In the Valley of the Kings

by Daniel Meyerson

  Their very un-Egyptian appearance must have caused a stir as they made their way from the quay to the Great Palace: their long, flowing hair, their curled, perfumed beards, and the rich, heavy Assyrian state robes worn on such occasions.

  The chief among them had the letter-tablet tied around his neck, its baked clay envelope stamped with the heavy royal seal.

  They were kept waiting in the palace’s open courtyard. Enormous gilded pillars in the shape of papyrus stalks rose on all sides, their bud capitals opening to the sun that beat down on the Assyrian messengers. They stood amid the gifts accompanying their king’s letter: exotic animals and gold vessels filled with perfumes; chariots, horses, and slaves, all duly recorded by pharaoh’s scribes.

  What the message contained, we do not know. But what happened, now we know from the next letter Asshurbalit sends. Pharaoh had told the messengers to wait, and they obeyed. How long—one day? two? three? We can almost see them standing in the splendid courtyard, surrounded by their rich gifts, as one by one they stagger in their state robes, fall to their knees, and die.

  Perplexed and offended, the Assyrian king wrote: “If staying out in the sun means profit for the pharaoh, then let my messenger stand in the sun till he dies. But there must be a profit to the king. Otherwise, why should he die in the sun?”

  But this letter was ignored as well; for pharaoh, indifferent to politics, was obsessed by his great discovery—that there was only one God.

  As Carter sat eavesdropping on the ancient voices, one wonders whether he was struck by the strangeness of his life. Only a little more than a year before, he was trudging through the English countryside, hustling to earn a living with his sketches of pet parrots and horses and dogs. And now the ancient world surrounded him; its rich fabric of human contradictions had become the subject of his waking hours, his preoccupation, and his passion.

  But it was impossible to know Carter’s thoughts at this moment. Whatever they were, he kept them to himself. As Petrie later said, looking back on their time together at Amarna, “I little thought how much he would be able to accomplish.”

  1* To recap: Tomb #55 was the unusual Valley of the Kings tomb in which a hurried reburial took place—actually, a double reburial. Two royals were brought here from Amarna. Presumably, these reburials occurred when Amarna was abandoned by the new pharaoh, Tut, who brought his relatives’ mummies back to the traditional burying place.

  Queen Tiye, Akhenaten’s mother and Tut’s grandmother, was one of the burials. The second is more problematic. Who is the young man in the gorgeously inlaid coffin with half the face mask ripped off and its identifying names defaced? That is the question. Could it be Tut’s father, Akhenaten? Could it be his father’s short-lived successor, Smenka’are, Tut’s brother?

  At this point, before the discovery of Tut’s tomb, if it can be established that Tut reinterred his father, Akhenaten, or his brother, Smenka’are, in tomb #55 in the Valley of the Kings, then it would be likely that Tut’s own tomb would be nearby. Which turned out to be the case. Tut’s tomb was found a few steps from KV #55.

  For a more detailed description of tomb #55, see Queen Tiye in the “cast of characters,” chapter 6.

  PREVIOUS PAGE: Funerary temple of Queen Hatshepsut, Thebes.

  UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

  1904

  Cairo

  AS THE SUN SET OVER THE NILE AND THE CALL TO PRAYER WAS heard from a thousand mosques, guests arrived for a dinner party at the British Residence, an elegantly tailored Carter among them. He was older than when we last saw him. His mustache was thicker, his hair thinned, his body filled out, and he was dressed for the part he had been playing for the last few years: chief inspector of the Service des Antiquités for Upper Egypt—that is, he was wearing white gloves and a tasseled fez, the standard turnout for an official of the Ottoman Empire, or “the Sublime Porte,” as Turkey was then called.

  For confusingly enough, at this time Egypt was an Ottoman province, though in fact the British ruled here. Not directly—nothing was that simple in Egypt. No, British decrees were issued in the name of Egypt’s king, or khedive (another anomaly: The title is Persian)—Abbas Hilmi II, who ruled at the pleasure of the Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid.

  But if Chief Inspector Carter was thus somehow in the Turkish civil service (as his fez proclaimed), his appointment had been made not by the Egyptian king; and not by the British viceroy; and not by the Turkish sultan or his bankers or eunuch—but by a Frenchman. For in deference to French influence in Egypt, it had been settled that the director of the Service des Antiquités must always be a Frenchman.

  Which is Ummi Dunya Masr for you—Egypt, Mother of the World, as her children call her. Her history has more twists and turns than one of the khedive’s belly dancers. The country’s identity is fractured, its memory long, its political processes subtle and indirect—too subtle and too indirect, as it will turn out, for the blunt, politically unsophisticated Carter.

  He had achieved much since his apprenticeship with Petrie in 1893, and his hard work and many discoveries earned him the inspectorate of Upper (that is, southern) Egypt, where some of the most important archaeological work in the world was being carried out. But his success had come at a price. His life had been too one-sided; he had descended into those tombs of his for twelve years, to come forth, Lazarus-like, chief inspector at a stylish dinner party, proper and dignified—but with a streak of craziness just under the surface … an intense, driven quality that had made him and would soon be his undoing.

  But what did it matter? Though disgrace was waiting just around the corner for the white-gloved Carter, though he would lose his position and have to turn in his fez, he had already accomplished more than most in Egypt, leaving his mark in almost every royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings.

  He could tell many stories as he dined at the residence, although he didn’t, being by nature silent and reticent. Instead he listened to his dinner companion, a young woman who must have been vague about his identity. Enthusiastically, she told him about the discovery of Thutmosis IV’s tomb—a “thrilling experience” at which she was present: A pair of white horses were used to drag Thutmosis’s chariot from belowground.

  To which Carter responded ironically, “Indeed!” as word went round that the cook had just collapsed with cholera (causing the guests to skip straight to dessert, Um Ali from the famous Groppi’s).

  Irony-proof, Carter’s companion went on about her experiences,and for once Carter restrained himself. Perhaps the absurdity of the situation amused rather than offended him. For he had spent much time in Thutmosis’s tomb, taking special pains over that same fragile chariot “dragged out by white horses.” He had managed to rescue its body intact, preserving the intricate battle scenes molded on its sides.

  The tomb was an important one for him. It strengthened his hand, giving him more archaeological authority and reputation; and it taught him to trust his instincts when wandering among the boulders and limestone chips, deciding where to dig. He described its discovery at length in his unfinished autobiography, in one of the fragmentary sketches: “A few eroded steps led down to the entrance doorway partially blocked with stones. We [Carter and his reis] crept under its lintel into a steep descending corridor that penetrated into the heart of the rock. As we slithered down the mass of debris that encumbered this corridor, the stones underfoot rolled with a hollow rumbling sound, echoed, re-echoed, in the depths of the tomb.

  “At the end of this corridor we came to a steep flight of steps with a shallow recess on either side. These steps, sixteen in number, led down to another descending corridor which brought us to the brink of a large gaping well [an ancient protective device, common to Eighteenth Dynasty tombs]. We looked down into the dusky space. At the edge of this abyss we waited until our eyes became more accustomed to the dim light of our candles, and then we realized in the gloom that the upper part of the walls of this well were elaborately sculpted and painted. The scen
es represented the Pharaoh Thutmosis IV standing before various gods and goddesses of the Netherworld….

  “As we stood on the edge of the well we could see the [door] in the opposite wall, wide open. Just as the last dynastic [ancient] tomb robbers had left it. Dangling from it and reaching to the bottom of the well was a stout palm fiber rope which the last intruders employed when they quitted the tomb proper. It had kept this attitude for more than three thousand years.”

  With rope of their own, they crossed the deep well and made their way through long corridors, finally reaching the pillared burial chamber. However, it was empty. Thutmosis’s body was no longer in the tomb, having been removed and hidden elsewhere in the Valley. But a prince remained—rather, his unwrapped mummy remained—a naked boy leaning against the wall, his stomach ripped open by ancient thieves searching for plunder.

  Strangely enough, a graffito near the despoiled prince would later become part of the legal battle over Tut’s treasures. In black ink, an ancient priest had written that the burial of Thutmosis IV was “renewed” (whehem) in year 8 of Horemheb—meaning that robbers had broken into Thutmosis’s tomb, which was then set in order, purified, and resealed during Horemheb’s reign. Lawyers for both sides in the Tut case, the Egyptian government and the Carnarvon estate, would cite the inscription as they argued a key issue: What constitutes an intact royal tomb? In fact, as the bitter fight over who got what from Tut’s tomb heated up, all kinds of ancient evidence and sepulchral analogies were dragged in, though the real issue—Egypt’s political reawakening—would decide the matter.

  But though that fight was still in the future, its seeds were being sown right now. The signs were there for anyone to see. When in 1899 thirteen royal mummies were discovered in Amenhotep II’s tomb, they could not be shipped down the Nile as the earlier DB tomb #320 cache had been. Orders came to keep the mummies in the tomb—where they would remain until some years later. The government understood that just such a spectacle, Egypt’s ancient kings in the hands of foreigners, would set off a riot or worse—an outright rebellion like the one in the Sudan.

  “Would that Egypt had no antiquities!” exclaimed the exasperated British viceroy, Lord Cromer. However, Egypt did have antiquities, and a stubborn inspector of these antiquities who would soon cause the viceroy some of his worst headaches.

  But just now, Carter was oblivious to anything but his tombs. If we are political animals, as Aristotle observed, if the human being who lives alone is either a beast or a god, then Carter was both. Daily he wandered in the desert, exploring what had become his home, the Valley of the Kings, or “the Great Place,” as the priests of Amun called it—a barren stretch of land where for five hundred years Egypt’s pharaohs were buried together with everything they had loved in this life or might need in the next: their pets and perfumes, their chariots and boats, their leather loincloths and their linen underwear, and, of course, their gold.

  The Valley of the Kings is located in the desert, to the west of the Nile. To the east of the river is Egypt’s ancient southern capital known as Wast to the Egyptians and Thebes to the Greeks (the “hundred-gated Thebes” had been in existence for more than a thousand years by the time Homer sang of its glory).

  Despite the location’s fame, by medieval times both splendid Thebes and the mysterious Valley of the Kings were forgotten. The early Christians living in Egypt had no interest in its ancient monuments and tombs; nor did the Arabs who swept into Egypt in AD 642.

  A handful of solitary European travelers passed through the region in the 1600s without any idea of the Valley’s history. The first to connect the place with its ancient associations was Father Claude Sicard, a French Jesuit priest living in Cairo. In 1707, he made the difficult and dangerous journey south in a quest to collect antiquities at the order of the dauphin. Throughout the century, several other Europeans visited the Valley, recording their impressions of the approximately eleven royal tombs then lying open, some since antiquity.

  One can get a sense of how difficult it was for a European to visit the Valley of the Kings from the memoirs of the Scotsman James Bruce, who attempted to see the tombs in 1768 on his way to Ethiopia. Leaving his boat moored in the Nile and taking along sketching materials, Bruce engaged guides to lead him to the desert valley. The plan was for him to be quickly taken through a few of the tombs’ large, rock-cut chambers. But Bruce was entranced by the tomb of Ramesses III and insisted on drawing the blind harpists painted on its walls.

  His terrified guides urged him to leave. The longer they stayed, the greater the danger from the bandits and cutthroats inhabiting the desert cliffs. But Bruce stubbornly continued to draw until his guides threw their torches to the ground, giving him the choice between staying in the dark and following them back.

  Their urgency was well timed, for word had gotten out that a foreigner was in the tombs. As Bruce mounted his horse, large stones were rolled down toward him from the mountainsides. Defending himself, he wrote that “I took my servant’s blunderbuss and discharged it where I heard the howl, and a violent confusion of tongues followed.”

  He escaped with his marvelous (though inaccurate) drawings of the harpists, which created a sensation in Europe and caused the tomb of Ramesses III (KV #11) to be known forever after as “Bruce’s tomb.”

  With Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1799 and the two-year occupation of the French, the Valley of the Kings was visited by the scholars Napoleon had brought along to make a thorough study of the country (resulting in the monumental twenty-one-volume Description of Egypt). The Baron de Denon, one of the expedition’s artists, accompanied the army south, where he sketched as many as he could of the Valley’s tombs. But he had to work almost as hurriedly as Bruce, and under conditions equally dangerous (feeling was strong against the infidel invaders, though the Mamluk regime that Napoleon had swept away was backward, oppressive, and cruel).

  After the French occupation was over, foreigners had a better time of it in the Valley. The Albanian adventurer Mohammed Ali, who ruled Egypt in the name of the sultan, counted on Europeans to help him modernize the country, and he saw to it that they were well protected.

  Perhaps too well protected, for Mohammed Ali cared so little about the ruins and monuments that he would have quarried the pyramids to build factories if it had been practical (a scheme he actually considered). Foreign consuls shipped colossal statues and boxes of tomb friezes back to Europe, where they found their way into collections such as that of the Louvre or the British Museum. It was only with the creation of the Egyptian Antiquities Service in 1858 that the Valley’s tombs began to be protected and preserved and that foreign excavators digging in the Valley found themselves regulated by Egyptian law.

  Carter had come to the Valley directly from his work with Petrie at Amarna in 1893—or rather, almost directly, after a few months in the north. But this interlude at Timai al Amdid proved to be irrelevant to him, something of a farce. Almost everything went wrong. It rained incessantly. The excavation permits never got issued. And Carter’s co-worker was a young athlete just arrived from England with barbells, a horizontal bar—and a nervous system totally unsuited to life on a lonely, windswept desert mound.

  They were supposed to retrieve a Ptolemaic library, but, as Carter remembered, “the rain made it impracticable to extricate anything of the nature of burnt papyri from under masses of mud bricks and earth now sodden with water. This inclement weather terminated in a tempestuous night, the force of which caused our tents to collapse and expose us to the elements, like wet and bedraggled crows. Upon this, my esteemed assistant began to weep profusely. So I hastily packed up….”

  To unpack again … where? The directors of the Egyptian Exploration Fund hesitated. Petrie had reported that Carter’s work had been satisfactory—high praise from such an exacting man. But other candidates had been proposed for the important assignment they considered giving him—candidates who, after all, were gentlemen. For a few months he was employed on minor tasks
, sent back and forth between sites in Middle Egypt.

  Then the good news came: He had been chosen to assist Édouard Naville at Deir el-Bahri, the site of Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple (1490 BC). It was perhaps the most beautiful building in Egypt, certainly the most dramatic in its setting. Three perfectly proportioned terraces, one on top of another, rose against the towering, reddish cliffs surrounding the temple in a semicircle. And just on the other side of these cliffs—an hour’s hike over steep footpaths—was the Valley of the Kings.

  He arrived in Luxor by the newly introduced “screeching train,” as Carter called it in a letter home, admiring the speed with which the trip could be made from Cairo: a single long day’s journey rather than the three weeks it would take by faluka, or sailboat, sometimes lengthened by contrary winds.

  Naville had sent his reis to meet him. In a calèche jingling with little metal hands against the evil eye, they drove through the town with its dusty streets; its shabby buildings and crowded bazaars; its smoke-filled water-pipe cafés, where Carter, unlike his European colleagues, would spend many hours. Here, he listened to the storytellers (even translating some of their tales) and paid close attention to the gossip—often empty rumors, sometimes valuable information, but focused always on one subject: the tombs, the digs, what had been found, and by whom.

  The ferry across the Nile here was just beneath the ancient temple that dominated the city; but Carter had no time to visit it since he had to get onto a boat so crowded, it seemed likely to sink. Word had gotten out that Naville’s excavation would be a large one, and desperate fellahin had shown up from far and near. The crops had been poor; overirrigation had led to a rise in the water table; there had been locust plagues and pest infestations—one disaster after another had brought them here, looking for work.

  Making his way among them, Carter crossed the Nile and then rode out past the Memnon colossi to the desert. The whole area where he had come to live was like a huge Casino of Tombs. Over the years, many treasures had been unearthed here—and for sure, more remained to be discovered. Where? Almost anywhere—“in the innermost recesses,” Carter noted, “in clefts and crevices, some [tombs] being cut high up in the rock faces of perpendicular cliffs.” It was a place where one could dig for years and find nothing. Or else one could suddenly turn up, at the first lucky swing of a pickax, the burials of hundreds of ancient priests (the Bab el Gasus), together with their grave goods.