The Valley of The Queens .. Historical notes .. Part ( 1 )

The Valley of the Tombs of the Queens is locally known as Biban el Harim, as that of the Tombs of the Kings is called Biban el Muluk . It is situated at the south end of the Theban Necropolis,

and may be reached easily from Medinet Habu, from which it is distant about 1¼ miles, or from Deir el-Medina, 1 mile .

We have already notice, in dealing with Deir el-Medina, that on the road to the Tombs of the Queens we pass several steles of Goddess Meretseger ( meaning " She Who Loves Silence ", Goddess of the pyramidal peak, she was the patron deity of the workmen at Deir el-Medina ) from the Ramesside date .

The paths from the two temples unite at a point below a spur of the western hills, and proceed into a fine valley, which contains a number of royal tombs of the 19^th and 20^th Dynasties, the 18^th Dynasty not being represented .

Altogether about seventy tombs are known here ; but very few of them are of any importance, and most of them are entirely uninscribed and undecorated .

We have seen that some of the queens of the Pharaohs of the 18^th Dynasty were buried in the Valley of the Kings . Hatshepsut and Tausret, both of them queens in their own right, had tombs of considerable size and importance there ; while Tiy, the queen of Amenhotep III, also had a tomb, though an undistinguished one, in the valley, and was apparently buried there, though her body was removed when her son Akhenaten was brought from El-Amarna and buried in his mother's tomb .

In several of the other royal tombs of the 18^th Dynasty, e.g., Amenhotep II and Haremhab, the presence of unidentified female mummies suggests that the Pharaoh's queen may have been buried beside her husband ; but the confusion introduced by the tomb-robberies and the consequent shifting of the royal mummies prevent us from having any certainty as to what the custom may have been . Certainly there was no sign of the presence of Queen Ankhsenamûn in the almost undisturbed tomb of Tutankhamûn . For her absence there may have been other reasons, especially if she is to be identified with the queen Dakhamûn, who wrote to the Hittite King Shibbiluliuma suggesting a marriage between herself and a Hittite prince after the death of her husband without issue .

The custom of burial in the Valley of the Queens begins, so far as is known, with Ramses I of the 19^th Dynasty, who buried his queen Sitrê in the tomb now numbered 38 . We do not know if Seti I followed his father's example ; but Seti's son, Ramses II, evidently had a fancy for the valley, as he buried there his favourite queen Nefertari, and three of his daughters, who were also his wives, Bant-Anat ( or Bintanath ), Meritamûn, Nebttaui ( or Nebettawy ) .

Then comes a gap in the valley, or rather in our knowledge of it, and we next come into contact with it in the reign of Ramses III ( 20^th Dynasty ), who buries in it his queen, Isis, and four sons .

The remaining tombs probably belong mainly to the subsequent reigns of the 20^th Dynasty, after which the Valley of the Queens, like its more famous companion to the north, the Valley of the Kings, seems to have been abandoned as a royal burial-place .

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