It will be noticed that the general rule is that the
earlier tombs in the valley, in accordance with what was the essence of the
plan, are on the whole inconspicuous, as regards their outward aspect and
entrance, compared with the later ones .
It was only in the 20th
Dynasty, when sad experience had taught the Pharaohs that concealment of their
tombs did not give the security they had hoped for, that the kings of the
Ramesside time abandoned the idea of concealment and made the entrances to
their tombs conspicuous, preferring to trust the security of their mummies to
enormous blocks of hollowed stone .
In general the principle is : early tombs,
inconspicuous entrances, decoration confined to the inner chambers, the
sarcophagus considerably less in size than the later specimens ; later tombs,
more imposing entrances, decoration from the very entrance, the sarcophagus a
huge mass of granite weighing several tons . Thus the breakdown of the system
of concealment may be traced .
The royal tombs in the valley are those of the 18th,
19th, and 20th Dynasties . With the Ramesside Pharaohs of
the 20th Dynasty, the record, so far, stops . It is note-worthy,
however, that the mummies of some of the priest-kings of the 21st
Dynasty were found in the great cache at El-Deir el-Bahari in 1881, so that it
seems likely that they were originally buried at no great distance from Thebes
. There still remains, therefore, the possibility that the burial-place of this
line of Pharaohs may be discovered, and that another find on the scale of that
of the tomb of Tutankhamun may reward some fortunate excavator ; though it
should be remembered that by the time of the 21st Dynasty Egypt was
far on the way downhill, so that it is improbable that anything like so much
treasure was buried with each Pharaoh as had been the case in the more
prosperous days of the 18th Dynasty .
There must have been a time when more wealth, both in
sheer bullion and in artistic craftsmanship, was stored away in this desolate
valley than in any other spot in the world ; but it is highly improbable that
it lasted for very long, or, indeed, that even all the treasures of a single
dynasty remained intact at its close, or for more than a few years after . We
have seen how scheme after scheme failed in its turn ; the gigantic pyramids of
the Old Kingdom, the elaborate puzzle-passages of the modest pyramids of the
Middle Kingdom, alike proved powerless against the hereditary skill of the
native Egyptian tomb-robber . It was not long before the new scheme of the
concealed tomb in the Valley of the Kings and the mortuary temple on the
western plain proved as futile as its predecessors .
How rotten the whole system of concealment had become
was fully proved in the later days of the 20th Dynasty . It must be
remembered that by this time, and indeed for long before, the Thebes of the
western bank had become a great city, not only peopled by the dead, but by a
large and peculiarly turbulent population of labourrers and craftsmen, whose
whole occupation was confined within the walls of the necropolis, and by a
considerable number of priests whose work was to carry on the funerary rites of
the various tombs of the nobles and such commoners as could afford the endowment
of their tombs .
It is possible that during the period of the early 18th
Dynasty the strong rule of the hard-hitting Pharaohs of the time kept the
valley and its treasures fairly safe, though the fact that Queen Hatshepsut had
shifted the sarcophagus of her father, Tuthmosis I, to her own tomb does not
encourage such a belief . But once the bonds of society had been loosed by the
crisis of Akhenaten's time, tomb-robbing once more became a laudable and
lucrative occupation in Thebes .
Tutankhamun's tomb was entered, though apparently only
with haste and with little result, within ten or fifteen years of his death ; a
few years later, in the eighth year of Haremhab, that Pharaoh had to issue
instructions to an official " to renew the burial of King Tuthmosis IV,
justified, in the Precious Habitation in Western Thebes ", which shows
that the robbers had been meddling even with the Pharaohs of the great time of
the Empire . It is possible that the stronger rule of Seti I and Ramses II may
have brought greater security to the valley for a while ; but when Ramses III
had passed away, and the Ramesside line was dribbling to its inglorious close, conditions
became rapidly worse . It is evident that by this time even the tombs of the
greatest of the Pharaohs, such as Amenhotep III, Seti I, and Ramses II, were
being broken into .
By the next dynasty, the helpless priests had given up
the attempt to safeguard the bodies of the kings, and in frantic terror were
hustling the mummies of the greatest Pharaohs of Egypt from one hiding-place to
another in a vain attempt to save them from the plunderer and the torch with
which he often completed his gruesome work . Most of the mummies which were
found at El-Deir el-Bahari and in the tomb of Amenhotep II bear upon their wrappings
a docket stating that they had been reburied in this way .
Ramses III, we know, was thus reburied three times .
Finally thirteen royalties were packed together into the tomb of Amenhotep II,
and something like forty more were huddled into the great cache in an
unfinished tomb at El-Deir el-Bahari . There for nearly thirty centuries they
found the security and peace which had been denied them in their own tombs,
until in the early seventies of the last century it became evident that some of
the indefatigable tomb-robbers of Thebes had discovered their resting-place .
The proceedings taken by the authorities against the
" Abd el-Rasul " family, which was suspected of guilty knowledge, may
not have been in accordance with Western ideas of justice, being, indeed,
strikingly similar to the primitive modes of punishment with which the Egyptian
reliefs have made us familiar ; but they were effectual, and the result was the
greatest discovery of royal mummies which has ever rewarded any archaeologist (
July, 1881 ) Emil Brugsch did not, indeed, find anything like the quantity of
funerary furniture along with his forty royalties as did Howard Carter in the
tomb of Tutankhamun, for the El-Deir el-Bahari cache had been created for the
single purpose of preserving royal immortality by preserving the mummy ; but
his find contained the very cream of the Egyptian kingship Tuthmosis III, Seti
I, Ramses II, and many others only less distinguished than these .
Hatshepsut was missing, nor has the whereabouts of the
great queen's body ever been disclosed, though it is not unlikely that she is
one of the royal ladies who have not been identified owing to the muddling up
of the mummies in the panic of the priests . Nor was Meneptah present ; a fact
which careless readers of the Bible, who believed, as everybody did at that
date, that he was the Pharaoh of the Exodus, attributed to the fact that he was
drowned in the Red Sea .
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