Dig days: Treasure without end By Zahi Hawass When I arrived in the Valley of the Kings to see the newly- discovered tomb KV 63, I found there hundreds of people from the media from all over the world. Otto Schaden and I gave interviews about the discovery, but we could not say anything definite. Was it a royal tomb? Or was it a cache of mummies? Many questions were raised on the day of the opening because, in the royal valley, the king or his cook could be buried. It was immediately clear to all of us that the tomb was probably not royal. We could see no sign of a uraeus (royal cobra), no cartouches, nothing that would suggest the presence of a king or queen. When I got back to my hotel I began to reflect that if this were a mummy cache, which is what it most looked like, it could be the fourth such cache to be discovered in the valley (not including the royal cache found at Deir Al-Bahari in the late 1800s). The first cache in the Valley of the Kings was found in 1898 by Victor Loret inside the tomb of Amenhotep II (KV 35). The mummy of the Pharaoh was still inside his sarcophagus, and there were other mummies in the tomb. One, already damaged by ancient tomb robbers and later, in 1901, destroyed by modern vandals, was lying on top of a large model boat in the first columned hall. A number of side chambers opened off the burial chamber. In one, Loret found three anonymous mummies without coffins. Another side chamber, blocked by limestone slabs except for a space in the upper right hand corner, contained nine coffins laid out in two rows. All these coffins contained mummies, eight of which turned out to be Pharaohs of the New Kingdom, including Tuthmosis IV, Amenhotep III, and Merenptah. Loret moved these to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, but left Amenhotep II and the three unidentified mummies in place. Several years later, when Howard Carter was chief inspector of the Luxor area, he moved Amenhotep II to Cairo. The final three mummies are still where they were found, and have long been the subject of heated debate. One is an older woman, perhaps 45 years of age. Many believe that she is Queen Tiye, wife of Amenhotep III and mother of Akhenaten, although it has also been suggested that she is Nefertiti. The second is a boy, perhaps a son of Amenhotep II. The third has been identified by several Egyptologists as Nefertiti. However, a DNA test, although not completely reliable, suggests that this is the mummy of a male. In any event, the person is most probably too young to be Nefertiti, and there are strong Egyptological reasons to suggest that this identification is incorrect. The second cache, discovered by Edward Ayrton and Theodore Davis in 1907, was in tomb KV 55. Inside were artefacts dating to the Amarna Period, and the tomb has thus been dubbed the "Amarna Cache". In the centre of the burial chamber was a coffin containing a mummy, and there is a debate as to whether this is Akhenaten or an ephemeral successor, Smenkhkare. Many scholars believe that the tomb was originally used for Queen Tiye, who might have been moved here from Al-Amarna, and later for the mysterious king found by Ayrton and Davis. The third cache was found in 1908, also by Davis, in the tomb of Horemheb. Only bones and scattered artefacts were left, but some scholars believe that several of the missing New Kingdom Pharaohs, including Horemheb himself, might have been hidden here. We were hoping that when Otto Schaden's team began to open the coffins in KV 63, we would be lucky enough to find more royal mummies, perhaps the lost bodies of Tuthmosis I, Ay, or even Nefertiti. Even if the coffins were empty, perhaps there would be inscriptions or other evidence to show who the original occupants had been -- perhaps the anonymous bodies in the tomb of Amenhotep II had once been stored here, or the child mummy found in the tomb of Tuthmosis IV, or the obese female mummy found in KV 60, a small uninscribed chamber tomb. Perhaps KV 63 would turn out to be a cache of non-royal mummies, people related to one of the kings in the valley, or even the tomb of some royal servants, since the king could bury anyone he wanted here. But KV 63 has now begun to yield its secrets, and the results are surprising... To be continued.
