The Daughters of Nefertiti

Valley of the Kings tomb KV63 was discovered quite by accident in 2005 by a team directed by Dr. Otto Schaden working on the tomb of Amenmesse inside and around the entrance of that king's tomb, KV10. As debris was being removed from in front of the tomb, ancient workmen's huts were found, and below a lip carved into the bedrock was revealed. The lip turned out to be the mouth of a shaft which descended five meters, revealing a stone-built door in one wall.

A few stones were taken from the top of the door, revealing for the first time in more than three thousand years a small room containing many large white pots and, at the back of the room, seven black resin-covered coffins, some with yellow faces, indicating that those coffins were finished for women. There was hope that the world of ancient Egypt was about to present several historical personages in the parched flesh.

Unfortunately, no mummies were found except for a shadow of where a mummy had left its impression at the bottom of a coffin. The tomb was, in reality, a mortuary dump of likely sacred leftovers of the mummification and reburial rites of perhaps a number of people. A clay seal was also found containing 'pa-aten', which may be part of Tutankhamun's wife Queen Ankhesenamun's Atonist name, Ankhesenpaaten.

The jars contained refuse, including a funerary bed taken apart and placed in one of them. Used natron and bits of human flesh along with the remains of a funerary repast that included floral collars worn by the attendants of a long-forgotten funeral. The storeroom KV63 lies near KV62, with the contents of both tombs from the reign of Tutankhamun, and more closely to the end of the Amarna heresy.  If the seal is correct and does represent Tutankhamun's queen, then some of the debris may have come from Ankhesenamun's mummification and funeral, suggesting that her death may have come quite quickly after Tutankhamun, perhaps for treason. If we are to believe it was Ankhesenamun who was writing to a foreign king for one of his sons, so she could make him king, rather than have herself married to a servant.

It is unknown what the circumstances were during the evacuation of the royal tomb at Akhetaton and the condition of the royal family's mummies by the time they were removed from the tomb. Judging by the king discovered in Valley of the Kings tomb KV55, which appeared to be disheveled yet still wrapped when found. This may be a good sign for the royal mummies theorized as hidden behind the walls of Tutankhamun's tomb.

It must be observed, however, that the accouterments found on the KV55 king were in no way equally as abundant as those found on Tutankhamun. This may suggest that the mummy in question might well have been found after a robbery of the royal tomb and had been re-wrapped. This leaves open the possibility that the Amarna tomb was robbed before the move to Thebes and that those members of the family that were buried there, such as King Akhenaton and Smenkhkare, Queen Tiye, Nefertiti, and possibly Nefertiti's oldest daughter Meritaton, as well as Princess Meketato,n had all been through at least one violent robbery before the transfer to Thebes.

The assortment of coffins found at the back of tomb KV63 looked humble enough, though they were finely made. Could the Amarna dead have been transported in these simple coffins, as some of the royal mummies from Amarna may no longer have had coffins left by the time the robbery was discovered? The occupants moved along with Akhenaton in his badly damaged and unwanted female royal coffin converted for his burial. More importantly, sending the disgraced king back to Thebes in this converted coffin of a woman may have had meaning to all those who saw the display and knew who was in the coffin.

 The idea that the coffins in KV63 came into the valley containing the unwanted mortuary material seems unreasonable. This material would likely have been part of the funerary arrangements for the daughters of Akhenaton and Nefertiti, with the mummification refuse being for Ankhesenamun. Certainly, all the coffins found in KV63 could not have belonged to Ankhesenamun alone.

In particular, the funerals of the two queens in tomb KV21. These mummies being known as KV21A who through DNA testing, are the mother of the fetuses in Tutankhamun's tomb and the only known queen of the boy king. KV21B, found in the same tomb as Ankhesenamun, may well be the deceased Meritaton, whose embalming materials may have been left buried at Akhetaton. There is no evidence of Meritaton changing her name, unlike Tutankhamun and Ankhesenamun, leaving open that she was already among the dead, having moved from Amarna.

The Newberry ring is a faience ring that contains two cartouches side by side, one is of Tutankhamun's successor, the Pharaoh Ay, while the other is Ankhesenamun's, indicating that she did outlive her husband, but not by much, as Ay's reign was short. The coffins deposited in KV63 were left in the refuse, as I would imagine that the royal workshops under Tutankhamun would have been busy making replacement caskets for those members of his family who left Amarna in these substitute coffins in approximately 1334 BC. How many years after the arrival and reburial at Thebes of those royals had spanned till the death and burial of the last queen of the dynasty is unknown.

Tutankhamun came to the throne at the age of nine, with the move back to Thebes occurring in year four or five of his reign. Four years later, Tutankhamun is dead, leaving Ankhesenamun to finish the dynasty. This may mean that KV 21 and refuse room KV63 had been employed for little more than three or four years around ca.1334 BC to 1337 BC, and likely both were finally sealed and forgotten after the burial of Ankhesenamun.

Famed Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves' theory that King Tutankhamun's tomb may have other chambers containing the burial of Nefertiti presents many opportunities for imagination. Mr. Reeves' theory may well be backed up by the number of coffins discarded in KV63 after the burials and reburials of Nefertiti and her daughters.

Notes:

Study of Nefertiti by Keith Schengili-Roberts
KV-10 The Tomb of Amenmesse
KV63 Excavation site
Theban Mapping Project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KV63
Daughter of Akhanaton and Nefertiti:  fr: Photo 169 de Guillaume Blanchard (Fujifilm S6900, juillet 2004)
Daughter of Akhanaton and Nefertiti: Miguel Hermoso Cuesta
Many Thanks to Jon Bodsworth for the Nefertiti photo directly above

Egypt Under the Pharaohs

Barbara Sewell
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York
1968
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-25454

The book opens with the usual rundown of the environment along the Nile, and the divisions into which ancient Egyptian history is partitioned. This short book contains black and white images on most pages; unfortunately, many of these are too dark, though nice color-filled page photographs are spaced throughout the book.

This volume is very much suitable for young readers ten and up. The read moves quickly onto death and the Egyptian afterlife with some very unusual images, including one of all four stoppers from Tutankhamun's canopic chest. From here, the writer moves to the Old Kingdom and the effective organization of manpower to create statues and stone buildings on a monumental scale.

After the fall of the Old Kingdom and its god-kings, a period of anarchy followed, where nomarchs vied with each other for power. The kings of the Middle Kingdom were once again effective rulers, but they were no longer seen as god-like. This produced statuary in the Twelfth Dynasty of kings whose faces were now worn by the heavy burden that rested upon them.

A series of weak rulers followed, creating the conditions for foreign kings to dominate Lower Egypt while intimidating the kings of Upper and Middle Egypt. The kings of Thebes, Seventeenth Dynasty, took up arms and fought to drive the foreigners from Egypt. It was finally the Theban King Ahmosis who unified the two lands, establishing the New Kingdom, and her period of empire.

An interesting full color picture of the statuette of Queen Tetisheri owned by the British Museum appears on page 71, and on the museum's website as a forgery. The great warrior Thutmosis III expanded Egypt's borders to their greatest extent, making the house of the Eighteenth Dynasty fabulously wealthy as well as the priests of the god of Thebes, Amun. Kings of both the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties contained rulers like the Nineteenth Dynasty King Ramesses II, and Ramesses III of the following dynasty who maintained order, but a series of weak kings living short reigns brought about the end of the empire.

Ms. Sewell presents the society and its domestic life with more amusing black and white photographs. Ancient Egypt was a barter economy where a worker was paid in food, clothes, or any other producible measure in exchange. A society whose comforts could be acquired through work, and the prosperous population in which their calendar year was dotted with great festivals, including the Opet festival.

The training of scribes brought with it the compositions of wisdom literature and admonitions of how to behave with consideration and good manners. These were to be written over and over again till the scribe could act on behalf of those in need of letters to be written, orders verified, tallying commodities, and the needs of the law.

The author relates the discovery of the hieroglyphic writing by Champollion and others from the ancient monuments, including the Rosetta stone.  Ms. Sewell proceeds forward with the sciences that, from mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and the calendar year, created an eternal people living eternal lives.

Today, the world’s modern Egyptian collections are inevitably made up of objects needed for both life and contentment in the afterlife. These workshop/home crafts range from the simplest of objects to intricate productions worthy of royal workshops. In color plate 15, a beautiful well well-painted scribe statue found in the Giza necropolis in 1951.

Barbara Sewell has put in print a manageable book for a young reader with solid tangibles about ancient Egypt. The book is suitable for an older reader, though the light overview of famous discoveries will have the most impact upon those who are just learning about ancient Egypt. Ms. Sewell has here presented a worthy gift for the young reader in Egypt Under the Pharaohs.

The Tomb of Nefertiti

Well, all is set for Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves to investigate Tutankhamun's tomb, hoping to find a doorway behind one of two walls or both. Mr. Reeves believes that Nefertiti's burial chamber may be behind one of them. This theory, coming from such a respected man, has caused great excitement not only in archaeological circles but in the mass media as well.

In fact, several candidates could be behind the walls of Valley of the Kings tomb number sixty-two. First, a couple of people we are unlikely to find, including Tutankhamun's mother, who has, through DNA, been found in the famous Valley of the Kings royal cache in the tomb of Amenhotep II in 1898. 

Giovanni Belzoni discovered in the valley tomb KV 21 in 1816 two well-preserved female mummies, which have since been destroyed. The headless remains of one of them, known as KV21 A, are also, through DNA, likely to be Tutankhamun's Queen Ankhesenamun, as at least one of the fetuses found in his tomb is the child of KV21 A.

In the Valley of the Kings most controversial tomb was found, the remains believed by some, including myself, to be those of the heretic King Akhenaton. Again, the DNA suggests that the mummy is Tutankhamun's father. So with mom, da,d, and wife already discovered, who are the missing?

King Smenkhkare's burial equipment occupies some of the most prestigious objects from Tutankhamun's burial, artifacts found not only in the tomb but also intermingled fragments of objects found in the fill of KV62's steps. If King Smenkhkare is behind one of those walls, it might be suggested that his/her burial might be modest, or completely ruined.

Who can say if Nefertiti, in homage to the great ancestor Hatschepsut, had herself declared pharaoh, ruling as Smenkhkare alongside Akhenaton in his last years? This might have been rectified by King Aye, who is painted administering the "Opening of the mouth" ceremony onTutankhamun's mummy. Aye may well have returned Nefertiti's burial to the status of queen. 

Having said that, it must be remembered that the KV55 mummy did not appear to have been unwrapped when found; only its mask was removed and perhaps restyled for King Tut. I suspect that if Nefertiti is behind one of the two walls that her burial will be modest in valuables, but providing that her mummy was not robbed in the transfer of royal burials from Tell el Amarna, I suspect that she will be intact, though there will be little gold outside the mummy, and major missing pieces from her burial.

In the royal tomb at Akhenaton's capital are to be found carved reliefs showing the funeral of Akhenaton and Nefertiti's daughter Meketaton. Should Nefertiti be found, I would suspect so will be found the mummy of this royal child reburied with her mother. The same rules apply to the transfer to Thebes of the royal dead, except the little princess's burial is more likely to be a complete ensemble.

The lost Amarna mummies include the oldest daughter of Nefertiti, Meritaton, who was a powerful queen in her own right and among those presumed to be addressed in the Amarna letters. Princesses Neferneferure, Setepenre, Neferneferuaten Tasherit, and Ankhesepaaten-Ta-Sherit, the daughters of Nefertiti, remain to be identified, though there is a chance that one of them may be represented by the remains known as KV21 B, found with the presumed remains of Ankhesenamun. 

I would go even further that KV21 B would perhaps be most appropriate if the mummy was not a princess but a queen, making KV21 the tomb of two queens, including Ankhesenamun's oldest sister, and only other queen of the daughters of Akhenaton and Nefertiti, Meritaton. This would be backed up by the position the arms of both mummies were in when found.

How many ladies may be found might be foreseen by the contents of Valley of the Kings tomb KV63, an Armana period cache of embalming refuse. Mr. Reeves may be on to the burial of Nefertiti, but also the mummies of her lost daughters.

Notes:

Tutankhamen's tomb; Hajor, Dec.2002. Released under cc.by.sa and/or GFDL.
Statue of Tutankhamun and Ankhesenamun; Ad Merskens
Akhenaton, Nefertiti, and daughters; Gerbil
National Geographic September 2010

Valley Of The Kings

John Romer
Henry Holt and Company
New York
1981
ISBN: 0-8050-0993-0

 'The first half of the 19th century was the heroic age of Egyptology, when a year more or less meant whole new worlds of knowledge and discovery for the scholars in Egypt and at their desks in Europe. Letters of dazzling erudition flew back and forth from Egypt to Europe among the charmed circles who were rediscovering the historical order of the ancient kingdoms and their rulers, their arts and the true ages of the massive ruined architecture.'

The book opens with an overview of Upper and Lower Egypt, including a map of the Valley of the Kings showing the locations of the sixty-two tombs known at the time of this publication. Mr. Romer puts forward the role of the king as the keeper of harmony for his subjects and the development of the king's burial over time. The conspicuous mastaba and pyramid burials of the Old and Middle Kingdoms afforded little protection from the depredations of robbers.


By the Eighteenth Dynasty, the king's mortuary temples were separated from the tombs, which now began being carved off in a closed wadi, the Valley of the Kings. The effect was, however, the same, as the people who created the tombs were often the thieves, especially in times of disorder. The kings of the later New Kingdom left Thebes for the cities in the delta, and by about 1000 BC, the tombs of the ancestor kings were opened, with one after another emptied of their extraordinary content.


Through the latter half of the ancient world, the Valley of Kings became a tourist attraction to both the Greeks, followed by the Romans, and by the early Byzantine era, the tombs in the valley ceased to be tourist attractions. A thousand years would pass before the royal necropolis and the city of Thebes were again recognized by seventeenth-century travelers.


Several travelers published details of their visits to the valley, though extremely insufficient, including James Bruce, who famously published a misinterpreted image of harpists he found in the tomb of Ramesses III. It was Napoleon, whose invasion in 1798 brought with him the best French scholars to explore the ancient monuments and scientifically record them for one of the finest publications ever put into print.


Eighteen years later, a circus strongman and hydrologist entered the silent valley on a mission to collect the pink granite sarcophagus from the now famous tomb of Ramesses III. His name was Giovanni Belzoni and he would become one of the Valley of the Kings most fortunate visitors, discovering several tombs including the burial vaults for three kings, the Pharaoh's Aye, Ramesses I, and the finest tomb known in the valley, the magnificent tomb of King Seti I. Belzoni describes his first entrance into King Ramesses abode with visitors he was showing around Thebes.


     'Having proceeded through a passage thirty-two feet long and eight feet wide, I descended a staircase of twenty-eight feet, and reached a tolerably large and well-painted room. I then made a signal from below to the travellers that they might descend, and they entered into the tomb, which is seventeen feet long and twenty-one wide. We found a sarcophagus of granite, with two mummies in it, and in a corner, a statue standing erect, six feet high, and beautifully cut out of sycamore wood: it is nearly perfect except the nose. We also found several little images of wood, well-carved, representing symbolic figures. Some had a lion's head, others a fox's, others a monkey's. One had a land-tortoise instead of a head.' *


Mr. Belzoni was followed by many other men of note, including John Gardiner Wilkinson, who painted numbers on the tombs in the valley, and Francois Champollion, who deciphered the hieroglyphs and went on to damage Seti's tomb, removing a fresco from a doorway in the tomb. The book contains many drawings and photographs placed liberally throughout the text, often encompassing a couple of full-page illustrations.


By the 1870's royal antiquities from a family of Theban high priests of Dynasty Twenty One began appearing on the Luxor antiquities market and in European museums. These finds included books of the dead, ushabti's, and mummy braces for various kings, queens, and princesses. The robbers had found a tomb containing tens of thousands of dollars' worth of antiquities.


It would turn out to be the greatest find of royal mummies ever and included a who's who of the greatest emperors of Egypt's New Kingdom. Present were the sainted mummies of Amenhotep I and his mother Ahmes Nofretari, the first three Thutmoside king's including the great warrior Thutmosis III, also the first three kings of the Nineteenth Dynasty, which included not only the great king Seti I, but also his son Ramesses II, the penultimate king.


John Romer imbues his telling with such spirit that it would be difficult to find another author who does better justice to the often over-told story of the discovery. The prominent kings are lined up in a salon of the then Bulaq museum, with the rest put into storage until the day they would be divested of their shrouds and bandages, mostly beginning in 1886.


As the nineteenth century comes to a close, we find the head of the Egyptian Antiquities service, Victor Loret, searching the Valley of the Kings for more tombs, except Mr. Loret is not always present, and his workers in the valley do not always inform him when a tomb is found, or at least remove small artifacts from tombs before Mr. Loret enters. This may be true of the discovery of the first intact Eighteenth Dynasty burial of a man named Mahirpra.


Mr. Loret is aware that objects were showing up in European museums bearing the cartouches of Amenhotep II. It has the appearance that his excavators in the valley took their share first, yet just as bad, Loret made insufficient notes of his excavations. These losses in the archaeological record are hurt even more by the importance of the tombs found being those of King Thutmosis III, and eventually his son Amenhotep II.


The author follows the order of the tombs discovered, creating a thorough rundown of excavations, though these diggings are more of a half-hazard hopping around the valley without any systematic order or governance. In an era where wealthy European's and Americans snatched up illegal antiquities and were broadly given permits to dig and keep objects unwanted by the antiquities service, Egypt was swarming with profiteers.


Theodore Davis was such a man, receiving the permit to dig in the Valley of Kings and unearthing major finds just about every year. Among these finds was the tomb of Queen Tiye's parents, Yuya and his wife Tuya. This was the finest tomb found in the valley to date, filled with well-preserved furnishings from the court of Amenhotep III.


The Amarna cache tomb 55 was excavated by a number of the top men in the antiquities service, each competent on his own, yet as a group completed the excavation with few records, being an embarrassment to each of them, seriously damaging the historical record of the tomb. Davis, having had such huge success in the valley, now retired, believing it held no more tombs.


The end of Davis's permit gave Lord Carnarvon the chance to take over and begin excavating the site with Howard Carter. This promising site, unfortunately, delivered little to justify Carnarvon's expenditure, and soon Carter was asking for one more season. The famous discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb would bring a global hurricane of tourists, interfering with the excavation of the tomb, challenging the nerves of Carter and the archaeologists working for him.



The book ends with a short chapter on the designated names for parts of the royal tombs. More than thirty years have passed since publication, and John Romer's must-read book remains a valuable, untarnished history in great detail of the romance of the Valley of the Kings.

Notes:
 
* Belzoni, Giovanni. Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia. London, 1822