EGYPTIAN
ARCHAEOLOGY
Thebes. To provide for them, either new tombs were cut, or tombs already cut for favoured officials appropriated. One was KV 55, which probably received the mummies of Akhenaten, Smenkhkare and Tiye; the potential tomb suggested by remote sensing could have received the bodies of Meketaten, Neferneferure and Setepenre – and perhaps others who had died prior to Year 3. One or other of these deposits may have included the body of Neferneferuaten/Nefertiti – buried as a queen, rather than a king – whose demise has been argued to have been the catalyst for initiating the ‘counter-reformation’ that changed the king’s name from Tutankhaten to Tutankhamun (and the queen’s from Ankhesenpaaten to Ankhesenamun), and ended Amarna’s career as a royal residence and cemetery. Another option is that her mummy was laid in the original version of KV 62 – probably comprising just a corridor and single chamber, like KV 55. Then, half a decade later, the death of Tutankhamun removed any familial brake on the erasure of Akhenaten’s legacy, and while KV 62 was being prepared for the young king’s burial, the neighbouring tombs were opened and their owners subjected to differential treatment. Smenkhkare was left in KV 55, albeit deprived of all evidence of his identity; a similar treatment may have been meted out to the daughters of Akhenaten in the putative additional tomb. Tiye and Nefertiti were
removed from their tombs and their mummies moved to a side-chamber of KV 35, but no trace has ever been found of the mummy of Akhenaten: perhaps it was destroyed to mark the definitive end to his religious experiment and to cast its author into the outer darkness. Of course this potential scenario is built on a mixture of facts, interpretations and assumptions, and represents but one of a number of ways in which the underlying data can be read. As with so much in Egyptology, further work is needed, in particular to verify whether another tomb indeed exists in the area – while Nicholas Reeves’s on potential additional tombs in KV 62 may add another facet to the issues. What one can say, however, is that the mantra repeated by investigators since Belzoni – that the Valley of Kings is exhausted – is unlikely to become true any time soon. Aidan Dodson is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol, and Chair of Trustees of the Egypt Exploration Society. His new book, The Royal Tombs of Ancient Egypt, is due to be published in autumn 2016. He is also the author of two studies on the later Eighteenth Dynasty, Amarna Sunrise and Amarna Sunset (2014 and 2009). Stephen Cross is an independent Egyptologist. He is a member of the Egypt Exploration Society, the Geologists’ Association (UK), the Merseyside Archaeological Society and the Liverpool Geologists Association. He was an advisor to the Supreme Council of Antiquities excavations in the Central Area, Valley of the Kings during the 2007–9 seasons.
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