KV42 – Tomb of Hatshepsut-Meryet-Ra .. Part ( 22 )

This tomb was certainly made for a royalty, but it is unfinished and uninscribed . It consists of a rough flight of steps, a sloping passage, a small chamber, and the oval burial-hall, with two pillars .

The shape of the burial-hall is the usual one for an early 18^th Dynasty tomb ( see KV34 and KV38 ) . It contained a sarcophagus of crystalline sandstone, similar to that of Tuthmosis III, but unpolished and uninscribed .

It has been suggested that this is the tomb of Tuthmosis II ; the Egyptian Government Survey, however, assigns it to Hatshepsut-Meryet-Ra, who was daughter of Queen Hatshepsut, wife of Tuthmosis III, and mother of Amenhotep II, and who had therefore an indefeasible claim to a tomb in the Valley of the Kings . The tomb contained a later intrusive burial of a noble named Sennufer .

A tomb for Tuthmosis III's Queen

KV42, situated in the valley leading up to the tomb of Tuthmosis III, was first entered by Howard Carter on 9 December 1900, having probably been discovered by Victor Loret during excavations in the vicinity some 18 months previously . As Carter later wrote : " On entering, I at once saw that the tomb had already been plundered in early times … for the funereal furniture, vases and Canopic jars, were mashed and lying about on the ground of the passage and chambers, evidently just as the former robbers had thrown them … " .

Architecture and decoration

KV42 is royal in appearance, being larger than any private tomb of definite 18^th Dynasty date and having the cartouche-shaped burial chamber found most famously in the tomb of Tuthmosis III ( KV34 ) . Although lacking well ( a good indication that the tomb had not been prepared as the primary place of burial of a king ) or pillars in the first hall, and with fewer subsidiary rooms leading from the burial chamber than are found in KV34, the design seems to postdate KV34 in all other features, most notably the added corridor between the first hall and the burial chamber .

The burial chamber had been plastered and partially decorated with a kheker ornament frieze and yellow-starred blue ceiling, the work had never been finished, and no inscriptions were in evidence .

A tomb for Queen Hatshepsut-Meryet-Ra

At the far end of the burial chamber, Carter encountered a rectangular stone sarcophagus, unfinished and seemingly unused . Yet other fragments of funerary equipment showed that the tomb had at one stage contained one or more burials of non-royal status, with the names of the mayor of Thebes, Sennufer, his wife the royal wet-nurse Senetnay, and the " King's adornment " Baketre occurring on the limestone canopic jars and dummy vessels, and an offering table . Carter also noted the remains of wooden " sledges and coffins ", uninscribed items including " some twenty or thirty, whole and broken, rough earthen jars " in the small side chamber of the burial hall, and " some gold leaf and an exquisite gold inlaid rosette ", found in the entrance corridor .

Carter believed in 1900 that KV42 was the burial of Sennufer and his immediate family . But we know that Sennufer at least had a tomb elsewhere at Thebes ( TT96 ) where he was probably buried . Furthermore, Catharine Roehrig has made the plausible suggestion that the burials of Senetnay and Baketre, rather than being original to KV42, may have been simply cached there following their transfer from original tombs nearby – perhaps KV62 and KV37 – at the end of the New Kingdom .

If the employment of KV42 is thus somewhat uncertain, the intended occupant of the tomb was convincingly established in January 1921 when Carter uncovered the foundation deposits placed at the entrance : these carried the name of the great royal wife Hatshepsut-Meryet-Ra, wife of Tuthmosis III and mother of Amenhotep II, for whom the husband had evidently excavated the tomb . Whatever Tuthmosis III's intention, however, the lady seems never to have been interred in KV42 : to judge from traces in the tomb of the son, it seems that Amenhotep II decided that she should rest instead in KV35 .

Emptying the burial

A graffito at the entrance to KV42 reads as follows : " 3^rd month of summer, day 23 : work was begun on this tomb by the necropolis team, when the scribe Butehamun went to the town to see the general's arrival in the north " .

The reference is clearly to official activity of some sort . Indeed, as Karl Jansen-Winkeln tentatively suggests, KV42 may be the " tomb of the ancestors " that the High Priest of Amun, Piankh, ordered the necropolis scribe Butehamun to uncover for him with a view to emptying it .

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