Historical notes about discovery some tombs at The Valley of the Kings .. Part ( 3 )

A few years later ( 1898 ) Victor Loret, acting on information secretly supplied from native sources, discovered the tomb of Amenhotep II, which is now No. 35 in the valley . It had been plundered ;
but to make up for the loss of much of its funerary furniture, it had another treasure of royal mummies . Amenhotep II was found resting in his sarcophagus, the solitary Pharaoh who had been so found up to the time of this discovery ; and with him lay the famous bow, of which he boasted that no one else of his army or of the foreign princes could draw it . Keeping him company were Tuthmosis IV, and his son, the magnificent Amenhotep III, two great Pharaohs coupled with such nonentities as Ramses IV, V, and VI ; while the missing Meneptah also put in an appearance, though he had in the interval lost much of the interest which he would have excited in 1881, owing to the fact that Petrie had discovered in 1896 the Triumph Stele which went far to depose him from the " bad eminence " of being the Pharaoh of the Exodus .

The experiment was tried of leaving Amenhotep II to rest in his sarcophagus as he was found, under the blue gold-starred roof of his tomb ( now, is in the Egyptian Museum at Cairo, Royal Mummies Hall ) ; but the result was not encouraging . In 1901 the tomb was attacked by armed robbers, the guards driven off, after putting up, according to their own testimony, a stout resistance, and the great king was ruthlessly tumbled out of his sarcophagus on to the floor, while most of what was left of his funerary equipment was stolen . It was fairly well known where the guilt of this sacrilege lay ; but it was not found possible to secure a conviction from the native court, which possibly regarded the attempt to secure such a thing as an indefensible infringement upon the ancient right of tomb-robbery . The commission of Ramses IX, three thousand years before, had held much the same opinion, judging from the fishy character of its proceedings .

In 1902, a wealthy American, Mr. T. M. Davis, united forces with the Egyptian Department of Antiquities in a series of excavations which proved highly successful . Mr. Davis provided the necessary funds for the work, which was conducted by skilled servants of the Department, such as Mr. Quibell, Mr. Howard Carter, Mr. Weigall, and the late Mr. Edward Ayrton ; while Mr. Davis found his reward in becoming the instrument without which this valuable work might not have been done at the time .

Under this convenient arrangement Mr. Howard Carter in 1903 discovered the tomb of Tuthmosis IV, which, though long since rifled, still contained some valuable work, including the front of the royal war-chariot .

In 1905 Mr. Weigall discovered for Mr. Davis the tomb of Prince Yuya and his wife Thuya, the father and mother of Amenhotep III's favourite wife, Queen Tiy . Though strictly speaking, not a royal tomb, this unpretentious sepulcher contained the finest equipment of funerary furniture which had ever been discovered up to this date .

In 1906 the tomb of Siptah, one of the less-known Pharaohs of the end of the 19^th Dynasty, was discovered by Mr. Ayrton and Mr. Davis ; and in 1908, the tomb of Queen Tausret, Siptah's wife-queen also in her own right-was discovered, with some valuable jewellery, by the same workers .

In 1907, Mr. Ayrton and Mr. Davis came upon an undecorated tomb of little apparent importance, which proved to have been used as the tomb of Queen Tiy, and to have been subsequently employed for the interment of a royal mummy which was to all appearances that of Akhenaten, the queen's unfortunate son . The identification of the mummy with Akhenaten has been questioned ; but the balance of evidence seems to be in its favour .

Finally in 1908 Mr. Ayrton and Mr. Davis lighted upon the rifled, but finely-painted tomb of Haremhab, the usurping Pharaoh who restored order to Egypt after the dislocation wrought by the religious revolution under Akhenaten . They also discovered a burial-pit which they took to be the tomb of Tutankhamun ; but in this belief they were fortunately mistaken, the pit having been used simply as a hiding-place for some of the loot taken from the real tomb of Tutankhamun when it was rifled soon after the young Pharaoh's interment .

Writing in 1912 the preface to his account of the finding of the tomb of Haremhab, Mr. Davis remarked : " I fear that the Valley of the Tombs is now exhausted " . Belzoni, nearly a hundred years before, had been of the same opinion : " It is my firm opinion that in the Valley of Biban el-Meluke there are no more tombs than are now known in consequence of my late discoveries " . Fortunately, just as Mr. Davis had himself disproved Belzoni's verdict, so in turn his own opinion was to be overthrown by one of his own collaborators .

In 1916 Mr. Howard Carter rescued from the hands of tomb-robbers the earlier tomb which Queen Hatshepsut had constructed for herself, before she made the large tomb in the valley which has long been known, and which was cleared by Davis and Carter in 1903 . This early tomb lay high up in the face of a cliff on the western side of the mountain overlooking the Valley of the Kings . It contained nothing but a fine unfinished sarcophagus of crystalline sandstone, which was removed with considerable difficulty from its lofty perch to the Cairo Museum ( No. 6024, G. 33, west ) .

In June 1914 the concession to Lord Carnarvon and Mr. Howard Carter to dig in the valley was signed by Sir Gaston Maspero, who frankly remarked that he did not believe that the area would reward further investigation . It was not till 1917 that work actually began, and for five years it yielded comparatively poor results . Indeed the winter of 1922-3 was to be the final season of the two excavators in the valley . It had only begun when ( November 4, 1922 ) the first indications were reached of a discovery which was to surpass, in the quantity and variety of its artistic results, anything that had previously been attained in the valley, and to become a world's wonder even for a long period .

Part ( 4 ) .. Coming SoOoOon .....

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