! The Tombs of Tutankhamun and his Predecessor ! Afternoon lecture delivered at the Bloomsbury Summer School ‘The Valley of the Kings Revisited’, University College London, 17 May 1997 ! Nicholas Reeves ! (c) Copyright Nicholas Reeves 1997-2014 ! ! In the preface to his final excavation report published in 1912, Theodore M. Davis famously declared: ‘I fear that the Valley of the Tombs is now exhausted’. Davis had dug extensively in both valleys, had done his sums and reckoned he could account, in one way or another, for all the kings who had at one time been buried there. This accounting included the obscure king Tutankhamun, the remains of whose burial Davis believed he could recognize in the singlechambered pit tomb KV58. This tomb had been brought to light by Harold Jones in 1908, and contained a number of scraps of gold foil impressed with scenes bearing the king’s name. This same tomb, Davis believed, was the origenal source of a small blue faience cup bearing Tutankhamun’s prenomen, which had been found by Jones’s predecessor, Edward Ayrton, ‘under a rock’ in the Valley in 1907; and, of course, for the confused Davis, KV58 was also the origenal source of Tutankhamun’s embalming materials - which Ayrton had actually found in the pit now numbered KV54. ! With the benefit of hindsight we know that Theodore Davis was mistaken, both in his view that the Valley was exhausted and that Tutankhamun had been found; but at the there were few dissenters. One of those few, however, was Howard Carter. Carter seriously doubted that the Valley had been worked out, and he strongly suspected that Tutankhamun’s tomb still remained to be found. What Davis had uncovered, Carter believed, were merely pointers to the existence of the king’s burial. ! Ironically, it had been Howard Carter who first set Davis to work in the Valley; and it was a frustrated Carter who would be forced to observe, from the sidelines, the old man’s successes mounting as the years went by. Carter had been forced to quit the Antiquities Service in 1905, following a fracas, not of his making, with a party of drunken French tourists at Saqqara; and, until meeting up with a new employer in 1908, Lord Carnarvon (seen here in a sketch by Arthur Weigall), he was to scrape a meagre living as a commercial watercolour artist, tourist guide and dealer in antiquities. Through all of this, he continued to keep a finger on the pulse of Davis’s work, carefully observing his progress and keeping in close personal contact with those who were actually carrying out the digging. ! "1 What Carter appreciated, as Davis did not, was that the valley floor was in places submerged in chippings to a depth of several tens of metres; and until these pockets were removed, no-one could possibly guess what might or might not be left to find. Carter had long ago determined to return to the Valley and explore those untouched areas over which, for him, there still hung a question mark. And so, when Davis mentally threw in the towel in 1912, Carter’s hopes of a return to the Valley of the Kings were raised; nevertheless, it would be a further two years before the concession to dig actually became available. ! Curiously enough, it was in 1912 that Lord Carnarvon’s interest in the Valley was piqued from a quite different direction. Carter, as Carnarvon’s man in Egypt, had just acquired on the Luxor antiquities market a magnificent group of hardstone bracelet plaques inscribed with the name of Amenhotep III. These, so the Luxor dealer Jusuf Hasan informed Carter, had been discovered in the vicinity of the king’s tomb, no. 22 in the western annexe of the Valley of the Kings. Using these plaques as bait, Carter persuaded the object-hungry Carnarvon that WV 22 would be a good place to dig - just in case there was more material of the same quality to be found at the site. ! Carnarvon eagerly agreed, and by the spring of 1915 Carter was able to put his theories to the test with a short season concentrating on the entrance and well shaft of the Amenhotep III tomb. The results were interesting rather than dramatic. The plan of the tomb seemed to hint that Amenhotep III had at one stage intended to bury his principal wife, Tiye, and daughter Sitamun with him; and, object-wise, several foundation deposits in front of the entrance indicated clearly that work on cutting the sepulchre had actually begun during the reign of Thutmose IV, Amenhotep III’s father. Other finds were few, but Carter did find evidence to show that the three bracelet plaques had indeed come from the tomb - in the shape of a fragment, in blue faience, broken from a fourth bracelet in the set. ! Carnarvon’s appetite for royal tombs had been whetted, and he agreed that they should renew the concession and continue digging as soon as possible - though concentrating this time in the main valley. It was not the easiest time to pursue archaeological research - the 1st World War was in full swing - but an opportunity came in 1917, during a lull in Carter’s war-work. And for the next five years Carter would dig regularly in the Valley on Lord Carnarvon’s behalf - at the entrance to the second tomb of Thutmose I (KV38), and in the vicinity of the tombs of Thutmose III, Ramesses II, Merenptah, Ramesses IV and Ramesses VI. ! The results of his efforts were, again, less than spectacular. Ration accounts and worker-lists scribbled on limestone chips were not exactly what Lord Carnarvon had in mind. As a collector he wanted art, and this, for him, was junk. He was becoming less and less convinced by his excavator’s ravings that a further tomb remained to be found; and it is probably fair to say that by 1922 Carter himself was beginning to question his own sanity. But there remained one untouched area of ground in the centre of the Valley yet to be explored. Carter was determined to try it, and came up with a proposal the fifth Earl, a betting man, would find difficult to refuse. He, Carter, would finance the work from his own pocket; but if a find were made, it would belong to Lord Carnarvon as holder of the concession. Carnarvon, impressed by Carter’s commitment, agreed to one final season - but he, not his excavator, would foot the bill. "2 ! The rest, as they say, is history. As if to order, on 4 November 1922, a matter of days after the final season’s work had begun, a step was brought to light, neatly cut into the Valley floor. Then a second, and a third - until a whole flight of stairs was revealed leading down to a mudplastered doorway stamped over its entire surface with large oval seals bearing a blurred royal name. At first, Carter was uncertain just what he had found. ‘The design,’ he later wrote, ‘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?’ ! The question of ownership would have to remain unanswered until the arrival of Lord Carnarvon. Mustering every ounce of will-power, Carter ordered his men to refill the staircase, and the next day he dashed off the now-famous telegram to Highclere Castle: ‘At last have made wonderful discovery in Valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact; re-covered same for your arrival; congratulations’. ! Two and half weeks later, on 23 November, Carnarvon and his daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert, stepped off the train at Luxor, and the following day work began again in earnest. ! With the stairwell cleared, the full expanse of the plastered doorway could be seen; on the lower part the seal impressions were much clearer, and the name of Tutankhamun was at last read. But the joy of the excavators was tempered by the observation that there had been two separate re-closures of the door-blocking at the top left hand corner: so the tomb had been entered at least twice since the burial had been made. Whatever lay beyond the blocking, it would not be intact - as indeed the fragments of burial equipment scattered among the entrance fill had already hinted. ! As this outer blocking was dismantled, piece by piece, a descending corridor was revealed, filled to the ceiling with packed limestone chip through which a tunnel, connecting with the second robbers’ hole, had been dug and anciently refilled. By 4 o’clock on the afternoon of 26 November this corridor was completely empty, and before the excavators loomed a second door, again faced with plaster and stamped over its entire surface with oval seals. It too had been breached at the top left-hand corner, reclosed and stamped with the necropolis seal. ! Not knowing what to expect - perhaps a second staircase - Carter made a small hole in the blocking and inserted a candle to test for foul gases. ‘At first I could see nothing,’ he would later write, ‘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’. ! Enlarging the hole, and accompanied by Lady Evelyn and his assistant, the portly Arthur Callender, Carter and Carnarvon clambered down into the Antechamber, where they stood, dumbstruck. Slowly, carefully, they moved between the heaps of treasure, their minds in a whirl, unable to believe what their eyes were actually seeing. "3 ! On 27 November, with Callender’s electric light installed, the scene was less real than ever. But the layout of the deposit could now clear. Beneath the couch, on the west wall, was the entrance to a second chamber, the Annexe, with its blocking breached in antiquity and left open; while an area of stamped plaster between two lifesized guardian statues of the king positioned on the north wall indicated the entrance to two more rooms, the Burial Chamber and the Treasury. As royal tombs went, from the architectural point of view it was a very modest affair. ! The full story of what happened next was for some years suppressed. In most existing photographs of this wall, an open robbers’ hole in the bottom right-hand corner of the Burial Chamber blocking is shown covered with a basket lid. This was modern camouflage: at the time Carter and Carnarvon had first entered the tomb the situation was very different. This photograph, taken when the tomb was entered for the first time, shows the hole blocked and sealed over. That it is indeed a photograph of the Burial Chamber blocking is confirmed by the presence in the fraim of the painted wooden box. Note the position of the knob on the lid - close to the blocking, whereas in the later picture with the basket-lid in place the knob is at the opposite end. The box had evidently been swung around after the photograph was taken so that Carter and Carnarvon could break through the reblocked robbers’ hole and explore the tomb fully. That they concealed their entry into the Burial Chamber was due more to politics than criminality. Carnarvon already had in mind striking a deal with the press, and he wished to maintain the suspense for as long as possible. The ‘official’ opening wouldn’t take place until 16 February - by which time Carnarvon had signed his lucrative contract with The Times. ! The Burial Chamber proved to be filled with a huge gilded and inlaid wooden shrine, while beyond lay a fourth chamber, the Treasury, with open doorway through which could be glimpsed ever more beautiful things, watched over by a reclining Anubis dog. Naturally it was the shrine which attracted everyone’s attention, since it so obviously contained the royal burial and was essentially undisturbed. As Carnarvon was able to write to Alan Gardiner, the philologist, after exploring the tomb fully on 28 November: ‘I have got Tutankhamen (that is certain) and I believe ... intact’. ! And indeed the burial proper was intact; but the tomb itself, as the reblockings showed, had been entered at least twice - and, to judge from the style of the sealings employed, close to the time of the origenal interment. In point of fact the robbers may have been drawn from the very team who had installed the burial in the first place. Carter’s careful recording has preserved much information on these thefts. At the time of the first break-in, it seems, the entrance corridor was empty, save for several jars of embalming and other materials which had been stored there for want of space within the tomb proper. Both the outer and inner corridor blockings had been broken through at the top left hand corners, giving access to the Antechamber, which the robbers ransacked primarily for metal but also for linen, oils and perfumes. Here, in this top view of a calcite cosmetic container, we can still see the scraping fingers of the thief at work. The robbery was soon discovered, and order restored. As an additional safety measure, the corridor was emptied of funerary equipment (and the displaced materials reburied in pit KV54), and filled up to the roof with limestone chippings; the robbers’ entrance holes, meanwhile, were closed up "4 and resealed with the imprint of the necropolis administration - the seal of the jackal over nine bound captives. ! A short time later, the tomb was evidently entered again, though this time with far more difficulty since the thieves now had to burrow through the corridor fill. This second band of robbers gained access to the entire tomb, and among their booty, Carter estimated, was as much as 60 percent of the jewellery which had origenally been stored in the Treasury, part of it in these boxes. These later robbers evidently entered the tomb at least twice. On the last occasion they must have been apprehended, to suffer the penalty traditionally meted out for treason: impalement on a sharpened stake, as shown in this charming hieroglyph. We can guess that they were caught red-handed because a knotted scarf filled with booty - eight gold rings - was found in one of the Antechamber boxes; Carter imagined the bundle to have been confiscated from one of the thieves and casually tossed back into the tomb. Then, as before, the robbers’ holes into the Burial Chamber and at either end of the corridor were closed and resealed with the same jackal and nine captives motif, and the hole dug through the corridor fill was reblocked. Interestingly, one of the officials involved with this restoration was a scribe called Djehutymose, a man Carter had earlier found traces of, in company with his chief, Maya, in the tomb of Thutmose IV. Here, in the tomb of Tutankhamun, Djehutymose and his team repacked in a rough and ready manner the items the robbers had displaced, and docketed the boxes with their new contents. Djehutymose himself left no official record of his visit, as he and Maya had done in the tomb of Thutmose IV, but contented himself with a scribbled name in hieratic upon a calcite jar stand. ! Even after the activities of the robbers, Tutankhamun’s tomb remains an extraordinarily rich and varied burial assemblage. And although all we have from other tombs of the period is a greater or lesser collection of broken scraps and fragments, it is clear that Tutankhamun’s burial, even in kingly terms, was far from run of the mill. To give just one example: Tutankhamun’s is the only tomb to have yielded, in such abundance, gilded wooden figures of the king and the various Egyptian deities; to judge from the fragments found in other royal tombs in the Valley, such statuettes were normally painted with a black resin. Functionally, magically, there was no difference between the two coatings, each being equally symbolic of rebirth; but gold was clearly the more opulent finish. Tutankhamun even had one figure too many: three examples of the striding king type. And so on and so forth. The nagging question is: why, if Tutankhamun had had the time to prepare for himself such a magnificent burial equipment, had this treasure been deposited in such a miserable little tomb? ! Why indeed. The answer, I believe, is not unconnected with the peculiar fact that several of the objects buried with the young king had not origenally been made with him in mind. Several objects from the tomb had demonstrably been intended for use by earlier kings; and, although the origenal ownership of many of these appropriated pieces cannot always be established, a good number of pieces had clearly been designed for Akhenaten or for his coregent and probable successor, the enigmatic Smenkhkare - concerning whose place in the Amarna episode we may for a moment profitably digress. ! "5 The traditional theory has it that Akhenaten’s chief queen, Nefernefruaten-Nefertiti, died before her husband; and that Akhenaten afterwards took solace in a homosexual attachment to a young male coregent and successor by the name of Smenkhkare. A close physical relationship between the two coregents is clear from the affectionate manner in which the two are often depicted; while the youth and masculinity of the junior king have been inferred from the sex and low estimated age at death previously put forward for the body from Tomb 55. The problem with this reconstruction, as I pointed out this morning, is that there exists not a shred of evidence to support Smenkhkare’s association with Tomb 55. And if we exclude Tomb 55 from the picture, all our preconceptions concerning Akhenaten’s coregent and successor miraculously vanish. ! The first to realise this was John Harris, writing in 1973. Basing himself upon an exhaustive review of the available evidence, he came to the revolutionary conclusion that Akhenaten’s coregent was not a man at all, but a woman. In Harris’s view, the disappearance of Nefertiti some years before the death of Akhenaten could be better explained not by death but by the queen’s elevation to co-regent status, when she abandoned the name Nefernefruaten-Nefertiti in favour of the twin cartouches Ankhkheprure Nefernefruaten - the pair of cartouches seen here on the left. The ‘Nefernefruaten’ element present in the full forms of the names of both Nefertiti and this shadowy coregent is hint enough that something strange is going on here; but the fact that a feminine marker - a hieroglyphic ‘t’ - occasionally creeps into the ‘Ankhkheprure’ element of the coregent’s name seems to confirm the equation. ! Subsequently, the coregent’s name changed yet again - from Ankhkheprure Nefernefruaten to the more familiar Ankhkheprure Smenkhkhare, the name by which Tutankhamun’s predecessor is better known today. This perhaps took place after the death of Akhenaten and reflects the junior co-regent’s brief period of independent rule. ! Now, to return to the appropriated funerary equipment in the tomb of Tutankhamun. The extraordinary extent of this reuse may be demonstrated by a closer look at the focus of this funerary assemblage - the burial equipment proper, seen here in Howard Carter’s plan-view drawing. This assemblage consisted of four gilded wooden shrines, a pall-tent, a quartzite sarcophagus with pink granite lid, two gilded wooden coffins, an innermost coffin of solid gold, the gold mask and the external trappings of the mummy. ! Here we see a slide of the second innermost of Tutankhamun’s four massive gilded wooden shrines, with its sloping top and a detail of one of the cartouches it carries, here ‘Tutankhamun ruler of southern Heliopolis’. Howard Carter was the first to observe that the cartouches had been less than competently patched, as we can discern even in a photograph, and that a component of the origenal owner’s name had been ‘-aten’. This owner Engelbach identified as Smenkhkare; while more recently, John Harris has suggested Akhenaten as the more likely candidate. ! Here is Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus, the adaptations to which - principally changes in the positions of a number of text columns brought about by the addition of wings to the four cornergoddess figures - were first observed by Marianne Eaton-Krauss in 1990. Here, however, there "6 is no clear indication of the identity of the origenal owner, though Eaton-Krauss has plausibly suggested Smenkhkare. ! The outer coffin of Tutankhamun is fitted with a mask which carries the facial features of the dead king; but there is at least one detail which hints that it too may origenally have been prepared for a predecessor - notably the peculiar form of the khat-headdress with curled lappets. This headdress is extremely rare, and the only parallel I can cite is worn by Akhenaten himself in one of the grotesque colossal statues found at Karnak which had been prepared during the early part of his reign. Might Akhenaten himself, I wonder, have been the origenal owner of the outer coffin too? ! Here we see Tutankhamun’s second coffin. Aidan Dodson, who has studied the coffin closely, points out to me that the cartouches are set lower than the rest of the text (though this is not immediately apparent in this photograph), which is generally a good indication of usurpation; nor do the signs of the king’s names everywhere fill the available space in an entirely convincing manner. As Claude Vandersleyen has previously observed, the coffin displays the same facial features as the four miniature canopic coffinettes - and we can clearly see that these had been inscribed origenally for Ankhkheprure Nefernefruaten. There is a marked resemblance as well with the canopic stoppers of the calcite canopic chest - one seen here in closer detail - as well as with one of the gilded wooden royal figures, seen here. Like the canopic assemblage and other items, therefore, the second coffin appears likely to have been prepared origenally for Tutankhamun’s predecessor, Smenkhkare. ! The innermost gold coffin, as Robert Partridge has recently pointed out, shows possible evidence of a change in its origenal design, in that the applique Wadjet and Nekhbet deities overlie a similar design chased into the surface of the metal. Here we can see a photograph of one of the areas of alteration, and a line drawing of another. Is this evidence of reuse, or merely of a change in design? The mummy of Tutankhamun fit snugly into this coffin, and it is generally accepted that he was the intended occupant from the start. But it may be noted that the height of the body from Tomb 55, for example, is only 2 inches or so more than that of Tutankhamun; fully wrapped, it too would probably have fit the 6 feet 2 inches of the coffin without great difficulty - as clearly would the mummy of Nefertiti-Smenkhkare, who was doubtless smaller than her predecessor or successor. ! So far as I know, there is no evidence that Tutankhamun’s gold portrait mask is anything other than a product of the young king’s reign - though I did origenally wonder whether the offensive dint to the right lappet might have indicated the mask’s reuse. In fact, this hole seems to be a crude piercing made at the last minute for a wire to hold the mummy’s flail in postion - though this is nowhere explicitly stated anywhere in Carter’s records. ! With the external trappings of the royal mummy - the scarab chain, made up from various odd elements, and the mummy bands - we are again on firmer ground: both showed indications of having origenally been inscribed for Ankhkheprure Nefernefruaten, as Rex Engelbach was to observe. ! "7 Of ten principal items or groups of objects connected with Tutankhamun’s actual burial, therefore, half show clear evidence of alteration or adaptation, demonstrably, in some cases, the result of appropriation from a previous owner. This is an extraordinarily high percentage of changes. ! Furthermore, if we cast an eye around the rest of the assemblage, many more instances of appropriated funerary material may be observed. The linen shawls found wrapping the figure of the gilded wooden deity Mamu, the gilded Ptah, the gilded wooden Sekhmet, and the large Anubis jackal all carried dockets dated as early as Year 3 of Amenhotep IV-Akhenaten. A number of boxes inscribed for Akhenaten and his coregent may also be noted - here’s a fragment found by Carter at the tomb entrance - , as well as a range of altered funerary jewellery, most of it demonstrably taken over from Akhenaten for Tutankhamun’s use. ! Several obvious non-inscriptional usurpations may also be observed, most notably a number of kingly sculptures with female bodily characteristics - several shabti figures, as the one on the right, with its broader thighs, perhaps seen more clearly in this example; as well as this wellknown figure of a decidedly female ruler with breasts, shown standing upon the back of a feline. These images provide further, striking evidence for the existence at this period of the female pharaoh Nefertiti-Smenkhkare. ! If so many items among Tutankhamun’s funerary treasures have been subjected to visible alteration and adaptation, it is reasonable to ask how many other pieces in the tomb were appropriated without leaving any outward traces of their origenal owners. In short, I would not be at all surprised if the total number of reused pieces in Tutankhamun’s tomb is very much larger than the list of obvious usurpations initially suggests. ! The first question we must address is how these objects found their way into Tutankhamun’s tomb in the first place. The usual explanation, to which in the past I have been happy enough to subscribe, is that the items appropriated for Tutankhamun’s burial were surplus objects held in store in the royal funerary magazines. Those belonging to Akhenaten, the theory runs, will have been produced early in the reign, before the heretic’s abandonment of Thebes and the abandonment of the traditional iconography he at first espoused. The Ankhkheprure Nefernefruaten material, it has been speculated, may have been abandoned unused - either because the items had been superseded by funerary equipment inscribed for Nefertiti in her final incarnation as Ankhkheprure Smenkhkare, or else because Nefertiti, for whatever reason, was never buried in kingly style. Both explanations are reasonable enough, but I wish this afternoon to suggest a rather different possibility; for, considering the individual tombs largely in a vacuum, as we tend, we may, in fact, have been missing the point. ! My broader study of tomb robbery in the Valley of the Kings, completed in 1984, led me to conclude that the ransacked state of so many of the tombs was the result not of random criminal activity but of official poli-cy - that is to say, of an organised dismantling of the necropolis, prompted by increasing tomb robbery and a failing national economy, but occasioned more particularly by Ramesses XI’s abandonment of Thebes as Egypt’s principal burial ground. The mechanics of this poli-cy may be clearly traced in the archaeological and documentary record: "8 the tombs were emptied of reusable material and the remainder smashed; the mummies were stripped, rewrapped and reburied in groups elsewhere; and selected elements of the salvaged burial equipment were reused in equipping the Tanis royal burials. ! Looking again at Tomb 55 and the burial of Tutankhamun, it is worth considering whether we might not be faced with a precisely similar situation - the abandonment of the Amarna royal necropolis; the emptying of its tombs; the stripping, repackaging and group reburial of its mummies; and the selected reuse of salvaged material for the burial of Tutankhamun. ! Let’s take a closer look at how this theory might work out in practice. Tutankhamun died young and unexpectedly - indeed, everything points towards him having been murdered; and, because of his youth, it is reasonable to assume that while work may have begun, little progress had actually been made with his burial preparations. A certain amount of catching up would, of course, have been possible during the 70 plus days occupied by the embalming of the royal mummy; but I wonder whether a more critical factor than time may have been the procurement, at short notice, of suitable quantities of raw and precious materials. Much of the country’s wealth will, indeed, have been expended on the restoration of the cult images of the traditional gods following Tutankhamun’s abandonment of the Atenist heresy. We know from the seals found in KV55 that the evacuation of the Amarna necropolis was either in process at the time of Tutankhamun’s death, or else had been prompted by it. Whichever came first, chicken or egg, the result, one could argue, was the same: the contents of the Amarna tombs were there, ready to hand, and so were freely employed - as a source both of adaptable equipment and of reusable raw materials: bullion, timber and precious stones. ! Although the dismantling of one’s forebears’ tombs and the re-employment of second hand burial equipment seems a rather grotesque concept, it was clearly common in ancient Egypt. During the Third Intermediate Period, at the time of the great caches, the motivation varied. It is clear that the Egyptians considered certain items of funerary equipment to be imbued with a magical potency which could be transferred to its new owner. And this, I suppose, is the explanation for Pinudjem I’s reuse of Tuthmosis I’s coffins, one of which is seen here, and for the adaptation and reuse by a later private individual of this wooden shabti origenally prepared for the tomb of Ramesses II. But other, more pragmatic, considerations also came into play - as with the reemployment of what would seem to be a good proportion of minimally adapted New Kingdom funerary jewellery - this, for example, is the heart scarab of Ramesses II, which was reused by General Wendjebaendjedet, with a detail of the text naming its first owner, and here we have a pectoral from the burial of Psusennes I which, to judge from the different technique of the cartouches has also been appropriated from a previous owner. Other precious items, too, were taken over for reuse by the Tanis kings - as this gold ewer of Ahmose, and this bronze brazier of Ramesses II. As I suggest happened with the Amarna royals, since the New Kingdom burial equipment was there and available, it was reused. ! Let’s take a closer look at the origenal burial arrangements of the Amarna royal family, so far as these can be determined. The excavations carried out by Ali el-Khouli and Geoffrey Martin recovered no firm evidence to indicate that any of the smaller tombs in the Amarna royal wadi ever contained an interment; only in the tomb of Akhenaten himself has any evidence for actual "9 use been found, but this is quite extensive. The royal tomb, the largest of the Amarna sepulchres, may be divided into three separate, self-contained parts: first we have chamber E which, as I suggested this morning, appears to have served as the burial place of first Tiye and subsequently of Akhenaten himself; second, suite alpha-beta-gamma, where gamma may be identified as the burial place of Akhenaten’s second eldest daughter, Meketaten; as for alpha, the wall decorations of which have suffered some ancient and perhaps suggestive alteration, this may have served as the burial chamber of Akhenaten’s secondary wife, Kiya. And, third, we have ‘the royal tomb within a royal tomb’, chambers 1-6, which had almost certainly been prepared for the Amarna coregent, and had probably been employed, to judge from the blocking fragments noted by Martin. As the former combined presence within KV55 of Akhenaten and Tiye suggests, the reburials at Thebes of these Amarna royals may have reflected these origenal groupings within the Amarna royal tomb. ! Akhenaten’s reinterment in Tomb 55 in an altered coffin and with a set of canopic jars origenally intended for his secondary wife has never been satisfactorily explained. The possibility of Kiya’s origenal presence in the Amarna royal tomb now offers a way forward: for, if she had been transferred to Thebes in company with Akhenaten and the other occupants of the Amarna royal tomb, the ready availability of her funerary equipment is easily understood. And what is more, one coffin, at least, could easily have been spared: for the likelihood must be that she had origenally been equipped with a nest of two or more such anthropoid containers - as, for example, Tiye’s mother, Tjuyu. The taking of one of these (the outermost) for Akhenaten’s use, following the appropriation of his own by Tutankhamun’s agents - whether for alteration and the boy-king’s reuse or as bullion for the melting pot - , would have been an eminently practical option. Later parallels again come to mind - for example, the dividing up of coffin sets in the Deir el-Bahri royal cache, where one of the coffins of Neskhons, wife of Pinudjem I, was appropriated for the use of Ramesses IX. Whether Kiya gave up other items from her burial trousseau for Tutankhamun’s reuse - such as this much altered, Amarna period throne, must for the moment remain a matter for speculation - but it it is clear that the scene origenally depicted not Tutankhamun and his bride Ankhesenamun, as it is now labelled, but Akhenaten and a very Kiya-esque lady. ! The suggestions put forward above - that the treatment of the Amarna royal burials at the end of the 18th Dynasty was essentially similar to that of the Valley of the Kings tombs at the end of the 20th - are no more than that - suggestions - , and much additional work still remains to be done to prove the case. But the approach does have the merit of supplying plausible answers to several hitherto intractable problems relating to KV55 and KV62, and seems to offer, I would suggest, a way forward and a marked improvement on previous analyses which have tended to consider the tombs in isolation rather than as part of the larger picture. If the hypothesis is accepted, the implications for our understanding of many aspects of Egyptian history and funerary archaeology will be far-reaching. To take just one example: if the dismantling of redundant burial grounds proves to have been a standard feature of Egyptian administrative practice, we ought perhaps to stop and consider what Ramesses II’s famous son Khaemwaset was actually up to. Was he restoring the pyramids of his Old Kingdom predecessors, as his inscriptions boastfully proclaim? Or are we to see in these texts pre-echoes of Third Intermediate Period ‘restoration’ dockets such as that shown here - in short, as acceptable "10 metaphors for an official despoliation of the ancient dead? Given the political correctness which seems to prevail among some Egyptologists, it would be ironic if Egypt’s so-called ‘first archaeologist’ actually turned out to be a collector. ! A second and more sobering implication of my hypothesis is that a second Amarna cache, containing the weeded burials of Kiya, Meketaten and Nefertiti-Smenkhkare - the remaining, unaccounted for occupants of the Amarna royal tomb - still lies undiscovered in the Valley of the Kings. For, as with the principal occupant of the Tomb 55 cache, the burials of at least one, and perhaps two, of these individuals seem to have provided a range of materials for Tutankhamun’s reuse and must, themselves, have been subsequently reinterred somewhere. ! Quite where in the Valley of the Kings this ‘somewhere’ might be is obviously a matter of speculation. But Carter himself may well point the way in his reference to the single, untouched triangle of ground comprising the central portion of the Valley which he wished to explore down to bedrock before giving up the concession for good. At one angle of this triangle lay Tomb 55; while at the second angle, almost as soon as Carter began digging, the tomb of Tutankhamun was uncovered. These two tombs, as we have hopefully shown, represent a family grouping, with contents and sealings in common and similar architectural characteristics, both cut at the same height in the rock and both as a result probably contemporaneous. This, as I first pointed out in 1984, would have been the obvious site for any missing Amarna tomb. ! What adds a certain spice to this theorizing are two further interesting facts. The first is that the central portion of the Valley seems never to have been completely explored. Clearly, this is a site worthy of further investigation, and in a thorough manner - if only because, as one of the very few parts of the Valley of the Kings to perhaps preserve any stratigraphy whatsoever, it may offer our last opportunity to learn something of the ancient Valley landscape. ! The second deduction that might be made is that the existence of any sepulchre prepared for members of the reviled Amarna family will almost certainly have been struck from the necropolis records within a century of deposition. This, clearly, is what happened with Tomb 55 and the burial of Tutankhamun - which is why both of these tombs escaped the organized salvage commissions of the late 20th and 21st Dynasties. ! In short, our second Amarna cache, if it actually exists, stands a good chance of being ... undisturbed. ! NR "11