VALLEY OF THE KINGS FOUNDATION

NEWS FROM THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS FOUNDATION

Nicholas Reeves
Director

31 July 2006

Another new tomb in the Valley of the Kings: ‘KV64’ - II

ARTP first encountered evidence of a second anomaly in the central area of the Valley of the Kings in the autumn of 2000, located at a point close to the southeast corner of the modern flood-prevention wall around the Tutankhamun-tomb entrance and a short distance to the north of KV63 (see Fig. 6). The radar readings generated by our equipment were uniformly strong and impressive (Fig. 5) - even more so than the data which in 2000 first alerted ARTP to the existence of KV63 (Fig. 4). As analysed by our radar specialist Hirokatsu Watanabe it seems all but certain (on analogy with the KV63 radar evidence) that the new data identify the presence of another tomb at some considerable depth - ‘KV64’.

From its location this tomb could prove to be a find of the greatest possible significance. By inference from the neighbouring tombs KV62 (Tutankhamun) and KV63 I believe it is likely to represent yet another burial of immediate post-Amarna date - not impossibly home to one or more of the missing Amarna dead about whom I first speculated in 1997 and to whose actual existence KV63 now points. Situated in a part of the Valley which was out of bounds to earlier excavators, moreover, the new find is almost certain to be undisturbed.

Faced with evidence for a second intact tomb in the Valley of the Kings those who understand the nature of the archaeological game in Egypt will feel not excitement but an overwhelming anxiety, for there will be inevitable pressure for quick results. This pressure must be resisted: speed equates to loss, and it falls to the responsibility of every one of us to ensure that Egypt and Egyptology are not denied the further, extraordinary opportunity they are now presented with.

‘KV64’ must be the platform from which to insist that any and all future investigations in the Valley of the Kings are approached with immense caution and carried out methodically to a larger plan by well-funded, professional archaeologists sensitive to all of the site’s possibilities and needs. The recovery of every ounce of the Valley’s remaining potential must be the aim - nothing less will do.

If Egyptology cannot meet these basic obligations then clearly no further work should be contemplated; all archaeology is destruction, and it stands to reason that what has been dug foolishly and in haste cannot later be undug sensibly and at leisure. Let us try, this time around, to get it right.

28 July 2006

Another new tomb in the Valley of the Kings: ‘KV64’ - I

The very real danger now for the Valley of the Kings is that we are living in interesting times (to employ the Chinese curse), with a serious threat of further, more intensive activity at the site than has been witnessed for a century and more. Unless we push hard for a drastic change in basic understanding and approach it is unlikely that this fresh round of activity will have as its priorities stratigraphy, sampling, and settlement archaeology - the aspects upon which we need desperately to focus - but once again a no-holds-barred hunt for tombs in which the real treasure, context, is again the sacrifice.

Why this fear of a new gold rush? Because despite current media disappointment at the absence of bodies it will soon become apparent that KV63 is in fact a discovery of the most extraordinary significance - not for what the single chamber actually holds but for what it clearly signals, which is the definite presence in the Valley of at least one further tomb. The situation is this: as a chamber full of embalmers’ refuse KV63 stands in relation to a future burial as the KV54 embalming-cache in 1907 stood to the tomb of Tutankhamun. It represents without question an augury of further, significant discoveries to come.

Over the summer I have given much thought to the current state of play in the Valley, to the threat of further uncontrolled excavation and to a peculiar dilemma I find myself in: for the prospect of yet more tombs is based upon rather more than mere academic hypothesis. Just as ARTP’s radar survey of the central Valley first highlighted KV63 in 2000, so our project discovered clear evidence also for the existence and location of what appears to be a second new burial, ‘KV64’ - the tomb to which KV63 quite likely relates. Ought I now to be drawing attention to the freshly reviewed evidence for this tomb - if a tomb is what our feature indeed transpires to be? Or should I be maintaining a discreet silence in the hope that the present archaeological uncertainty in the Valley will eventually pass?

Because of the intensity of interest KV63 has aroused among those currently in control I have concluded that the best option is to reveal publicly not only this second tomb’s apparent existence but its precise location also. There is deliberate method in this course of action. First of all it will prevent the possibility of yet another ‘accidental’ discovery and hurried clearance: publicising the existence of the feature in advance of its physical exposure ought to allow time for a considered, scientific approach to its investigation to be insisted upon by the wider archaeological community and arranged through the SCA. Secondly, disclosure now will limit the amount of collateral archaeological damage otherwise likely to be sustained in the sort of random search which is all but imminent. Thirdly, with the publicity the announcement of a new tomb is likely to generate there is a chance that sanity will prevail and the message at last get through that all future excavations in the Valley must be carried out systematically and at a state-of-the-art level - not by the very modest standards which are currently considered acceptable.

25 July 2006

Observations on the clearance of KV63

The topic of overwhelming interest for the past several months has naturally been KV63, the excavation of which is now virtually complete. With the dust beginning to settle on that discovery we might usefully consider how the work has gone.

The clearance has attracted a good deal of international coverage but as yet the excavators themselves have said and published little. Most of what is known in any factual detail about the find has come via the KV63 website, a couple of magazine articles and two (of a projected three) Discovery Channel specials. The tomb has rightly been described as the most important discovery in the Valley of the Kings since Tutankhamun; and, while it lacks the glamour of that earlier find, when what the new tomb has to tell us is eventually released in full it will be matter of immense interest to scholars and public alike.

In contrast with the find itself the excavation has been less than inspiring. Keen that the work might rise above basic mechanical clearance - a process all but guaranteed to sell this unique find short - a number of parties including ARTP sought to provide finance, guidance, and expertise. The absolute necessity of adequate funding was urged upon Memphis at an early stage, as well as the need for careful planning, technical consultation, the best equipment, and above all extreme caution; the possibility of a discreet seminar was also mooted, to tap into all possible sorts of information-capture before a physical investigation of the shaft and entry into the burial chamber was attempted.

All offers and proposals went unanswered, however, as the American team determined to go it alone. This was not a good decision to make. Restricted funding seems to have combined with lack of foresight to produce a series of dangerous fudges: the threat of flash-flood, for example, would not be addressed until after the 2006 tomb opening, despite the deposit having been signalled as probably intact by ARTP as early as 2005; there would be no time put aside to develop any real strategy of work before excavation of the shaft and chamber began; the deposit proper would be cleared in haste and clearly on a budget, with scant attention paid to anything beyond the most basic archaeological techniques and possibilities; and so on. A particular weakness was staffing, and the inability of Memphis to secure adequate conservation assistance until several weeks into the work. Ultimately Chicago House and the SCA stepped in, and it is due in no small measure to their hard-pressed conservators that so much has in the end been physically salvaged from this immensely fragile deposit.

All things considered it represents a less than perfect state of affairs for a find of this significance - located as it is in the very centre of a premier World Heritage Site adjacent to a tomb, Tutankhamun’s, which had yielded the most important burial equipment ever discovered.

Is this really how we wish the Valley of the Kings to be dug? Reactively rather than proactively?

The contrast with the soaring ambition and technical brilliance of archaeological process elsewhere in the world has been stark and frightening. Before further digging is considered Egyptology needs to pause, consider, reassess. For if we are to salvage anything at all meaningful from this sadly abused site then the manner of its future investigation must change, and radically.

22 July 2006

Current and future work in the Valley of the Kings

The excavations carried out by the Amarna Royal Tombs Project between 1998-2002 were of immense significance - not only for the data the project uncovered but also for the strategy on future work it was possible to formulate on the basis of that information. The prospect of further tombs - which I first raised in 1997 and subsequently pursued on the ground through ARTP - is now demonstrated with the uncovering of KV63. While this prospect has inevitably captured the imagination of those now in charge in the Valley, the more general archaeological potential of the site - the unexcavated parts in which such tombs might be located - seems in danger of being overlooked.

To recap: ARTP’s principal achievement since 1998 has been to demonstrate how much, against all the odds, the Valley of the Kings still has to offer - and further tombs represent but one side of the story. With the discovery of a previously unsuspected and intact stratigraphy, able to breathe new life into old finds and provide a background for much that has gone before, context too has been given a miraculous second chance.

Observing the work currently being carried out in the Valley my fears for this and other aspects of the site’s archaeological legacy have grown. As an informed third party no longer engaged in fieldwork I am able to speak freely on the current situation and indeed feel a strong responsibility to do so - to provide the sort of independent voice which has for too long been lacking and which like-minded colleagues, fearful for their own concessions, are loath to venture. My agenda is simple and straightforward: to press for the highest possible standards and clarity of purpose in work undertaken both in the tombs themselves and in the Valley at large - before it is altogether too late.

28 March 2006

KV63 in context: VI

If ARTP knew about the existence of KV63 as early as 2000 it might reasonably be asked why we did not immediately dig it.

The fact is that our delay was quite deliberate: from the start we took the view that in excavating in the Valley of the Kings there is no need for haste and every necessity for caution.

With or without our political difficulties, in ARTP’s schedule of work an investigation of the feature remained some years away from realization. These were years which, in preparation terms, we deemed absolutely essential.

First, the shaft lay some distance from the point we had chosen in 2002 to commence the systematic, stratigraphic excavation of our principal concession. We preferred not to burrow vertically through - and destroy - out of sequence in another part of our site several metres of intact, overlying archaeology solely to dig out a tomb.

The point is that what the Valley of the Kings so desperately needs is not further isolated tombs and funerary objects but good, contextualising data - data which at this site in particular is crucial in recovering for long-known finds a background sacrificed at the time of their amateurish initial excavation a century and more ago.

Much of this data, ARTP now recognized, had by a miracle survived and in salvageable form; and it would be most efficiently collected not by a selective cherry-picking of the Valley’s juicier parts but as part of a thorough and detailed examination of the site as a whole. We were naturally happy at the prospect of excavating a tomb, but that excavation would have to take place at the appropriate time.

Secondly, it was obviously essential for the project to be fully prepared before any physical investigation of the feature took place.

From its location ARTP recognized that the feature revealed on our radar had the potential not only to be a tomb but to be intact. An intact tomb, whether royal or private, is an exceptionally rare phenomenon in Egypt generally and in the Valley of the Kings in particular. The prospect of excavating such a find is - or ought to be - a daunting one.

What an intact deposit of this sort has the potential to tell us about aspects of ancient Egyptian life, death and burial is considerable. Properly handled such a find has the potential to revolutionize, on many levels, our understanding of the ancient past. In order to fully achieve this potential, however, the manner of excavation is crucial.

ARTP concluded early on that to undertake a physical investigation of the tomb hurriedly and without wide-ranging consultation would be a serious error of judgement. Forethought and advice were needed to establish the sorts of information which might, with cutting-edge scientific guidance, be squeezed from such a find - the full range of questions which might feasibly be asked of such a deposit. And, these questions formulated, the practicalities of providing answers would in turn need to be addressed and resolved to ensure that the potential information yield might actually be achieved.

For example: if, like the burial of Tutankhamun, the new tomb proved to be hermetically sealed the excavator would have before him not only a valuable collection of funerary objects but a unique day-in-the-life of ancient Egypt. Air samples, smells, pollen, insects, microbes, dust - an entire ancient environment of inestimable scientific value. The rarest of all possible data, immensely difficult to gather - and in the case of Tutankhamun gone forever when Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon clumsily broke through the sealed doorway to peer in.

What if a second sealed tomb were now in the offing? It was apparent that every effort should be made to avoid undue contamination of the scene - to attempt to salvage now what, in the case of Tutankhamun, had been lost for good.

The headache for the digger is that he or she can never know precisely what lies ahead. In circumstances such as these a responsible archaeologist cannot simply assume that the deposit has been disturbed; rather than take any risks he or she must over-prepare in readiness for all eventualities.

Anticipating the potential reality of an intact tomb ARTP therefore concluded that it would be essential to include in our team from the very start a whole array of specialists and attendant technologies capable of testing for and collecting, prior to contamination or dispersal, every possible type of sample and form of fugitive evidence.

And, equally obvious to us, the project must include and from the very beginning an entire team of conservators - specialists skilled in emergency stabilization procedures, with the highest specification equipment and supplies ready to hand. For once a tomb is opened physical deterioration begins to take place, often extremely rapidly; if one is successfully to preserve what has been uncovered quite literally every minute counts.

ARTP thought long and hard about KV63 for many months. Sadly we were given no opportunity to put our strategy into practice: in February 2005 Otto Schaden, digging in search of KV10’s foundation deposits some 10 metres (sic) from that tomb’s ancient entrance, stumbled upon the shaft and our project was presented with a fait accompli.

23 March 2006

KV63 in context: V

For ARTP’s 2000 season the decision was taken to test this hypothesis by means of radar. The equipment employed was a custom-built 400 MHz system designed by our Japanese radar specialist, Hirokatsu Watanabe (Terra Information Co Ltd, Yokohama). A difficult technology to use because of the multiple reflections which tend to be generated, radar proved surprisingly accurate in the dry Valley terrain once calibrated to the site and its output correctly analysed.

Watanabe’s initial survey revealed within our concession several interesting sub-surface features.

Excavation in 2002 in the vicinity of one of these readings, beneath the tourist path above and between the tombs of Ramesses III and Horemheb (Fig. 1: ARTP excavation area 4), yielded a massive cross-wall with integral, rock-cut shrine - a natural barrier which seems in antiquity to have served as a guard-post closing-off the central section of the Valley. Work at this area is yet to be completed.

Other blips on the radar screen during our 2000 survey clearly indicated the presence of new tombs. One of these blips was KV63, recently stumbled upon by Otto Schaden (Figs. 3, 4).

The subsurface profile of this tomb was established by ARTP and its likely nature logged. And, situated as it was squarely within the ARTP concession (Fig. 1), the feature was slated by us for detailed investigation in due course.

(To be continued)

21 March 2006

KV63 in context: IV

Within the space of a few weeks in 1998 ARTP had made an astonishing discovery: that the entire central area of the Valley beneath the modern tourist areas remained completely undisturbed. This was a revelation of the greatest possible significance, since it implied the survival of a priceless stratigraphy not just at a single point but across the Valley as a whole.

This stratigraphy, properly excavated, recorded and read, has the potential to permit a fuller understanding than Egyptologists could ever have dared hope for - of the processes of siting, quarrying and stocking the tombs, of planning and administering the workmen’s village which occupied the site in antiquity, and of concealing, robbing and subsequently dismantling the burials and their furnishings at the start of the first millennium BC.

Virtually overnight, thanks to ARTP’s initial soundings, the Valley of the Kings had been transformed from a cemetery which most Egyptologists believed worked-out to a site which was archaeologically intact and, treated with care, capable of yielding a full and eloquent context for its many orphaned tombs and individual artefacts.

By the end of our second season in 1999 ARTP had been able to take its conclusions one stage further. We could confirm not only that the central area of the Valley of the Kings was indeed intact but also that it was unique in form - that the Valley’s cliffs descended beneath the scree not in a gentle slope but in a series of abrupt, natural ‘shelves’, arranged one below the other, descending several metres down to the wadi floor (Fig. 2).

The implications of this discovery were even more startling.

The bulk of the extant Valley burials had been found as a consequence of the excavating technique favoured by our nineteenth- and early twentieth-century predecessors – Giovanni Battista Belzoni, Victor Loret, Theodore Davis and Howard Carter. These excavators simply followed the route of any and every exposed cliff face, digging down until they either did or did not hit upon a shaft or buried tomb doorway cut into the uppermost of these shelves.

Tutankhamun’s tomb was different: it was uncovered not by the old hit-and-miss method but by Carter opening up to investigation a wider area of the Valley. This had revealed a tomb positioned not at the base of an exposed cliff face but on a lower shelf closer to the Valley centre - out of range of the early excavators.

For Carter this location explained why the boy-king had escaped detection for so long. What he seems to have overlooked, however, is that a much more dramatic inference could be drawn from this state of affairs.

For ARTP the combined evidence of excavation area 1 and the location of Tutankhamun’s tomb indicated that a second, and perhaps even a third, layer of the necropolis existed and remained wholly unexplored. Layers within which the discovery of further, essentially undisturbed burials might reasonably be anticipated.

(To be continued)

19 March 2006

KV63 in context: III

The technical limitations of previous work in the Valley had prompted an early and easy decision within ARTP: to replace the outmoded process of ‘clearance’ - little more than a digging of holes, tracing of ground-plans and collection of easily salvageable artefacts - with a far more thorough, multidisciplinary methodology.

It will come as a shock to some to discover that truly scientific archaeology has been such a long time coming in Egypt - and as Egyptian sites go the Valley of the Kings is more behind than most. The situation is changing, with some of the best archaeologists in the world now at work in the Nile Valley; but it remains a sobering fact that at many sites the old, amateurish techniques practised at the start of the twentieth century are still in common use a hundred years later. It has to be emphasized that Egyptology and archaeology are not one and the same thing; that most Egyptologists don’t have any formal training in archaeological technique, nor do they even employ formally trained archaeological staff. And since archaeology is something they have traditionally tended to pick up from their Egyptologist-predecessors bad habits are perpetuated longer here than in most other countries.

In consequence, in the Valley of the Kings the complexities of survey, stratigraphic excavation and specialist sampling receive scant attention even today. It is a site also where the physical nature of archaeologically significant fragments commonly passes unrecognized through a quite frightening lack of familiarity with the ancient material; and where less imposing scraps perceived by the digger as ‘uncontexted’ - in a closed site where any such concept ought to be alien - can still be written-off as unworthy of serious study or even retention. The loss to knowledge has been great.

ARTP was to work very differently. Our team boasted many well-known archaeological names - senior staff eventually to include Dr David Aston and Dr Bettina Bader (of the Austrian Archaeological Institute), Ed Johnson (UCLA), Mohsen Kamel (UCLA, mainstay of Mark Lehner’s work at Giza), Prof. Jiro Kondo (Waseda University, Tokyo), Dr Peter Lacovara (Michael C Carlos Museum, Atlanta), Prof. Geoffrey Martin (Christ’s College, Cambridge; formally abandoned ARTP in 2003 to follow his own interests), Dr Mary Anne Murray (Institute of Archaeology, London), Shin’ichi Nishiyama (Institute of Archaeology, London), Dr Catharine Roehrig (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Will Schenck (Chicago House, Luxor), Dr Ian Shaw (Liverpool University), and Ana Tavares (Institute of Archaeology, London - another Lehner team member). Under this staff a determined application of modern survey, excavation and recording techniques and the closest possible study of materials recovered resulted in a burgeoning of the site’s information-yield; and as our area of work expanded the potential of the Valley as a whole became increasingly apparent.

By the end of our first season in 1998 it was obvious just how far from exhausted the Valley of the Kings actually was, prompting us to reassess not only traditional assumptions of the site’s supposedly limited potential but also our own future strategy. Nefertiti remained a very real goal and a useful peg on which to hang ARTP’s publicity and fund-raising efforts. But it was becoming obvious that within the Valley’s rubble fill a much more vital legacy had been preserved - and it was clear to us that it was this larger issue which needed to be given priority.

(To be continued)

18 March 2006

KV63 in context: II

That part of the Valley of immediate interest to me stretched from KV53 in the west to KV55 in the east, and from Ramesses VI (KV9) in the north to Ramesses I (KV16) in the south. These coordinates would define the ultimate extent of ARTP’s principal concession (Fig. 1).

Within this area one particular location appeared to offer particular promise: the stretch of ground between tomb KV56 and the tomb of Tutankhamun (Fig. 1: ARTP excavation area 1).

Fig. 1: The ARTP concession 2002 (showing extent of principal site highlighted in yellow): excavation areas 1-4 (base map after Reeves and Wilkinson, Complete Valley of the Kings; copyright © Thames and Hudson, 1996)

Not only did this area represent an important archaeological loose-end which needed to be tied (it was the precise point at which Carter broke-off digging in 1922), but an intriguing sonar investigation of the area by a Stanford team, SRI International, had in 1977 revealed here two unexplained sub-surface ‘anomalies’ which cried out for closer examination. (These anomalies, it should be noted, are quite separate from the radar readings of ARTP which first identified the location of KV63 in 2000.)

ARTP started work at area 1 in the autumn of 1998 - the first expedition to break new ground in the Valley of the Kings since Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun in 1922. Our discovery that same season, on the freshly exposed cliff face between KV56 and Ramesses VI, of ancient graffiti of a type found only above the entrances to tombs was to amply justify our efforts. These graffiti, left by the scribe Wennefer, provided a strong hint that Stanford’s readings were indeed significant, and that there might well be undiscovered tombs below.

More than this: rare objects of Amarna date recovered by our team in this general area in 1999 (fragments of a coffin, a canopic jar with ground-off text, and a large, blue-painted funerary vessel, as well as a late-Amarna ostracon) pointed clearly, as we had hoped, to at least one reburial of that period having once existed close by - if not within the putative sonar/graffiti tombs then conceivably within the adjacent tomb KV56.

Intriguing in the extreme it is a situation which further excavation beneath the adjacent tourist path promises in due course to clarify.

(To be continued)

16 March 2006

KV63 in context: I

Unlike most excavations which have worked in Egypt the Amarna Royal Tombs Project is not a national enterprise but a determinedly international collaboration. Between 1998 and 2002 ARTP fielded annually for several months a uniquely qualified team of some thirty archaeologists and technical staff drawn from Egypt and Africa, the United States, Japan and a range of European countries. Because of this international character the project was able to draw freely upon the immense goodwill of several countries, in particular Japan where generous financial and material support from a number of major companies - including Kajima, Pasco, Sony and Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) - was ably coordinated by our Associate Project Director Yumiko Ueno (formerly Institute of Silk Road Studies, Kamakura; currently Ancient Orient Museum, Tokyo).

As Director of ARTP the work was for me personally the culmination of twenty years’ professional involvement with the Valley of the Kings - as museum curator, researcher, archaeologist and writer, with a good deal of what is currently in print on the Valley being from my pen.

I had decided to switch my principal focus from the library to the field in 1998. This was prompted by a drastic proposal then being openly discussed: to bulldoze and remove wholesale the scree fill of the royal wadi - thousands of tons of rubble which over the centuries have accumulated to raise the Valley of the Kings’ floor to dangerously high levels. As a result of this elevation, during rare periods of flash-flood - most recently the events of 1994 - the rushing waters have tended to flow destructively into the tombs rather than safely past the entrances as they did in antiquity. Mass clearance to lower the paths was being mooted by some as one solution to the problem.

From my perspective the proposed emptying of the Valley represented an equal threat to the site - a knee-jerk reaction which if carried through uncontrolled would result in the destruction of much valuable archaeological evidence. While there was still time, therefore, I determined to pursue on the ground, with an expert team, a specific project I’d had in mind for some time.

By the late 1990s book-based progress on the Amarna period (which along with the Valley of the Kings was an area of special interest to me) had effectively ground to a halt: in order to move forward in our understanding of this topic it was clear to most scholars that an input of fresh primary evidence was required. This evidence, under the aegis of Durham University Oriental Museum (to which I am attached as Honorary Fellow), I set out to see if I could uncover within the confines of the royal wadi.

Specifically I had concluded from my research that beneath the floor in the central part of the Valley were concealed still several Amarna-period burials - the majority of these in fact reburials analogous to that of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten discovered in 1907 in tomb KV55.

My particular quarry was the burial place of Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s wife and coregent (who, I concluded, had been buried in the Valley as and when she died), but also the whereabouts of Akhenaten’s secondary consort Kiya, his second daughter Meketaten and other lesser members of the royal family who had originally been interred at El-Amarna. I’d established that the first two were women upon whose funerary furniture Tutankhamun had drawn either for the preparation of his own burial within KV62 or for the refurbishment of Akhenaten’s within KV55 before the boy-king reinterred these ladies’ bodies close by. (My ideas on this subject were presented in detail in a Discovery Channel documentary first aired at the end of 1999: Nefertiti: Egypt’s Mysterious Queen.)

Needless to say most of my colleagues considered the project speculative in the extreme: after Tutankhamun the majority of Egyptologists assumed there was nothing of significance left in the Valley of the Kings to be found.

(To be continued)

28 February 2006

ARTP, the Valley of the Kings and KV63: update

Recent comment from Dr Zahi Hawass ( link ) and Dr Bob Bianchi ( link, link ) suggests there may be a need for further clarification of ARTP’s work in the Valley of the Kings and our precise role in the locating of tomb KV63.

I’ll begin by addressing suggestions that ARTP is currently claiming the discovery of the new tomb for itself. I should like to reassure Dr Hawass, Dr Bianchi and the public at large that this is not the case - though in the immediate aftermath of the discovery there was obvious disappointment felt by me, by the members of my team and by our supporters. Here was a tomb whose position we had located in the course of our 2000 radar survey, situated squarely on what as recently as 2002 was our concession; a feature we had every hope of investigating ourselves in due course. But it was Dr Otto Schaden who physically uncovered it and confirmed its character. Under those circumstances there can be no question that the credit for actual discovery should go to him and to the University of Memphis. It was they who were permitted to dig the shaft; it is they who are now excavating the burial chamber. And of course, as Dr Bob reminds us, who digs where and when are matters entirely in the gift of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

Furthermore, I should like to emphasize that Otto and his team were given access to ARTP’s radar data only after they had uncovered the shaft, in an attempt at friendly collaboration on our part; there is no suggestion that Memphis were aware of our radar findings before they stumbled upon the tomb entrance. Their discovery of the KV63 shaft was achieved quite independently of our locating it in 2000. It may well be that the potential revealed by ARTP’s excavations inspired Otto similarly to investigate beneath the tourist path as and when he had the opportunity - but that is quite a different matter.

I might also point out that as soon as the accuracy of our radar readings had been confirmed by Otto’s discovery this information was immediately communicated to Dr Hawass - naturally before it was shared with the Memphis team.

With recent years having been taken up almost entirely with the matter of personal and professional survival it is clear that I have neglected properly to publicise the history and strategy of ARTP’s work in the Valley. It may be worthwhile, therefore, to summarize here on our website, over the coming weeks, what archaeologically our team has been attempting to do, why, and what we were able to achieve; to provide for the recent KV63 find, in other words, some sort of context - because the discovery does indeed have a context, at least from our side.

15 February 2006

Website back in action!

Friends and supporters of the Valley of the Kings Foundation and the Amarna Royal Tombs Project will be surprised and I hope pleased to see that the website is again back in action after a break of many months. It has been an eventful time.

First of all I should like to express ARTP’s delight at the recent uncovering by Otto Schaden’s University of Memphis team, outside the entrance to Amenmesse (KV10), of a new shaft tomb - KV63. The discovery offers welcome confirmation that my belief in the existence of further tombs in the Valley of the Kings was indeed soundly based.

The investigation of KV63 is now ongoing. Photographs and descriptions indicate that the burial, undisturbed since antiquity, contains at least five wooden coffins and a collection of large pottery storage jars. Coffins, pottery and tomb-type appear to be mid-late 18th Dynasty in date.

ARTP was quick to put at the disposal of Otto and his team our research on that particular area just as soon as we heard a rumour of the discovery in mid-2005. We send our best wishes for a painstaking and thorough excavation - properly executed the potential information-yield of the find should be very high indeed.

Please note that for the time being this website will be the only official vehicle for my thoughts and comments on KV63.

Secondly, most of you will be aware of my personal struggle over recent years defending against (false) accusations of involvement in antiquities smuggling - accusations which resulted in my suspension from digging in 2002. I am pleased to report that at a meeting of the Supreme Council of Antiquities held in Cairo on 7 August 2005, following meticulous investigation, my name was officially cleared of any wrongdoing. We are hopeful that this bodes well for ARTP’s return to the Valley of the Kings in due course.

Finally, please be aware that the Valley of the Kings Foundation and Amarna Royal Tombs Project now have a new home - at beautiful Chiddingstone Castle in Kent, itself a registered educational charity. The full postal address is:

Amarna Royal Tombs Project
Valley of the Kings Foundation
Chiddingstone Castle
Near Edenbridge
Kent
TN8 7AD
United Kingdom

Email: vokf@aol.com