KV55 – Tomb of Queen Tiye (?) or King Akhenaten (?) .. Part ( 26 )

General view

This tomb, unsculptured and uninscribed, has great historical interest . It was discovered in 1907 by Mr. Edward Russell Ayrton and Mr. Theodore Monroe Davis, and lies between the tomb of Ramses VI ( KV9 ) and that of Ramses IX ( KV6 ), quite close, in fact, to the tomb of Tutankhamun .

It appears to have been begun for Queen Tiye, and it seems probable that she may have been actually buried there temporarily, as part of her funerary equipment, and especially the remains of the funeral canopy, of wood covered with gold foil, was found in the tomb ; but the actual burial discovered there was that of a young Pharaoh of Egypt, who seems from the inscriptions on his coffin to have been Akhenaten or Smenkhkare who participate Akhenaten in his reign .

Discovery and clearance

Theodore Davis's excavator, Edward Russell Ayrton, had been digging in the central portion of the main valley, when, on 3 January 1907, a few meters to the west of the tomb of Ramses IX ( KV6 ), he uncovered " a recess in the rock " containing a cache of pottery jars perhaps containing embalming refuse associated with the Ramesside tomb . Three days later the entrance to a tomb was uncovered . The tomb was KV55, today better known in the literature as " Tomb 55 ", about which more has been written than almost any other burial in the Valley of the Kings .

The remains of an original cemented door-blocking were encountered, stamped with the " jackal-and-nine-captives " seal, which had been partially dismantled in ancient times . Subsequently, the entrance had been blocked off with a loosely built wall of limestone resting upon the rubble fill of the stairway beyond . This secondary blocking had itself been breached in antiquity, giving access to a sloping corridor partially filled with limestone chippings which flowed out into the tomb's single chamber .

On top of the corridor fill lay a single door leaf and a large panel from what proved to be a large gilded wooden shrine prepared by Akhenaten for the el-Amarna burial of his mother, Tiye . Further dismantled portions of this shrine were encountered as the excavators gingerly slid their way down the corridor into the burial chamber . The figure and cartouches of the heretic Akhenaten had everywhere been erased from this shrine in ancient times .

" … bits of gold leaf seemed to be flying through the air in every direction . We felt we must be breathing it in . Tyndale whispered to me that he had just sneezed and found seven and six in his handkerchief ! " . By : Charles Trick Currelly .

On the southern side of the chamber lay a decayed wooden coffin adorned with crook and flail and carrying an uninscribed bronze uraeus ; the cartouches had everywhere been cut out, and the gold face mask brutally torn away below the eyes .

Within, slightly displaced, lay a mummy " crowned " by a gold vulture pectoral and with one arm crossed over the breast .

A large niche ( the barely begun entrance to a side room ) in the south wall contained four calcite canopic jars with portrait-head stoppers, and scattered to the four cardinal points among the debris were four mud " magical bricks " and a range of other broken funerary items .

A recent sifting of the tomb by Lyla Pinch Brock has turned up further interesting objects . These include a possible fragment of the original hard plaster door sealing, with the remains of a practically illegible impression, blue painted pottery fragments, and a hieratic docket and mud seal mentioning " an estate in Sinai and another estate belonging to Sitamun, a daughter of Amenhotep III " . Most interesting of all is a limestone chip with what may be part of a working plan of the tomb, found by Earl Ertman in the back of the " canopic niche " .

Whose body ?

" Are you sure that the bones you sent me are those which were found in the tomb ? Instead of the bones of an old woman, you have sent me those of a young man . Surely there is some mistake " . This is a letter to Arthur Weigall sent by Grafton Elliot Smith .

Theodore Davis was thrilled at the possibility of having discovered the burial of Queen Tiya, and he at first accepted that the coffined body and calcite canopic jars found in Tomb 55 were hers . Although he was soon forced to change his opinion since the body was evidently male, the find was published in 1910 as The Tomb of Queen Tiyi .

Almost a century later, no consensus has yet been reached on the nature of the discovery or the identity of the mummy . What is clear is that the finds fall into two main groups : the first comprising the shrine and a number of minor items of funerary furniture, which may be associated with the burial of Queen Tiye ; the second comprising the coffined mummy, canopic jars and magic bricks .

The presence of Tiye's dismantled shrine seems to indicate her original presence in the tomb, though her mummy and most of her funerary equipment were absent, having perhaps been removed when KV55 was stumbled upon by workmen quarrying the overlying tomb of Ramses IX ( KV6 ) . The shrine itself had been abandoned when the workers realized that it could not be extracted without fully clearing the corridor fill . The mummy of Tiye was identified a few years ago, on the basis of the Tiye hair sample found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, with the " Elder lady " from the Amenhotep II cache ( KV35 ) in 1898 – but the equation has not been universally accepted .

As for the tomb 55 coffin and canopic jars, these had been prepared originally for a secondary wife of Akhenaten named Kiya, who appears to have fallen from grace sometime after Year 11 of the king's reign . Kiya seems never to have employed the items, and, adapted for their new, kingly owner, they were subsequently employed for the burial found in KV55 . Unfortunately, the names of this last owner had been excised from the coffin ( the jars had never been reinscribed ), presumably at the time the burial of Tiye was removed from the tomb . 

The inscriptions on the magic bricks suggest that the coffin, jars and body ought to be those of Akhenaten himself . Both he and Tiye had originally been buried in the same chamber of the royal tomb at Amarna and , to judge from the seal impressions sifted by Ayrton from the KV55 floor debris, both had been transferred to Thebes ( on separate occasions? ) by Tutankhamun following the abandonment of the new capital at Akhetaten ( Amarna ) . Indeed, close physical similarities have been observed between the decayed KV55 body and the mummy of Akhenaten's putative son, Tutankhamun, while both corpses shared the same blood group ( A2MN ) .

" The body was lying in a coffin inscribed with Akhnaton's name ; it was bound around with ribbons inscribed with his name ; it had the physical characteristics of the portraits of Akhnaton ; it had the idiosyncrasies of a religious reformer such as he was ; it was that of a man of Akhnaton's age as deduced from the monuments ; it lay in the tomb of Akhnaton's mother ; those who erased the names must have thought it to be Akhnaton's body, unless one supposes an utter chaos of cross-purposes in their actions ; and finally, there is nobody else who, with any degree of probability, it could be " . By : Arthur Weigall .

Weigall's argument is compelling, despite the latest low estimates put forward for the corpse's age at death, ranging between 20 and 25/26, which seem to conflict with the archaeological analysis . The accuracy of these estimates has yet to be proven . Until it is, Akhenaten, on balance, is who our mummy must be .

Architecture

The entrance stair is cut well into the overhanging rock and thus is comparable in design to those of royal tombs in the valley ; yet the overall size and form of the tomb are clearly closer to those of a private burial . The single sloping passage and burial chamber resemble the core elements of Tutankhamun's tomb, itself of private origin, although the dimensions of these elements in KV55 are somewhat larger and more impressive and may indicate by their scale an uncompleted royal sepulchre . The fragment of a tomb plan found in KV55 in 1993, on a limestone flake, may show the intended widening of the main entrance, as might masons' marks outside the entrance to the tomb . The small canopic niche in the tomb chamber seems to be the initial opening for an intended side room . And red masons' marks may also indicate where another room was planned in roughly the same position as the annexe in Tutankhamun's tomb .

Unusually, the chamber walls of KV55 were plastered ( but left undecorated ), possibly indicating the intention to utilize a private tomb for a royal burial as evidently occurred in the tomb of Tutankhamun .

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