The Shadow King Read Free

gradually forgotten about. Others had been buried by rocks and rubble since ancient Egyptian times, but even they were already looted in antiquity.
    Of the original riches buried with the pharaohs, only a few scraps were left—a damaged stone sarcophagus perhaps, or pieces of pottery and wooden figures. The finest tomb discovered was a series of chambers dug by a Nineteenth-Dynasty ruler called Seti I, entered for the first time in three thousand years by Belzoni in 1817. The walls were covered with brightly colored paintings, while the floor was littered with statues and pieces of broken burial equipment. Belzoni found hundreds of glazed blue figures of the king, the carcass of a bull, and a gorgeous alabaster coffin, which he shipped to London. But even here, the hoped-for treasures were long since gone.
    There were no royal mummies in these tombs either—none of the kings and queens were still to be found in their original resting places. It was assumed they had long ago been destroyed. Egyptologists like the expansive and easygoing Frenchman Gaston Maspero, head of the Bulaq museum, began to doubt that an undisturbed royal burial would ever be found.
    Then in the 1870s, that changed. A series of intriguing antiquities began to appear on the international market. Hundreds of scarabs, statues, and scrolls of papyri from the burials of Twenty-First-Dynasty kings and queens were popping up as far afield as Suez and Syria. To Maspero, the only explanation was that looters had discovered an unspoiled royal tomb or tombs and were gradually pilfering and selling the contents.
    For decades, Egypt had been a kind of lucky dip, a free-for-all treasure-hunters’ paradise where you couldn’t turn around for stumbling over priceless antiquities and there was nothing to stop you from taking home as much as you could carry. Adventurers descended, shipping everything from delicate jewelry to entire monuments home with them to the west. Some of this was done by private individuals, but much was carried out on behalf of governments such as those of Britain and France. The heritage of an entire country was slowly but surely being drained.
    In 1858, the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette had set up Egypt’s antiquities service in an attempt to stamp out the illegal antiquities trade and stem the flow of artifacts abroad. In the spring of 1881, Maspero was appointed his successor, which meant that if ancient royal treasures were being looted and sold, it was his job to stop it. Along with Brugsch, his deputy, Maspero sailed the antiquities service steamboat down the Nile to Luxor, desperate to track down the looters and uncover the lost tomb before its priceless contents were completely gone.
    It wasn’t hard to discover that the main seller of antiquities in the area was a certain Ahmed Abd el-Rassul. He was one of several brothers who lived in Gurna, a village on a hill that forms the south side of Deir el-Bahri. The villagers had intimate knowledge of the tombs in the area—in fact the houses of Gurna were built onto ancient nobles’ tombs, ingeniously using their outer chambers as extra rooms. Many of the inhabitants made a living from selling antiquities they unearthed, but the Abd el-Rassul family, who lived in a particularly extravagant white-painted house, were widely known to be at the center of this illicit trade.
    Maspero interrogated Ahmed on board his steamboat but the Egyptian revealed nothing, so Maspero had him and his brother Hussein arrested and taken to the capital of the province, Kena, to be questioned with rather less compunction by the governor, Daoud Pasha. Despite techniques that ranged from offering bribes to beating the soles of their feet (a torture technique known as bastinado), the brothers staunchly denied all knowledge of looting or tombs. After two months of this, they were provisionally released, and a disappointed Maspero left Luxor, vowing to renew his search the next winter.
    A few weeks later,