BURIED ROYALTIES
Among the most curious of ancient Egyptian documents are the two
papyri, the Abbott and the Amherst, which tell the story of the
robberies of the royal tombs at Thebes, which came to light in the
reign of Ramses IX, about 1100 B.C. At that time the capital city was
ruled, under the Governor, by a certain noble named Paser, who was
called “The Prince of the Town.” Western Thebes, however, the City
of the Dead, was not under the care of Paser, but was supervised by
another official named Pewero, who rejoiced in the title of “Prince
of the West.” Between the Prince of the Town and the Prince of the
West there was no love lost, as is not uncommon with the heads of two
adjacent jurisdictions; and Paser, on the eastern bank of the river,
kept his ears open to all the tittle-tattle of discontented workmen
from the Necropolis which drifted across the river. It so fell out
in the sixteenth year of Ramses IX, that certain thefts from the
Necropolis were reported by the Prince of the West to the Governor;
and Paser seized the opportunity of making the most to the Council
of the laxity of administration which allowed such things, and of
suggesting that infinitely worse robberies, involving the Royal Tombs,
were occurring under his enemy’s jurisdiction.
[Illustration: 17. LUXOR, PAPYRUS-BUD COLUMNS AND COLOSSI OF RAMSES II.]
A special commission was appointed to investigate the charges, and
the importance of the case is shown by the rank of the members of the
court. These were Khaemuas, the Governor, “The Royal Vassal Nesamen,
Scribe of Pharaoh,” _i.e._ the King’s private Secretary, and “The Royal
Vassal Neferkara-em-per-Amen, the Speaker of Pharaoh,” doubtless the
King’s Public Orator. This august court went at great length into the
charges, and it is impossible to read the account of the case without
feeling that Paser had right on his side, though he rather made a
bungle of his case. Obviously his information was mainly derived from
ill-natured gossip, for it was so inaccurate in detail that the very
royal tomb which he positively declared to have been robbed was found
on examination to be untouched; but equally obviously there was a great
deal going on in the Necropolis which should not have gone on, and
Pewero either connived at the thefts or was culpably careless.
On the whole Paser failed to establish his charges, though in one case,
to be mentioned directly, there was plain evidence of the violation of
a royal tomb. The Prince of the Town took his failure rather badly, and
spoke wild whirling words before a riotous deputation of Necropolis
workmen, which got him into trouble; but bit by bit the actual truth
leaked out, though not in the Commission.
Three years later, in the reign of Ramses X, sixty persons, mainly
priests and officials of the Necropolis, were arrested on the charge
of complicity in the thefts; and even this big bag of robbers did not
bring security to the royal dead. Ere long the priests of the dead
kings were frantically hustling the mummies of their dead masters from
one tomb to another in the vain attempt to put them beyond the reach
of the spoilers, until at last the bulk of the great Theban Pharaohs
were gathered, or rather huddled, together, in the obscure shaft of the
unfinished tomb of Queen Astemkheb at Der el-Bahri, or in the tomb of
Amenhotep II in the Valley of the Kings.
The kind of treatment which was meted out to the mighty dead by the
sacrilegious rascals in the Theban Necropolis is detailed for us in
the confession of one of them, a confession extracted, for the rest,
by the time-honoured Eastern questionary of the bastinado. “We found
the august mummy of this god,” says the thief, describing his work at
the tomb of King Sebek-em-saf and his wife Queen Nub-khas, “with a long
chain of golden amulets and ornaments round the neck; the head was
covered with gold. The august mummy of this god was entirely overlaid
with gold, and his coffin was covered both within and without with
gold, and adorned with every splendid costly stone. We stripped off
the gold which we found on the august mummy of this god, as well as
the amulets and ornaments from around the neck, and the bandages in
which the mummy was wrapped. We found the royal wife equipped in like
manner, and we stripped off all that we found upon her. We burnt her
bandages, and we also stole the household goods which we found with
them, and the gold and silver vessels. We divided all between us; we
divided into eight parts the gold which we found with this god, the
mummies, the amulets, the ornaments and the bandages.”
Such was the treatment accorded to a Pharaoh of Egypt by one of
his subjects three thousand years ago; a curious commentary on the
present-day Egyptian protests against the opening of the royal tombs in
the interests of science! But the story of the Ramesside tomb-robberies
is only an illustration of two contradictory cravings which are seen
working all down the long record of the Egyptian monarchy. On the one
hand there is the constant attempt of royalty to secure for itself by
the most elaborate precautions that age-long endurance of the physical
frame which was deemed a necessary condition for the welfare of the
dead king in the Underworld, an attempt which expresses itself in
different ways, some of them most wonderful, in the successive periods
of Egyptian history; on the other, there is the equally constant
and resolute determination of the Egyptian tomb-robber that not all
the divinity which doth hedge a king, and especially a Pharaoh,
shall keep him from his prey. The Ramesside thief has any amount of
lip-reverence for the dead king whose rest he so rudely disturbs; but
all the time that he is talking about “the august mummy of this god,”
he is stripping the gold and jewels from it, and his accomplices are
kindling the fire which will shortly destroy, from an Egyptian point of
view, King Sebek-em-saf’s hope of immortality; and the contradiction is
an epitome of a good deal in the story of Egyptian royalty.
The most enduring religious feeling in the Egyptian was the craving
for immortality; and the most permanent, as it was one of the earliest
religious convictions, was that immortality was linked with faith in
the god Osiris, who, as the legend ran, had been treacherously slain
by his brother Set, had risen from the dead, had been judged and
pronounced just by the tribunal of the gods, and thenceforth reigned as
the god of the Underworld and the judge of the dead.
The devout Egyptian believed that after death, if the necessary
conditions had been fulfilled on his behalf, he was identified with
his god, and like him rose again, was justified, and admitted to the
Egyptian Elysian Fields. These conditions, briefly stated, were, first,
the continuance for as long a period as possible, of the body, in a
state as closely as possible resembling that of life. Whether this
need, which, of course, was responsible for the characteristically
Egyptian practice of mummification, sprang from the belief that the
spiritual essence of the dead man might find a resting-place after
death in the mummified shell of its living abode, or whether the
creation of the mummy was merely, as Professor Peet asserts, a counsel
of despair, an attempt to deny death for as long as possible, is not
certain; but the attempt to preserve the body, first by the provision
of a secure tomb, and later by mummification as well, endures through
the whole of Egyptian history. The second condition was the provision
of food and drink, and all the comforts of life, for the dead man in
his tomb. The third was the equipping of him with all the words of
power which would enable him to escape the dangers which haunted the
ways of the Underworld, and to pass the ordeal of the judgment, and
with amulets which would prove efficacious in warding off the assaults
of the demons of the Underworld. Last of all, as in the Elysian Fields
there was work to be done, and it was not fitting that a king or a
great noble should stoop to manual labour, the dead man had to be
provided with simulacra of servants who should answer for him when he
was called upon for service, and take upon themselves his burden of
labour.
Out of all these conditions there arose gradually the whole wealth of
Egyptian funerary equipment, as it is found in the tombs of the great
men of the land, and above all in those of the Pharaohs, an equipment
whose splendour has dazzled the whole world in the revelations of the
tomb of Tutankhamen. From the very earliest times the kings of Egypt
were laid to rest with elaborate provision for the wants of the dead
monarch, and the provision grew in completeness and complexity with
each successive generation, till it reached its culmination in the
gorgeous tombs of the Theban Pharaohs of the New Empire, with their
hundreds of feet of rock-hewn chamber and corridor, their glittering
canopies, their nests of gilded coffins, their wealth of costly
amulets and illuminated papyri, their stores of ushabtis, and, at the
heart of all, the wonderfully preserved mummy of the man for whom all
this magnificence had been prepared.
It may be questioned, however, whether all these precautions did not
rather tend to defeat their own end, and whether Pharaoh might not have
slumbered in greater security had his tomb been less gorgeous and less
richly equipped than he could hope to do when his tomb was a wonder of
the world, and when all men knew that wealth untold was stored within
its dark depths. At all events we know that from the earliest days of
the Egyptian kingdom to the latest the kings were few indeed whose rest
was not rudely broken by the sacrilegious hands of robbers. The fate of
King Sebek-em-saf, already described, is typical of that of the royal
tombs in general. For five thousand years human greed has proved more
powerful than human piety or even than human superstition. To-day, the
professional tomb-robber of native birth, though his activities are as
skilfully conducted as ever, finds a rival in the scientific explorer,
whose disturbance of the rest of the royal dead, though there are still
many who object to the work as a profanation of what all men should
regard as sacred, is at least conducted with as much reverence as
possible, and in the interests not of individual greed of gain, but of
the general sum of knowledge of the human race.
In this respect the situation should be clearly understood. It is not
a question of whether the dead kings of ancient Egypt shall or shall
not be allowed to rest in peace in their tombs. That question has
been settled, and settled in the negative, for many centuries by the
persistent habit of the Egyptians themselves. Robbed the tombs of the
Pharaohs (such of them as still remain undisturbed) will inevitably
be. That is as sure as death itself. The only question is whether the
robbery shall be conducted by ignorant fellahin for the sake of private
gain, and in such a fashion that the whole of the results shall be
scattered among a score of private collections, and all their historic
value forever lost, or whether it shall be conducted in orderly and
scientific fashion, the finds duly catalogued in their true order, and
gathered together in one great assemblage in a place where they can be
studied in their true relation to one another, and to other finds of
similar character.
There can be no doubt as to which of these methods is preferable.
To deny to the man of science the opportunity of investigating the
history, the art, and the life of the past as revealed in the treasures
of the royal tombs is simply to make it certain that, without securing
in the least the sanctity of the tombs, all the knowledge which might
have been drawn from them shall be lost forever to the world. This is
the sufficient justification of those excavations which, in spite of
all the interest created by their revelations, have so often created
also a feeling of repugnance and protest.
The story of the royal tombs of Egypt begins with the excavation of
the Sacred City of Osiris, Abydos. The work there is by no means the
earliest in point of time of the series of discoveries which have
been made in connection with the burial of royalty, though Abydos was
one of the sites excavated by Mariette, who revealed to the world
the wonderful XIXth Dynasty work of the temple of Sety I there. Much
had been discovered at Thebes and at Memphis before Amélineau and
Petrie began at Abydos those researches which have revolutionised our
knowledge of early Egyptian history and civilisation, and have given
back to us several centuries of the story of human effort which had
previously been shrouded in darkness; but it seems best to follow
the subject down the line of history rather than to follow the order
of discovery with its consequent mixing up of all the dynasties and
periods.
Up to the nineties of last century, it may be said that practically
nothing was known of those earliest Kings of Egypt who reigned before
the time of the IVth Dynasty. The history of Egypt began with the
Pyramid-builders, Khufu, Khafra, and Menkaura; and so far as any real
knowledge went, Egyptian civilisation sprang, like Athene, full-armed
and full grown into being, and offered to the world as its firstfruits
the most gigantic structures ever reared by the hand of man.
[Illustration: 18. COLONNADE IN TEMPLE OF SETY I, ABYDOS.]
Obviously this was an impossibility, for things do not happen thus
in real life, and the advance of civilisation is a business, not of
leaps and bounds, but of slow and ordered progress; but before the
Pyramid-builders there was nothing in Egyptian history but a gulf
of misty darkness, in which a few dim and mighty shapes could be
faintly discerned through the clouds. Manetho, the Egyptian historian
of Sebennytos, preserved in the few fragments of his story which have
survived the names, and a few more or less incredible legends, of the
great men who had lived and reigned before the Pyramid-period; but they
were only shadows, and the bulk of what little he told us of them was
too fantastic to command any respect. The chief figure of his story
was the king Menes, or Mena, who was said to have founded Memphis, and
who seemed to have some semblance of reality among the pale shades
of the others; but even he came to us in Manetho’s pages in such a
questionable shape as to seem more a figure of romance than of fact.
The discoveries of the closing years of the nineteenth century,
however, have put an end to all that vagueness, and while our knowledge
about the earliest dynastic kings of Egypt is still scanty enough, it
is quite solid and real as far as it goes. Not only so, but excavation
has resulted in the extension of knowledge to the period before the
rise of the earliest dynastic rulers, and such a mass of material has
been accumulated bearing on the life of the pre-dynastic Egyptians as
to justify Professor Peet’s statement, “it may reasonably be said that
we are as well acquainted with the material civilisation of this era as
with that of any other in Egyptian history, though at the same time it
has to be admitted that our knowledge of its actual history amounts to
practically nothing.”
With the pre-dynastic tombs, however, and with their comparatively
meagre provision for the dead, we have not to do at present. All that
need be said is that the pre-dynastic Egyptian buried his dead in a
shallow pit cut in the sand or the soft rock, the body being laid on
its side in a crouching posture, the knees drawn up towards the chin,
and the hands placed in a supplicating attitude before the face. Around
the dead man, who was often covered with a reed mat, were placed the
vases for food and drink, the various utensils, flint knives, ivory
tablets, and suchlike things which were held to be necessary or useful
for him in the life beyond, and above all the carved slate palette
which was used for grinding the green face-paint in which the early
Egyptian delighted, and the material for making the paint itself.
From these early tombs we have learned that the pre-dynastic Egyptian
was far from being an uncultured savage. His funerary equipment,
primitive as it is in some respects, shows us that he had already
acquired the rudiments of that art of representing human and animal
form which was to be carried to such remarkable heights in the dynastic
period; he was an accomplished potter, whose vessels, though he was as
yet ignorant of the potter’s wheel, are so perfectly moulded by hand
that the absence of the wheel is no loss, and who “belonged to one of
those rare and happy periods when the craftsman seems incapable of an
error of taste, and in consequence almost every form that leaves his
hands is a thing of beauty”; and he had an inexhaustible patience and
an amazing skill in the working of vessels of the hardest stone which
make the pre-dynastic hard stoneware the standard of quality by which
all succeeding periods are judged.
The disclosure of the tombs of the true early dynastic period, as
distinguished from the earlier tombs which we have been describing,
was to come from the Holy City of ancient Egypt--Abydos. The reason
for the fact that the royal tombs of this period are to be found in
the neighbourhood of a town which was never the capital of the land,
and not at such important cities as Memphis or Thebes, is, of course,
that Abydos had a sanctity to which no other place in Egypt could lay
claim, as the burial-place of the head of the God of the Resurrection,
Osiris, after his slaughter and dismemberment by Set. Osiris was
not the original god of the dead at Abydos, for there existed, long
before his supremacy, the worship of a local god Khenti--“The First
of the Westerners,” whose place Osiris usurped, or rather with whom
he was identified. But from a very early date Osiris was supreme at
Abydos. Every devout Egyptian desired to be buried, if possible, at
Abydos, and as close as might be to the burial-place of the God of the
Resurrection; if actual burial was impossible, as in the vast majority
of cases, the next best thing was to be allowed to set up a memorial
slab in the neighbourhood, or to make a pilgrimage, even after death,
to the Holy City, before being laid in the less holy ground elsewhere;
while if none of these expedients was feasible, at least one could
send a little votive vase of common pottery, and have it laid near
to the sacred site. Accordingly the Necropolis at Abydos is full of
memorials of all periods of Egyptian history, and in particular the
ground is so crowded with broken pottery of all ages and types that the
Arabs call the place “Umm el-Ga’ab,” “The Mother of Pots.”
It was on this site that M. Amélineau began his excavations in 1895,
continuing them till the spring of 1898. He discovered several large
chamber tombs, which contained many articles of exquisite workmanship,
vases, and plaques in fine stone and in pottery, ebony and ivory
tablets, bearing inscriptions in archaic hieroglyphics, and evidence
that the tombs had belonged to kings of Egypt earlier in date than the
period of the Pyramid-builders. In particular he found the tomb of a
king whose name he read as Khent, and whom he identified with Osiris
himself, as one of the titles of the god is “Khent-Amenti.” In January,
1898, he found in this tomb part of a skull which he conjectured to
be the skull of the god, and on the same day his workmen unearthed a
granite bier of familiar Egyptian shape to which he gave the name of
“The Bed of Osiris.”
Had these attributions been established M. Amélineau’s discoveries,
important enough in themselves, would have been absolutely unique in
character. But the somewhat acrimonious discussion which followed the
announcement of the finds, established the fact that though he had
discovered the tomb of one of the earliest kings of Egypt it was the
tomb of a man, and not of a god. The Bed of Osiris proved to be a New
Empire copy of some more ancient bier placed there by Egyptians who
had made the same mistake as the modern explorer, and imagined that
they were restoring the actual tomb of the god of the Underworld. The
great discovery thus failed to produce the effect which its importance
deserved, and rather cast ridicule upon the possibility of retrieving
for serious history the period of the earliest dynasties. M. Amélineau
shortly afterwards abandoned his uncompleted task, believing that the
site was completely worked out, and for a time Abydos remained without
any further attempts to unravel its mysteries.
In the winter of 1899–1900, however, Professor Flinders Petrie began
work on the abandoned site, and the results of his patient and skilful
study have been of supreme importance for the reconstruction of this
earliest period of the history of the ancient Egyptian kingdom. He
not only found in the tombs already discovered a great quantity of
valuable material, but added considerably to the number of known
tombs, and planned with the utmost care all those which came to light.
In the main, these royal tombs of the earliest dynasties proved to
conform to a single type, though the variations in size and in the
number of apartments are considerable. Generally speaking, there is a
large central chamber, dug in the soil, and sometimes approached by a
stairway. This chamber, which we may believe to have been the actual
royal sepulchre, is lined, and sometimes floored, with wood, though
in some instances the flooring is of stone, in one case of granite,
the earliest known examples of stonework. Around the central chamber
are grouped smaller cells, in which were stored the provision for the
use of the dead king in the Underworld, or where the bodies of his
favourites who were doomed to accompany him in his dark journey were
laid after they had been slain during his funeral rites.
The great tomb of King Kha-sekhem of the IInd Dynasty, 223 feet by 54
feet, is unique in the fact that its central chamber, 10 feet by 17
feet, and nearly 6 feet deep, is entirely built of stone, and is the
earliest known example of a piece of mason-work. Each tomb, when it was
completed and occupied, was roofed with wooden beams, and above it the
sand was piled in a low mound, the precursor of the great stone burial
mounds which were to appear ere long when the pride of the IVth Dynasty
monarchs was no longer content with anything less than a pyramid for
its memorial. Above the tomb a pair of grave-steles bearing the king’s
name were placed, so that the royal cemetery of Abydos must have
presented an appearance not unlike that of a modern churchyard with its
mounds and its headstones.
No royal bodies, of course, were found in these earliest tombs.
Time and the tomb-robber had done their work too well for that, and
the art of mummification was as yet unknown. At a very early date
the tombs had been rifled, and some of them burned, no doubt in the
process of disposing of the bodies after they had been plundered, as
the Ramesside robber disposed of the mummy of Sebek-em-saf. The most
unquestionably personal relic discovered was the shrivelled arm of
the queen of King Zer, which had been stolen by some robber who had
not time to carry off his plunder, and had thrust it into a hole in
the tomb wall, where it was found, with its four beautiful bracelets
still intact, by one of Petrie’s workmen. What was left in the tombs
is simply what previous robbers had not deemed worth the trouble of
carrying away. Yet these pieces of pottery, these broken bits of
ivory furniture, these ebony and ivory plaques, with their archaic
inscriptions, have proved of inestimable importance; for they have
enabled us to fashion in our minds a picture, rude enough, no doubt,
and sadly lacking in detail, but unquestionably true in its main
outline of the earliest ordered civilisation in the history of the
world.
We can see that by 3500 B.C., the very latest date to which the Ist
Dynasty can be brought down (Petrie dates it from 5500 B.C.), the
Egyptian state, under “The Scorpion,” Narmer, or Aha-men, the group of
kings who probably stand for the Menes of Manetho’s story, had long and
completely emerged from the barbarism which swathed the rest of the
world save Babylonia, and possibly Crete, and was already thoroughly
organised and master of all its own resources. War, which had produced
the union of the two sections of the land, the Delta and the Upper
Valley, was carried on, not as a matter of chance razzias, but with the
movement of great armies which could sweep a whole populace into their
net. The great mace-head of King Narmer records the capture of 120,000
men, 400,000 oxen, and 1,422,000 goats. The same king has in his train
a Leader of the Ceremonies, a title which shows that the etiquette of
the court was already thoroughly organised, and at an early date the
Commander of the Inundation shows by his presence that the Egyptian
already realised the importance of this great annual event, which,
indeed, was no doubt the compelling cause which resulted in the
extraordinarily early growth of organisation in Egypt as compared with
other lands.
[Illustration: 19. BRACELETS (Ist DYNASTY); CHAIN (VIth DYNASTY); GOLD
SEAL (VIth DYNASTY); GOLD URÆUS (XIIth DYNASTY).
(_From “Arts and Crafts of Ancient Egypt.”_)]
That the equipment of the royal household was sumptuous and tasteful,
and that the personal adornments of the glittering figures who occupied
its stage were of the richest material and of the highest artistic
quality, even the pitiful relics which have survived are sufficient
to assure us. Pharaoh’s palace was adorned with vases and bowls of
diorite, breccia, rock-crystal, and alabaster, wrought with matchless
skill, and ground to translucent thinness; his furniture was of ebony
and ivory exquisitely carved and adorned with hammered gold. Nor was
the glow of beautiful colour wanting to the picture; for the Egyptian
craftsman had already mastered that art of glazing objects with
brilliant colour which his successors practised with such satisfying
results. The ladies of the court found that the goldsmith was capable
of meeting their desire for costly and tasteful jewellery in a fashion
that has never been surpassed, and the bracelets of the Queen of Zer,
of amethyst, turquoise, lazuli, and gold, are of fine design and
astonishingly good workmanship; while the existence of a Court barber
is attested by the plait of false hair which was found in the tomb of
Zer, and was perhaps worn by the lady of the bracelets.
The art of hieroglyphic writing was already fully established,
and though the hieroglyphics are archaic in form, they are quite
intelligible. In many of the tombs are found small ivory plaques, “made
by the king’s carpenter.” These are inscribed, each with the records
of the events of a single year; so that we have evidence of a regular
system of chronicling. The British Museum possesses the lid of the
ivory box in which King Semti kept his Great Seal--“The Golden Seal
of Judgment of King Den”--so that manifestly official documents were
in existence, and had to be authenticated by the royal seal. Of art,
nothing on a large scale has survived; but the artist who carved the
little ivory statuette of a king (perhaps Semti) wearing the White
Crown, and clothed in a long parti-coloured robe, was already, within
his limits, a master; and Professor Petrie says of the statuette of
Kha-sekhem of the IInd Dynasty, found at Hierakonpolis, “the art of
these figures shows a complete mastery of sculpture, the face being
more delicately modelled than almost any later work.” Altogether we
must conceive of the Court of the earliest Dynastic Kings of Egypt as
being organised on a high plane of luxury, and indeed of comparative
refinement. There is little that can be called barbaric, save the
possible survival of the custom of slaying the king’s favourites to
accompany him in his journey through the Underworld.
The results of this exploration of the resting-places of the first
buried royalties of Egypt may not in themselves be imposing, when
compared with the bewildering wealth of some of the later royal
interments; but their importance is not to be measured by mere quantity
or richness in the precious metals, but by the fact that they have
given to us a revelation of a whole period of human activity which was
previously hidden beneath the mists of antiquity. Viewed in this light
it becomes apparent that these poor fragments from the tombs of Abydos
have a value far exceeding that of many much more gorgeous finds,
and scarcely surpassed by the discoveries of any period. They stand,
in this respect, on the same level with the revelation of the Minoan
civilisation at Knossos, or that of the city-states of Sumer at Lagash.
The search for the buried royalties of Egypt next brings us into touch
with the great age of the Pyramid-builders, beginning with Zeser and
Seneferu, and extending, with gradually diminishing splendour, down
to the last relics of the XIIth Dynasty--a period which has already
been dealt with in detail. It is followed by the dark period which
witnessed the incursion and supremacy of the Hyksos kings, and the War
of Independence--a troubled period from which few relics have survived,
though the account of the robbery of the tomb of King Sebek-em-saf of
the XIIIth Dynasty, with which our chapter began, shows that the kings
of even these dark days were laid to rest with at least something of
the ancient splendour of Egyptian royalty.
When we resume our story, we find that two great changes have taken
place, one in the course of the national history, the other in the
burial customs with which we have to deal. The centre of gravity of the
Empire has shifted from the area south of the Delta, embracing Saqqara,
Memphis, and the Fayum, to the great city from which the Theban princes
had been directing the struggle against the Hyksos; and henceforward,
throughout all the most brilliant period of Egyptian history, Thebes
remains almost exclusively the royal abode, and, particularly for our
purpose, the place where the great monarchs of the New Empire were
buried in the midst of all their magnificence.
Along with this political change has gone another, which has completely
revolutionised the funerary customs consecrated by so long usage. The
resting-place of a Pharaoh is no longer marked by a “star-y-pointing
Pyramid,” with its temple and causeway. The tombs of the great nobles
of the Middle Kingdom at Beni Hasan and elsewhere had already been
indicating a change in the funerary ideal, and the temple of Mentuhotep
at Der el-Bahri, with its combination of pyramid and rock-hewn shrine,
may perhaps be looked upon as the compromise between the old ideal and
the new. Henceforward the actual tomb and the funerary temple were to
be separated by the necessities of the locality in which the first was
situated. The Temple was to stand by itself, free in the open plain
on the western bank of the Nile; the Tomb was to be hidden from human
knowledge, so far as possible, in a wild and desolate valley of the
Libyan hills behind the plain and its girdling cliffs.
[Illustration: 20. ENTRANCE TO THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS, THEBES.]
On the western bank of the Nile, opposite Thebes, there lies a great
bay of the Libyan cliffs, extending for more than two miles from the
ruined palace of Amenhotep III and the temple of Ramses III at Medinet
Habu on the south, to Drah Abu’l Neggah and the temple of Sety I at
Qurneh on the north. From cape to cape of the bay there stretches, like
the string of a bow, a row of ruined funerary temples, built by most
of the notable Theban Pharaohs. Beyond the line of the string towards
the Nile, the two Memnon colossi still keep watch and ward--all that
remains of the most gorgeous of all the western temples, reared by
the most gorgeous of Theban Pharaohs--Amenhotep III; while between
the string and the bow, and clinging close to the curving cliffs, lie
the temples of Der el-Medinet and Der el-Bahri. Beyond the northern
nock of the bow at Drah Abu’l Neggah, a rugged winding path leads
north-westwards into the heart of the hills for about a mile, then
turning sharply westwards, it reveals a forked valley, one branch of
which is known as the West Valley, and the other and more important as
the East Valley. Together these two ravines make up the Biban el-Moluk,
or Valley of the Kings, the most famous place of royal sepulture
in the world, where for a thousand years the kings of the earliest of
world-empires were laid “all of them in glory, everyone in his own
house.”
They chose for their resting-place one of the wildest and most barren
scenes which it is possible to imagine, a sun-scorched wilderness of
rock and tumbled stone, where the heat, reverberated from rock to rock
under a sky of brass, is like that of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace. But
it was not beauty or richness that they were seeking when they came
to the Valley of the Kings; it was the security which not even the
Great Pyramid had been able to give to the mighty dead. The loneliness
and desolation of the place were the very things which prompted its
selection; for they sought--how vainly the future was to show--a place
where human foot had never trod, and where they might expect that their
long sleep would be unbroken by any intruder. The sacrilegious attempts
of the type of robber who had scattered to the winds the dust of Khufu
they foresaw, and tried, though with only imperfect success, to guard
against; what they could not foresee was the advent of the scientific
excavator, with a patience which rivals and a skill which far surpasses
that of the native plunderer, whose work has put the crown on the
lengthy demonstration of the futility of all their pathetic efforts at
security.
The type of tomb which is characteristic of the Valley of the Kings
is simple enough in its general idea, though its development is
sometimes complex enough. An entrance gallery is driven into the rock
sloping downwards, the passage-way being sometimes an inclined plane,
sometimes a stairway. This corridor is sometimes interrupted by a deep
pit, possibly meant to catch any water which might flow in through
the doorway, but more probably to render the task of the robber more
difficult. Beyond the pit, the passage is continued, and gives access
to chambers and halls varying in number and size, until at last the
sarcophagus chamber is reached. Of this general type there are all
varieties, from the simplicity of such a tomb as that of Tutankhamen,
with its short entrance passage, and its scanty provision of poorly
decorated rooms, to the complexity of the tombs of Ramses III or Sety
I, with their hundreds of feet of corridor and chamber, brilliantly
decorated with the finest art which their time could produce.
The decoration of the royal tombs, though often of high quality
artistically, is generally of a sombre and gloomy character, differing
in this from the brilliant pictures of life which are characteristic
of the Old Kingdom tombs of the nobles at Saqqara, or even from some
of the private tombs, such as those of Nekht and Rekhmara at Thebes.
Generally speaking, the leading conception is that the dead king,
accompanied by the sun-god or identified with him, sails in the bark of
Ra through the Underworld, bringing light as he passes. On his voyage
he is accompanied by all manner of spirits and genii, which ward off
the enemies of the soul from the divine boat. The subjects of the
illustrations are largely derived from two books of funerary ritual,
_The Book of Him Who is in the Duat_ (Underworld), and _The Book of the
Gates_, while portions of the _Book of the Dead_ are also illustrated.
These wonderful tombs have always been more or less known in historic
times. Strabo mentions that there were in his time forty tombs worthy
of a visit, and we may be sure that the bulk of these had already been
long rifled, or at least cleared of their contents to avoid the danger
of desecration, before the Egyptian Empire ended its long course. The
centuries between the visit of the old geographer and that of the
scholars of the French Expedition had brought oblivion to the majority
of the tombs, for the French explorers mention only eleven, the others
having meanwhile got covered up and forgotten.
It is with the coming of Belzoni on his second journey in 1817 that
the modern search for buried Pharaohs may be said to begin, and since
his discovery of the tomb of Sety I, the work of finding Pharaohs has
gone on for more than a century with more or less success, until at
the present time something like sixty tombs have been found, including
a few which are not royal, and some which are merely pits. The
probability is that few tombs remain to be discovered in the Valley,
for most of the great royalties of the Empire have now been accounted
for in one way or another.
One chance of some importance, however, remains. The last king whom we
know to have been buried in the Valley of the Kings is Ramses XII of
the XXth Dynasty. In the great _cache_ at Der el-Bahri, which will
fall to be spoken of shortly, several of the mummies of kings of the
XXIst Dynasty were found, along with those of the earlier and more
famous lines; but the actual tombs of the XXIst Dynasty have never yet
come to light, and it is possible that some fortunate explorer may yet
fall, in one of the desolate valleys among the Libyan hills, on the
necropolis of a line of kings who, if they do not fill so great a place
in the history of Egypt as their predecessors of the XVIIIth and XIXth
Dynasties, were yet sufficiently important to make the discovery of
their resting-place a matter of great moment.
[Illustration: 21. TOMB OF RAMSES IX, VALLEY OF THE KINGS.]
It was on October 6 that Belzoni began those excavations in the Valley
which resulted in the discovery of what is still the finest example
of a royal tomb of the Empire. On the 9th he was fortunate enough to
discover two tombs of considerable importance, one of them beautifully
painted, the other undecorated, but containing some funerary furniture
and two female mummies. “Their hair,” says Belzoni, whose summary
method of dealing with mummies we have already noticed, “was pretty
long, and well-preserved, though it was easily separated from the head
by pulling it a little”! On the 11th, this amazingly fortunate man, who
knew so little the greatness of his good fortune, entered another tomb,
evidently one of still greater importance, which, with its contents,
is dismissed in half a page of his story. “We found a sarcophagus of
granite, with two mummies in it, and in a corner a statue standing
erect, 6 feet 6 inches high, and beautifully cut out of sycamore
wood; it is nearly perfect except the nose. We found also a number of
little images of wood, well carved, representing symbolical figures.
Some had a lion’s head, others a fox’s, others a monkey’s.... In the
chamber on our right hand we found another statue like the first, but
not perfect.” Thus summarily Belzoni dismisses a discovery which would
make most present-day explorers green with envy. What became of the two
mummies, the two funerary statues, and the ushabtis, we are not told,
but can easily imagine.
These, however, were only the preliminaries of the great find which
was awaiting the lucky excavator. On October 16 he started operations
at a point about 15 yards from the tomb already mentioned (which would
seem, therefore, to have been that of Ramses I), and in a spot which
seemed to his workmen most unlikely to yield anything. On the 17th they
struck the first indications of a cutting, and on the next day the
entrance of a tomb was laid bare. Before the close of the day Belzoni
had penetrated into the tomb as far as the antechamber to the first of
its pillared halls, where his progress was interrupted for the time by
a pit 30 feet deep, which had to be bridged before he could advance
further. Crossing it on the next day, he gained access to the rest
of the tomb, and the next three weeks he spent as a man in a dream
wandering through the chambers of the great tomb, and recording to the
best of his ability the wonders which he had been the first to see
for nearly three thousand years. His attempts at representation of
what he saw were imperfect enough, and his nomenclature of the various
chambers is merely paltry. Titles like “The Drawing-room,” “The Room of
Beauties,” “The Side-board Room,” seem ludicrously out of place amidst
the sombre dignity of Sety’s sepulchre. Still Belzoni cannot be denied
the merits of patience and perseverance, and it was no careless worker
who spent a whole twelve-month in the stifling atmosphere of a tomb in
the Valley of the Kings taking impressions in wax of all the figures on
a tomb which measures 328 feet from end to end.
Belzoni attributed the tomb to Necho and Psamtek II of the XXVIth
Dynasty, finding evidence to his satisfaction of the attribution
in a procession on the walls, in which he saw Persians, Jews, and
Ethiopians, all of whom, according to him, “Nichao and Psammethis”
had conquered. He was thus a matter of seven hundred years out in his
dating of his discovery, for the tomb is that of Sety I of the XIXth
Dynasty, and a monument of the art of the New Empire just at that point
when it had passed its zenith, and was trembling on the verge of the
decadence, though still capable of the wonders of Abydos, which are
rivalled by some of the work here. Sety himself, of course, he did not
find in the magnificent alabaster sarcophagus which stood in one of the
pillared halls of the tomb. Luckily, when we think of how the explorer
would probably have treated him, that honourable king and valiant
soldier had long centuries before been removed from his splendid
underground palace to the obscurer but safer hiding-place where he was
discovered in our own time, and treated with a little more reverence
than he would have received from Belzoni; but his sarcophagus was in
itself a prize more than sufficient to reward the excavator for all the
labour he had spent.
“It is a sarcophagus,” says the lucky discoverer, “of the finest
Oriental alabaster, 9 feet 5 inches long, and 3 feet 7 inches wide.
Its thickness is only 2 inches; and it is transparent, when a light
is placed in the inside of it. It is minutely sculptured within and
without with several hundred figures, which do not exceed 2 inches
in height.... I cannot give an idea of this beautiful and invaluable
piece of antiquity, and can only say that nothing has been brought into
Europe from Egypt that can be compared with it.” He was not far wrong
in his enthusiastic estimate of the artistic value of his find, as
anyone who has seen the exquisite piece of carving in the Soane Museum
will admit.
The fame of Belzoni’s discovery was not long in reaching the ears of
the Turkish officials, and ere long the chief local authority, Hamed
Aga of Keneh, appeared upon the scene with a troop of cavalry, having
been so eager over the find that he had made the journey in thirty-six
hours instead of forty-eight. It was no love for antiquity, however,
which had brought him. All the artistic wonders of the tomb were lost
on him and his following; but they ransacked every corner of the tomb
with great eagerness. After a long search the Aga dismissed his
soldiers, and turning to Belzoni, he revealed the true object of his
anxiety. “Pray, where have you put the treasure?” he said. Belzoni’s
denial of the existence of any such thing was met with an incredulous
smile. “I have been told,” said this characteristic specimen of
Turkish officialdom, “by a person to whom I can give credit, that you
have found in this place a large golden cock filled with diamonds and
pearls. I must see it. Where is it?” The explorer at length succeeded
in convincing the Aga that there was nothing to lay hands on, and with
supreme disgust he rose to leave the tomb. Belzoni asked him what he
thought of the beautiful figures which surrounded him. “He just gave
a glance at them, quite unconcerned, and said, ‘This would be a good
place for a harem, as the women would have something to look at.’”
Thirty years later, Layard’s experience of the Turkish official was
almost identical with that of Belzoni.
Forty-two years elapsed before anything of importance was added to
our knowledge of the buried royalties of Egypt. It was in 1859 the
beautiful jewellery of Queen Aah-hotep was rescued by Mariette from
the hands of the worthy successor of Hamed Aga, as has already been
told. But it was not till 1881 that there occurred the first of those
amazing resurrections of the Theban Pharaohs which since then have been
repeated on several occasions, culminating with the discovery of the
most splendid of all royal burials in the tomb of Tutankhamen.
The story of the 1881 find is one of the romances of excavation,
though the credit of it, if there is any, goes, not to the scientific
explorer, but to the native practitioner of the gentle art of
tomb-robbery. It was in 1876 that evidence began to accumulate, in the
shape of various papyri and other articles of XXIst Dynasty date which
appeared mysteriously on the market, that the fellahs of Sheikh Abd
el-Qurneh had somehow or other gained access to some royal tomb of that
period. The Service of Antiquities took the matter up, and suspicion
fell on the members of a family named Abd-er-Rassoul. In April, 1881,
Maspero arrested with his own hand Ahmed, one of the members of the
family, and committed him to the tender mercies of Daoud Pasha, the
third Mudir of Keneh who has appeared in this chapter, but who, unlike
his predecessors, comes in on this occasion on the side of the angels,
so to speak. Justice, in the Egypt of the eighties, had ways and
means of arriving at its ends which seem strange to mere Occidentals,
and Maspero covers a good deal in his simple statement that Daoud
Pasha carried on the investigation “with his habitual severity.” The
Ramesside inspectors, in 1100 B.C., put things more bluntly--“They
were beaten with sticks both on their hands and feet”--but probably
the facts were not very different in the modern trial. The only result
was to produce a flood of testimony that Ahmed Abd-er-Rassoul “never
had excavated, and never would excavate, that he was incapable of
misappropriating the tiniest antiquity, to say nothing of violating a
royal tomb,” and the spotless victim of oppression had to be liberated
“provisionally.” “The vigour with which the inquiry had been conducted
by Daoud Pasha” had, however, impressed the mind of one of the
Abd-er-Rassoul family with the conviction that there are cases where
honesty, or the best possible imitation of it, is the best policy.
Mohammed Ahmed Abd-er-Rassoul came secretly to the Mudir, made a clean
breast, or at least a breast as clean as was convenient, to that
Rhadamanthus, and on July 5, 1881, Emile Brugsch Bey, representing the
Service of Antiquities, at last found the truth about the business, as
usual, at the bottom of a well.
He was led by the penitent sinner Mohammed to a lonely spot at the foot
of the Libyan cliffs, not far from Hatshepsut’s famous temple at Der
el-Bahri. There, after a long climb up the hillside, and the scaling of
a high cliff, he found behind a great rock the mouth of a black shaft
about 6 feet square, the well of the unfinished tomb of Queen Astemkheb
of the XXIst Dynasty; and the story of his experiences may best be told
by himself.
“Finding Pharaoh was an exciting experience for me. It is true I was
armed to the teeth, and my faithful rifle, full of shells, hung over
my shoulder; but my assistant from Cairo, Ahmed Effendi Kemal, was the
only person with me whom I could trust. Any one of the natives would
have killed me willingly, had we been alone, for everyone of them knew
better than I did that I was about to deprive them of a great source
of revenue. But I exposed no sign of fear, and proceeded with the work.
The well cleared out, I descended, and began the exploration of the
underground passage.”
There are many types of courage; but surely not the least remarkable
is that of the man of science who allows himself to be lowered on an
Arab rope, down a 40-feet shaft, to explore a dark gallery of the dead,
while the rope which is his only link with life and light is held above
by a man who would cheerfully have left him to keep unending vigil
beside the Pharaohs whom he was seeking.
Mohammed’s penitence, however, or perhaps we had better say, his
respect for Daoud Pasha’s “habitual severity,” kept him true, and
Brugsch had no other terrors to face than those of his strange task.
“Soon,” he says, “we came upon cases of porcelain funeral offerings,
metal and alabaster vessels, draperies and trinkets, until, reaching
the turn in the passage, a cluster of mummy-cases came to view in
such number as to stagger me. Collecting my senses, I made the best
examination of them I could by the light of my torch, and at once saw
that they contained the mummies of royal personages of both sexes; and
yet that was not all. Plunging on ahead of my guide, I came to the
chamber, and there, standing against the walls, or lying on the floor,
I found even a greater number of mummy-cases of stupendous size and
weight. Their gold coverings and their polished surfaces so plainly
reflected my own excited visage that it seemed as though I was looking
into the faces of my own ancestors. The gilt face on the coffin
of the amiable Queen Nefertari seemed to smile upon me like an old
acquaintance.” “The fellahs,” says Maspero, “had unearthed a catacomb
crammed with Pharaohs.” Among the mummies were those of several of the
most famous Pharaohs of the New Empire, Seqenen-Ra, the hero of the
War of Independence, Amenhotep I, and Queen Aahmes Nefertari, Thothmes
II, and Thothmes III, the greatest soldier of Egyptian history, Sety
I, Ramses II, and Ramses III, the most famous kings of the XIXth and
XXth Dynasties, Pinezem I and Pinezem II of the XXIst Dynasty, Queen
Hent-taui, Queen Nezem-Mut, and others.
The question of the removal to a place of security of this astonishing
mass of dead royalty presented its own difficulties. The removal had
to be as speedy as possible, for now that the secret was out every
hour would add to the danger of a violent attack on the shaft, and
the dispersal for ever of its previous treasures. Yet the problem of
removal was no easy one. The spot where the shaft lies is lonely and
difficult of access; and the coffins of some of the kings and queens
were of huge size and corresponding weight. That of Queen Aahmes
Nefertari, for instance, is 10 feet long, and required sixteen men to
lift it.
“Early the next morning,” says Brugsch, “three hundred Arabs were
employed under my direction--each one a thief. One by one the coffins
were hoisted to the surface, were securely sewed up in sailcloth and
matting, and then were carried across the plain of Thebes to the
steamers awaiting them at Luxor.”
It took six days of hard labour, under the blazing sun of an Egyptian
July, before the tomb was cleared; and then three days more were spent
in waiting for the Museum steamboat to arrive. Brugsch must have
been an anxious man as he watched the efforts of the three hundred
professional tomb-robbers from whose hands he was snatching what they
regarded as their legitimate prey; and no doubt he heaved a sigh of
genuine relief when, on July 20, he handed over his precious freight to
the Museum at Boulak, and was delivered from the burden of royalty. Sir
Gaston Maspero has told us how all along the Nile, from Luxor to Quft,
both banks of the river were covered with frantic crowds of fellahs,
the women tearing their hair and wailing, the men firing rifles, as
they followed the downstream progress of the steamer bearing the
mummies. So, no doubt, only without the rifles and the steam, their
ancestors had followed the funeral barks which bore across the river
the dead bodies of these mighty kings three thousand years before!
The very richness of the find proved somewhat of an embarrassment to
the authorities at the Cairo Museum, and it was several years before
the results of Brugsch’s great haul of Pharaohs were properly sorted
out and classified. It was not till May, 1886, that the unwrapping of
the mummies began, and the task was only completed in the end of June.
The figure of supreme interest was that of Ramses II, who was then
believed to be the Pharaoh of the Oppression of the Israelites, and who
was then taken more at the estimate of his own overweening vanity than
he is at present. The mummy of the great king was solemnly unwrapped in
the presence of an illustrious gathering, the Khedive of Egypt himself
verifying the existence of the later inscription of the priests of the
XXIst Dynasty on the wrappings around the body, before the process of
unwrapping began. The state of the mummy agreed with the historical
evidence as to the length of the reign of Ramses. The king must have
been nearly one hundred years old when he died, and his body bears the
marks of extreme old age.
“The mummy,” says Maspero, “is thin, much shrunken, and light; the
bones are brittle, and the muscles atrophied, as one would expect in
the case of a man who had attained the age of a hundred; but the figure
is still tall and of perfect proportions. The mask of the mummy gives
a fair idea of that of the living king; the somewhat unintelligent
expression, slightly brutish perhaps, but haughty and firm of purpose,
displays itself with an air of royal majesty beneath the sombre
materials used by the embalmer.”
The hero of the battle of Kadesh must in his prime have been a man of
large and powerful frame. “Even after the coalescence of the vertebræ
and the shrinkage produced by mummification, his mummy still measures
over 5 feet 8 inches”; so that we may picture him as a formidable
figure over 6 feet in height, perhaps nearer 7 feet with the high war
helmet of the Pharaohs crowning his head, as he charged with arrow
drawn to the head, in his rattling war-chariot upon the Hittite ranks.
His conduct at Kadesh suggests a good trooper, but a dull general, and
his mummy does nothing to cause a revision of the judgment.
An infinitely nobler figure was that of the father of Ramses, Sety I,
whose mummy was also found in the _cache_. “The fine kingly head was
exposed to view,” says Maspero. “It was a masterpiece of the art of
the embalmer, and the expression of the face was that of one who had
only a few hours previously breathed his last. Death had slightly drawn
the nostrils and contracted the lips, the pressure of the bandages had
flattened the nose a little, and the skin was darkened by the pitch;
but a calm and gentle smile still played over the mouth, and the
half-open eyelids allowed a glimpse to be seen from under their lashes
of an apparently moist and glistening line, the reflection from the
white porcelain eyes let in to the orbit at the time of burial.” The
somewhat gruesome art of the Egyptian embalmer reached its culmination
in this extraordinary piece of work, and while to our minds the whole
practice verges upon, if it does not overstep, the limits of the decent
into the realm of the horrible, we may admit that it comes as near as
possible to the attainment of what Professor Elliot Smith tells us was
the aim of the embalmer--“to make the representation of the dead man
so life-like that he should, in fact, remain alive.” We should never
have known how noble and dignified a type the aristocratic Egyptian
of 1300 B.C. had attained had it not been for the preservation of the
grand head of Sety, which teaches us that the sculptor of the exquisite
reliefs of Abydos was doing no more than bare justice to his king when
he carved the delicate beauty which charms us to-day.
If the beauty of Sety’s face almost justified both the morbid skill
which sought to deny the reality of death and the curiosity which
unveiled the secrets of the grave, the same cannot be said of the
mummy of Seqenen-Ra, not the least interesting of the grim assemblage.
There are few things more ghastly than the head of the old hero of the
Expulsion of the Hyksos, with three gaping wounds on skull and face,
and the teeth clenched, in the death-agony, upon the mangled tongue.
Yet even this grim evidence of a violent death on the field of battle
seems to bring the reality of that ancient struggle in which the
Pharaoh died more forcibly home to the imagination.
A still more horrible figure of nightmare was that of the unnamed
person whose contorted limbs and writhen countenance suggested to
Maspero the most ghastly of all suspicions as to how he met his end.
“It makes one’s flesh creep to look at it,” says Maspero, speaking
of this mummy; “the hands and feet are tied by strong bands, and are
curled up as if under an intolerable pain; the abdomen is drawn up,
the stomach projects like a ball, the chest is contracted, the head is
thrown back, the face is contorted in a hideous grimace, the retracted
lips expose the teeth, and the mouth is open as if to give utterance
to a last despairing cry. The conviction is borne in upon us that the
man was invested while still alive with the wrappings of the dead.”
Others have suggested a less horrible interpretation of the condition
of the figure. In the report of the trial which took place in the
reign of Ramses III of individuals accused of a conspiracy against
the life of the king it is significantly said of some of those whose
guilt was established, “They died of themselves,” and the suggestion
has been made that this figure, whose contortions might well be due to
the action of an irritant poison, is that of one of these involuntary
suicides. In either case, the thing is sufficiently horrible, and
hints, not obscurely, at that darker aspect of Oriental Court life
which lay beneath all the glitter and splendour of the Theban palace.
The find of Der el-Bahri was followed, in 1894–5, by the discoveries of
M. de Morgan at Dahshur, which have given us the exquisite jewellery of
the XIIth and XIIIth Dynasty already alluded to in our chapter on the
Pyramids. And then, in 1898, M. Loret discovered in the Valley of the
Kings the tomb of Amenhotep II, son of the great conqueror Thothmes III.
Until the great discovery of last year threw all others into the shade,
this discovery of M. Loret was unique, for the mummy of Amenhotep
was found still resting in its coffin under the gold-starred and
blue-painted roof of the funerary chamber--the first Pharaoh who had
ever been found sleeping in the tomb where he was laid. His own records
tell us of his prowess. “He is a king very weighty of arm,” so the
inscription of the Amada and Elephantine steles runs; “there is not one
who can draw his bow among his army, among the hill-country sheikhs, or
among the princes of Retenu, because his strength is so much greater
than that of any king who has ever existed.” In later days this boast
of the old Pharaoh got twisted into the curious legend which Herodotus
records of the king of Ethiopia who challenged Cambyses to draw his
bow. The redoubtable weapon itself, strange to say, was found in the
tomb along with its owner. It bore the inscription: “Smiter of the
Cave-dwellers, overthrower of Kush, hacking up their cities ... the
great wall of Egypt, protector of his soldiers.” Amenhotep was still
wrapped in his shroud and adorned with garlands; but the tomb had been
ruthlessly plundered in ancient days, and little of artistic value
was found. One of the side-chambers of the tomb, however, yielded a
store of Pharaohs, only second in importance to the great find of Der
el-Bahri. Here were gathered nine royal mummies, among them those of
Thothmes IV, Amenhotep III, Siptah, Ramses IV, Ramses V, and Ramses
VI. Most interesting of all, in view of the idea then prevalent of the
date of the Exodus, was the discovery, along with these, of the mummy
of Merenptah, who was held to be the Pharaoh of the Exodus. The absence
of Merenptah from the royal gathering at Der el-Bahri was explained by
interested but casual readers of Scripture by the fact that of course
he was drowned in the Red Sea. The narrative of Exodus, of course,
makes no such statement, and Merenptah duly appeared, though the
interest attaching to him has somewhat waned with the progress of the
view that the Exodus took place two hundred years before his reign.
The fate of the tomb of Amenhotep is suggestive of the difficulties
which meet the explorer in his attempt to preserve for science and to
treat with proper reverence the relics of the past which he unearths.
The great king was left in his coffin, with a few articles of his
funerary furniture beside him. The result was that in spite of the
armed guard which is maintained in the Valley of the Kings, or perhaps
with the complicity of the guard, the tomb was rifled in 1901, the
mummy of the Pharaoh tumbled out on the floor, and the model boat which
had been left beside the king stolen.
With the suggestion that Tutankhamen should be allowed to rest in the
midst of the splendours which accompanied him to the grave, everyone
must sympathise; the question is, will he be allowed to rest in peace,
no matter what the precautions which may be taken, in the midst of a
people with whom tomb-robbery is a profession of six thousand years
standing, and who know the matchless value of the treasure which lies
within their reach? Whatever the decision, it may be hoped that if the
mummy of the last king in the direct line of the great XVIIIth Dynasty
be found beneath his gorgeous canopy it will not be made the subject of
a vulgar show, as is done with that of Amenhotep II.
In 1902 the work of excavation in the Valley of the Kings was
undertaken by an American, Mr. Theodore M. Davis, or rather the funds
for the work were provided by Mr. Davis, while the actual work of
excavation was carried on by officials of the Service of Antiquities,
first Mr. Howard Carter, then Mr. Weigall, and Mr. Ayrton. In 1903 Mr.
Carter found the tomb of Thothmes IV, son of Amenhotep II, and father
of Amenhotep III. His mummy had already been found in the tomb of his
father, but many articles of funerary furniture, mostly broken, were
found, including the embossed leather front of a state chariot, with
decoration in gesso. Between 1902 and 1912, the work financed by Mr.
Davis was crowned with the most astonishing success. In these years
were found the tombs of Queen Hatshepsut, King Siptah, Akhenaten (or
rather the tomb of Queen Tiy, with the mummy of Akhenaten), Horemheb,
Prince Mentuherkhepshef, and, above all, the tomb which, though its
occupants were not of royal rank, proved yet the richest and the most
interesting which was ever discovered, till it was outclassed by that
of Tutankhamen--the tomb of Yuaa and Tuau.
It was in February, 1905, that the workmen of Mr. Davis struck
the first indication of the tomb in the shape of a well-cut stone
step, which promised to prove the first of a flight descending to a
tomb-passage. By February 12 the door was cleared, and the next day Mr.
Davis, with the late Sir Gaston Maspero and Mr. Weigall, penetrated
with some difficulty into the tomb-chamber, and the little party found
themselves in the presence, not only of two of the most interesting
personalities of Egyptian history, but also of the most wonderful
collection of funerary furniture which, up to that time, had ever
rewarded the explorer. Their delight was very nearly turned to tragedy
before they had begun to realise the importance of their find. In his
eagerness to inspect the funeral sledge, on which Maspero had just read
the famous name of Yuaa, Mr. Davis stooped with his candle close to the
bitumen-covered woodwork, and was pulled back just in time. One touch
of the flame on the pitch, and the corridors of the tomb would have
been a roaring tunnel of flame, in which Yuaa, his funerary equipment,
and his discoverers would probably all have perished together.
The danger once realised, candles were discarded, and electric light
led into the tomb. And then the explorers began to realise the full
wonder of their discovery. The tomb was full of furniture of the finest
and most careful workmanship. Armchairs carved and inlaid, coffers
of wood inlaid and enamelled with that wonderful blue of which the
Egyptians had the secret, boxes of painted wood, with figures in gilt
gesso, designed to hold the canopic jars which contain the viscera of
the dead, ushabti figures, some of them plated with gold or silver,
wicker-work baskets for holding perfume bottles, couches of elegant
design, a perfectly preserved specimen of the type of light chariot in
which the Theban noble of the Empire took his airing, cushions stuffed
with down, still soft and resilient after three millenniums, costly
alabaster vases, toilet articles of all sorts, and a plentiful supply
of the mummified meats which the dead might require for their journey
through the Underworld; the chamber was a storehouse of all that the
Egyptian deemed desirable for his use in this life or the next. Nor
were the needs of the spirit neglected. There stood the magical figures
by whose help the occupants of the tomb were to make their way through
the dark paths of the Duat, inscribed with the “Chapter of the Flame,”
or the “Chapter of the Magical Figure of the North Wall”; while a great
roll of papyrus 22 yards long contained other prayers which would
assist the sleepers to conquer all the dangers of their long road.
Never had such an assemblage of beautiful and curious things rewarded
the seeker even in this land of beautiful and curious things.
Fascinating as the treasures of the tomb were, however, the main
interest was not in them, but in the two gilded coffins in which the
owners of all this wealth lay quietly sleeping their long sleep. “First
above Yuaa and then above his wife the electric lamps were held, and
as one looked down into their quiet faces there was almost the feeling
that they would presently open their eyes and blink at the light. The
stern features of the old man commanded one’s attention, and again and
again our gaze was turned from this mass of wealth to this sleeping
figure in whose honour it had been placed there.” For these two silent
tenants of the tomb were the man and woman to whose influence, in all
probability, was due not a little of that great religious revolution
which in a few years altered the whole course of Egyptian history,
and swayed the balance of the destinies of the Ancient East. Prince
Yuaa and his wife Tuau were the father and mother of that famous Queen
Tiy, whose sway over the mind of her husband Amenhotep III prepared
the way for the supremacy of that new spiritual faith of which her
son, the ill-fated Akhenaten, was in the fulness of time to be the
exponent and champion, and whose failure broke his heart in the midst
of the downfall of the empire to which he had vainly attempted to teach
the creed of the Brotherhood of Man. To few people has it been given
to exercise so great an influence upon the course of history as to
these two quiet figures whose rest was broken after 3300 years by the
representatives of three nations whose ancestors were outer barbarians
when Prince Yuaa and his wife were foremost figures in the most
glittering court of the Ancient East.
Two years later, the work of Mr. Davis resulted in another discovery,
less important from the point of view of the wealth of funerary
furniture involved, for in this case there was little found, but even
more interesting in view of the personality whose mummy occupied the
tomb. The site of the new find was at the corner of the ravine leading
to the well-known tomb of Sety I, and was covered with gravel and loose
stones. “After some days of hard work, the regular rectangle of a pit
appeared upon the soil, then two or three steps appeared, followed by
a staircase open to the sky, a door, a narrow passage, and a wall of
rock-work and beaten earth. The seals affixed by the guardians, more
than thirty centuries before, were still intact on the lime-wash.”
Breaking them on January 6, 1907, Mr. Davis and Mr. Weigall penetrated
into a narrow passage, which was almost blocked by two panels of
gilded wood, which had once formed part of a funeral canopy, like that
of Tutankhamen. Wriggling past these with difficulty, they entered a
roughly hewn and quite undecorated chamber, on the floor of which lay
a few earthen pots, some alabaster ornaments, and a number of amulets.
But the sight which arrested the eye was that of the coffin, which,
at the first glance, seemed in the glare of the electric light to be
made of massy gold. “It seemed,” says Maspero, “as if all the gold
of ancient Egypt glittered and gleamed in that narrow space.” The
news of a wonderful discovery of treasure spread far and wide through
the neighbourhood, growing as it spread, till the report had reached
such fabulous proportions that it was necessary to place a guard over
the tomb to prevent an assault. Of course it was more seeming than
reality, for the gold turned out to be mere gold-foil, and the tomb
was in reality singularly poor in objects of value. The coffin had
originally been placed upon a bier of the usual form; but this had
decayed, and the heavy coffin had fallen, and its lid had come off in
the fall, exposing the head and feet of its tenant, from which the
bandages had decayed. The body was wrapped in sheets of gold-foil, and
the inscription on the coffin, worked in semi-precious stones, gave the
title of Akhenaten, “the beautiful child of the Sun.”
Such a discovery was, of course, most unexpected; for Akhenaten had
made his capital, not at Thebes, which he hated, but at Tell el-Amarna,
where he had declared his intention to be buried, and where his tomb
was known. Besides, the inscription on the funeral canopy stated that
Akhenaten had made it for his mother Queen Tiy. The explorers therefore
concluded that they had indeed discovered the tomb, part of the funeral
furniture, and the skeleton (it cannot be called a mummy) of Queen Tiy,
and in this belief they sent the broken fragments of the skeleton to
Professor Elliot Smith for examination, only to be informed by him that
what they had sent was not the body of an old woman, but of a young
man, who, if normal, which was doubtful, could not have been much older
than twenty-six when he died. There seems in fact to be little doubt
that the skeleton which was discovered in the tomb of Tiy was that of
the man whose action in one direction and inaction in another changed
the destiny of the ancient world in one of the most critical periods of
its history. Mr. Davis, strange to say, could never bear the idea that
he had found the bones of Akhenaten, though one would have thought that
the discovery of the most pathetic and interesting figure of Egyptian
history would have put the crown on the satisfaction with which he
could justly regard his work. He had set his heart on discovering Queen
Tiy, and to have even her far more famous son substituted for her was a
bitter disappointment to him.
But how came Akhenaten, the heretic king, “that criminal of
Akhetaten,”[1] as the priests of Amen always called him, to be buried,
not in his own heretic capital at Tell el-Amarna, but in orthodox
Thebes, and in his mother’s tomb? There is, of course, no certain
explanation of the facts; but from what is known of the history of
the period an explanation may at least be suggested with a reasonable
amount of confidence that it is not very far from the truth. When
Akhenaten died, his body was no doubt buried at Tell el-Amarna, as
he had decreed. When his son-in-law, Tutankhaten, and his daughter,
Ankh. s. en. pa Aten, found the pressure of circumstances too strong
for them, and were obliged to return to Thebes, to restore the old
religion, and to change their names to Tutankhamen and Ankh. s. en.
Amen, they carried with them, doubtless, the body of the reformer,
still revered and beloved, and gave it honourable burial in the tomb
of Tiy--the most fitting place, since no royal tomb could have been
prepared in Thebes. But as time went on, the reactionary priests of
Amen became more and more the dominant element in the kingdom, and
they had none of the chivalrous spirit which prompted Charles V’s “I
war not with the dead,” at the tomb of Luther. The only way in which
they could strike at the dead heretic was also, to an Egyptian mind,
the most certain and the most deadly; they could destroy his hopes of
immortality by desecrating his tomb, and blotting out his name from
it. So the body of Queen Tiy was removed from the tomb which had been
polluted by the presence of her son, his name was erased from the
inscriptions, and the entrance of the tomb was blocked with stones and
sealed with the seal of Tutankhamen. Then the body of “the world’s
first great idealist and the world’s first _individual_” was left in
solitude, and, as his enemies fondly believed, in eternal oblivion and
shame, to await its resurrection, thirty centuries later, at the hands
of a generation which has at least learned to appreciate and to honour
the ideals for which he sacrificed so much.
[1] Akhetaten, the town created by Akhenaten, the man.
The remarkable success of Mr. Davis in the search for buried royalties
was fittingly crowned a year later by the discovery of the tomb of
Horemheb, the usurping reactionary who had formerly been a general in
the service of Tutankhamen, and who seized the throne after the brief
reigns of Tutankhamen and Ay. The tomb had been plundered and wrecked,
but the beautiful red granite sarcophagus, 8 feet 11 inches in length
by 3 feet 9½ inches in width and 4 feet in depth, was intact. In it
were found the bones of one person, but in such a condition that it
was impossible to determine the sex of the person to whom they had
belonged. In 1906 Mr. Davis made another discovery, this time of
an uninscribed chamber nearly filled with mud. The presence in the
chamber and in the neighbourhood of a number of articles bearing the
names of Tutankhamen and Ankh. s. en. Amen led him to believe that
this was the tomb of Tutankhamen, and the sumptuous volume in which
he published the results of these last two discoveries was therefore
entitled “The Tombs of Harmhabi and Touatankhamanou.” Time and further
investigation have proved that in this respect he was wrong, as also in
the conviction which he expressed in the book that “the Valley of the
Kings is now exhausted.” Another discovery was due sixteen years after
his last find, which was to prove that the Valley yet held treasures
whose beauty and richness could dazzle the world, and make even those
of the tomb of Yuaa seem almost paltry by comparison. Yet the work of
Mr. Davis remains as one of the most remarkable series of successes
which has ever rewarded excavation in Egypt--a fitting prelude to the
great find of November, 1922.