Beneath the Sands of Egypt Read Free

by the workmen when making the tomb of Ment-hi-khopesh-ef. The portion of the coffin containing the mummy had been stripped of itsouter moulding, possibly on account of its being gilded, and the only inscription of value that could be made out was the following name and title: the royal nurse, In. Mr. Newberry was present at the opening, and he thinks that possibly these were the mummies of the nurses of Thouthmes IV. I reclosed the tomb, only removing the geese. *
    In retrospect the description of the tomb would seem sufficient to cause any modern archaeologist a major twinge of excitement, yet Carter’s comments suggest almost a casual disinterest in this remarkable discovery. The tomb description appears as a couple of paragraphs in a lengthy article in which Carter describes his work in Upper Egypt for the years 1902–3. During that time he also excavated at the mortuary temple of Rameses II (“the Ramesseum”), inspected the work of various archaeologists, made repairs to temples, excavated the dangerous tomb of Thutmose I and Hatshepsut in the Valley of the Kings, discovered the marvelous royal tomb of Thutmose IV, and oh, yes, an undecorated tomb of minor interest in the vicinity containing two female mummies.
    Carter, at the time, had been contracted to do some archaeological work for the eccentric American millionaire Theodore Davis. Davis, an amateur archaeologist, hired Carter to conduct excavations on his behalf in the Valley of the Kings. Davis had the concession to dig wherever he chose in the sacred valley, and despite his armchair background he was exceedingly successful in uncovering some wonderfully provocative tombs. He was also responsible for finding a cache of embalming materials belonging to a then-obscurepharaoh named Tutankhamun, a discovery that provided evidence that the king’s burial was yet to be found somewhere in the valley. When a small tomb was discovered in 1907, Davis concluded that this must be the woefully robbed tomb of the little-known king and moved on, although Carter himself remained skeptical.
    If Howard Carter’s notes regarding KV 60 are brief, Theodore Davis himself has even less to say about the experience: “During the season of 1904–5, Mr. Carter, while excavating for Mr. Davis, dug a trench across the entrance to this tomb, and discovered a tomb of the XVIIIth Dynasty, over which the tomb of Mentuherkhepshef had been cut. This earlier burial he found to contain the mummies of two women. The tomb had been plundered and contained nothing of interest.”
    The words “nothing of interest” certainly confirm the early-twentieth-century attitude about these smaller tombs, an attitude so blasé that the wrong year was given in Davis’s description of the find.
    Just a month or two before he encountered Tomb 60, Howard Carter discovered in the same vicinity the large, decorated, and looted tomb of the great Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh Thutmose IV. In fact, an old rope, likely used by robbers three thousand years ago, was found tied to a pillar in order to facilitate the crossing of a deep shaft, and a large ancient cursive graffito records an inspection of the tomb after the robbery. Though the tomb was robbed in antiquity, there was an impressive residual collection of battered burial debris found along with the pharaoh’s magnificent stone sarcophagus, sans mummy, that dominated the spacious burial chamber.
    Given the prevailing outlook of the day and the continual search for more “significant” discoveries, it is not surprising that Tomb 60 drifted quickly into obscurity. Carter closed the tomb, probably filling it with the debris of continuing excavations, butits history was far from over. The tomb was likely entered three years later, in 1906, by another excavator, Edward Ayrton, while he was in the process of excavating KV 19. We know of this visit only indirectly, through a handwritten notation in the Egyptian