The Shadow King (3 page)

After about twenty feet, the corridor turned sharp right and continued north into the heart of the mountain. A princess’s crumpled funeral tent was carelessly thrown into the corner. This passage was higher so Brugsch could stand, but the floor was still strewn with antiquities that glittered in the candlelight. About seventy feet farther on, he found a side chamber, nearly twenty feet square. Piles of huge coffins were stacked upright against its walls, some of them more than twice his height.

Brugsch raised his candle over the coffins to read some of the inscriptions inked onto their lids, and was stunned. The looted antiquities that had appeared for sale belonged to the family of high priests who ruled Thebes during the Twenty-First Dynasty. But here, all in one place, were the most famous rulers of the great Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties, who ruled when ancient Egypt’s power was at its height, with an empire that stretched north as far as Syria and south into Sudan. Scholars had read about these pharaohs in the hieroglyphs carved in stone all over the country: on statues, temples, palaces, and of course the empty royal tombs.

There was Ahmose I—first pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who famously founded the New Kingdom when he liberated Egypt from an Asiatic people called the Hyksos. He was joined by Amenhotep I and Thutmose I, II, and III—several of whom had reputations as great warriors—and one of the best-known Egyptian queens, Ahmose-Nefertari. Most impressive of all, here lay Rameses II—in Brugsch’s time (when Tutankhamun was barely heard of) the most famous pharaoh of all. Nicknamed Rameses the Great, he was a mighty conqueror king, often compared with Napoleon, and many scholars then thought he was the biblical ruler responsible for enslaving the Israelites. It was widely believed that without Rameses II, there would never have been a Moses.

Stunned at coming face to face with such an illustrious assembly, Brugsch felt as if he was dreaming. He later described the experience of being surrounded by ancient royals to Wilson: “Their gold coffins and their polished surfaces so plainly reflected my own excited visage that it seemed as though I was looking into the faces of my own ancestors. The gilt face on the coffin of the amiable Queen Nefertari seemed to smile upon me like an old acquaintance.”

After reading the names, Brugsch withdrew from the chamber, aware that if he stumbled or fainted in such a tinder-dry environment, his candle could easily spark a fire. As he continued, the corridor became gradually wider and taller, until a hundred feet or so further on, it opened into a large, final chamber.

This room was again filled with coffins, but this time they were from the expected Twenty-First Dynasty. Here lay the family of Pinedjem—high priests who ruled the southern part of Egypt on behalf of the official pharaohs who were based in the north. Overall, Brugsch found nearly forty mummies of kings, queens, princes, and priests, and even more enormous coffins.

After nearly two hours in the tomb, Brugsch emerged back into the valley. It was almost sunset, and not far off he could hear the howl of hyenas. He had stumbled across one of the greatest archaeological finds of the century, and its safety now depended on him. Previously the Abd el-Rassul brothers had kept their knowledge of the tomb closely guarded. Now, thanks to the presence of the workmen, its secret was out. He had to get the coffins out of the shaft and to safety before the villagers of Gurna, who now knew that a great treasure was being taken from them, came to claim it for themselves.

Brugsch went back across the river to Luxor and spent nearly the whole night hiring men to help remove the precious relics from their hiding place. Already rumors were starting to spread among the locals—stories of coffins filled with diamonds, rubies, and gold. By the next morning, he had a team of three hundred workers assembled at the shaft. One by one, they wrapped each coffin in matting, sewed it in white sailcloth, and hoisted it up using the rope tied to the palm log.

Then the precious packages had to be carried through the fields to the river. It was an eight-hour trudge across the plain, often with twelve or sixteen men to a coffin, carrying the dead kings past the ruins of the ancient temples that they themselves had built. As Brugsch watched the strange procession, he felt closer than usual to the stories he had read in the Bible: “As the Red Sea opened and allowed Israel to pass across dry-shod, so opened the silence of the Theban plain, allowed the strange funeral procession to pass—and then all was hushed again.”7

The royal haul was then ferried across the river to Luxor and loaded onto the antiquities service steamer. It had taken six days in all to empty the tomb—later dubbed the Deir el-Bahri cache. A unique ancient treasure had been rescued, but at the same time, an invaluable source of knowledge was lost forever. Brugsch was so keen to get the mummies to safety that even though he was a skilled photographer, he didn’t take a single picture of the coffins in their resting place, or make a single drawing of how they were arranged—much to the frustration and disappointment of generations of archaeologists since.

When Brugsch and his colleagues set off on the steamer back to the museum in Cairo, they found that news of their cargo had traveled down the Nile ahead of them. At each town they passed, crowds gathered at the quays, gesticulating wildly. Men fired their guns. Disheveled women ran after the boat, tearing their hair and wailing. The pharaohs were being treated to traditional mourning rites that had barely changed since ancient times.

According to one version of the story, when the steamer finally arrived in Cairo, the government customs officer had no suitable category on his lists for imports of royal mummies.8 Eventually he chose farseekh—dried fish.

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* Edwards wrote extensively about her travels in Egypt, and also founded the Egypt Exploration Fund (now the Egypt Exploration Society) in 1882.

† The literal translation of Biban el-Moluk is actually “Gates of the Kings.”

* Historians divide events in ancient Egypt into three main spans of time, the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom, separated by intermediate periods when order collapsed. (There was also an Early Dynastic Period before, and a Third Intermediate Period and a Late Period after.) Within all that, there were thirty-one dynasties of pharaohs. The New Kingdom—the period when these rulers were based in Thebes—encompasses Dynasties Eighteen to Twenty (roughly 1550–1070 BC).

* Amenhotep III’s inscriptions record that the floors of the temple were plated with silver, and the doorways with electrum (an alloy of silver and gold).

† This route is also known as Agatha Christie’s Path, as it featured in one of her murder mystery stories.

* “The first object that caught Mr. Émile Brugsch’s eye …”

ONCE INSTALLED IN THE BULAQ MUSEUM, it wasn’t long before some of the mummies started to smell. Conditions in Cairo were much more humid than in the dry Theban desert, and the ancient corpses started to rot. Brugsch unwrapped a couple of them but it didn’t go too well. One of the first, in 1885, was the mummy of Queen Ahmose-Nefertari, a balding old woman with worn teeth and a wig made of plaits of human hair tied to strings. Her body had barely been exposed to the air when it began to ooze a stinking black pus, and she had to be buried until the stench wore off.

Unraveling another mummy promised to reveal the body of the great warrior Thutmose III, known mainly for a dizzying series of military conquests, as well as his efforts to erase the name of his stepmother, the female pharaoh Hatshepsut (whom we’ll learn more about later), from history. Yet beneath the bandages, Brugsch found that the head and all four limbs had been broken from the battered torso, the body apparently smashed by ancient looters before being gathered together and roughly rewrapped in the general shape of a man.

Meanwhile, Maspero studied the mummies’ coffins and wrappings, in an effort to understand what all these famous kings and queens were doing bundled into a remote cliff tomb that dated from hundreds of years after they had actually ruled.

The bodies of Pinedjem and his family seemed to be intact—as originally interred—or at least they had been until the Abd el-Rassuls started pilfering their burial goods. But the great kings in the side chamber, as Thutmose III showed, were not in their original state. By deciphering inscriptions written on the mummies’ wrappings, together with what was known of the history of the time, Maspero was able to piece together what had happened. The sequence of events he suggested is still largely accepted—with a few tweaks—by scholars today.

Under the Nineteenth Dynasty, ancient Egypt was at the peak of its power. But a series of weak kings in the Twentieth Dynasty left Thebes in the midst of civil war. As order crumbled, the memorial temples and tombs—including those of the Valley of the Kings—were robbed and vandalized. By this time, Egypt’s pharaohs had moved to the north of the country, in Memphis, and a family of high priests effectively ruled the south. The New Kingdom had come to an end.

These high priests of the Twenty-First Dynasty gradually brought Thebes back under control, but security in the Valley of the Kings remained lax, and they were unable to stop the royal tombs from being repeatedly looted. The Valley had been home to a thriving community of priests, guards, and workmen—the sacred resting place of Egypt’s rulers for five hundred years. But all that was now over, and with the valley left empty, thieves moved in. Repeated reburial commissions were set up to inspect and restore the ravaged tombs, rewrapping the royal mummies and sometimes moving them between tombs in an attempt to keep them safe. But the thefts continued, and the dead pharaohs were progressively stripped of their riches.

Eventually, around 975 BC, high priest Pinedjem II decided to remove the royal mummies from the Valley altogether. He collected them and stripped them of their remaining gold—a welcome addition to the declining state coffers—so they would no longer be a target for thieves. The bodies were (more or less) carefully rewrapped, and placed in plain wooden coffins.

It seems they were taken to the now-lost tomb of a long-dead queen called Inhapy, where they rested until 930 BC, when King Shoshenq I, of a new Twenty-Second Dynasty, moved them yet again, to Deir el-Bahri and the remote tomb that Pinedjem II had constructed for himself and his family. It was intended to be the pharaohs’ final journey and it very nearly was. After depositing their royal charges in the tomb’s outer corridors, Shoshenq’s reburial party sealed the door and climbed back up the shaft, the last people to know of its existence for nearly three thousand years, until the arrival of the Abd el-Rassuls.

IT WAS TIME, decided Maspero, to treat his royal mummies with a little more respect. He organized a series of grand unwrapping ceremonies, starting on June 1, 1886. The guests included the Khedive Tewfik, Egypt’s nominal head of state (the British were really in charge since storming Alexandria in 1882, though they left the antiquities service to the French), and other illustrious figures including the consul-general of Russia and Queen Victoria’s commissioner, Henry Drummond Wolf.

Proceedings began at ten minutes to ten in the morning with the illustrious Rameses II, identified by an inscription on his coffin written by Pinedjem II’s priests. The mummy was laid on a wooden trestle table in front of the crowd of spectators—the men in turbans or tarbooshes, the women in corsets and floral hats. It took Maspero and Brugsch just fifteen minutes to strip the king’s body bare, leaving the bandages in an exploded mess around them on the floor.

Underneath it all, they found a scrawny, old man, as to be expected after nearly seventy years of rule, still strikingly lifelike though, with a strong jaw, hook nose, and particularly satisfied expression. Perhaps that was to be expected too for a man who had eight wives and a harem of beautiful women. Maspero was relieved and pleased not to let his guests down. “The face of the mummy gives a fair idea of the face of the living king,” he wrote afterward.1 But like the previous unwrappings, the event doesn’t seem to have achieved much of scientific value. In Maspero’s time, archaeology was still more of a treasure hunt than a science.

Instead, the conclusions reached were highly subjective by today’s standards, with the king being judged rather like a student in school. One writer described Rameses II’s “somewhat unintelligent expression, slightly brutish perhaps, but haughty and firm of purpose,” adding that “his conduct at [the battle of] Khadesh* suggests a good trooper, but a dull general, and his mummy does nothing to cause a revision of the judgement.”2

Buoyed by this success, Maspero immediately brought out another, unidentified mummy. Once he had cut through an outer shroud of orange linen, inscriptions on the wrappings beneath revealed it was none other than Rameses III, considered the last New Kingdom ruler to wield any substantial authority over Egypt. The excited spectators abandoned their chairs and crowded round the investigators’ table. After numerous layers of canvas and linen, which Maspero and Brugsch cut through with scissors, they finally revealed the king’s head.

But it was a disappointment. Though the mummy was in good condition, the pharaoh’s face was completely covered with a mass of black resin. It was enough for the Khedive, who seems to have been unimpressed by meeting his illustrious predecessors. At twenty past eleven, he walked out.

Unwrapping of other inhabitants of the cache soon followed, and revealed various pieces of information. Seqenenre Tao (Ahmose I’s father, and the penultimate king of the Seventeenth Dynasty), was found to have been killed by a succession of dreadful wounds to the head, perhaps inflicted in battle by Egypt’s dreaded enemies, the Hyksos. Seti I turned out to have been great-looking, with a face that apparently amazed the investigators with its beauty.* One king not subjected to the procedure was Amenhotep I. His wrappings were in near-perfect condition, still adorned with blue flowers and even the fragile body of an ancient wasp. Maspero couldn’t bear to ruin the mummy, so he left it wrapped.