THE VALLEY OF THE TOMBS
It was about the year 1500 B.C. that the desolate and impressive ravine
which is now known as the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings was chosen
by King Thothmes I as the site for his tomb. His immediate predecessor
Amenhotep I had observed the practice, which had prevailed since the
temple was first invented, of building the tomb in association with
it. For the temple was a development of the rooms provided at the tomb
for the relations of the deceased to make offerings of food and drink
to the dead for the essentially practical purpose of maintaining his
existence. In these rooms also certain ceremonies were performed from
time to time with the object of animating the dead man (or his portrait
statue) so that he could enjoy the food and commune with his relations.
But such functions were also part of the process of conveying “life” to
him and so ensuring the maintenance of his existence.
[Illustration: FIG. 10.—The end of the desolate Valley of the Tombs of
the Kings at Thebes, the most impressive site in the whole of Egypt.]
In course of time as these ceremonies for conveying sustenance and
life to a dead king assumed a wider significance the chamber of
offering developed into a temple and a subtle change occurred in the
meaning attached to the ritual. For instead of being regarded merely
as a physical device for conveying food and the essence of life the
ceremonies came to be regarded more and more as acts of worship of the
dead king. When this happened the close nexus between the temple and
the tomb was no longer so essential as it was in earlier times when the
ceremonial in the former was intended to vitalize the corpse of the
king (or his substitute the portrait statue). But it was not until the
closing years of the sixteenth century B.C. (Thothmes I is believed
to have died in 1501 B.C.) that the king began to prepare a tomb for
himself miles away from his temple. This geographical separation of the
temple from the tomb had a far-reaching influence upon the functions
of the former, and prepared the way for the modern conception of a
house of worship, even though in Europe the ancient conception of the
close association of a church and a churchyard (as a burying place) was
retained. The practice inaugurated by Thothmes I of preparing royal
tombs in the famous Theban Valley lasted from about 1500 B.C. until the
end of the twentieth dynasty, about 1090 B.C.
[Illustration: FIG. 11.—An ancient Egyptian drawing (_circa_ 1400 B.C.)
illustrating the arrangement of the tomb and temple about a millennium
earlier. The temple where the relations of the deceased made offerings
or animating ceremonies before the statue (or the mummy itself) was
then an essential part of the tomb, where the actual body of the
deceased was laid to rest.]
Amenhotep III, who was buried in 1375 B.C., broke away from the
observances of his four predecessors who were buried in the Eastern
Valley and made his tomb in the Western Valley; and his famous son and
successor, Amenhotep IV, the heretic king Akhenaton, made the more
daring innovation of preparing a tomb at his new capital, the City of
the Horizon of Aton, on the site of the modern Tell el Amarna. It was
a rock-cut tomb in the mountains about seven miles to the east of his
new capital—which Akhenaton built midway (p. 22) between Thebes and
Memphis, the ancient capitals of Upper and Lower Egypt respectively.
There he seems to have been buried in the red granite sarcophagus that
is now broken into fragments; but his son-in-law Tutankhamen, when
he reverted to the orthodox religion of Thebes, thought it proper to
remove the mummy of his father-in-law from the City of the Horizon to
the Theban necropolis and made for it the resting place in the Valley
of the Tombs, which was discovered in 1907 by Mr Arthur Weigall,
who as Inspector of Antiquities for Upper Egypt was supervising the
excavations endowed by the late Mr Theodore M. Davis.
The fate of the mummy of Akhenaton’s successor Smenkhara is unknown:
but Tutankhamen came after him, and Mr Howard Carter’s discovery has
shown that he displayed his return to strict orthodoxy by making his
tomb in the Eastern Valley among the worshippers of Amen. For some
reason which has not been fully elucidated, his successor Ay made
his tomb in the Western Valley and so was laid to rest alongside
Amenhotep III, whose Minister he seems to have been during his life.
He is supposed by some historians to have been the father or the
foster-father of Nefertiti, the wife of Akhenaton.
[Illustration: Map of Thebes.]
Until the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in the Eastern Valley last
November it was believed (by Sir Gaston Maspero and others) that it
would be found in the Western Valley. Until then Ay’s was the earliest
royal tomb, after that of Amenhotep III, to be discovered, and as they
were in the Western Valley, it seemed probable that Ay’s predecessor
Tutankhamen had also been buried there. But when making the secondary
tomb for Akhenaton in the Eastern Valley he seems to have made his own
tomb there also, and so resumed the old practice, which was observed by
all his successors for two and a half centuries with the exception only
of his successor Ay.
This wonderfully impressive gorge (Fig. 10, p. 66) is known to the
modern Egyptians as the _Bab_ (or _Biban_) _el Moluk_, the Gate (or
Gates) of the Kings. It was known to travellers ever since it was made
into the royal necropolis, and Greeks and Romans marvelled at the
wonderful tunnel-like tombs there, as generations of tourists have done
ever since. Strabo mentions his having seen forty of these tombs, but
it is not clear from his account whether he did not include those of
the Western Valley and perhaps the Tombs of the Queens and others.
Modern research was inaugurated by the traveller Belzoni who opened the
tomb of Seti I in 1819 and described the pictures on its walls (Fig.
20 is copied from his notebook) before they were damaged or destroyed.
He brought to London the magnificent “alabaster” sarcophagus of this
pharaoh, which is now in Sir John Soane’s museum in Lincoln’s Inn
Fields.
The year 1881 will always be memorable for the earliest discovery
of Royal mummies. Five years later, when the wrappings were removed
from such pharaohs as Seti I and Rameses II, modern men had the novel
experience of gazing upon the actual faces of these famous rulers of
the remotely distant past, whose exploits had resounded through the
civilized world for thirty centuries and more. On several occasions in
former years the discovery of Royal mummies had been reported; but in
every case further investigation failed to justify such claims, for
they proved to be merely intrusive burials of unknown people belonging
to times much later than the rifled tombs in which they were found.
Examples of such mistakes in identification are the eighteenth dynasty
mummy, now in the Cairo Museum, which was found in a pyramid at
Sakkara, and at one time was supposed to be the son of King Pepi, of
the sixth dynasty; and the skeleton (not a mummy) in the British Museum
from the pyramid of Mykerinus, which has repeatedly been referred to as
the bones, or even as the mummy, of that pharaoh.
The discoveries made in the famous cache at Deir el Bahari in 1881, and
in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings during the decade 1898-1908,
revealed the only actual mummies of members of the royal family so far
recovered, although the skeletons of much earlier members of the ruling
house were found by M. de Morgan in the pyramids of Dashur nearly
thirty years ago.
Long before the recovery of the actual bodies of these famous rulers
the statues and bas-reliefs of some of them had familiarized us with
their appearance; and inscriptions on their monuments and the ancient
writings of the Egyptians and their neighbours had made us acquainted
with certain of their exploits. The plundered tombs of some of the
great kings of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties have been
known and visited by tourists from the times of the Greek domination
of Egypt, and contemporary documents refer to others. Moreover, twenty
years before the mummies themselves were revealed, the dealers in
antiquities began to offer for sale a series of papyri (most of which
came to this country) giving accounts of the desecration of the royal
Theban tombs.
[Illustration: FIG. 12.—An old photograph of the great cliffs behind
Deir el Bahari, showing this temple as it was in 1881 before it was
excavated. The royal mummies were hidden in a cleft in these cliffs.]
_Tomb-robbers’ Confessions_
In the late Lord Amherst’s collection, which was recently sold in
London, there was a judicial papyrus of the reign of Rameses IX (about
1125 B.C.), reporting the trial of eight “servants of the High Priest
of Amen,” who were arraigned for plundering the tomb of King Sebekemsaf
of the thirteenth dynasty. The written depositions of the prisoners
set before the pharaoh by the vizier, the lieutenant, the reporter,
and the mayor of Thebes were translated by Professor Percy Newberry
in these terms: “We opened the coffins and their wrappings, which
were on them, and we found the noble mummy of the king. There were
two swords and many amulets and necklaces of gold on his neck: his
head was covered with gold. We tore off the gold that we found on the
noble mummy of this god [_i.e._ the dead king who was identified
with Osiris]. We found the royal wife also. We tore off all that we
found from her mummy likewise, and we set fire to their wrappings. We
took their furniture of gold, silver and copper vases, which we found
with them.” The prisoners who made this confession were found guilty,
and sentenced “to be placed in the prison of the temple of Amen,” to
await “the punishment that our lord the pharaoh shall decide.” There
are several other famous papyri reporting trials of desecrators of the
royal tombs. In the Abbott papyrus (in the British Museum) inspectors
submit a report on the tombs that were said to have been plundered, but
the only one that had actually been robbed was that referred to in the
confession just quoted from the Amherst papyrus. The two Mayer papyri
in the Liverpool Free Public Museums relate to plundering in the Valley
of the Tombs of the Kings. One of these is of special interest at the
present moment because it relates to the violation of the tomb of
Rameses VI, which is immediately above that of Tutankhamen. The robbers
were discovered as the result of quarrels among themselves about the
division of the spoil. This was one of the most disgraceful incidents
in the whole history of tomb-plundering. The robbers, in their haste to
get at the gold and jewels upon the mummies, usually chopped through
the bandages, and mutilated the mummy in the process. But when, in
1905, I removed the wrappings from the mummy of Rameses VI (which in
ancient times had been removed to the tomb of Amenhotep II, where it
was discovered by M. Loret in 1898), the body was found to be hacked
to pieces. This was no mere accidental injury, but clearly intentional
destruction of a malicious nature. It makes one realize the sort of
vandalism Tutankhamen’s tomb so narrowly escaped.
_Hiding the Mummies_
The discovery of the royal mummies in 1881—and this applies with
special force to the remains of the famous pharaohs Seti I and Rameses
II—gave us the other side of the story, for it revealed the measures
taken to protect the bodies of these kings from further injury, and
the persistence with which the protectors of the tombs moved the
mummies from one place to another in their endeavour to save them.
The condition of affairs revealed in the tomb of Tutankhamen brings
proof of what has long been suspected, that the work of the plunderer
began soon after the closing of the chambers. But during the twentieth
and twenty-first dynasties, when there was a rapid weakening of the
Administration, tomb-robbing assumed proportions it had never attained
before. The record inscribed upon the coffins of Seti I and Rameses
II throws a lurid light on the extent of this loss of control. For a
century and a half their mummies were moved from one hiding-place to
another in the attempt to secure their safety. The mummy of the great
Rameses was moved to the tomb of his father, Seti I, whose body for
some time remained in its own alabaster sarcophagus, which is now in
Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. But in the reign of
Siamon (976-958 B.C.) the two mummies were hidden in the tomb of a
queen called Inhapi, and about ten years later were moved again, this
time to a tomb that had been originally prepared for Amenhotep I at
Deir el Bahari. Here they, together with more than thirty other royal
mummies, remained undisturbed for more than twenty-eight centuries,
until about fifty years ago they were rediscovered, and the successors
of the ancient tomb-robbers of Thebes once more resumed the old
process of depredation. But the late Sir Gaston Maspero had not
studied the papyri of the twentieth dynasty in vain, for he obtained
a confession that is worthy of being set beside those recorded in the
Amherst and Mayer papyri.
[Illustration: FIG. 13.—The lid of the coffin that contained the
rewrapped mummy of Amenhotep III, to show how it was labelled by the
Priests of the twentieth dynasty and the record of an inspection
written alongside it.]
The story of the ill-treatment of the royal mummies and of their
repeated removal from one hiding-place to another prepared us in some
measure for the discoveries that were made when the shrouds and linen
bandages were removed. But in spite of this the investigation was full
of surprises. Several of the mummies after being hastily rewrapped (in
the twentieth or twenty-first dynasty) were put into the wrong coffins.
So that, for example, when the mummy supposed to be Rameses I (of the
nineteenth dynasty) was unwrapped, an old white-haired lady was found
embalmed in a way distinctive of the early part of the eighteenth
dynasty. And again, when the mummy in the coffin of Setnakht (the first
king of the twentieth dynasty) was examined, it was found to be that of
a woman embalmed in the manner distinctive of the time of Setnakht’s
predecessor (Seti II, of the nineteenth dynasty); and it is probable
that she is Queen Tausret, the wife in turn of the two kings, Siptah
and Seti II. Such discoveries reveal the need for caution in claiming
that the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings has yielded up all its hidden
secrets. For there are many royal mummies that we know to have been
buried there which have yet to be recovered.
If the examination of the royal mummies reveals the thoroughness
with which the tombs have been rifled—not one of the series has
ever been found undisturbed—they also give us some idea of the value
of the jewellery and amulets which excited the greed of the robbers
thirty centuries ago. The torn and mutilated wrappings of the mummies
often bear the impressions of magnificent pectoral ornaments, and of
amulets on the forehead, neck, or limbs; and the occasional finding of
fragments of these, made of gold, lapis lazuli, or carnelian, gives
us some idea of the value and beauty of this extravagant equipment
of the dead. But I have known only one instance of an object of any
considerable intrinsic value escaping the diligent searching of these
experienced robbers. During the examination (in 1909) of the badly
plundered mummy of Queen Hontaui I found a large and beautifully
embossed plate of pure gold, unique in size and in the elaboration of
its design.
From these considerations we can safely predict that if, as seems
now to be certain, the unplundered mummy is found in the tomb of
Tutankhamen jewellery of great value and beauty of design will
probably be found on it. The superb workmanship displayed in making
these ornaments and amulets is known to us from the discoveries
made by M. de Morgan in the Pyramids at Dashur in 1893. These gold
pectoral ornaments inlaid with precious stones were wrought with an
amazing perfection of technical skill many centuries before the time
of Tutankhamen; but the jewellery of the eighteenth and nineteenth
dynasties now exhibited in many museums (especially the Cairo Museum
and the Louvre) reveals that the skill in making such works of art had
not been lost. The quality of the workmanship revealed in the objects
found in the first chamber of Tutankhamen’s tomb should prepare us
for the discovery on the mummy of ornaments even surpassing those of
Rameses II in the Louvre (see Maspero, _Egyptian Art_).
But the chief interest in the discovery should be in the mummy itself,
for the welfare of which all the elaborate arrangements were made.
It is not merely because the mummies enable us to form some idea of
the physical features of the kings and queens, and by appealing to
our common humanity give their personalities a reality they would not
otherwise possess; nor is it because they often reveal evidence of age
and infirmities; their chief interest is the light they throw on the
history of the period and upon the development of the art of embalming.
Perhaps I can best make plain what is meant by this statement if I
refer to specific illustrations of the former kind of contribution the
study of mummies makes to the fuller understanding of history.
When in 1907 the bones were found that had once formed part of the
mummy wrongly assumed to be the famous Queen Tiy, I discovered that
they were the remains of a young man’s skeleton, for which, if it had
been normal, it was difficult to admit an age of more than twenty-six
years, if indeed as much. Now the archæological evidence seems to leave
no loophole of escape from the conclusion that these bones are actually
the skeleton of King Akhenaton; but, on the other hand, the historical
evidence seems to demand an age of at least thirty years (or, according
to a recent memoir by Professor Kurt Sethe, thirty-six years) for
the famous heretic pharaoh. This apparent conflict between the two
classes of evidence has stimulated an intensive study of the historical
data and of the medical history of Akhenaton himself; and the final
outcome of the investigations is likely to provide a most illuminating
revelation of the inner meaning of perhaps the most human and dramatic
incident that has come to us from ancient times. The peculiar
features of Akhenaton’s head and face, the grotesque form assumed by
his legs and body, no less than the eccentricities of his behaviour,
and his pathetic failure as a statesman, will probably be shown to
be due to his being the subject of a rare disorder, only recently
recognized by physicians, who have given it the cumbrous name Dystocia
adiposo-genitalis. One of the effects of this condition is to delay
the process of the consolidation of the bones. Studying the history
of modern instances of this affection the possibility suggests itself
that Akhenaton might well have attained the age of thirty or even
thirty-six years, although his bones are in a condition which in the
normal individual is appropriate to the years twenty-two to twenty-six.
It is tempting to speculate on the vast influence on the history of
the world, not merely the political fate of Egypt and Syria in the
fourteenth century B.C., but the religious conceptions of Palestine and
the whole world for all time, for which the illness of this pacifist
poet may have been largely responsible.
There is still a vast amount of information to be got from the study of
the royal mummies in the light of modern knowledge, and by the use of
technical methods that are now for the first time available: and one
of the hopes raised by the new discoveries is that it may be possible
to set an example of how such work ought to be carried out, so as to
extract from the remains of these ancient pharaohs all the information
they can give us.
The importance of the study of the technique of mummification as a
means of revealing the past history of civilization (by affording
evidence of the diffusion of culture which was the chief factor in the
process of cultural development) is too large a subject to embark on
here. I mention it only because most of the exact information we have
of the history of embalming has been derived from the royal mummies
themselves.
In my pamphlet _The Migrations of Early Culture_ (1915) I made use of
the evidence afforded by the geographical distribution of the practice
of mummification to demonstrate the diffusion to the ends of the earth
in ancient times of elements of culture that were derived directly or
indirectly from Egypt.
In the _Revue Neurologique_ for 1920 two French physicians, Drs M.
Ameline and P. Quercy, published a very curious memoir with the
title “Le Pharaon Aménophis IV, sa mentalité. Fut-il atteint de
Lipodystrophie Progressive?” I have used the adjective curious with
reference to their work, because they have put forward a carefully
reasoned statement in support of the diagnosis they suggest, but do not
seem to have made any attempt to make themselves acquainted with the
evidence provided by the remains of the pharaoh. When it is recalled
that in 1912 I gave a detailed account (_The Royal Mummies_, Catalogue
Générale du Musée du Caire) of the broken bones which were all that
was left of the mummy of the pharaoh (no trace of the mummy of his
mother, Queen Tiy, has been found), it is surprising to find in a
scientific journal the following statements, written ten years after
the appearance of my official report was published:—“on a retrouvé
récemment (1905), à Thèbes même, les _momies_ du pharaon _et de sa
mère Tii_,” and, referring to the remains of Akhenaton, _i.e._ the
broken fragments of the skeleton, “La momie, recouverte de feuilles
d’or délicatement repoussé et d’un réseau d’or avec pierres et verres
colorés, _est également exceptionnellement belle, mais ces ornements
empêchent naturellement d’examiner le corps du pharaon aux rayons X et,
a fortiori, d’en practiquer l’autopsie_?” (_op. cit._, p. 451. All the
italics are mine).
[Illustration: FIG. 14.—An inscribed stone from Tell el Amarna, showing
Akhenaton, his queen Nefertiti, and their daughters, all represented by
the sculptor as suffering from the same dystocia as Akhenaton himself.]
I have quoted these purely imaginary statements to emphasize the
fact that the distinguished physicians who made them were totally
ignorant of the conditions revealed in the skull, and based their
diagnosis wholly upon the pictures of Akhenaton and the history of his
achievements. They describe the condition of progressive lipodystrophy
as an affection characterized on the one hand by a progressive and
complete disappearance of the subcutaneous fat of the upper part of the
body; and, on the other, by a marked increase of the adipose tissue
below the loins. The first example of this strange affection was
described by Barraquer in 1907, but it is exceedingly rare in adult
men. In fact the authors remark that “it would indeed be curious if a
pharaoh, dead for thirty-five centuries, should provide a second case
(after Gertsmann’s) of the occurrence of this condition in an adult
man.”
It is unfortunate that these physicians neglected to study the report
which I wrote for the General Catalogue of the Cairo Museum, published
in the volume _The Royal Mummies_ in 1912. For they would then have
realized that the slight hydrocephalus, the indication of an early
overgrowth of the jaw such as occurs in acromegaly, and then the
gradual assumption of a feminine contour of figure, with a delayed
union of the epiphyses, suggest the possibility that Akhenaton may have
been the subject of Dystocia adiposo-genitalis.
[Illustration: FIG. 15.—A painted wooden portrait bust of Nefertiti,
wife of Akhenaton.]
The form of the head in Akhenaton, his daughters and some of the
members of his family, more than half a century before his time, raises
a problem of great difficulty and complexity.
[Illustration: FIG. 16.—The skull of Akhenaton seen from the left side.]
There is no doubt that the slight malformation of Akhenaton’s head
was due to pathological causes. It is equally certain that the gross
distortion of the heads of his daughters, represented in the statues
from Tell el Amarna which are now in Berlin, are the result of
artificial deformation such as was and still is practised upon young
children in Asia Minor and Northern Syria, with the royal family of
which Akhenaton’s family was linked by close ties. But in addition
the mummy of a boy in the tomb of Amenhotep II, which was certainly
embalmed in the reign of that pharaoh and is probably the body of his
son, has a skull which is exceptionally broad and flat, and when viewed
from the front presents an appearance curiously similar to the portrait
statues of Akhenaton’s daughters. The full significance of these
peculiarities cannot be interpreted until the royal mummies now in the
Cairo Museum are submitted to a thorough re-examination.