Thursday, March 30, 2017

KV43 – Tomb of Tuthmosis IV .. Part ( 23 )

General view
This tomb was excavated by Mr. Howard Carter and Mr. Theodore Monroe Davis in 1903 . The results of the work are now to be seen in the Cairo Museum ( see No. 3000, U 48, east, there, the front of the king's battle-chariot ) .




Tuthmosis IV reigned from about 1420 to 1412 B.C., his mummy shows him to have been always delicate, and he died before attaining the age of twenty-six .



His tomb had been rifled certainly before 1340 B.C., for in the eighth year of the reign of Haremhab ( 1346-1322 B.C. ) instructions were issued by that Pharaoh to an official named May, Harbour Master in Thebes or Superintendent of Works in Theban Necropolis as follows : " Command of His Majesty, to commission the fan-bearer on the king's right hand, May … to restore the burial of King Menkheperure ( Tuthmosis IV ), in the august house on the west of Thebes " . This order was found written in ink on a wall of a chamber of the tomb .



The king's mummy was subsequently taken to the tomb of Amenhotep II, where it was found with others in 1898 .



The tomb lies not far from the tombs of Hatshepsut ( KV20 ) and MontuHerKhopeschef ( KV19 ) . 



A flight of steps leads into a corridor, from which a second flight leads down to a second corridor . Then follows the well, which has upon its upper walls some paintings representing the Pharaoh before the gods . These are interesting in that they show the first change from the outline method of decoration which we have seen in the tombs of Tuthmosis III ( KV34 ) and Amenhotep II ( KV35 ) to the method of complete painting which we have seen reaching its conclusion in the tomb of Ramses I ( KV16 ) .



Crossing the well we have a flight of steps, a corridor, and another flight of steps ; then comes a chamber which has on its walls paintings of the king before the gods, and the inscription relating to May's restoration, already quoted .




We then enter the four-pillared burial-hall, which contains the fine sarcophagus of the king, which, as will be seen from the illustration, has not developed the guardian goddess symbolism at the four corners which is characteristic of later examples such as the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun or that of Haremhab .



Historical notes
Tuthmosis III's warlike nature, which had been shared by his son and successor, Amenhotep II, seems not to have been inherited by the subsequent kings, Tuthmosis IV ( c. 1401-1391 BC ) and Amenhotep III ( c. 1391-1353 BC ) . These two reigns ushered in an extended period of peace and prosperity on a scale Egypt had never before enjoyed . Diplomacy took over from the sword as the principal instrument of Egyptian foreign policy, and peace was made with the kingdom of Mitanni in northern Syria, Egypt's main rival, which now found itself threatened by the Anatolian Hittites . Pharaoh became fat, self-indulgent and ever more convinced of his power and infallibility . please note that the name of Amenhotep is the same of Amenophis ( in the Greek version or Hellenization ) .



Tuthmosis IV, a son of Amenhotep II's second queen, Tiaa, had come to the throne following the premature death of an elder half-brother . Like his two predecessors, he was buried in the main part of the royal valley, within tomb KV43 . His son and successor, Amenhotep III, was born to the lady Mutemwia and would be married by Year 2 of the reign to Tiye, daughter of the commoners Yuya and Tjuyu, whose burial was discovered by Theodore Davis in tomb KV46 in 1905 .



Amenhotep III's own tomb, founded by his father, was the first to be located in the western Valley of the Kings, better known today as the West Valley .



Discovery the tomb of Tuthmosis IV ( KV43 )
Howard Carter tell us : " … our eyes became more accustomed to the dim light of our candles, and … we realized in the gloom that the upper part of the walls of this well were elaborately sculptured and painted . The scenes represented the Pharaoh … standing before various gods and goddesses of the Netherworld … Here was final proof that I had found the tomb of Tuthmosis IV … " .



The formal opening of KV43 took place on 3 February 1903 . However, Carter had first entered the tomb on 18 January to ensure that he had indeed uncovered more than an unfinished pit . The burial had, of course, been plundered in antiquity – which was to be expected . The work had been thoroughly done : everything of any conceivable value had been carried off, from the smallest scrap of metal to large, re-usable pieces of wood such as doors and lintels . What was left had been smashed and scattered around the tomb .



Architecture and decoration
Clearly a development of KV35 ( Amenhotep II ), KV43 follows the earlier tomb's location preference ( it is the last tomb to be sited under a storm-fed waterfall ), size and complexity, while further increasing its precision of plan . The carefully cut entrance stair and first three corridors push in a straight line to a large well with an offset chamber cut at the base of its far wall . The axis then turns 90 degree into the first pillared hall from which a staircase, sloping corridor and another staircase lead to the anteroom and burial chamber . Different from KV35 is the lowering of the far third of the burial chamber to from the " crypt ", the alignment of the storage rooms and the tomb's more careful cut-thing . Also, two small rectangles – one on a pillar, the other ( in outline ) on the entrance wall – represent the first occurrences of the " magical niches " which are found in all succeeding tombs until the time of Ramses II .



Despite the careful cutting of the tomb, the burial chamber is undecorated and austere . Only section of the well shaft and antechamber were decorated, and the representations were evidently hastily prepared . The two decorated areas were afforded similar treatments : the ceilings of both the well shaft and anteroom are painted with yellow stars on a dark blue ground and kheker-friezes appear at the top of the decorated walls, which are painted a uniform golden yellow .



In the well shaft, six images of the king receive the gift of " life " ( the ankh ) before various deities, and in the antechamber the king is seen again before images of the same deities .



In both locations the representations of the king are virtually identical, and those of the various goddesses are distinguished only by differing patterns in the materials of their dress . The inscriptions are also very similar, and consist only of the names of the deities shown and, alternately, the throne – and birth – names of the king .



Robbers and restorers
Two large and beautifully written hieratic texts on the south wall of the antechamber read as follows :
(1) " Year 8, 3rd month of akhet-season ( also known as " The Season of the Inundation or Flood ", it was the first season in the ancient Egyptian calendar, and the name refers to the annual flooding of the Nile ), day 1, under the majesty of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Djeserkheprure-setepenre, son of Re Horemheb-merenamun . His majesty life! prosperity! health! Commanded that the fan-bearer on the king's right hand, the king's scribe, overseer of the treasury, overseer of works in the Place of Eternity [ i.e. the royal necropolis ] and leader of the festival of Amun in Karnak, Maya, son of the noble Iawy, born of the lady of the house Weret, be charged to renew the burial of King Menkheprure [ Tuthmosis IV ], true of voice, in the noble mansion upon the west of Thebes " .



(2) " His assistant, the steward of the southern city, Djehutymose, whose mother is Iniuhe of the city [ i.e. Thebes ] " .



The text refers to a restoration, by the pharaoh Horemheb ( 1319-1307 BC ), of the burial of Tuthmosis IV within KV43, made necessary by illicit entry, perhaps during the troubled years following the Amarna period . Robbery in the valley was evidently a rare occurrence at this time, and the repairs seem to have been carried out with far more care and attention than during later restorations, Carter noting quite elaborate repairs to the tomb's faience in " blue paste " or " yellow plaster " . A further response to this 18th Dynasty robbery may have been the plastered blocking erected in front of the original wooden door to the burial chamber, further bolstering the protection it offered . Again, we owe the evidence of this to Carter .



" [ Those who carried out the robbery ] must have been bold spirits … : they were evidently in a great hurry, and we have reason to believe that they were caught in the act . If so, we may be sure they died deaths that were lingering and ingenious " .



A second intrusion may be discerned in the breached reblockings to the doorways at D-E and I-J . This took place at an undetermined date, but it may have been at this time that a number of items removed from the tomb were hidden in KV37 . This later phase of theft may also have been the prompt for the official removal of the king's mummy . With the king gone, the dismantling of the burial began in earnest . The thoroughness of the workers is shown by the fact that they were concerned to remove even the small bronze eye-surrounds of the royal and divine statuettes, two of which, after treatment, had been casually thrown into the now-empty royal sarcophagus . The job done, they abandoned the tomb to posterity, taking care to close off ( albeit with a simple dry-stone wall ) the entrance after they had left .



The royal mummy
The mummy of Tuthmosis IV would eventually be cached within a side chamber of the tomb of Amenhotep II ( KV35 ), where it was discovered by Victor Loret in 1898 . The original coffins had gone, and the king now lay in a rough and unadorned replacement of later date . The fact that the mummy of the child propped up against the wall of side room (Jd) had not been removed from KV43 with that of the king may suggest that those responsible for clearing the tomb were being deliberately selective in which bodies they restored and reburied . The fate of the second and third subsidiary burials is uncertain, though for Amenemhet . Now in the Egyptian Museum at Cairo ( CG 61073 ) .



Finds from the Tomb of Tuthmosis IV
Ambrose Lansing said : " Though plunderers had stripped the contents of this tomb of all its valuable gold, they had left much that to us is even more valuable " .



Beside the royal funerary equipment, Carter recovered fragments of three subsidiary burials, presumably offspring of Tuthmosis IV who had predeceased their father : the king's son, Amenemhet ( whose rewrapped and recoffined mummy may be that discovered by the Metropolitan Museum Expedition buried close to the Deir el-Bahari cache a few years later ), the king's daughter, Tentamun, and an individual whose name is not preserved . The corpse discovered by Carter propped up against the wall in side room (Jd) perhaps belongs to one of them .



Functional items from the tomb such as wicks and a weight may be associated with the dismantling of the burial at the end of the New Kingdom .



The burial chamber and the king's sarcophagus
After passing the pillared chamber (F), and through some badly damaged steps from the left corner of the pillared chamber, we reaches the burial chamber (J) . The entrance was still blocked with the stones, plastered and then sealed . There were signs of an earlier wooden door behind this blockade .



The burial chamber is undecorated, and it was constructed in two elevations as in ( KV35 ) and in rectangular shape . A long nave hall with six pillars on the upper level and a central four-steps staircase as a connection between the two levels . In the lower level stood the sarcophagus of the king at the rear end, also, there are four magical brick niches, one on each wall, and the fourth on the back of the last left pillar .



The sarcophagus hall has four undecorated rectangular secondary chambers (Ja/Jb/Jc/Jd) . They were originally closed with wooden doors and were contained the finds objects .



Even today, the monumental yellow crystalline sandstone ( quartzite ) sarcophagus of the king is still in his place at the middle of the lower level of the burial chamber, with surfaces painted red and figures and texts painted yellow with details in black . The sarcophagus is richly decorated with inscriptions and reliefs . On the head and the foot of it, there are a decoration contains a representations of the goddesses Nephthys and Isis who raised their arms protectively . On the two sides are Anubis and the four sons of Horus . Anubis, Imsety and Qebehsenuef are in the side, and the other side are Anubis, Duamutef and Hapi . It much like the sarcophagus of the king Tuthmosis III .





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