut off access to the Tomb of Ramesses VI, if that should prove necessary, at a time when it would cause least inconvenience to visitors. That brings us to the present season, and the results that are known to everyone. Recording by Avahi in June 2019 Chapter 5 The Finding of the Tomb The history of the valley, as I have endeavored to show in former chapters, has never lacked the dramatic element, and in this, the latest episode, it has held to its traditions. For consider the circumstances. This was to be our final season in the valley. Six full seasons we had excavated there, and season after season had drawn a blank. We had worked for months at a stretch, and found nothing, and only an excavator knows how desperately depressing that can be. We had almost made up our minds that we were beaten, and were preparing to leave the valley and try our luck elsewhere. And then, hardly had we had set whole to ground in our last despairing effort, then we made a discovery that far exceeded our wildest dreams. Surely never before in the whole history of excavation has a full digging season been compressed within the space of five days. Let me try and tell the story of it all. It will not be easy, for the dramatic suddenness of the initial discovery left me in a dazed condition, and a months that have followed have been so crowded with incident that I have hardly had time to think. Setting it down on paper will perhaps give me a chance to realize what has happened and all that it means. I arrived in Luxor on October 28th, and by November 1st I had enrolled my workmen and was ready to begin. Our former excavations had stopped short at the northeast corner of the tomb of Ramesses VI, and from this point I started trenching southwards. It will be remembered that in this area there were a number of roughly constructed workmen's huts, used probably by the laborers in the tomb of Ramesses. These huts, built about three feet above bedrock, covered the whole area in front of the ramesside tomb, and continued in a southerly direction to join up with a similar group of huts on the opposite side of the valley, discovered by Davis in connection with his work on the Ankenotun cache. By the evening of November 3rd we had laid bare a sufficient number of these huts for experimental purposes, so, after we had planned and noted them, they were removed, and we were ready to clear away the three feet of soil that lay beneath them. Hardly had I arrived on the work next morning, November 4th, then the unusual silence, due to the stoppage of the work, made me realize that something out of the ordinary had happened, and I was greeted by the announcement that a step cut in the rock had been discovered underneath the very first hut to be attacked. This seemed too good to be true, but a short amount of extra clearing reveals the fact that we were actually in the entrance of a steep cut in the rock, some 13 feet below the entrance to the tomb of Ramesses VI, and a similar depth from the present bed level of the valley, Plate 9. The manner of cutting was that of the sunken stairway entrance so common in the valley, and I almost dared to hope that we had found our tomb at last. Work continued feverishly throughout the whole of that day and the morning of the next, but it was not until the afternoon of November 5th that we succeeded in clearing away the masses of rubbish that overlaid a cut, and were able to demarcate the upper edges of the stairway on all its four sides, Plate 12. It was clear by now beyond any question that we actually had before us the entrance to a tomb, but doubts, born of previous disappointments, persisted in creeping in. There was always the horrible possibility, suggested by our experience in the Tothmas III valley, that a tomb was an unfinished one, never completed, and never used. If it had been finished there was the depressing probability that it had been completely plundered in ancient times. On the other hand there was just the chance of an untouched or only partially plundered tomb, and it was with ill-suppressed excitement that I watched the descending steps of the staircase, as one by one they came to light. The cutting was excavated in the side of a small hillock, and, as the work progressed, its western edge receded under the slope of the rock, until it was, first partially, and then completely, roofed in, and became a passage, ten feet high by six feet wide. Work progressed more rapidly now, step succeeded step, and at the level of the twelfth, towards sunset, there was disclosed the upper part of a doorway, blocked, plastered, and sealed. A sealed doorway. It was actually true, then. Our years of patient labour were to be rewarded after all, and I think my first feeling was one of congratulation that my faith in the valley had not been unjustified. With excitement growing to fever-heat I searched the seal impressions on the door for evidence of the identity of the owner, but could find no name. The only decipherable ones were those of the well-known royal necropolis seal, the Jackal and Nine Captives. Two facts, however, were clear. First, the employment of this royal seal was certain evidence that a tomb had been constructed for a person of very high standing, and second, that the sealed door was entirely screened from above by workmen's huts of the twentieth dynasty was sufficiently clear proof that at least from that date it had never been entered. With that for the moment I had to be content. While examining the seals I noticed at the top of the doorway where some of the plaster had fallen away a heavy wooden lintel. Under this, to assure myself of the method by which the doorway had been blocked, I made a small peephole, just large enough to insert an electric torch, and discovered that the passage beyond the door was filled completely from floor to ceiling with stones and rubble, additional proof this of the care with which the tomb had been protected. It was a thrilling moment for an excavator. Alone, safe for my native workmen, I found myself after years of comparatively unproductive labour on the threshold of what might prove to be a magnificent discovery. Anything, literally anything, might lie beyond that passage, and it needed all my self-control to keep from breaking down the doorway and investigating then and there. One thing puzzled me, and that was the smallness of the opening in comparison with the ordinary valley tombs. The design was certainly of the eighteenth dynasty. Could it be the tomb of a noble buried here by royal consent? Was it a royal cache, a hiding place to which a mummy and its equipment had been removed for safety? Or was it actually the tomb of the king for whom I had spent so many years in search? Once more I examined the seal impressions for a clue, but on the part of the door a so far late bear, only those of the royal necropolis seal already mentioned, were clear enough to read. Had I but known that a few inches lower down there was a perfectly clear and distinct impression of the seal of Tutankhamun, the king I most desired to find, I would have cleared on, had a much better night's rest in consequence, and saved myself nearly three weeks of uncertainty. It was late, however, and darkness was already upon us. With some reluctance I reclosed to small hole that I had made, filled in our excavation for protection during the night, selected the most trustworthy of my workmen, themselves almost as excited as I was, to watch all night above the tomb and so home by moonlight, riding down the valley. Naturally my wish was to go straight ahead with our clearing to find out the full extent of the discovery, but Lord Carnarvon was in England and in fairness to him I had to delay matters until he could come. Accordingly, on the morning of November 6th I sent him the following cable. At last have made wonderful discovery in valley, a magnificent tomb with seals intact, recovered same for your arrival. Congratulations! My next task was to secure the doorway against interference, until such time as it could finally be reopened. This we did by filling our excavation up again to surface level and rolling on top of it the large flint boulders of which the workmen's huts had been composed. By the evening of the same day exactly forty-eight hours after we had discovered the first step of the staircase this was accomplished. The tomb had vanished. So far as the appearance of the ground was concerned there never had been any tomb and I found it harsh to persuade myself at times that the whole episode had not been a dream. I was soon to be reassured on this point. News travels fast in Egypt and within two days of the discovery, congratulations, inquiries and offers of help descended upon me in a steady stream from all directions. It became clear, even at this early stage, that I was in for a job that could not be tackled single-handed, so I wired to calendar, who had helped me on various previous occasions, asking him, if possible, to join me without delay, and to my relief he arrived on the very next day. On the eighth had received two messages from Lord Canarvon in answer to my cable, the first of which read, possibly come soon, and the second received a little later, propose arrive Alexandria 20th. We had thus nearly a fortnight's grace and we devoted it to making preparations of various kinds, so that when the time of reopening came we should be able, with the least possible delay, to handle any situation that might arise. On the night of the eighteenth I went to Cairo for three days to meet Lord Canarvon and make a number of necessary purchases, returning to Luxor on the twenty-first. On the twenty-third Lord Canarvon arrived in Luxor with his daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert, his devoted companion in all his Egyptian work, and everything was in hand for the beginning of the second chapter of the discovery of the tomb. Calendar had been busy all day clearing away the upper layer of rubbish, so that by morning we should be able to get into the staircase without any delay. By the afternoon of the twenty-fourth the whole staircase was clear, sixteen steps in all, plate thirteen, and we were able to make a proper examination of the sealed doorway. On the lower part the sealed impressions were much clearer and we were able, without any difficulty, to make out on several of them the name of Tutankhamun, plate fourteen. This added enormously to the interest of the discovery. If we had found, as seemed almost certain, the tomb of that shadowy monarch, whose tenure of the throne coincided with one of the most interesting periods in the whole of Egyptian history, we should indeed have reason to congratulate ourselves. With heightened interest, if that were possible, we renewed our investigation of the doorway. Here for the first time a disquieting element made its appearance. Now that the whole door was exposed to light, it was possible to discern a fact that had hitherto escaped notice, that there had been two successive openings and re-closings of a part of its surface. Furthermore, that the ceiling originally discovered, the jackal and nine captives, had been applied to the re-closed portions, whereas the ceilings of Tutankhamun covered the untouched part of the doorway, and were therefore those with which the tomb had been originally secured. The tomb then was not absolutely intact, as we had hoped. Plunderers had entered it, and entered it more than once, from the evidence of the huts above, Plunderers of a date not later than the reign of Ramesses VI, but that they had not rifled it completely was evident from the fact that it had been resealed. Footnote From later evidence, we found that this resealing could not have taken place later than the reign of Hormhap, i.e. from 10 to 15 years after the burial. End footnote Then came another puzzle. In the lower straight-out rubbish that filled the staircase, we found masses of broken potchards and boxes, the latter bearing the names of Enkinatun, Smenkare, and Tutankhamun, and, what was much more upsetting, a scarab of Tothmes III, and a fragment with the name of Amenhetep III. Why this mixture of names? The balance of evidence so far would seem to indicate a cache rather than a tomb, and at this stage in the proceedings we inclined more and more to the opinion that we were about to find a miscellaneous collection of objects of the 18th Dynasty kings brought from Tel El Amarna by Tutankhamun and deposited here for safety. So matters stood on the evening of the 24th. On the following day, the sealed doorway was to be removed, so calendars set carpenters to work making a heavy wooden grill to be set up in its place. Mr. Engebach, Chief Inspector of the Antiquities Department, paid us a visit during the afternoon and witnessed part of the final clearing of rubbish from the doorway. On the morning of the 25th the seal impressions on the doorway were carefully noted and photographed, and then we removed the actual blocking of the door, consisting of rough stones carefully built from floor to lintel, and heavily plastered on their outer faces to take the seal impressions. This disclosed the beginning of a descending passage, not a staircase, the same width as the entrance stairway, and nearly seven feet high. As I had already discovered from my hole in the doorway it was filled completely with stone and rubble, probably the chip from its own excavation. This filling, like the doorway, showed distinct signs of more than one opening and re-closing of the tomb, the untouched part consisting of clean white chip mingled with dust, whereas the disturbed part was composed mainly of dark flint. It was clear that an irregular tunnel had been cut through the original filling at the upper corner on the left side, a tunnel corresponding in position with that of the hole in the doorway. As we cleared the passage we found, mixed with the rubble of the lower levels, broken potards, jar ceilings, alabaster jars, hole and broken, vases of painted pottery, numerous fragments of smaller articles, and water skins, these last having obviously been used to bring up the water needed for the plastering of the doorways. These were clear evidence of plundering, and we eyed them as scans. By night we had cleared a considerable distance down the passage, but as yet saw no sign of second doorway or of chamber. The day following, November 26th, was the day of days, the most wonderful that I have ever lived through, and certainly one who's like I can never hope to see again. Throughout the morning the work of clearing continued, slowly perforce on account of the delicate objects that were mixed with the filling. Then in the middle of the afternoon, 30 feet down from the outer door, we came upon a second sealed doorway, almost an exact replica of the first. The seal impressions in this case were less distinct, but still recognizable as those of Tutankhamun and of the Royal Necropolis. Here again the signs of opening and re-closing were clearly marked upon the plaster. We were firmly convinced by this time that it was a cache that we were about to open and not a tomb. The arrangement of stairway, entrance passage and doors reminded us very forcibly of the cache of Ankenatun and Taiyi material found in the very near vicinity of the present excavation by Davis, and the fact that Tutankhamun's seals occurred there likewise seemed almost certain proof that we were right in our conjecture. We were soon to know. There laid a sealed doorway, and behind it was the answer to the question. Slowly, desperately slowly it seemed to us as we watched, the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway were removed, until at last we had the whole door clear before us. The decisive moment had arrived. With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner. Darkness and blank space, as far as an iron testing rod could reach, showed that whatever lay beyond was empty and not filled like the passage we had just cleared. Tandal tests were applied as a precaution against possible foul gases, and then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in, Lord Canarvon, Lady Evelyn, and Callender standing anxiously beside me to hear the verdict. At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist. Strange animals, statues, and gold, everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment, an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by, I was struck dumb with amazement. And when Lord Canarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, can you see anything? It was all I could do to get out the words, yes, wonderful things. Then, widening the hole a little further, so that we both could see, we inserted an electric torch. 6. A Preliminary Investigation I suppose most excavators would confess to a feeling of awe, embarrassment almost, when they break into a chamber closed and sealed by pious hands so many centuries ago. For the moment, time as a factor in human life has lost its meaning. Three thousand, four thousand years may be have passed and gone, since human feet last trod the floor on which you stand. And yet, as you note the signs of recent life around you, the half-filled bowl of mortar for the door, the blackened lamp, the finger mark upon the freshly painted surface, the farewell garland dropped upon the threshold, you feel it might have been but yesterday. The very air you breathe, unchanged throughout the centuries, you share with those who laid the mummy to its rest. Time is annihilated by little intimate details such as these, and you feel an intruder. That is perhaps the first and dominant sensation, but others follow thick and fast, the acceleration of discovery, the fever of suspense, the almost over-mastering impulse born of curiosity, to break down seals and lift the lids of boxes, the thought, pure joy to the investigator, that you are about to add a page to history or solve some problem of research, the strained expectancy, why not confess it, of the treasure seeker. Did these thoughts actually pass through our minds at a time, or have I imagined them since? I cannot tell. It was the discovery that my memory was blank, and not the mere desire for dramatic chapter ending that occasioned this digression. Surely never before in the whole history of excavation had such an amazing sight been seen as the light of our torch revealed to us. The reader can get some idea of it by reference to the photographs on plates 16 to 20, but these were taken afterwards when the tomb had been opened and electric light installed. Let him imagine how they appeared to us, as we looked down upon them from our spy-hole in the blocked doorway, casting the beam of light from our torch, the first light that had pierced the darkness of the chamber for three thousand years, from one group of objects to another in a vain attempt to interpret the treasure that lay before us. The effect was bewildering, overwhelming. I suppose we had never formulated exactly in our minds just what we had expected or hoped to see, but certainly we had never dreamed of anything like this, a roomful, a whole museumful it seemed, of objects, some familiar, but some the like of which we had never seen, piled one upon another in seemingly endless profusion. Gradually the scene grew clearer and we could pick out individual objects. First, right opposite to us, we had been conscious of them all the while but refused to believe in them, were three great gilt couches, their sides carved in the form of monstrous animals, curiously attenuated in body as they had to be to serve their purpose, but with hits of startling realism. Uncanny beasts enough to look upon it any time. Seen as we saw them, their brilliant gilded surfaces picked out of the darkness by our electric torch, as though by limelight, their heads throwing grotesque distorted shadows on the wall behind them, they were almost terrifying. Next on the right, two statues caught and held our attention, two life-sized figures of a king in black, facing each other like sentinels, gold-kilted, gold-sandaled, armed with mace and staff, the protective sacred cobra upon their foreheads. These were the dominant objects that caught the eye at first. Between them, around them, piled on top of them, there were countless others, exquisitely painted and inlaid caskets, alabaster vases, some beautifully carved in openwork designs, strange black shrines from the open door of one, a great gilt snake peeping out, bouquets of flowers or leaves, beds, chairs beautifully carved, a golden inlaid throne, a heap of curious white ove-form boxes, staves of all shapes and designs, beneath our eyes, on the very threshold of the chamber, a beautiful, lotus-form cup of translucent alabaster, on the left a confused pile of overturned chariots, glistening with gold and inlay, and peeping from behind them another portrait of a king. Such were some of the objects that lay before us. Whether we noted them all at the time, I cannot say for certain, as our minds were in much too excited and confused a state to register accurately. Presently it dawned upon our bewildered brains that in all this medley of objects before us there was no coffin or a trace of mummy, and the much-debated question of tomb or cache began to intrigue us afresh. With this question in view we reexamined the scene before us, and noticed for the first time that between the two black sentinel statues on the right there was another sealed doorway. The explanation gradually dawned upon us. We were but on the threshold of our discovery. What we saw was merely an anti-chamber. Behind the guarded door there were to be other chambers, possibly a succession of them, and in one of them, beyond any shadow of doubt, in all his magnificent panoply of death, we should find the pharaoh lying. We had seen enough, and our brains began to reel at the thought of the task in front of us. We reclosed the hole, locked the wooden grill that had been placed upon the first doorway, left our native staff on guard, mounted our donkeys, and rode home down the valley, strangely silent and subdued. It was curious, as we talked things over in the evening, to find how conflicting our ideas were as to what we had seen. Each of us had noted something that the others had not, and it amazed us next day to discover how many and how obvious were the things that we had missed. Naturally it was the sealed door between the statues that intrigued us most, and we debated far into the night the possibilities of what might lie behind it. A single chamber with the king's sarcophagus? That was the least we might expect. But why one chamber only? Why not a succession of passages and chambers, leading, in true valley style, to an innermost shrine of all, the burial chamber? It might be so, and yet in plan the tomb was quite unlike the others. Visions of chamber after chamber, each crowded with objects like the one we had seen, passed through our minds and left us gasping for breath. Then came the thought of the plunderers again. Had they succeeded in penetrating this third doorway, seen from a distance it looked absolutely untouched, and, if so, what were our chances of finding the king's mummy intact? I think we slept but little, all of us, that night. Next morning, November 27th, we were early on the field, for there was much to be done. It was essential, before proceeding further with our examination, that we should have some more adequate means of illumination. So calendar began laying wires to connect us up with the main lighting system of the valley. While this was in preparation, we made careful notes of the seal impressions upon the inner doorway, and then removed its entire blocking. By noon everything was ready, and Lord Conarvon, Lady Evelyn, calendar and I, entered the tomb and made a careful inspection of the first chamber, afterwards called the anti-chamber. The evening before I had written to Mr Engelbach, the Chief Inspector of the Antiquities Department, advising him of the progress of clearing, and asking him to come over and make an official inspection. Unfortunately he was at the moment in Kenah on official business, so the local Antiquities Inspector, Ibrahim Effendi, came in his state. By the aid of our powerful electric lamps, many things that had been obscure to us on the previous day became clear, and we were able to make a more accurate estimate of the extent of our discovery. Our first objective was naturally the sealed door between the statues, and here a disappointment awaited us. Seen from a distance it presented all the appearance of an absolutely intact blocking, but close examination revealed the fact that a small breach had been made near the bottom, just wide enough to admit a boy or a slightly built man, and that the hole made had subsequently been filled up and resealed. We were not then to be the first. Here too the thieves had forestalled us, and it only remained to be seen how much damage they had had the opportunity or the time to effect. Our natural impulse was to break down the door and get to the bottom of the matter at once, but to do so would have entailed serious risk of damage to many of the objects in the anti-chamber, a risk which we were by no means prepared to face. Nor could we move the objects in question out of the way, for it was imperative that a plan and complete photographic record should be made before anything was touched, and this was a task involving a considerable amount of time, even if we had had sufficient plant available, which we had not, to carry it through immediately. Reluctantly we decided to abandon the opening of this inner sealed door until we had cleared the anti-chamber of all its contents. By doing this we should not only ensure the complete scientific record of the outer chamber, which it was our duty to make, but should have a clear field for the removal of the door-blocking, a ticklish operation at best. Having satisfied to some extent our curiosity about the sealed doorway, we could now turn our attention to the rest of the chamber and make a more detailed examination of the objects which it contained. It was certainly an astounding experience. Here, packed tightly together in this little chamber, were scores of objects, any one of which would have filled us with excitement under ordinary circumstances, and been considered ample repayment for a full season's work. Some were of types well enough known to us, others were new and strange, and in some cases these were complete and perfect examples of objects whose appearance we had here to forebut guessed at from the evidence of tiny broken fragments found in other royal tombs. Nor was it merely from a point of view of quantity that the find was so amazing. The period to which the tomb belongs is in many respects the most interesting in the whole history of Egyptian art, and we were prepared for beautiful things. What we were not prepared for was the astonishing vitality and animation which characterized certain of the objects. It was a revelation to us of unsuspected possibilities in Egyptian art, and we realized, even in this hasty preliminary survey, that a study of the material would involve a modification if not a complete revolution of all our old ideas. That, however, is a matter for the future. We shall get a clearer estimate of exact artistic values when we have cleared the whole tomb and have the complete contents before us. One of the first things we noted in our survey was that all of the larger objects, and most of the smaller ones, were inscribed with the name of Tutankhamun. His two were the seals upon the innermost door, and therefore his, beyond any shadow of doubt, the mummy that ought to lie behind it. Next, while we were still excitedly calling each other from one object to another, came a new discovery. Peering beneath the southernmost of the three great couches, we noticed a small irregular hole in the wall. Here was yet another sealed doorway, and a plunderous hole, which, unlike the others, had never been repaired. Cautiously we crept under the couch and inserted our portable light, and there before us lay another chamber, rather smaller than the first, but even more crowded with objects. The state of this inner room, afterwards called the Annex, simply defies description. In the anti-chamber there had been some sort of an attempt to tidy up after the plunderous visit, but here everything was in confusion, just as they had left it. Nor did it take much imagination to picture them at their work. One, there would probably not have been room for more than one, had crept into the chamber, and then hastily, but systematically, ransacked its entire contents, emptying boxes, throwing things aside, piling them one upon another, and occasionally passing objects through the hole to his companions for closer examination in the outer chamber. He had done his work just about as thoroughly as an earthquake. Not a single inch of floor space remains vacant, and it will be a matter of considerable difficulty when the time for clearing comes to know how to begin. So far we have not made any attempt to enter the chamber, but have contented ourselves with taking stock from outside. Beautiful things it contains too, smaller than those in the anti-chamber for the most part, but many of them of exquisite workmanship. Several things remain in my mind particularly. A painted box, apparently quite as lovely as the one in the anti-chamber, a wonderful chair of ivory, gold, wood, and leatherwork, alabaster, and fiance vases of beautiful form, and a gaming board, encarved and colored ivory. I think the discovery of the second chamber, with its crowded contents, had a somewhat sobering effect upon us. Excitement had gripped us hitherto, and given us no pause for thought, but now for the first time we began to realize what a prodigious task we had in front of us, and what a responsibility it entailed. This was no ordinary find to be disposed of in a normal season's work, nor was there any precedent to show us how to handle it. The thing was outside all experience, bewildering, and for the moment it seemed as though there were more to be done than any human agency could accomplish. Moreover, the extent of our discovery had taken us by surprise, and we were wholly unprepared to deal with the multitude of objects that lay before us, many in a perishable condition and needing careful preservative treatment before they could be touched. There were numberless things to be done before we could even begin the work of clearing. Vast stores of preservatives and packing material must be laid in. Expert advice must be taken as to the best method of dealing with certain objects. Provision must be made for a laboratory, some safe and sheltered spot in which the objects could be treated, catalogued and packed. A careful plan to scale must be made and a complete photographic record taken while everything was still in position. A dark room must be contrived. These were but a few of the problems that confronted us. Clearly the first thing to be done was to render the tomb safe against robbery. We could then, with easy minds, work out our plans. Plans which we realized by this time would involve not one season only, but certainly two, and possibly three or four. We had our wooden grill at the entrance to the passage, but that was not enough, and I measured up the inner doorway for a gate of thick steel bars. Until we could get this made for us, and for this and for other reasons it was imperative for me to visit Cairo, we must go to the labourer of filling in the tomb once more. Meanwhile the news of the discovery had spread like wildfire, and all sorts of extraordinary and fanciful reports were going abroad concerning it. One story that found considerable credence among the natives being to the effect that three aeroplanes had landed in the valley and gone off to some destination unknown with loads of treasure. To overtake these rumors as far as possible we decided on two things. First to invite Lord Allen B and the various heads of the departments concerned to come and pay a visit to the tomb, and secondly to send an authoritative account of the discovery to the times. On the 29th accordingly we had an official opening of the tomb, at which were present Lady Allen B, Lord Allen B was unfortunately unable to leave Cairo, Abdel Aziz Bey Yehya, the governor of the province, Mohamed Bey Fahmi, Mamour of the district, and a number of other Egyptian notables and officials, and on the 30th Mr Tottenham, advisor to the Ministry of Public Works, and Mr Pierre Lacau, Director General of the Service of Antiquities, who had been unable to be present on the previous day, made their official inspection. Mr Merton, the Times Correspondent, was also present at the official opening and sent the dispatch which created so much excitement at home. On December 3rd, after closing up the entrance doorway with heavy timber, the tomb was filled to surface level. Lord Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn left on the 4th, on their way to England, to conclude various arrangements there, preparatory to returning later in the season, and on the 6th, leaving calendar to watch over the tomb in my absence, I followed them to Cairo to make my purchases. My first care was to Steelgate, and I ordered it the morning I arrived, and the promise that it should be delivered within six days. The other purchases I took more leisurely, and a miscellaneous collection they were, including photographic material, chemicals, a motor car, packing boxes of every kind, with thirty-two bales of calico, more than a mile of wadding, and as much again of surgical bandages. Of these last two important items I was determined not to run short. While in Cairo I had time to take stock of the position, and it became more and more clear to me that assistance, and that on a big scale, was necessary if the work in the tomb was to be carried out in a satisfactory manner. The question was where to turn for this assistance. The first and pressing need was in photography, for nothing could be touched until a complete photographic record had been made, a task involving technical skill of the highest order. A day or two after I arrived in Cairo I received a cable of congratulation from Mr. Lithko, curator of the Egyptian Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, whose concession at Thebes ran in close proximity to our own, being only divided by the natural mountain wall. And in my reply I somewhat diffidently inquired whether it would be possible, for the immediate emergency at any rate, to secure the assistance of Mr. Harry Burton, their photographic expert. He promptly cabled back, and his cable ought to go on record as an example of disinterested scientific cooperation. Only too delighted to assist in any possible way. Please call on Burton and on any other members of our staff. This offer was subsequently most generously confirmed by the trustees and the director of the Metropolitan Museum. And on my return to Luxor I arranged with my friend Mr. Winlock, the director of the New York excavations on that concession, and who was to be the actual sufferer under the arrangement, not only that Mr. Burton should be transferred, but that Mr. Hall and Mr. Hauser, draftsmen to the expedition, should devote such of their time as might be necessary to make a large-scale drawing of the anti-chamber and its contents. Another member of the New York staff, Mr. Mace, director of their excavations on the pyramid field at Lischt, was also available, and at Mr. Lithgow's suggestion, cabled, offering help. Thus no fewer than four members of the New York staff were for whole or part time associated in the work of the season. Without this generous help it would have been impossible to tackle the enormous amount of work in front of us. Another piece of luck befell me in Cairo. Mr. Lucas, director of the chemical department of the Egyptian government, was taken three months leave prior to retiring from the government on completion of service, and for these three months he generously offered to place his chemical knowledge at our disposal, an offer which, needless to say, I hastened to accept. That completed our regular working staff. In addition, Dr. Allen Gardiner kindly undertook to deal with any inscriptional material that might be found, and Professor Breasted, in a couple of visits, gave us much assistance in the difficult task of deciphering the historical significance of the seal impressions from the doors. By December 13th the steel gate was finished and I had completed my purchases. I returned to Luxor and on the 15th everything arrived safely in the valley, delivery of the packages having been greatly expedited by the courtesy of the Egyptian state railway officials who permitted them to travel by express instead of on the slow freight train. On the 16th we opened up the tomb once more, and on the 17th the steel gate was set up in the door of the chamber and we were ready to begin work. On the 18th work was actually begun, Burton making his first experiments in the anti-chamber and Hall and Hauser making a start on their plan. Two days later Lucas arrived and at once began experimenting on preservatives for the various classes of objects. On the 22nd as the result of a good deal of clamour permission to see the tomb was given to the press, both European and native, and the opportunity was also afforded to a certain number of the native notables of Luxor who had been disappointed at not receiving an invitation to the official opening. It had only been possible on that occasion to invite a very limited number, owing to a difficulty of ensuring the safety of the objects in the very narrow space that was available. On the 25th Mace arrived and two days later, photographs and plans being sufficiently advanced, the first object was removed from the tomb. End of section 9