Background to the ARTP

Amarna Royal Tombs Project - Background

The Amarna Royal Tombs Project

'The Valley of the Tombs is now exhausted'

The last great find in the Valley of the Kings was the tomb of Tutankhamun, uncovered by the fifth Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter in 1922. In the years since that spectacular discovery, archaeologists have assumed the Valley to be completely worked out.

Nicholas Reeves, Director of The Amarna Royal Tombs Project, believes otherwise, basing his conclusions on a close study of Tutankhamun's burial goods. Dr Reeves's ideas were the subject of a recent television documentary produced by the BBC/The Learning Channel. 'Nefertiti. Egypt's Mysterious Queen' included supporting comments from a range of leading scholars - James P. Allen, Lambert Dolphin, James E. Harris, John R. Harris, Zahi Hawass, Geoffrey Martin, and Catharine H. Roehrig.

Reeves's argument runs as follows.

Tutankhamun's famous burial poses something of a conundrum. It has long been recognized that the boy-king died unexpectedly and before he had been able to make any substantial preparations for the Afterlife: the small size of the tomb in which Tutankhamun was found suggests that there had been no time to quarry anything more substantial. This explanation raises, nonetheless, an intriguing question: if the time available to the undertakers was indeed so limited, how did they manage to prepare, at short notice, such a wealth of spectacular burial furniture?

The answer, Reeves suggests, is a simple one. A close examination of the inscriptions, style and iconography of Tutankhamun's burial treasures reveals that a good proportion of the equipment was in fact taken over from the burials of previous kings. The suggestion is that this recycling had occurred when the Amarna royal dead (Akhenaten, Tiye, Nefertiti, Kiya and others) were transferred from el-Amarna to Thebes late in the boy-king's reign, and their tomb equipment pooled and reallocated. The first evidence for this redistribution of funerary items (though it was not recognized as such at the time) was in 1907, with the discovery of Tomb KV 55 - the mix-and-match Theban reburial of Akhenaten and his mother Tiye. The implications of this are significant. For, if the burial equipment of the Amarna royal dead had been available for reemployment at Thebes, the balance of probability is that their bodies had been reinterred in the Valley of the Kings. Akhenaten has been found, Reeves maintains - in Tomb KV 55, where Tiye also had once been interred. But where are the other bodies?

It is a question rendered the more intriguing by a growing consensus that one of the missing dead, Smenkhkare, was none other than Nefertiti, Akhenaten's powerful wife - regarded by some as the most beautiful woman of the ancient world.

Conserving the past

The possibility of further tombs in the Valley of the Kings is a real and exciting spur to the work of The Amarna Royal Tombs Project, and a useful publicity tool. But the Project is much more than this. Whether or not evidence of a second Amarna cache is found, the painstaking and methodical work of the Project hopes to contribute substantially not only to a wider understanding of the history and archaeology of this extraordinary site, but to its long-term survival also.

Since the erection of the Aswan High Dam, the Theban area has been increasingly prone to flash-floods. Such floods cause great structural damage, and are a cause of serious concern for the future well-being of Egypt's ancient monuments. In the Valley of the Kings, the efficiency of the ancient watercourses has been compromised by the vast, earth-moving works of the early excavators. The ground level having been raised - in places by several metres - the waters inevitably drain away through the tombs themselves, with not infrequent damage to their unique painted scenes.

How to remedy this unsatisfactory situation?

Egypt's Ministry of Culture and Supreme Council of Antiquities has worked tirelessly to erect flood-barriers at key points in the Valley. This is a great help, but as the authorities acknowledge, the only real solution, in the longer term, is to reduce the height of the Valley's rubble fill to ancient levels. The controlled stratigraphic excavation of The Amarna Royal Tombs Project is beginning to reveal just how the Valley landscape has changed and developed since antiquity. With the ancient levels safely identified at a range of sites within the area, the removal of modern archaeological dumps and efficient landscaping can begin in earnest.

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