Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings (12 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

Secrets of the Three Tombs

Well over half a century after Wilkinson's first account of the Amarna remains in 1924, Akhenaten's tomb had still not been found – at least not by the Americans or Europeans. Before the local villagers began to resent foreign intrusions and wreak havoc on the ruins in the late nineteenth century, they had been quick to realize the profitability of the ancient artefacts that still survived in the debris. Diverting their efforts from their usual subsistence toil, they had rummaged through the rubble in search of precious antiquities, particularly around the tombs in the eastern hills. Many such items were unearthed and sold to intrepid artefact hunters and so found their way into the hands of private collectors and the museums of Europe and North America. It was not until the 1880s, however, that funerary items from Akhenaten's tomb first appeared.

In 1882, pieces of jewellery, later identified as burial effects from Akhenaten's tomb, were sold to the Reverend W. J. Loftie, an English clergyman who visited Amarna in search of antiquities. He in turn sold some of them to the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh where they remained, their significance unrealized for another three decades. Unfortunately for the Scots, this was well after the villagers decided to reveal the tomb's whereabouts to a French team in the early 1890s, presumably once they considered it no longer contained anything of tradable value. The person who actually discovered the tomb of one of the most intriguing pharaohs of ancient Egypt, therefore, was no wealthy adventurer like Theodore Davis, or a world-famous Egyptologist like Howard Carter, but an uneducated, poverty-stricken peasant whose name we will probably never know.

The reason why the whereabouts of Akhenaten's tomb had remained a secret for so long is that it was situated almost six kilometres from the nobles' tombs in a remote side valley. Now called the Royal Wadi, this craggy gorge cuts its way into a barren plateau due east of what had once been the central city. As the engineer of the French expedition, Alexandre Barsanti began the official excavation of the tomb in December 189l. This painstaking sifting of rubble, that had already been rummaged through for decades, lacked all the excitement of the discovery of Tomb 55 or the glamour of the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb. In fact, Barsanti's first job was to fit iron gates to the entrance to prevent his work being hampered by further foraging by the locals.

The design of the royal tomb at Amarna departs markedly from other contemporary tombs. It is actually a series of tombs seemingly being intended to house the entire royal family. A long, wide corridor leads downward into the hillside by means of two staircases, separated by a long sloping passageway, for a distance of 28 metres to arrive at the king's burial complex. This consisted of an anteroom leading a protective well-room (a platform overlooking a shaft some 3 metres deep) giving on to the doorway of the burial hall itself. Some 10 metres square in all, the left third of the chamber was a dais with two columns to support the roof, while the remaining area contained a slightly raised emplacement for a sarcophagus. Nothing of the burial
remained; even the wall decorations had been virtually obliterated by what must surely have been the anti-Atenist desecrators. Fortunately, there were one or two faint traces of inscriptions near the ceiling which revealed that the chamber had been prepared for Akhenaten and Nefertiti.

Most Egyptologists believe that when Amarna was abandoned, within a year or two of Akhenaten's demise, the tombs had been emptied by the families of the deceased and the mummies and burial goods were taken away for reinterment at Thebes. Anything that remained would have been looted during the anti-Atenist desecrations that occurred about fifteen years later. Where the majority of the mummies ended up is unknown. Some may have been ransacked during the reprisals, others may have escaped destruction by being well hidden. Whether or not these included Akhenaten himself is at present impossible to say, as his remains or alternative tomb have never been found.

The royal burial chamber at Amarna had certainly been used before the city was abandoned. Not only are there the remains of the limestone wall that once sealed the chamber, but there is the protective well which would not have been dug until the mummy and burial goods were in place. Such a well, or pit, immediately outside the burial chamber, is a common feature of New Kingdom tombs and was intended to make it difficult for thieves to remove the funerary furniture. This one had been refilled with rubble in antiquity so that the deposits could transported elsewhere.

Evidence that both Akhenaten and Nefertiti were once interred here comes in the form of a number of discarded items left behind when the tomb was evacuated, such as
ushabti
figures (small funerary statues) of the king and queen, together with fragments of Akhenaten's sarcophagus and his alabaster
Canopic chest. Recently, modern enhancement of the damaged reliefs in the burial chamber have revealed faded scenes of the pharaoh's funeral with mourning attendants similar to that in Huya's tomb, a scene that was almost certainly carved as the mummy was being laid to rest. From this assorted evidence we can tell that Akhenaten had initially been buried in the Amarna royal tomb in the usual fashion. However, whether he remained here peacefully until Amarna was abandoned, and like the other mummies removed to Thebes, or whether his body had been desecrated by Meritaten prior to the evacuation, is the all-important question. Had his remains ever been deposited in Kiya's coffin and Canopic jars as his daughter apparently intended? A strong indication that they were can be found in other chambers in the royal tomb.

Immediately to the right of the antechamber, at the end of the entrance passageway, is a suite of three rooms, designated as chambers Alpha, Beta and Gamma. Chamber Alpha is around 5.5 metres square and nearly 3 metres high and decorated with scenes showing the death and burial of a princess whose name has been excised, but may have been Neferneferure (see Chapter Four). Chamber Beta, which divides the two, is undecorated but Chamber Gamma, roughly 3.5 metres square and 1.8 in height, is decorated in a similar fashion to Chamber Alpha and inscriptions identify it as having belonged to the princess Meketaten.

Unlike the king's burial chamber, where reliefs had been thoroughly defaced by the anti-Atenists, these chambers were left virtually untouched. However, although the name of Princess Meketaten had been left intact, someone had taken the trouble to erase the name of the woman who is shown outside the death-bed room holding a baby. The same woman is found depicted in the reliefs in Chamber Alpha, and here too her
name has been excised. As this is clearly not the work of the anti-Atenists, who had not considered the chambers worth violating, it means that someone else with a different motive had been responsible. The prime suspect is Meritaten, as the baby-carrying woman would, once again, seem to have been her arch-rival Kiya.

As we have seen, the royal family chose only those of the most exalted position to act as their close attendants. Nefertiti's governess, for example, had been the chief minister's wife, and her lady-in-waiting, her sister, eventually became chief queen herself (see Chapter Four). This in itself would strongly suggest that the woman was someone of Kiya's standing, but there is further evidence pointing exclusively to her. In both scenes the baby-holding woman is accompanied by fan-bearers, a sign of high rank. As even the highest-ranking courtiers in the entourage are not depicted in this way, the woman is superior to them and must therefore be either a princess or a queen. She cannot be Nefertiti or one of her daughters, all of whom are present in the Chamber Alpha scenes, albeit one of them as a corpse, and she cannot be Queen Tiye who, apart from evidently being deceased, would have had her name in a cartouche, which the intact limestone surrounding the excised name reveals not to have been the case. The only other person we know of who appears to fit this picture is the number two queen, Kiya.

Although it has been propounded that the fan-bearers are attending the child, the argument does not stand up to scrutiny. The suggested scenario is that both princesses had died in childbirth and the woman is a nursemaid leaving with the baby who would therefore itself be a prince or princess. However, this cannot possibly have been the case in one of the scenes. Although Mekataten, in Chamber Gamma, being around fourteen, could have died in childbirth, the occupant of Chamber
Alpha was far too young. As the elder sisters Meritaten and Ankhesenpaaten outlived Akhenaten and Nefertiti, and are both shown in the reliefs, the princess in question can only have been either Neferneferure, Neferneferuaten-ta-sherit or Sotepenre. Sotepenre, as we have seen, was no older than eight and, as they do not appear in reliefs until after the year 8, the other two could have been no older than ten – all too young to have conceived (see Chapter Four).

As Meritaten had been responsible for excising Kiya's name from monuments throughout Amarna, it must surely also have been she who was responsible for excising Kiya's name in the royal tomb. It is most unlikely that she would have desecrated the tomb during her father's burial. Before his death, Meritaten may have appropriated Kiya's
Maru
temple and in its inscriptions replaced Kiya's name with her own, but it was only after he died that she was free to deface her rival's monuments so savagely. It seems highly improbable that, before the priests and high officials, the princess would expunge the name of the woman who was still being described as the 'king's favourite' and 'greatly beloved' right till the end of his reign. As she had died, or had been disgraced, by the time Amarna was abandoned, she would not have been around to desecrate the chamber at that time. Consequently, if Meritaten excised Kiya's name from the burial chambers, it means that she must have ordered the tomb to be opened at some point between Akhenaten's interment and the abandonment of the city.

As no further burials appear to have been made in the royal tomb after Akhenaten's demise, the opening of the tomb by Meritaten must have been for another purpose, presumably to acquire Akhenaten's mummy for its re-burial in Kiya's effects. There is indeed evidence that Chamber Alpha was adapted for this very purpose, in the form of four niches cut into its walls to
contain the 'magic bricks'. Egyptologist Geoffrey Martin of London University reasoned that such amulets were only to be found in the tombs of sovereigns or royal consorts, and proposed that the chamber was ultimately adapted for someone other than a princess. Although Professor Martin suggested that it may have been prepared for one of the secondary queens, it seems unlikely that one of the beloved princesses would have been removed from her own tomb while Akhenaten was still alive, and even less likely during Meritaten's time as queen for the benefit of one of her rivals. It would seem to fit more into the emerging picture, in view of the preparations made for Akhenaten's macabre reinterment, that it was adapted for the king himself. We know from Tomb 55 that Akhenaten had 'magic bricks' specifically made for him, yet his own burial chamber has no niches for such amulets. They must therefore have been used elsewhere, possibly in Chamber Alpha, before being appropriated, along with the other equipment, for Smenkhkare's peculiar burial. In all probability, Meritaten, not wishing to disturb her mother's remains in the royal chamber, and restrained from removing the body from the tomb complex by cultic considerations or by the need for secrecy, chose to move Akhenaten's mummy into Alpha Chamber for its profane reinterment. As for the 'magic bricks': as they employ the form of the king's name only used in the earlier part of his reign, they may have been items he ultimately considered unnecessary, and had been discarded until others deemed them an essential element in the their strange burial ritual.

The first act of the scenario of the Tomb 55 mystery would therefore seem to be this: after his death, Akhenaten is renounced by Meritaten and Smenkhkare, possibly because of his uncharacteristic behaviour following the death of his wife. The tomb of Meritaten's enemy, Kiya, is opened, her mummy
defiled, her burial equipment stolen, and her coffin mask defaced to leave one eye. Akhenaten is then reinterred in Kiya's effects, in the belief that it will restrain his, or some invading demon's, spirit. For the purpose, he is moved into Chamber Alpha where the 'magic bricks' are set in place, presumably in the conviction that they would serve to prevent anyone from finding or disturbing him. At this time Kiya's name is expunged from the reliefs in this and Chamber Delta.