Read Tutankhamen for Free Online Page B

or galleries under the mountains…The galleries are mostly about ten feet wide and high; four or five of these galleries, one within another, from thirty to fifty feet long, and from ten to fifteen feet high, generally lead to a spacious room, in which is seen the tomb of the King, with his figure cut in relief on
the lid, as I saw it on one. In the furthermost room of another, the picture of the King is painted on the stone at full length; both the sides and ceilings of the rooms are cut with hieroglyphics of birds and beasts, and some of them painted, being as fresh as if they were but just finished, though they must be above two thousand years old… 3
    In 1798 Napoleon’s Commission – a band of scientists, historians and artists charged with recording Egypt ancient and modern – arrived to count a mere eleven tombs in the main Valley plus one in the Western Valley. Publication of their survey, as part of the Description de l’Égypte (1809 – 29), coincided with the culmination of Jean-François Champollion’s work on the decoding of the hieroglyphic script. Suddenly, it was possible for scholars to read the texts that decorated the tomb and temple walls while the texts themselves were, for the first time, available to stay-at-home scholars via the plates of the Description . As her king-lists were deciphered, Egypt’s lost history was restored and Egyptology became a proper, respectable subject for academic study. Museums that had once regarded Egyptian artefacts as beautiful but meaningless ‘dead ends’ – unlike Greek and Roman artefacts, which had always been recognised as both beautiful and relevant to the development of Western civilisation – were now increasingly interested in acquiring them.
    Explorers and treasure-hunters were drawn to the Valley. These first Egyptologists had no idea that the royal mummies had already been removed from their tombs, and their hope was always that an intact royal burial would be found. Theirs was not a pure, academic curiosity: enough non-royal burials had been recovered to suggest that a royal tomb would be packed with grave-goods which could be sold at great profit to the growing number of private and institutional collectors in the west. Finding the royal tombs was not, in fact, too difficult: from 1816 – 17 the ex-circus strongman Giovanni Battista Belzoni used his practical engineering skills to locate eight, including the
tomb of Ay. But, although they yielded occasional random artefacts, none of the tombs was intact.
    The missing kings would not be discovered until the 1870s, when Ahmed el-Rassul, a member of a notorious family of tomb robbers, discovered the hidden entrance to the tomb of the High Priest Pinodjem II. As we have already seen, this tomb housed not only the Third Intermediate Period Pinodjem family burials, but an entirely separate cache of New Kingdom royal mummies. Because the royal mummies had already been stripped of all valuables, the el-Rassul brothers concentrated on the Pinodjem family grave goods. They were able to sell a series of illustrated papyri, bronze vessels, figurines and at least one mummy before their dealings attracted the attention of the Antiquities Service. On 6 July 1881 the el-Rassuls revealed the whereabouts of the tomb and Émile Brugsch, the representative of the Cairo Museum, was lowered down the shaft. To his amazement, he discovered a chamber packed with coffined and labelled mummies including the 18th Dynasty kings Ahmose, Amenhotep I, Tuthmosis I (a disputed mummy), Tuthmosis II and Tuthmosis III. A second chamber held the recently desecrated burials of the Pinodjem family.
    Meanwhile, French Egyptologist Victor Loret had started to explore the Valley of the Kings. He was to discover sixteen tombs, but his most important discovery, in 1898, was the tomb of Amenhotep II (KV 35). Lying in the tomb passageway he found an anonymous male mummy stuck to a model boat.