I had assumed that Egyptologists, as a subsection of anthropologists, were a dying breed. There are no new hieroglyphics to translate; there are no new sites to raid; there are no new dead kings to defile. (I actually love knowledge, and think it’s good that we learn things from Egyptian tombs–but you have to admit that from the ancient Egyptian perspective on the dead and their afterlife, "defile" is the appropriate word for what is done to mummies and their pyramids.) Did I say the academic and intellectual field was dead? Turns out, I was wrong. Seriously, how cool is this discovery? The story, I think, speaks for itself:
LUXOR, Egypt — The 3,000-year-old face of a woman, her eyes lined in black kohl, stared out from a funerary mask through the freshly unsealed door of a tomb.
The five mummies inside, possibly members of a pharaoh’s court, are already celebrities amid archeologists’ excitement over the first tomb discovered in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings since that of King Tut more than 80 years ago.
Egyptian authorities gave the world a first peek yesterday at the treasures, which were discovered by a team of American archeologists while working on the neighboring tomb of Amenmeses, a late 19th Dynasty pharaoh.
”It’s a dream come true," said Edwin Brock, co-director of the project, affiliated with the University of Memphis.
He and his colleagues have not yet entered the single-chamber tomb, believed to be about 3,000 years old and dating to the 18th Dynasty. But they have made a hole about a foot high in the door and peered through to see five wooden sarcophagi and about 20 alabaster jars.
”It was just so amazing to find an intact tomb here after all the work that’s been done before," Brock said. ”This was totally unexpected."
Yesterday, Egypt’s antiquities authority allowed journalists a first look into the tomb, located across a pathway from Tutankhamun’s, the last burial site discovered in the valley on Nov. 4, 1922 by British archeologist Howard Carter.
Inside the 12-foot-by-15-foot chamber, one sarcophagus had fallen on its side, facing the doorway. The funeral mask showed the painted features of a woman, with long black hair, thin eyebrows, and kohl-ringed eyes. Gold patterns of a thick necklace or breastplate were visible, but the lower half of the coffin was splintered and rotting, the result of termites, Brock said.
In one corner of the chamber, a coffin seemed to have been partly pried open. The brown cloth below the lid probably belongs to a mummy, the archeologists said.
At the back of the chamber was the silhouette of another sarcophagus, the stately face painted on its funeral mask staring upward, and hands folded on the chest.
Large pottery jars, some cracked, lined the chamber. Egypt’s chief of antiquities, Zahi Hawass, said the jars held food and drink to sustain the deceased in their journey to the afterlife.
Hawass said archeologists hope to find hieroglyphs on the coffins that will identify the mummies. ”Whoever they are, they should be very important people," he said. ”Nobody can be buried in the Valley of the Kings unless they are important."
Brock and Otto Schaden, who heads the US team, pointed out that the mummies were not necessarily royalty; other tombs in the valley belong to favored royal servants or top officials.
The discovery broke the long-held belief that there is nothing left to dig up in the Valley of the Kings, the desert region near the city of Luxor, 300 miles south of Cairo, that was used as a burial ground for pharaohs, queens, and nobles in the New Kingdom, which dated from 1500 B.C. to 1000 B.C.
Accidental Blogger 
2 responses to “New Discovery: Important Dead People”
Actually, the field is probably far from dead. There may be fewer tombs to dig up and even fewer intact mummies to unwrap, but the Egyptologists are not yet a dying breed. There is a lot of forensic (as in pathology) archaeology going on to determine the health and cause of death etc. And I am sure they have not yet fully read and interpreted what is on the walls of all the pyramids.
As for “defilement” of the royal dead, well no fear there. The ancient Egyptians are not likely to rise from the sarcophagi and riot on the streets of Cairo.
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Joe’s comments are more than a little naive. Discoveries, many of great consequence, are constantly being made by archaeologists working in Egypt, the ancient Near East, and the greater Mediterranean region as a whole. The narrative of the ancient world is far from fixed. Chronologies are ever in flux, texts are found and puzzled over, artifacts cast new light on what daily life was like. As for Egypt, the face of Zahi Hawass, that country’s director of antiquities, can be found frequently on western television, touting some new and exciting discovery.
As a former editor at an archaeology magazine that specialized in Egypt and the Mediterranean world, I once interviewed Hawass at a Washington, D.C., hotel. For about an hour straight the man talked, about all the discoveries archaeologists in Egypt were making, about how these finds would help us better understand the ancient world. He barely took a breath, so excited was he. I was breathless listening to him. He had to leave, abruptly, to catch a flight, but if given the chance, he would have talked all night; of that I’m fairly sure.
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