The Murder of Cleopatra Read Free Page B

of the Kings, just east of the famous sites of Luxor and Karnak in Upper Egypt, an overnight trip by train straight south along the Nile River. The Valley of the Kings was on the West Bank of the Nile, a quick ferry ride from Luxor and twenty minutes into the desert by van. The site itself is rather unspectacular, just a drab entrance, a bunch of dirt hills with holes in them looming up behind it. It seems a rather odd setting for kings to be buried, but apparently at least sixty-three tombs were built to house the royals for eternity, so they had little issue with their finery being confined to burial chambers and elaborately decorated corridors hidden under the dirt rather than some large memorial seen from above the surface. The tombs were built in the Eighteenth Dynasty, and the pharaohs who would eventually be buried in them hoped to protect them from grave robbers, a centuries-old problem for royal Egyptian tombs built earlier. Considering the plundering of so many of these tombs not too long after the kings were ensconced in them, that wish did not exactly pan out over time; criminals always seem to find a way to break into wherever massive wealth is stored. 3
    I visited a half dozen of the tombs, including the small tomb of the boy-king Tutankhamen, the least interesting of them all in spite of the twenty-dollar charge. However, for the pleasure of saying one had been in King Tut’s burial chamber and of seeing his mummy, it was oddly worth the expense. It was also quite thrilling to have been there and then to later go to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and view King Tut’s beautiful coffin and spectacular golden funerary mask inlaid with jewels, along with a supposed seventeen hundred items that were removed from his tomb; having been in the tomb made the museum experience more meaningful. And, like Tut’s tomb, none of the other Valley of the Kings tombs retained any treasures, but their walls are covered with fabulous reliefs in many colors.
    All these tombs were reached by descending a very long corridor into the earth until one came into a rectangular compartment (with the exception of King Tut’s chamber, which was quite close to ground level). I noted during my visit to each chamber that all the edges of floors, walls, and ceilings inside the tomb were aligned perfectly, with no cracks or separating seams or holes. The burial chamber itself was quite small, providing only for the deceased in its coffin and a space to move around the platform upon which it rested with its mummy inside. There are some tombs that are larger, but, in general, the tomb was meant for one body to be ensconced in the chamber along with a pile of expensive possessions to keep the pharaoh company on his journey into the next world. Once the body was interred in the tomb along with the requisite royal treasures, the door was sealed and no one entered again. There was hardly a need to have a massive room for a corpse that was not going to be getting up and strolling about. If one were alive and spending any amount of time in the tomb, the only thought going through one’s head would be to notice how stifling it was and to question how soon one could get out.
    Now, I stood in front of the Bent Pyramid at Dashur, theorized to be second of King Sneferu’s attempts at pyramid building. His first is believed to be the “Collapsed Pyramid,” on the outskirts of Fayoum at the village of Maidum. That pyramid was built like the earliest ones, a step pyramid with simple layers of massive stone like the one built at Saqqara in the Third Dynasty. Each pyramid had four or six huge stone terraces, each of which was smaller than the one below it. But the Collapsed Pyramid was modified. It was encased with an outer shell of white limestone blocks to beautify the exterior and make it a true pyramid (with flat sides). Unfortunately, it was badly designed and fell down from the stresses of the poorly planned structural addition.