EGYPTIAN
ARCHAEOLOGY
Map of the central area of the Valley of the Kings. Adapted from K.R.Weeks (ed.), Atlas of the Valley of the Kings (Cairo, 2000), sheet 3/72.
burial of a member of the period’s royal family – Kiya, the junior wife of Akhenaten, and often posited (on wholly nebulous grounds) as the mother of Tutankhamun, being a leading candidate. When its nature as a cache of material left over from an elaborate embalming process became clear, the question moved to whose interment the deposit should be associated with. Given the date of the coffins, the only candidates seemed to be Tutankhamun, whose tomb was close by, and Horemheb, whose KV 57 lay 60 m to the west. Given that back in December 1907, the American excavator Theodore Davis had found KV 54, a shaft that contained material from Tutankhamun’s funeral, some Egyptologists wondered whether KV 63 might thus be Horemheb’s, although the difference in scale between KV 54 and KV 63 was striking, suggesting that they might be rather different kinds of deposit. The solution to the problem came, not so much from the ongoing analysis of the contents of KV 63, although seal impressions of a kind found in KV 62 began to hint at a date close to Tutankhamun’s death, but from the study of the hydrology of the Valley of the Kings. This work (by Cross) determined that the whole of the
central area of the Valley of the Kings – which included both KV 62 and KV 63 – had been sealed under a thick flash flood layer prior to the construction of huts used by the builders of Horemheb’s tomb, and that it was most likely that the flood occurred during the reign of Ay – perhaps within its first year. This of course ruled out Horemheb as the owner of the deposit in KV 63, and made it certain that, if indeed those of a king, the embalming whose debris were deposited there was that of Tutankhamun. In that case, what then of Davis’s KV 54? On closer examination, it becomes clear that rather than the actual embalming, the KV 54 material was from the ceremonies surrounding the funeral, by which time the ‘real’ embalmers’ cache would presumably have been sealed. It may be pointed out, however, that nothing in KV 63 named a king, and it could be suggested that it might represent a deposit of embalming material removed from noble tombs in the Valley, as part of freeing them up to accommodate the royal dead removed from Amarna (see below). Indeed, it is possible that KV 46, the tomb of Yuya and Tjuiu, may not have been their original resting place, the apparent order of 4