Tutankhamen (8 page)

KV 55 was an incomplete, single-chambered corridor tomb cut into the floor of the main Valley. Ayrton's brief report mentions
digging through ‘chippings which at this depth were cemented together by the action of water'; this suggests that KV 55 was protected by the same layer of late 18th Dynasty flood debris that covered Tutankhamen's tomb.
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A rough flight of steps led down to a blocked doorway, which Davis neglected to photograph before he had it dismantled; Weigall tells us that the remains of an original wall of plastered limestone blocks lay beneath a second and more loosely constructed wall.
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Sealings found within the tomb suggested that the tomb had initially been closed during Tutankhamen's reign: the layer of flood debris suggested that the re-entry and re-sealing occurred no later than the early part of Horemheb's reign.

 

The entrance opened into a descending passageway, partially filled with stone and blocked by a large wooden panel, one of the four sides of a gilded funerary shrine with bronze fittings. The panel was in poor
condition and could not be moved without treatment: rather than wait, the over-eager excavators constructed a plank bridge which would allow them to cross to the burial chamber beyond. This proved to be an unfinished and undecorated room whose seemingly random collection of grave goods – the remainder of the shrine, a cosmetic box, alabaster jars, mud bricks, a decayed funerary pall, faience objects and beads which had once been strung together to form jewellery – were, according to Weigall, ‘roughly arranged'. A coffin with a dislodged lid lay on the floor, while a niche in the south wall – probably an unfinished chamber – held a set of human-headed canopic jars (jars designed to hold the preserved entrails of the deceased). Clearly, this was by no means a primary burial. It was a secondary burial, or re-burial, incorporating artefacts prepared for several Amarna royals, some of which had been adapted for use by someone other than their original owner.

Davis's companion, Mrs Emma B. Andrews, entered the chamber after the passageway had been cleared, and was struck by the sheer quantity of gold on display:

Mrs Andrews's ‘vulture crown' had a missing leg and, like so many objects in the tomb, a confusing history. It had started life as a gold pectoral or collar designed to rest on the mummy's chest; it is not clear whether it had simply been displaced, perhaps when the coffin fell to the ground, or whether it had been deliberately re-used as a headdress. The funerary bricks – magical bricks intended to ensure the rebirth of
the deceased – bore Akhenaten's titles with his cartouche erased, and almost certainly came from his Amarna burial. The funerary shrine, however, had been commissioned by Akhenaten as part of his mother's burial equipment. Akhenaten's image had subsequently been deleted, although Tiy still remained to worship beneath the Aten's rays. Vases inscribed with the name of Amenhotep III, husband of Tiy, may also have formed a part of the queen's funerary equipment.

The four alabaster canopic jars had originally been carved with the name of their owner, but this inscription had then been ground away, leaving the cartouches of the Aten and Akhenaten intact. Next the cartouches had been chiselled away, leaving the anonymous jars suitable for re-use by either a man or a woman. Egyptologists are fairly certain that these jars were originally made for Akhenaten's favoured secondary queen, Kiya.
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The near-identical jar lids are beautifully carved female heads dressed in the Nubian-style bobbed wigs worn by the Amarna royal women. Holes in the forehead indicate where the uraei (the protective cobras worn on the brow) should be; it would appear that these were a late addition to the lids. The delicate lids do not sit well on their rather heavy bases, and this suggests that they may not be the original stoppers.
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On the basis of the wigs and the facial features, which have been compared to images found at Amarna, it seems likely that they are female, and that they represent either Kiya or the eldest Amarna princess, Meritaten; others have suggested that they may be Tutankhamen or Tiy (Daressy) or Akhenaten (Maspero and Weigall). Three of these jars have been subjected to chemical analysis. Two contained a ‘hard, compact, black, pitch-like mass surrounding a well-defined centrally-situated zone of different material, which was of a brown colour and friable nature'; this brown and friable material was almost certainly the remains of the viscera. The third jar yielded the same compact black mass, but the viscera had been removed some time after its discovery.
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The elaborate inlaid
rishi
or feathered-style anthropoid coffin (the
earliest coffin of this type to be found in the Valley) lay on the ground with its lid displaced and its mummy partially revealed. The five bands of hieroglyphs that decorated the coffin exterior, and the twelve lines of text on the foot-end, showed obvious signs of mutilation, and the cartouche which would have named the coffin's owner was empty. The coffin's face had been torn away, and further, accidental, damage had been caused by a rock that had fallen from the ceiling, splitting the coffin lid. Davis assumed that the coffin had originally rested on a lion-legged bed, and that this had rotted and collapsed when water entered the tomb, causing the coffin to fall. There is good evidence to suggest that floodwater did indeed run along the ceiling and drip into the tomb, damaging much of what lay below. But no diagnostic pieces of the ‘bed' survive; it may therefore be that the coffin, which always lay on the ground, was simply disturbed by the intruder (either a robber or necropolis official), who tore away its golden face and – perhaps – stole the golden mummy mask that lay beneath the coffin lid.

The fragile coffin disintegrated as it was removed from the tomb, leaving the excavators with a collection of glass and semi-precious stone inlays and gold. By 1915 conservators in the Cairo Museum had restored the coffin lid, but the base remained a collection of fragments stored in two boxes; by 1931 these boxes had vanished, and were presumed lost or stolen .
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They eventually found their way, via Switzerland, into the collection of the State Museum of Egyptian Art in Munich, where the lower part of the coffin was restored and mounted on a Plexiglas shell. The coffin base, together with some gold foil from the inside and outside of the coffin, was returned to Cairo Museum in January 2002.

Ayrton tells us that the mummy within the coffin was ‘wrapped in flexible gold plates', Davis that it ‘was covered with pure gold sheets, called gold foil, but nearly all so thick that, when taken in the hands, they would stand alone without bending'.
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It seems likely that these
large, flat gold sheets were part of the coffin lining, rather than a separate mummy cover, and the fact that Daressy excluded them from his catalogue suggests that he, too, regarded them as integral to the coffin. These gold sheets are today housed in Cairo Museum; they are inscribed but, as they have been repeatedly folded and badly creased, are almost impossible to read. A further six uninscribed sheets of gold foil, which appear to have fallen off the underside of the lid (five pieces) and the exterior of the base (one decorated piece), were given to Davis by Maspero; today these are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, New York.

Weigall's description of the mummy adds another layer of complexity to an already confused situation:

These inscribed gold ribbons were obviously very different in appearance to the flat gold sheets, yet Weigall is apparently the only witness to have seen them. He tells us that they were sent to Cairo, where he again saw them in the Museum workshop. However, they were omitted from the Daressy catalogue, and Weigall rather sadly concludes: ‘…I am now not sure whether they are still somewhere in the Cairo Museum, or whether they have disappeared.' Grafton Elliot Smith subsequently mentioned the ribbons in his report on the KV 55 human remains, but there is no indication that he actually saw them with his own eyes:

It is probable that the gold which Weigall saw in Cairo was not in fact the remains of (non-existent) ribbon-like mummy bands, but the remains of the six gold foil bracelets which, everyone agrees, were found adhering to the mummy's skeletal arms. These bracelets were sent to the museum in a box of bones, and were stolen from Smith's desk on the day that they were unpacked. The gold ‘ribbons' that Weigall saw in the tomb were probably a part of the coffin.

The quality of the coffin confirms that it was made for an elite, almost certainly royal, owner. Some experts have argued, on stylistic grounds, that it must have been made for (but not necessarily used by) Akhenaten, towards the beginning of his reign when he was still Amenhotep IV. Others, studying both the coffin's style and its surviving inscriptions, have felt able to identify two distinct manufacturing stages, with the coffin originally built for a woman who could be described as the ‘beloved of Waenre [Akhenaten]', then modified, with alterations to the texts and the addition of a false beard and uraeus, for use by a royal man. This suggestion is supported by the mutilated hieroglyphs, which James Allen has reconstructed to read:

The text on the exterior foot-end is more intact, but again shows evidence of alteration:

Finally – and almost certainly while in use – the coffin was vandalised, its face and uraeus ripped away and its cartouches erased.

Ominously, the mummy was damp:

No photographs were taken at the unwrapping, so once again we are reliant on eye-witness accounts; accounts which vary wildly. Davis, for example, tells us that the hands were clasped, while Ayrton reports that the left arm was bent with the hand resting on the breast and the right arm was fully extended along the thigh. Tyndale, who had been told that the mummy was female, remembered: