Ancient Egypts Largest Tomb: KV5 (DOCUMENTARY) [48:59]

Transcript pt 1

For a thousand years, the capital of Fonic Egypt in the heyday of the Egyptian Empire under Rameses II, this was one of the great cities of the world. It is Thieves, modern Luxor, which is the scene of an extraordinary archaeological mystery story that is still unfolding: the discovery of a lost tomb, a tomb known as KV5. Archaeologist Kent Weeks has lived in Egypt for over 30 years and has spent most of his working life among today’s Egyptians, trying to bring to life the history of their Fonic ancestors. There are thousands of archaeological sites in Egypt, and they all are interesting in one way or another, but I don’t know of any that have the magic of Luxor, of ancient Thieves, and I certainly don’t know of any that offer the incredible potential for future archaeological work that we find here. Kent’s words would prove uncannily prophetic.

The story began as part of a long-term archaeological survey on Luxor’s West Bank. For 20 years now, Kent Weeks has been trying to make a definitive map of the tombs and monuments of the Valley of the Kings and the Theban Royal burial grounds, the necropolis. But during the time of the Pharaohs, the cultivation wouldn’t have been right out to where it is now. No, I don’t think so. Certainly, it wouldn’t have gone beyond that irrigation canal. I think this last half kilometer is probably no more than about 50 years old. The N flood probably came this far. By making a topographic survey of the Theban Acropolis, we’re creating a master plan that will ensure that in the future, any excavation, any touristic development, will be done in a way that will benefit and protect the monuments and not damage them.

But as the study of the Western Hills progressed, Kent began to notice discrepancies between today’s plans and those of earlier explorers. Over the years, a handful of tombs and monuments had disappeared, but it seemed hard to believe that there could still be a major find to make in one of the most intensively dug sites in the world, the Valley of the Kings. But it was only 70 years ago that Howard Carter broke through a sealed doorway into the intact tomb of Tutankhamun. The splendor of the finds thrilled the archaeological establishment, and yet just a matter of months before, Carter had been told by colleagues that there was nothing of any significance left to be found in the Valley of the Kings. Carter had two things that I think every archaeologist should have: one, he had a knowledge of the area that he was working in that allowed him to work on hunches; and two, he had a stubbornness, a willingness to take risks. He persevered, and that’s what makes an archaeologist in any area a success. The wonderful things that Carter had unearthed made the Valley of the Kings famous and sparked off a popular fascination with Egypt and archaeology. Today, three-quarters of a million tourists come to the Valley of the Kings each year, drawn still by the magic of the Pharaoh’s tombs.

Kent believed, though, that there were still several unexplored tombs in the valley, right under the feet of the modern tourists. You can see the problem: there are thousands of tourists who come up here every day. There are cars and vehicles that drive up this way, and back in 1989, the Antiquities Department was planning to widen the roadway to make it more comfortable for the tourists to disembark. But if they did that, we realized if there was a tomb lying on this hillside, they ran the risk of damaging it. And so we began looking for these lost tombs right here at the bottom of this hill.

According to the modern maps of the valley, each tomb carries a number, a system that goes back to 1827. But in the sequence, one tomb in the central area was missing: Kings Valley number five, KV5. Where was KV5? To find out, Kent went back to records of the early 19th century when a number of European explorers visited the valley. Many noted what they saw in paintings, sketch maps, and diaries. One of them was a young Englishman who came here in the 1820s: James Burton. I knew Burton had been in the Valley of the Kings and had taken notes on a variety of tombs; that’s common Egyptological knowledge. Even though his journals were unpublished, he had gone to Egypt to make his fortune. He worked as an artist on a number of different projects. He was the kind of person who noted things that other people might totally have neglected. Burton’s notebooks were donated to the manuscript library of the British Museum. Here were the next clues in Kent’s search for the lost tomb.

As Kent turned the pages of Burton’s notebooks, he saw that Burton had described a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, now unknown, descending from a narrow entrance. He had scrambled into a labyrinth of chambers choked to the ceiling with debris. In the middle, he saw a 16-pillared hall, and he thought there were signs of a passage leading to a lower level where perhaps the sarcophagus had stood. On his sketch map, Burton also gave the approximate location of the tomb, right in the mouth of the Valley of the Kings. But back in the valley, there was no trace of the entrance Burton described. Burton’s map pointed to a narrow strip of the valley where today the hawkers sell souvenirs and fake artifacts to the tourists. The tomb lay somewhere underneath their stalls. It’s a covered site, and the salesmen took a lot of convincing that they should shift to make way for the archaeologists.

At last, Kent got his chance. The first dig was recorded on home video. Nine days in, on their second test trench, they found a doorway just where Burton’s map had marked it. But one would expect to find cartouches here, and presumably here, and then the next opportunity to find them with any certainty would probably be over there. So clean that from the doorway, a tunnel descended into the ground. It had escaped the attention of modern archaeologists by sheer chance; the area had been used as a dumping ground by Howard Carter in his 10-year search for Tutankhamun. The tomb had simply been covered by debris from Carter’s dig. Then, on the doorway, Kent found the cartouche, the name sign of the great Pharaoh Rameses himself. “Yeah, we’ve got an inscription. This should be the cartouche of Rameses. We see everybody tomorrow for all the workmen can come back tomorrow.” Rameses’ own tomb lay barely 100 meters away on the other side of the valley. So who was down here? There was only one way in, via a narrow cutting perhaps left behind by Burton 170 years before.

“I had never had an attack of claustrophobia before. I didn’t know what that meant, but I discovered very early on it was really panic time about 50 feet into the third chamber. ‘Okay, if you go over here, I’ll go around the other side. I want to count the colors crawling over the debris, crawling through areas where 10-ton blocks had fallen from the ceiling and realizing that, you know, a hard hat wasn’t going to do you the least bit of good. It made you a little bit nervous.’ “Off, it’s bigger than I thought it was. That must be the back wall. There’s one pillar there, one here. Inside, they could make out the pillared hall Burton had described in his notebooks. ‘And I think I see another over here. Do you see one over here? No? Okay, Burton said 16. I’m pretty sure he’s right. Oh, there are a lot of cracks out, but actually, the ceiling’s in better condition than I thought it was. This part looks absolutely stable. Yeah, be a lot of work cleaning this out.’ “Then on the ceiling, they saw the autograph of the last person to get in here: incredible, signed in lamp black, Burton 1825. There was now no doubt the tomb Burton had seen had been rediscovered. But crawling just under the ceiling, it was impossible as yet to judge how big it was. But what had left it in this devastated condition? Well, it never rains in Luxor, but once every 300 years or so, you get the mother of all rainstorms falling on the hillsides above the valley. That rain washes hundreds of tons, thousands of tons of debris down the hillside, and when you got one of those torrential floods, you get tons of debris cascading through the doors in these tombs, coming at 30, 40 mph, plummeting, pushing huge boulders into the tomb. We had this happen in our tomb at least 10 times in the last 3,000 years, and it’s filled the tomb to chock-a-block full, right to within a few centimeters of the ceiling with debris that has since dried to the consistency of cement, 95% humidity.

They began to clear the first two chambers down a little. “Okay, target, okay, reflector, tya.” It gave an insight into the methods of the ancient diggers who had hacked the tomb out of solid rock. The way in which they dug these tombs in ancient times, the way in which they took the debris out the door, is very little different from the way we’re working today. We’ve got two men working, digging, so did they. We have a bucket brigade, the length of which depends on how far we are from the front door. So we have maybe 30 men who just pass buckets one to the other. It’s exactly the same technique, and we know that because there’s a workman’s village, Deir el-Medina, just over the hill, where 120 men, whose children and grandchildren and great-great-great-great-grandchildren who were responsible for these tombs, lived. They worked in two teams: the left gang, the right gang. They went in, often competing with each other to see who could work the fastest, and they timed their workday by using bowls of oil in which they floated a wick. The length of the wick determined the length of the workday.

At this stage, Kent was still operating on a tiny academic grant and the financial support of a handful of well-wishers. The task ahead was daunting. With part of the rubble gone, the damage done by the tour buses above became clear. “You can see the crack all the way around this plate here that may or may not drop out this piece of stone up here, and that’s what it is. That’s the concern. We got a wiggly point there, we got a wiggly point here, and a wiggly point here. See if we can get rid of one of them at least, and then when we get it good and plumb, then we can turn this screw up and put a strain on it and get this thing nice and vertical.” The layout of the tomb began to take shape. Two entrance rooms led to the large 16-pillared hall with chambers going off in all directions. But the depth of flood-born debris still made it impossible to see how far this underground labyrinth really extended. As the walls were cleared, sculpted wall reliefs appeared, which had once been painted.

Yeah, what I want to do is remove the dirt from here in that direction beside these buried details Burton could not have seen. I think it’s up there and the king and something that almost looks like the prow of a boat. That’s what I’d like to see. Now you know, you’re the first person to see this in more than 3,000 years. Me? I’m like, you see it is a boat. This is the prow of the boat. It’s on the walls. There were tantalizing glimpses of royal ceremonies for the passage into the afterlife, but who were the royal dead of KV5? The answer, as it turned out, lay in Italy. Here in Turin is one of the world’s greatest collections of Egyptian papyri collected by Italian adventurers a century ago. They’re now in the vaults of the Turin Museum. Day-to-day records from the time of Ram II and his successors, they include trial records concerning tomb robberies in the Valley of the Kings soon after Ram II’s day, and Kent hoped they might throw some light on the mystery of KV5.

Now, the first mention of the robbery of the tomb of Ramses II is somewhere at the top of the column, isn’t it? Yes, we are here at the end of the fourth line, the qualine. Let me write that down. As we go up, I’ll transcribe it into hieroglyphs as you read it in the key papyrus. One of a gang of robbers had been tortured to act as a witness for the prosecution against his companions. His evidence still survives today. The two accused, Uset and Pwera, have stripped stones to break into the tomb of the Osiris King Ramses the Great God, as did the chief artisan Panb. My father, meanwhile, Canna, the son of Routa, did exactly the same in the tomb of the royal children of Ramses the Great God. This is a very short text, but what we know from other papyri allows us to fill in some details. I doubt very much that this was the first time these fellows had robbed tombs. This is simply the first time their luck ran out and they got caught. Tomb robbery was a risky business; the penalty was a gruesome death by strangulation or impalement. But if the robbers got away with it, the rewards were huge, as royal tombs were packed with treasure. I don’t think most of these guys who were engaged in tomb robbery cared one whit about the idea of an afterlife. They were so far down the social scale they were not very likely to get there anyway.

So the papyrus gave Kent two key clues: first, that the tomb of Ram II’s sons in the Valley of the Kings had been robbed within a century of his death, and second, that their tomb lay close to that of their illustrious father. Well, it’s the children of Ramses II; there’s no doubt about that. No, no doubt the papyrus is related to that. Must be KV5. The Turin papyrus gave Kent a working hypothesis: KV5 was perhaps the tomb of the sons of Ramses the Great. By the beginning of the second season of digging, the walls of the tomb had begun to give up their secrets. On the newly uncovered reliefs were clues bearing royal names, remarkably well preserved, isn’t it? All things considered, so we have the name of Ramses II exactly right there. We got “Ramses, beloved of Amun,” right? And we got the name of one of his sons, Amun, his oldest son, I believe. Exactly, number one. So KV5 was definitely built for the sons of Ramses, and in particular, his firstborn, Amon Heev. This could be a bombshell. The tomb was now caught up in religious controversy, for according to many Bible scholars, Ramses II was the Pharaoh at the time of the Exodus, the flight of the Israelites from Egypt to help build the Pharaoh’s great monuments. So the Bible says huge gangs of labor were drawn from his subject peoples, among them the children of Israel. Pharaoh rejected the Israelites’ pleas for freedom. Then God sent down a series of plagues on the Egyptians at the behest of the Israelite leader Moses, and the last of these plagues claimed the life of the Pharaoh’s firstborn son.

If we assume there was an Exodus—not everybody does assume that—but if we assume there was, let’s say it does occur during that reign. Okay, we know from the Bible that the firstborn son of Pharaoh was killed. Now, the firstborn son of Ramses II is Amon Her Kesef. We’ve got him in our tomb. This is where the evidence would be. But short of finding a body with a bolt of lightning stuck through the chest, how on Earth could we prove that this young man was murdered, killed, died in some strange, unusual, divine manner? Why on Earth would the Egyptians have mentioned the Exodus? It would have been one of the most humiliating events in their history, and they certainly would not mention it in a tomb where it would be carried with them for eternity. Whether the Exodus is historically accurate or not, the search for KV5 had now led Kent to Ramses and his sons. But had there been any bodies in the tomb? At this point, he found the first traces of ancient bones. Nice! And this, I think, is probably part of the YK. Yeah, maybe finish. That’s all. Okay, great. Congratulations, eagle eyes! It was at least possible that the bones could be from one of Ramses’ sons. There were plenty to choose from right here, exactly. Great! Ramses had more than 50 sons. He reigned for so long that 11 of his heirs died before him. So the question of how many of Ramses’ children were buried in the tomb was fraught with problems. It would be interesting to speculate, for example, that a number of the sons died simultaneously. Perhaps they were killed on the field of battle; perhaps there was a plague that did them all in. Who knows? Maybe palace intrigue. Possibilities are endless. It is possible that a number of them died at the same time, had to be interred at the same time, and that was the reason this was chosen. Kent now knew he was sitting on a potentially sensational find, the most exciting in the Valley of the Kings since Tutankhamun in 1922.

Excavation, however, is a very costly business, and the work now had to stop until Kent could raise fresh funds. And there’s nothing in Egypt as of now that talks about the Exodus. All Bruce L. from Los Angeles now enters the story. Bruce had already used his own money to back Kent’s earlier digs. Now he brought over a group of wealthy travelers for a Nile cruise and the chance to buy into a piece of history. The hard sell was timed for the lunch stop: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and set up another row over there: 13, 14, 15, one more pillar. Imagine a pillar hall of this sun, several meters between the pillars. We’ve got 16 pillars. We’ve got one of the largest rooms of any tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The thing is absolutely incredible! I keep using the word, but I don’t know how else to describe it. Go down the main axis, past the first column, and then zigzag our way down toward the back wall. There’s another doorway just here, another doorway just here, a doorway here and here. Must have been quite a sight to crawl into this. I mean, walk into it. You’re going down like so, pillars beautifully decorated, a lot of paint on them. And we know there was paint because we’ve got a few thumbnail-sized fragments on the surface. Presumably, we’ve got names; we have scenes of gods and so forth. You’re wandering through this maze. It must have been absolutely overwhelming. I mean, if I were an ancient Egyptian, this would have been like the hypostyle hall at Karnak. It would have been just an absolute knockout! Wow! And this being one of the largest rooms in the valley is a good indication that it’s going to be of major historical importance. That’s great, Kent! That’s really great! That’s exciting, really. Now let’s talk money about the check. I’ll get the separate checks, please.

Kent now had enough backing to take on his old team and a few extra workers for a further season’s digging. Ali Abdah Muhammed Mahmoud Ahed, his aim now, was to push on beyond Burton’s original handful of rooms to try to discover how far the tomb extended, but in which direction? Kent decided to try one of several bluff doorways which led off the central hall. In the third week of the new season, Kent’s gamble paid off. “Don, what have you got?” After digging through 2 meters of debris, Kent’s assistant Almed had broken through to a new part of the tomb. “See, you think it goes very far?” “Yeah, oh my God! You know, this is about twice the size of what we’ve been through. Very big! It’s huge!” “Well, congratulations! What you... should we go inside?” “You can have the honors this time. I’ll take the first next time.” As they squeezed through the narrow opening, they could see that a much larger complex of rooms lay beyond. “Huge! Oh my God! One, two, three, four, five, six doors on the right. Yeah, two, three, four, six on the left. Look at the end! How you look? Let’s go take a look.” “After you!” “I’ve never seen... look at this! That a statue on the side are huge! The rooms are all about the same size. There’s absolutely no trace of anyone having been in here in the last couple of thousand... oh, you can stand up in now! Last couple of thousand years! A long passage strewn with fallen stone led up to a junction with lateral corridors. “Look at this! Must go down another... go down another 20 meters! There must be 40 chambers in here!” And on this side, they were now 75 meters from the entrance. At the end of the main passage was a statue of the god of the underworld, Osiris. “My God, that’s lovely!” Who would have thought Kent had made a major discovery?

Kent’s backer, Bruce L., came back to Luxor. Their rendezvous was at the same hotel where Howard Carter and his backer, Lord Carnarvon, had launched their press releases on the Tutankhamun discovery 75 years before. “We’ve got the staircase! We have the two rooms! We’ve got the 16-kilohole in Burton, right? And what did we find? You ready for this? Look at this! And this thing goes on to all this! All of this to become the largest tomb in the Valley of the Kings!” “Congratulations!” “Well, congratulations to you, man! We got it!” Kent was unprepared for the scale of the reaction. It was as he was mapping the area around the Valley of the Kings from the air that Professor Kent Weeks realized there was an unexplored tomb below. Like Howard Carter before him, he found himself headline news. “Archaeologists have uncovered an enormous tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Upper Egypt. It is where the ancient Egyptians buried their pharaohs.” Here’s ABC’s Beth Niss: “It is dim and damp and cramped with rubble, yet regal. This is the royal resting place for 50 of the sons of Ramses II.” The lure of Egypt, it seemed, was undimmed. The hawker stalls were moved further down the valley. KV5 was now on the tourist map.

[rest to be done later]

Transcript pt 2

They were now 75 m from the entrance. At the end of the main passage was a statue of the god of the underworld, Osiris. “My God, that’s lovely! Who would have thought Kent had made a major discovery?” Kent backer Bruce Lwig came back to Luxor. Their rendezvous was at the same hotel where Howard Carter and his backer, Lord Canavan, had launched their press releases on the Tutankhamun discovery 75 years before. “We’ve got the staircase, we have the two rooms, we’ve got the 16-kilohole in buron, right? And what did we find? You ready for this? Look at this! And this thing goes on to all this—all of this—to become the largest tomb in the Valley of the Kings.”

“Congratulations! Well, congratulations to you, man! We got it.” Kent was unprepared for the scale of the reaction. It was as he was mapping the area around the Valley of the Kings from the air that Professor Kent Weeks realized there was an unexplored tomb below. Like Howard Carter before him, he found himself headline news. Archaeologists have uncovered an enormous tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Upper Egypt. It is where the ancient Egyptians buried their pharaohs. Here’s ABC’s Beth Niss: “It is dim and damp and cramped with rubble, yet regal. This is the royal resting place for 50 of the sons of Ramses II.”

The lure of Egypt, it seemed, was undimmed. The hawker stalls were moved further down the valley. KV5 was now on the tourist map. “See, look! Look at here!” And as usual, the tour guides suffered none of the doubts of the scholars. “Of those rooms for the son of King Ram II, Ram the Great, he had a great number of children: 106 daughters and 92 sons. So he did such VI to the kings for his son.”

“Isn’t she cute? Yeah, beautifully carved face in there! And look at ISAS! Isn’t she great? Oh, she’s beautiful! Beautiful! And the way this horn is carved…” As the dust settled, Kent had a chance to take stock of what he had found. “These are the back chambers we found just a couple of days ago. Oh my God, look at that! It just goes on and on and on! Wow! Oh God, it goes back forever! And it looks like there’s some decent carving on that one wall way back there.”

“But one chamber after another, Kent, this is absolutely amazing!” But the question now was, where were the princes, and how many of them had been buried here? Now Kent took on an enlarged team to clear and sift tons of debris from the corridor. The hope was that the lateral corridors might lead to burial chambers. Kent now knew that the tomb was the biggest in the Valley of the Kings, with at least 67 rooms, but the scale and the layout were perplexing, without parallel in Egyptian tombs. Indeed, in the extraordinary elaboration of the plan, it was tempting to see the controlling mind of the great king Ramses himself—a fitting monument, perhaps, for a living god-king to commemorate his dead sons.

“By that time, I’d convinced myself that the rooms we’d found were offering chapels and that there were definitely burials someplace in the tomb. We began looking in the transverse corridor to the left of the Osiris statue, and suddenly it all came together. Here was a corridor sloping downward. Here was a corridor that, as we dug, had a floor that moved down at about a 15° angle. And lo and behold, we get 20 m down that corridor, and we find a drop in the ceiling level. And not just a staircase, but that peculiar kind of staircase—the left third, the right third of which are steps; the central third is a ramp—exactly the kind of staircase you would have in a tomb where the priests were intended to walk down on either side of a sarcophagus being slid down the ramp. There was no question at all in my mind: this was the way to the burial chamber. This was where we were going to find the sarcophagi and the mummies of the sons.”

And suddenly, one morning, the workmen called me down. “Come, come see what we have found!” And I rushed down there, and we had found nothing—a solid wall. They had just stopped work—the ancient Egyptians, not our workmen. It was a crushing disappointment. Perhaps, after all, the tomb had never been used.

“So, have you found anything that’s really interesting?” “We found thousands of pieces of pottery, some statuary, fragmentary pieces of jewelry—the usual collection of things you’d expect to find in a burial.” The public and the press, of course, expected royal mummies and treasure, but Kent had nothing to satisfy their curiosity. The layout of KV5 continued to puzzle him.

“If we do get answers to many of the questions we’re asking, why did they build such a melum when they’d never done it before? Why did they use a plan that they never used before? Why did they build a tomb that was designed for so many sons?”

“Yeah, I think we’re going to find clearly that Ramses II was doing something very different—something that had never been done before. But at the moment, the questions far outweigh the answers. This is not a senap, a fake tomb. It’s not some kind of memorial or shrine or temple. The only question is, where are the bodies?”

Kent knew that his hopes of finding an answer to this question most likely lay in the Egyptian way of death—in surviving traces of the mummification process by which royal bodies were preserved for the afterlife. A great deal is known about these elaborate funerary rites and the inventory of grave goods, furniture, and jewelry which accompanied the dead on the journey to the afterlife. However thorough the tomb robbers had been, it was still possible that traces of these remained in the debris—the magical amulets, for example, which were wrapped into the bandages in preparation for the last journey.

This was all presided over by the priest of Anubis, god of the underworld, who made the mummy ready for its sarcophagus, with the canopic jars holding the vital organs: liver, lungs, stomach, and intestine. “It’s a canopic jar fragment—of a canopic jar, anyway.”

In the debris, Kent now found the crucial piece of evidence. “These are the usual titles: the revered one before the god Osiris, the beloved son of the king, his beloved Seti. This tiny fragment was part of a jar containing the embalmed organs of one of the sons of Ramses. So the princes had been buried in KV5.”

As the search progressed, they found pieces of canopic jars naming four sons. The contents of the tomb had apparently been smashed by thieves, but the clue had not been destroyed. “The ancient tomb robberies mean basically we’ve been left with the drags. They had first choice. They came in here, admittedly they were in a great hurry; they didn’t have a lot of time to look around and window shop. But to collect things, come in quickly, spend an hour of an evening, hack your way through a mummy, break up a coffin, destroy a canopic jar, open a box, look for anything that could be marketed, that could be fenced. And what we have now is a crime scene.”

This is a piece of wood. It doesn’t look very exciting, but we know it to be the hand of a wooden coffin, placed like this on the chest of the coffin. Now the ancient thieves would have taken the coffin itself because wood was quite a valuable commodity. This hand happened to fall off; it’s all we’re left with. And we get more mundane things too that, again, most ancient thieves would have ignored: ostraca—they’re the post-it notes of ancient times—just small pieces of limestone chips on which scribes kept records. This is a delivery receipt acknowledging receipt of two oil lamps that would have been used by the people digging this tomb, providing light in the back chambers.

Here, a wonderful alabaster ushabti—a servant statue designed to perform in the next life all of the work that the gods might call upon a prince to do. These are particularly unattractive pieces; they’re not great. No self-respecting ancient thief would ever have wanted one, so he left it behind. But for us, it gives us more information on burial customs and, in fact, on who was buried here.

It’s remarkable that the thieves, in a country where people were so careful about preparation for the afterlife, would have had such utter disregard for the religion and funerary beliefs that this was founded on. Between the religion of the ordinary people and that of the rulers in their palace, there was a vast gulf. The villagers of the West Bank have never been frightened by the mystique of the pharaoh’s tombs. It was they who cut and carved the tombs, and it was they who, when the opportunity arose, would rob them.

And in more modern times, one such robbery cast a dramatic light on Ramses himself. A century ago, in this lonely gorge, a family of notorious tomb robbers, the Abdal Rasul brothers, chanced on the hiding place of 17 royal mummies in an abandoned shaft in the Theban Hills. Alarmed at the looting of the royal graves, the ancient priests had removed the mummies of some of the greatest pharaohs from the Valley of the Kings and reburied them in secret. Here they rested undetected for 3,000 years until they were found by the modern robbers. The bodies were then plundered for their gold and jewelry. They got selfish and began dumping large quantities of very unusual ushabti and other objects on the international art market, and people in Cairo got suspicious. The Antiquities Department opened an investigation, and it didn’t take long to discover that the Abdar Rasuls were busily engaged in Luxor, robbing one of the great finds of the century.

Finally, in 1881, the robbers were caught. The royal mummies were all recovered and taken by river to Cairo. And as they left, the local women wailed the ancient laments for the dead, just as their ancestors would have done for the kings of old. Among them was the father of the princes in KV5, Ramses the Great himself.

Ramesses had reigned for 67 years. He lived to over 90. He left a chain of great monuments down the Nile, many showing his regard for his family and especially for his favorite wife, Nefatari. It’s true he built a family mausoleum for his sons in the Valley of the Kings, something that no other pharaoh had ever done. It’s true that he mentions his sons and his daughters on reliefs in Temple after Temple after Temple from the Mediterranean Sea south into the Sedan. It’s also true that he acknowledged all of his wives, referring to them not only in his own inscriptions but building temples for them and, in the case of Nefatari, constructing one of the most elaborate tombs to be found anywhere in the Valley of the Queens. All of these, plus the very flowery lyric poetry that he wrote to his queens, do truly suggest that he was a nice guy, a devoted husband, a wonderful father, the kind of guy you might want to meet and have dinner with.

But there’s another side to the story too, a side that is based upon political need, upon religious theories that, in fact, imposed upon what may have been a really mean, nasty fellow the necessity of having himself shown as being Mr. Nice Guy. Meanwhile, back at the dig, there was another discovery. Underneath the entrance to the tomb, two sloping stairways were found leading to a lower level. It now appeared the tomb had two stories with around 150 rooms. It was now by far the biggest tomb ever found in Egypt. The mystery of KV5 only intensified.

Then, in the last weeks of the 1997 spring season, came a breakthrough. A skull was found, not deep in the interior where Kent had expected, but in a pit under one of the chambers near the entrance. “What is that black stuff over there in the corner? Is it cloth? Is it mummified cloth? Be careful.” Beside it were fragments of mummy bandage. Had Kent finally found remains of the princes? “Hand me the mandible, the jaw, one right by where you are. Yeah, that can be moved. Thank you.” Well, we have three MERS. The wisdom teeth are there, but they’re worn, late 20s, early 30s, maybe. It probably is male. It’s interesting; it’s the right age for a son. In the pit was one complete skeleton and parts of another, including fragments of the knee and thigh of a young man.

Well, we have a pit in the floor that could be a burial pit, although it’s of unusual size for that. We have painted texts, traces of them on the wall, that suggest it’s a burial. And higher up on the wall, we have the king and another figure that may be the son, standing in front of an alabaster box in which the four canopic jars are shown. We have found fragments of canopic jars in the fill of this pit with the names of Om Heef and Seti. All of these things fit: burial pit, the decoration on the wall, the inscription on the walls of the pit itself, the age of the skeleton, the sex of the skeleton. But it still isn’t enough to absolutely prove that this is one of the two sons. We’re just going to have to wait.

Then, two more skulls were found. Kent now felt sure he had found remains of four royal princes. An explanation of the tomb’s remarkable size and layout was beginning to take shape. If we assume that Ramesses had declared himself, or was declared, a deity, a god during his own life, and in the process had elevated himself to a position where he could no longer deal with the secular affairs of state, and if we assume that he brought his sons in to play that role, the secular heads of government, then maybe we do have an explanation for the peculiar nature of KV5: its large size, its unusual plan. These sons of the king were very special; they now were sharing in the power of kingship with their deified father. They were playing a much more elevated role than princes had ever played, to my knowledge.

What we see in the reign of Ramesses II is something that is redefining the concept of kingship and, by definition, redefining the role of the crown princes in the operation of the royal court. According to this theory, Ramesses built the tomb at the height of his power as a symbol of the unprecedented status he had given to his own family: a god-king in his old age, honoring his last heirs who never lived to be pharaohs.

Then, only days from the end of the dig, there was a further twist in the tale. At the bottom of the southwest stairway, a new corridor was traced heading out towards the tomb of Ramesses himself. “Very good. How many more meters does it go?” “Yeah, I think about 16 m.” So were the real burial chambers still to be discovered? That would have to wait till the next season. The search for KV5 is part of a larger quest to understand the ancient civilization of Egypt, at whose heart is the all-too-human hope for life after death. As archaeologists gradually make sense of the tomb, they will throw further light on the remarkable and enormous family of Egypt’s greatest pharaoh.

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