The Amarna Royal Tombs Project
- Dig diary 2002
by Paul Sussman
The Amarna Royal Tombs Project
My final day in the Valley of the Kings - I can't believe this season has gone by so swiftly. It seems like only last week that I was stepping off a plane from England. Felt distinctly miserable driving up through the hills for the last time.
Spent the morning tying up a few loose ends down in KV56, notably going around the walls and ceiling leaving small sticky markers beside what I think might be masons' marks, and collecting samples of what is possibly very rough gypsum plaster from the floor of the chamber. Also left a sticky marker on the north wall of the shaft, about a metre and a half (around five feet) above the tomb doorway, where there is a mark that might, just might, be the remains of an ancient graffito. Hopefully, Geoffrey will check it out once I am gone.
Ana came down for a look at the tomb and, to my embarrassment, noticed something that I myself hadn't seen. (Sometimes you can be so familiar with a space that obvious things pass you by.)
I was showing her the beautiful cutting at the south-west corner of the chamber, when she pointed to a round depression in the stone of the ceiling and asked: "What's that?"
I had brushed that corner of the ceiling only a few days before and not noticed it. Now that I took a closer look, however, it was clear that the depression was some kind of socket or post-hole. We looked at the floor directly beneath it, and low and behold there was another round depression of almost exactly the same diameter.
Precisely what these sockets signify is uncertain. They might have been for a scaffold of some sort that the ancient workers used while cutting the tomb, or they might have been there to hold some item of tomb furniture in place. Whatever the case, I was annoyed at myself for having missed them. I felt like a parent who finds out something important about their child from a third party.
Another interesting discovery - made by me this time, thank God - were some very thin black lines on the broken rock above the chamber doorway, on the shaft side.
The top of the doorway has broken away, leaving an inverted "V" of shattered stone where there ought to be a horizontal lintel. It is Nick's belief, and mine too, that the upper part of the doorway was smashed in ancient times, either by robbers or by necropolis workmen who, having cut the doorway, discovered that it wasn't actually big enough to accommodate some of the larger items of tomb furniture intended for the chamber (shrine panels, for instance).
The thin black lines are perhaps faint visual echoes of the tools used to do this smashing.
Loose ends were being tied up elsewhere on site too. Up the Valley at Site A, Andrew brushed down the loose stone that forms the base of the gebel, leaving his excavation area neat and tidy. (He's even more fastidious about these things than I am.)
On Site B, the only site that will still be operative during the final week of the dig, the workmen continued to cut down the section at the north side of the site, revealing some large tumbled stones - possibly the remains of ancient workers' huts, probably just natural.
Work finished at 1 p.m. today. Too early for me - despite six weeks down in KV56 I still feel I haven't quite got everything out of the tomb that it has to offer. (I would have liked just a couple of more days examining the walls and floor and ceiling.) Still, I guess you have to let go sometime. But I console myself with the thought that it's something to look forward to when we come back next season.
I bade an emotional farewell to our inspector Ezz, to reis Ahmed and to the workmen, especially Mohammed and Shaaban, with whom I have shared so many happy - and dusty - hours down in the Gold Tomb.
As we drove away from the Valley, the Qurn dropping away into a sea of hills behind us, I found myself thinking about the past six weeks, and all the things we have done and found.
It has, in many ways, been the best season yet in the Valley. Not simply in terms of finds, but in terms of the information we've been able to gather about the history of this most magnificent of archaeological sites.
Clearing KV56 has been a wonderful, rewarding experience, and a job that I hope posterity will judge I have done well. Not only did we find some breathtaking items of gold jewellery, but, more importantly, in the form of the wig curls and fragments of coffin inlay, conclusive evidence of an earlier - probably 18th Dynasty - usage of the tomb. (All the items found by Davis in 1908 dated to the 19th Dynasty.)
Curiously, however, when I think about what has given me most pleasure this season, it is not to KV56 that I look, but rather Site B and the four magnificent copper chisels that were unearthed there on Thursday 12th February (Day 22). They might not be the most glamorous of objects, but somehow their very simplicity brings you closer to the reality of the ancient world and those who lived and worked there than any amount of gold.
For me this will always be the Copper Chisel season, and it is a source of immense pride to me that I was a member of the team who found them - albeit a member who, at the time, was fifty feet away down a deep hole.
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