Valley of the Kings

The Valley of the Kings

The gold funerary mask of the Boy King Tutankhamun

The Entrance to the Valley of the Kings (Wadi Biban el-Muluk)

   A visit to the Valley of the Kings is the trip of a lifetime and of course one has to see the Tomb of the Boy King Tutankhamen. This was the only tomb to be found "virtually" in tact, with very little looting by ancient tomb robbers. The golden artefacts Howard Carter found are just breathtaking. So truly exquisite. A picture is worth a thousand words, so best just look at the thumbnails in the picture section lower down the page.

A bejewelled golden winged Isis from the tomb of the Boy King Tutankhamun

   Tutankhamen is one of the very few pharaohs to be still residing in his burial chamber and his mummy is inside the second coffin which is encased in thick glass for protection. I am delighted to have an autographed photograph of the second coffin when it was opened by my friend Doctor Essayed Hegazi, the Head of Antiquities for Upper Egypt at the time. Over the years the tomb has been shut down at frequent intervals because of the damage done by the bacteria in the damp breath of visitors condensing on the paintings. The spotty patches which can be seen in the burial chamber will eventually destroy the reliefs completely unless a permanent cure can be found, and at present all that can be done is to give the tomb a chance to dry out for a while by closing it to visitors. Should the tomb be closed there is a vast selection of other tombs which are well worth the visit.

   The first thing I notice, however, is that 20 years ago a visit to 3 tombs in the Valley cost about £1.00, whereas nowadays the price is more like £9.00, but there have been vast improvements and they have to be paid for.

   In the old days there was a cafe/gift shop directly opposite Tutankhamen's Tomb with toilets and an open air veranda where one could sit in the shade. All very nice and convenient except ... the sewage from the toilets ran through fractured underground pipes and leaked out into a very absorbent shale band and thence into the tombs, for a considerable distance around, which caused cracks and all sorts of other damage before a decision was made to close the cafe and move the whole facility some quarter mile down the valley well away from any tombs. Now one can ride the Disney style electric train from the new facility up to the entrance gates. This seems to have sorted the problem for now, but some fallen ceilings and other wall paintings can never be replaced, and let's face it, they are unique.

   Nowadays, there is a splendid 3-D map of the tombs in the Valley, cast in clear glass so one can see the intricate way in which the tunnels run in all directions, barely missing one another in some places. Looking under the map they appear to be floating in space, but I couldn't get a decent photograph.

The wall paintings in the Valley tombs are magnificent - worthy of a king.

Click on the picture to see Wall Paintings from the Book of the Dead and Elysian Fields

The goddess Isis in the tomb of Seti I as found by Belzoni

All the tombs in the Valley are worth a visit, it is not true that if you have seen one then you have seen them all, every tomb is an original with its own unique designs, although they are all designed to do the same thing, protect the king's body for eternity and help his spirit journey on to his brother gods.

One of my favourites is that of Merenptah, the 14th son of Ramesses II. This is a quiet tomb, seldom visited and should you be on your own, like I prefer to visit them, then the guard seldom bothers to accompany you into the tomb, so you can take a few forbidden pictures. There is a possibility that flash photography may damage the wall paintings but videos seem to do no harm at all, and video cameras seem to take still pictures very well in the gloom of the tomb, some pictures are a little colourless but this is easily corrected by Adobe or similar software which brings back the vividness of the original colours.

There is a magnificent sarcophagus in the lower burial chamber.

     The tomb of Merenptah proves beyond doubt that the tombs were carved by the hand of man and not by some alien culture from outer space. The Lime stones often contain variable amounts of silica in the form of chert or flint, and in the Valley of the Kings these chert nodules concentrate around the tombs of Merenptah and Ramesses II. It is thought that the king originally intended to be buried in the upper chambers but as they were excavated the workers uncovered this huge chert nodule in the upper left wall and ceiling. This nodule is huge, black and rounded, weighs several tons, and stands out like a sore thumb, but as the Ancient Egyptian workers had only chert tools to work with they were powerless to make any impression on this grand-daddy of all chert nodules. I spent several years in the geology/gemstone business and I have never seen a nodule of this size. This is the same hard sharp material that they used for their knives and arrowheads, the same as I had found in the hills above the tombs, but a million times larger than this arrowhead.

                              See Out and About in the Mountains.

So, with the same aplomb as when they abandoned the unfinished obelisk, because it was cracked, they simply chose to ignore this "thorn" in their side and continued to dig downwards into the present day burial chamber.

   Any aliens would have had no such problem, would they? The next recommended trip is the Tomb of Ramesses III, plenty of variety and some fine wall paintings from the Book of the Dead, followed by a visit to the

Ground plan of the tomb of Ramesses III

KV34 tomb which is reached by climbing up the very steep staircase in the dry river bed of the wadi Biban el-Muluk, the old name for the Valley of the Kings.

Climbing up the steep staircase in the wadi Biban el-Muluk to KV34

Tomb KV34, Tuthmosis III, has glass panels to protect the wall reliefs from the fingers of curious tourists who just can't resist touching the paintings. Those paintings that are not protected have already been almost entirely worn away.

Glass panels to protect the wall reliefs in tomb KV34

   There is an abundance of tombs in the Valley and, of course, there are those who said they had all been found, and there was nothing new left to find. How wrong they were. Kent Weeks re-entered the lost tomb KV5 and over a few months of hard work it proved to be the largest tomb complex in the Valley, the tombs of the sons of Ramesses the Great. A couple of years back another find in the Valley floor only 14 metres from the Tomb of Tutankhamun revealed another new tomb KV63, with mummy cases, one golden case for a child.
   No visit to the Valley is complete without seeing the tomb of Set I, although this is not always open as the sewage leakage from the old cafe caused considerable damage and the ceiling fell down in the burial chamber.

KV Picture Show

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The Mysterious Tunnel

in the Tomb of Seti I

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    We were sitting in the shade of the Ramesseum Cafe, on the West Bank drinking mint tea, when Farrag, my antiquities dealer friend, enquired if I knew the old gentleman sat at the next table, and introduced me to the legendary Sheikh Ali Abdel Rassoul, who knew the local tombs like the back of his hand.

       Sheikh Ali was the last living descendant of the famous Abdel-Rassoul family of the village of Gurna, who were the notorious tomb robbers in the Theban necropolis who first found tomb DB320, and it was their attempts to sell off objects from the mummy cache inside it that alerted the Antiquities Service to the existence of this priceless archaeological treasure.

     I didn't appreciated it at the time but Sheikh Ali had befriended Zahi Hawass some ten years earlier, and had take him under his wing, and had inspired the young archaeologist with an Indiana Jones type tale of a secret tunnel in the tomb of Seti I that may lead to the real, as yet undiscovered, burial chamber.

   Sheikh Ali told the young Zahi that he knew that he would be an important and influential Egyptologist one day so he decided to take him to the tomb of Seti I, one of the most beautiful in the entire Valley of the Kings, and tell him about its greatest secret. He took him to a tunnel that extends downward from the king’s burial chamber, and explained to him how he had explored it to a depth of around 136 meters, farther than any archaeologist had gone up to that point. He had been excavating with the permission of the Antiquities Service, but this permission was revoked after only a few months, and he was unable to go any farther. Sheikh Ali told Zahi that when he became a great archaeologist, he should come back to the tomb and find out what lay at the end of this tunnel - he believed that it would be the true burial chamber of the king, hidden away behind a false burial chamber to protect it from robbers.
   When Zahi Hawass became the Head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, he decided that he would do just that and would explore this tunnel for himself.

Zahi Hawass with his team in the Valley of the Kings

   In 2003, Zahi entered the tunnel for the first time. He attached himself to a thick rope for safety, and a light was set up so that he could see. None of the other tombs in the Valley of the Kings has such a tunnel, and Egyptologists have not been able to explain exactly what it is or why it is there. Some have suggested that it is symbolic, and leads down into the underworld, where the king’s soul would join with the ruler of the dead, the god Osiris, so that he could be resurrected. But why is he the only king to have this?

   Zahi descended down a gentle slope, but at the 252-foot mark, he decided it was far too dangerous to continue. Rock was falling, and the tunnel was clearly unstable. It was also becoming narrower, and he knew that he would have to do serious work to make the tunnel safe before he could explore further.
   A steel reinforcement structure supported the ceiling of the tunnel, and his team began clearing the tunnel in 2007. It was very unsound structurally, and the rock of the ceiling was very fragile. It crumbled easily and there was always a risk that a chunk of stone would fall from it. Once, just such a chunk of stone fell on his foot when he was supervising work in the tunnel. It broke his toe, which was very painful, but he kept right on working. Because the tunnel is so dangerous and fragile, he knew that we had to shore it up it as we worked.

He brought in an expert in soil mechanics to work with his team, as well as engineers to construct steel reinforcement structures at appropriate intervals to reinforce the walls and ceilings.

Scaffolding in the tunnel to support the crumbling rock

The quality of this work is truly remarkable, and he is very pleased with the results of his team’s efforts - we are now able to work in relative safety in this challenging space. It is truly amazing to watch the team as they use an electric winch to bring up a cart on rails to the surface, carrying each load of debris from inside the shaft. Interestingly, we have found a few small artefacts in the rubble filling the shaft, including two 19th Dynasty shabtis, and fragments of stone inscribed with the king’s name.
   They have constructed a wooden staircase to make it easier to work inside the tunnel, but in the floor, one is able to see the original limestone stairs that descend into the cliff. After a depth of 65 meters, Sheikh Ali lost the real path of the tunnel and began to dig through the bedrock itself, so losing the original roof, and making the place very unstable.

The original wooden beams of Sheikh Ali Abdel-Rassoul

   The team, which works under the supervision of Zahi Hawass, is headed by Dr. Tarek El Awady. To date, they have cleared about 40 meters (120 feet) of the tunnel. The results are intriguing: among the finds are a number of non-royal New Kingdom shabtis, dating to near the reign of Seti I. Hopefully they will soon be able to reveal the final mysteries of the tomb of Seti I, but not quite yet. Work continues into 2009.

           (Extracts from the diary of Dr Zahi Hawass, Head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities)

     From personal experience, as a crazy potholer in my youth, I would rather be back down under on the infamous Great Rubble Heap in Spectacle Pot than scrambling on the weatherworn crumbling cliffs of the Valley or scratching around down a man-made tunnel which has been crumbling away for the last 3,500 years. The crumbly rock is very unpredictable, breaking away without warning, and is responsible for many deaths in the Valley and surrounding mountains. I was at Hatchepsut's Temple in Deir el-Bahri one day when a German tourist who was venturing too far forward on the rim of the high cliffs lost his foothold and plunged head first some 150 feet into the temple.

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So what did you find in the valley then?

     You know by now that I am only happy when I find an artefact, no matter how small, to give me some contact with the ancient civilization, and this is my find from the Valley of the Kings when I went looking for the boy king.

   A small pottery shard with a single straight line cut into the clay. What the rest of the inscription was, well we may never know, but Tutankhamun's name in hieroglyphics has three straight vertical lines, l l l , two of which would have been to the left of this line, if this fragment was in fact part of Tutankhamun's name ... and why not ? ... LOL

   I can only give a small taste of what the Valley has to offer, to do it justice would require more data storage space than all of our computers put together. All I can suggest is for you to visit it, several times, once is just not enough.

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