Haremhab, Pharaoh and Conqueror: New Investigations in His Royal Tomb in the Valley of the Kings

I'm Dorthea Arnold from the Egyptian art department and of course we have the great pleasure and honor to hear somebody special today professor Jeffrey Martin when I was thinking of what I should say in order to introduce him I really remembered how we first met many many years ago I don't dare even to think how many but you do and maybe you don't remember the same occasion he came from walking through the desert and looking for samples is that the one you remember looking for samples for c14 which then was a big thing done in Oxford and came out as an important first step in to see 14 days of ancient Egypt and then of course I also remember when he came back from Sakawa and said I think I know where these new kingdom toms are so of course it was too and then he found the tomb of harm hub and that is really that he's now as such as the discoverer of that tomb before ham hock became king he is the one who wraps up our exhibition really it will be still up there for until June July the 4th but in a way today we are sort of giving it a peek moment after the conference in this symposium yesterday and we are really very very honored that you are ready to talk to us for a whole evening pokken of course you know that Professor Martin is a professor emeritus of the University College in London it was actually Edward's professor of Egyptology there and he is now still continuous of costal work as a scholar and he has close connections in Cambridge he lives in Cambridge to the Christ College where he is a fellow commoner that's the expression which is I'm sure medieval or something anyway please welcome professor Matt thank you very much dr. Arnold your kindness as always wonderful kind introduction can you hear me the back ladies and gentlemen that's always the first thing to check I think when you're giving a public talk if the lights could go down please then you won't have to look at me the screen will is far more interesting perhaps right ladies and gentlemen it's a joy to be in New York in the spring I must say I come every year from my holiday but usually in the fall at this time the spring and this year an additional bonus is to be invited to take part in a seminar organized by the Department of Egyptian art in the museum on the career of the general and later pharaoh horemheb which the museum cause hard him hub no no it's perfectly correct we also had this afternoon a roundtable so to speak on the very very difficult question of ancient Egyptian chronology which was most illuminating in addition I have this evening being given the chance to talk to you about my recent work in the Valley of the Kings which involves the re excavation of parts of King Horemheb's to the Metropolitan Museum of Art authorities dr. de la dia Arnold in particular the curator of Egyptian art here and the members of Isis I must remember them they remember the members of Isis the organization which supports the work of the Department of Egyptian antiquities have made my visit possible and I'm deeply grateful so my association over for very very happy years I must say with another expedition working in the Valley of the Kings from 1998 gave me the opportunity of examining most of the tools most the royal tombs there noting the existence in some of them of debris clearly remaining to be examined including debris in the tomb of King Horemheb numbered 57 in the Kings Valley sequence of tombs this slide I took takis years ago not soon after I met dr. Derrick dr. Tara Dorotea Arnold it would have been way way back and I if we're looking down we are looking as she said we are looking down into the Valley of the Kings so it's an interesting shot looking down is the valley here we go yes but before I begin to talk about the re excavation this tomb just a very few brief words of introduction to talk about this military man Horemheb who began his career under King Tutankhamen whom he served as regent during the early years of that young Kings reign from it shall we say about 13 47 BC the mission I directed at saqqara in the north of Egypt and English Dutch expedition from 1975 we had the good fortune three days after we opened the site to discover the magnificent tomb built for this man horemheb while he was still a private citizen while he was in fact regent of Tutankhamun and a great military general I spoke about the discoveries there many many years ago here in the met that I mustn't trouble you with that now Tutankhamun died as you probably know very young age de bout 20 or so and was succeeded as Pharaoh by an official named I who reigned only four years when Tutankhamun by the way the male the male line of the Egyptian royal family was extinct so a military man I took over for four years and then it was then about 1335 BC that the general Horemheb became Pharaoh he's fine to MIT Sakura which I just mentioned was abandoned unfinished and preparations presumably immediately began for work on his royal tomb in the valley of the kings tomb discovered and excavated by the american explorer Theodore Davis in 1908 in other words just over a hundred years ago for orientation purposes I'm sure many many people in this room have been to the value of the Kings of course we're looking down into the central part of it it's completely landscaped now of course because the enormous press of visitors tourists and others in all the major sites of Egypt not least in the Valley of the Kings and the Egyptian authorities of course in order to make it as easy as possible for these enormous crowds to move around have had to landscape the terrain so to speak and to protect the entrances to the tombs and to take precautions against possible floods for orientation purposes the tomb of Tutankhamun is just down here on the bottom right we move up this pathway so to speak and the tomb of Horemheb is over here as just about there the entrance the modern entrance to the tomb of two horemheb is just about there so as I can see if I may just show you just two or three slides of the superb painted reliefs in the interior this is one followed by another you can see the quality of the work it's truly outstanding but it's not my intention this evening it's not part of the program to talk about the tomb decoration as such but I will concentrate on the objects found in the tomb which have a story to tell as I hope to demonstrate you may wonder why after Theodore Davis's work you may wonder why it was necessary a hundred years later to re excavate the tomb the answer is that our predecessors often worked extremely rapidly and much was lost or overlooked in recent years a new kind of archaeology has emerged in Egyptology the reacts curved asian and analysis of sites and monuments cleared in the past by our predecessors who often missed or ignored important clues as I hope to demonstrate as I speak about the results obtained by my own tiny mission the Cambridge expedition to the Valley of the Kings there were only two professionals on board myself and my colleague from the University of Kernighan dr. van Dijk and I had a small team of local men about 50 normally and our work over for very short seasons was sponsored financially by two very good and very altruistic friends of mine peers and journey little and I take pleasure in mentioning their names because nothing could be done without their help the entrance to the tomb of Horemheb was revealed as I said a century ago the excavation of the monument proved to be Theodore Davis's last major project in the Valley of the Kings after he'd cleared a Horemheb he announced that he thought the to the many of the Kings was more or less empty now everything had been discovered and so he lit so he upped and left and of course not all that well some years later well in fact in doing so in leaving the Valley of the Kings he he ultimately paved the way for the mission of the Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter as you know perfectly well they are major discovery was the tomb of Tutankhamun just a tiny distance away from the tomb of Horemheb the tomb of Horemheb was revealed by Theodore Davis to be enormous in size in fact one of the grandest in the valley the most of the decoration was unfinished at the Pharaohs death it is without any doubt one of the most important monuments in Egypt for studying the various stages of work involved in planning and decorating a major tomb the Theodore Davis's publication of the results of his work the title page of which you see on the screen now is magnificent as well all his publications actually is magnificent some to us in fact in terms of its format but opening it up and it's remarkably uninformative about the actual excavation and find spots of the objects now it's easy to criticize Theodore Davis most scholars do but I'm bound to say that he was a man of his age he financed some of the most remarkable work in the Valley of the Kings and his name will will always be remembered for making some of the most spectacular discoveries there so let people criticize him but he made a really astonishing contribution to our knowledge of the value of the Kings in a way this is this is a book I ought to explain I think you'll probably guess the name harm hobby there was the early night one of the early 19th century versions of Horemheb or harem Harlem hub as the met cause it to attend commando is the old-fashioned way of spelling tootin Carmen again in the early 19th century Theodore Davis as well as excavating horemheb he cleared a short just adjacent to the entrance of Horemheb tomb and found there some very fragile gold foil fragments some of which named Tutankhamun so he thought he'd discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun and so he's put the name on the title page but of course he hadn't discovered Tutankhamun he was just down the road so to speak the the catalog the objects found by Theodore Davis was made and published in this volume by the French scholar rather a famous French scholar called George Darcy and it's a very important part of the book of course but it's selective only the most important or spectacular in some cases objects being chosen for illustration and detailed cataloging we shall see some of these objects on the screen in a moment or two but the photographs in this book I'm bound to say are outstanding for their time a hundred years ago and I've had to use as you will see in a moment the black and white photographs the archival photographs to illustrate my talk the photographs in this book were the work of a young Englishman Harry Burton whose name will be familiar to you early in his career before he went on to achieve immortal Fame for his photographic record of the objects in Tutankhamun's tomb discovered by Howard Carter as I'd said in 1922 Davis's description of Horemheb's two occupiers believe it or not only two pages in this publication and these contain several questionable statements suggesting that the excavator was relying on partly on his memory when he wrote his as we all do of course if we're honest the longer and doubtless more scholarly account of the work in this tomb by his young collaborator Edward Ayrton another Englishman was rejected by Theodore Davis for publication in this volume Theodore Davis said it was too long this crucial this very crucial document document of of it would Alton has long since disappeared and probably no longer exists which of course is a tragedy Davis does not tell us how his work proceeded though it's logical to suppose that the great quantities of limestone chippings from the original cutting of the tomb which he found at the entrance to the tomb which continued as far as a deep well shaft pot way in would have been removed by his workmen to give them access to the corridors staircases and rooms inside the too which you see on this modern cross section if you imagine yourself standing at the entrance here and entering down the flight of steps so if it's very very steep as you can see a corridor another flight of steps the corridor the first of the decade painted wonderfully painted decorated rooms you've seen rise for that this is the well shaft coming down here but yes this is the will show up which I shall talk about and then you another flight of steps corridor steps until you get down into the sarcophagus hall a pillared hall the room for the sarcophagus a very large undecorated room behind the sarcophagus room another small smaller chamber behind an unfinished chamber and storerooms for funerary equipment and wine am free there this is the cross-section in fact from the publication quite a lot can be deduced from Harry Burton's excellent photographs which I've already mentioned and I shall show them in a moment or two but I would like to mention that it happens that not one you may be surprised at this not one of the major royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings is definitively published in respect of its excavation history its architecture its inscriptions its paintings reliefs funerary equipment and skeletal remains the architecture the texts and funerary objects in particular are crucial for an understanding of the fundamental concept of divine kingship in Egypt and the Royal so called mortuary cult the cult of the dead monarch which was planned to continue forever and it really is ironic that one of our most important sources for the study of these matters the tomb of Tutankhamun is not really a royal tomb at all in respect of its architecture so that its contents with the exception of the objects found in the sarcophagus chamber of Tutankhamun are not arranged in their correct positions in the various rooms of his monument an added complication is that Tutankhamun's tomb was disturbed at least twice in antiquity and the the contents turned over rifled and so on moreover great numbers of the objects found by Carter still await definitive publication after 80 years well now now is the time to indicate some of the areas within the tomb of Horemheb investigated by the expedition I emphasize a game perhaps I can go back just for a split second where we were there already I would like to emphasize the yes and I to emphasize the great distance from the well shaft here to the exterior of the tomb a very steep stairways and ramps as well as the enormous labor expended by Davis's expedition in removing the debris that certainly filled the approach corridors and stairs as well as all the material he found in the shaft a terrible job one photograph in Davis's publication indicates that the shaft itself there it is was filled almost to the brim with debris in it before he excavated it of course so that he and Ayrton were able to get into the interior rooms and corridors without too much difficulty and it's clear to me that after emptying the shaft assumably that's one of the first things he did although we shall never know because he doesn't tell us and after clearing the shaft Theodore Davis decided to use that shaft now empty as an area in which to deposit debris found further down in the tomb thus avoiding the problem of transporting enormous quantities of debris found in this area all the way up and outside as we subsequent subsequently did the debris he left behind in our rear excavation if Theodore Davis had taken had taken everything that he'd found outside there would obviously have been nothing for us to find so there we are and this is the original entrance to the tomb as it was found by Theodore Davis and you can see the superincumbent chippings he cut down there you see and when the when the burial of Horemheb was in position the great flight of steps going down into the entrance and then the long corridor was filled I'm sure to the ceiling with the chippings from the original cutting of the structure just as just as Howard Carter found in the tomb of tutankhamun so this this archival photograph is very very interesting not because it doesn't begin to resemble that now there's a huge concrete structure over this area now as with almost all the royal tombs but to protect them from floods so this is a very very interesting photograph we see here the initial descent into the tomb with quantities of masons chippings as I said that filled the approach corridor originally to the ceiling but of course the robbers when they came in they they didn't take out all the chippings they just came out they just made a passageway presumably over the top the collapse ceiling I seem to remember in the second painted room beyond the well shaft and just to give you an idea of the kind of thing that Theodore Davis encountered because the interior of the tumors in a shocking state not only because of the activities of robbers but in particular because so much of the substructure was partly shattered by what must have been earth movements over the centuries you see and this too is unique with all these photographs I can't think of another tomb that that that has such detailed photographs of the interior of of such a monument almost at the moment of its discovery this is a collapsed ceiling on the west side of the pillared Hall which you saw in the section and the sarcophagus Hall itself exactly as Theodore Davis found it with the lid thrown over across by the robbers and smashed I shall talk about the sarcophagus later on towards the end of my talk fragments from the ceilings and so on it was in a truly shocking State another shot taken from a different angle but no I must just mention this if I may I think in that shadow they are just in the distance on the side of the sarcophagus there it was never recorded by Theodore Davis or Edward ad well perhaps Edward Ayrton did but we shall never know it's an emplacement a square emplacement for the reception of the so called canopic chest which was a piece of funeral furniture as you perhaps know which with Jarrah which which contained jars with the Pharaohs some of the Pharaohs interior organs that's where it was it doesn't appear on the plan and so on and so forth but now of course the floor of the tomb with the floors of so many of the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings covered with modern planking so we can't get access to it to record it let's just buy the buyer another interesting shot from the from the sarcophagus hall looking outwards to the pillared Hall and you see these curious rectangle emplacements on the east wall and the west wall the so-called emplacements for magical bricks everything I mean the whole idea in these monuments of course was the purpose for the protection of the body of the divine Pharaoh in his sarcophagus there were little images originally in there but these they feature in quite a number of the royal tombs including tutenkhamun's they were found intact but these emplacements were never recorded by Theodore Davis or measured and because I had a ladder available I clambered up and of course made detailed measurements and so on for anybody in the future who will study the architecture of the tomb why don't we move now into the large undecorated room which you saw again on the section of the tomb the debris piled up there this is as Theodore Davis found it debris piled up against the wall there great chunks from the ceiling when of course that was all examined and cleared by Theodore Davis and I'm sure this is some of the material that was thrown back in was taken up and thrown into the shaft but when but in but when we entered the tomb in order to reiax cavae tit there was an enormous pile of debris starting from just under the ceiling in this corner covering I suppose about a third of the tomb and this was what in a sense inspired me to in to inaugurate a reinvestigation because I wondered did Theodore Davis examine all this stuff if he did did he take out every tiny fragment unlikely one or two objects if you've got keen eyesight you can even see that one or two objects in situ here at the back here there is there is a wooden object which is the base of I think it's the base of a so-called germinating Osiris you may you may remember the one that Thea that Howard Carter found in the tomb of Tutankhamun an image in this in the shape of the god of the underworld Osiris filled with soil and planted with grain which was watered and in it germinated a kind of symbolic resurrection and rebirth maybe Ayrton studied all these things in detail in his report but again we shall never know oh there it is yeah that's a better view of it you see it there in the background there and one of two wooden objects here a particular interest now on the west side of the sarcophagus Hall there's a spool by the well-cut room with a beautifully painted image of the god of the underworld whose iris still in more less perfect condition after 100 years thank goodness although some of the paintings that you saw earlier have undoubtedly deteriorated and the interesting thing about this room again one or two small objects scattered on the floor but you see these two I can scarcely saved myself from here but can you see just propped up against the wall under the image of Osiris two rather strange bizarre wooden figures so-called wooden magical figures rather rare objects which again part of the scheme for protecting the body of the Pharaoh they were positioned I won't go into details where I think they were positioned but they they they were used as a protecting Pharaoh in some way the if you can make out the human headed figure there that's not surprisingly in the Cairo Museum but the one with the Rams head with arms outstretched somehow escaped from the excavations and was purchased by the British Museum in 1912 together with five other wooden figures of the same class which with very little doubt were also from Horemheb's tomb you have to remember you see these wonderful days in the past the field director was often not on site the work was simply left to his workmen and who were controlled by the foreman and so I mean things were things shall we say went astray something we have to face now if I may just a selection of objects found by Davies just to give you a kind of a and not everything of course we don't have the time some of the objects found by Theodore Davies most things smashed of course by the robbers not just one team but no doubtless people went in time and time again after the tomb was opened in antiquity that I've mentioned the canopic chest here it is it was smashed to pieces by and here you see it interestingly on the way to being reconstructed it's still far from complete we found more fragments as I shall show in a moment a lid from the so called canopic chest it's coming up now I seem to remember yes there it is of course it's now it's now repaired it's in much better state now but mercifully the face of exquisite workmanship is there another lid from a canopic jar this time interestingly of a private person not a royal person late 18th dynasty type I suppose perhaps who knows an associate of Horemheb buried it is tomb we shall never know a guardian figure of the King coming up now large very large wooden guardian figure originally covered with a very fine figure indeed covered with gold leaf and you can see how the original tomb robbers went in with their chisels and Zoar adzes whatever they had and just chipped off every tiny fragment of gold leaf you can imagine them working down in the depths of this magnificent tomb with just I suppose oil lamps and so on it must have been an utterly bizarre situation two of these this is one of the figures I've already mentioned I seem to remember one that was in the one that was in the Osiris chamber there and a very fine figure of a striding panther covered in bitumen this black material ahead a head from a couch representing the hippopotamus headed thar well it the god is tall where it doubtless again also originally covered in gold foil here a beautiful figure of the jackal god Anubis figure of the germinating Osiris having to do with resurrection and rebirth I've already mentioned here it is both the base and the lid you may know the at least you gypped ologists and those who take a particular interest in Egypt will we'll see instantly there were very close parallels for these damaged and smashed objects found by Theodore Davis in the tomb of Horemheb we found we Howard Carter found objects in more less perfect condition similar objects in the tomb of Tutankhamun so these kind of things seem to be what we would say during a necessary for the survival the protection of the divine Pharaoh at least late 18th dynasty but the fact of the matter is that we have enormous numbers of pieces of equipment from royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings but I don't know of any major overall study of the significance of these things they were obviously extremely necessary it's it's a major piece of research of waiting waiting to be undertaken I think well these are just some of the objects found by Theodore Davis who mentions of other duress see the man who catalogued these things in Davis's catalog over Diversey remarks that besides these these objects some of which you've seen on the screen besides these objects they were found remains of objects not worth describing they were happy days embedded intestines wrapped in cloth to imitate the appearance of a small mummy one wonders what could be done with these kind of things if they'd survive today with the advances that have been made he says these must have been placed in the canopic jars fragments of statues of men and animals weren't worth recording they were in bituminous twould objects covered in bitumen parts of caskets for statuettes or for provisions he mentions glazed ware beads for necklaces leaves of copper and so on not worth recording but luckily these pieces not worth recording by and large were transported together with these kind of things to the Cairo Museum where we find Egyptian colleagues gave dr. van Dijk and myself access to them the very end of our season our last season and it was all rather rushed and so on but I took I did my best making proper catalog entries for everything while the photographs were taken by dr. van Dijk why don't we turn now to a selection of objects mostly fragmentary of course because Theodore Davis found all these splendid things find that these are the kind of things I'm going to talk about which he which he didn't buy his workmen didn't bother to collect all the material but they the material in the from that huge pile of debris as you can imagine it coming down from here shall we say it's vast pile of debris it's odd that the workmen didn't didn't collect these as it were they were just simply left there and these are very very lovely blue glazed inlays of various sizes we found I seem to remember several dozens of these beautiful things we even found a fragment of bituminous wood with a couple still in situ and an emplacement on the left there for another and there are fragments I have seen with my own eyes yet in the Louvre museum in Paris which with no doubt also came from the debris in this room behind the sarcophagus chamber so and what they come from you may remember Howard Carter found in the tomb of Tutankhamun there is a complete so-called may med where it cow double-headed cow couch and these are the little trefoil inlays which he which we have together with a few miserable fragments of the what remains of these beautiful beautiful figures but curiously enough I mean this is magnificent objects of course but the actual inlays are terribly blackened and almost carbonized whereas and down to say this is where we have one up on how ricotta for one's beef round as I said just now fragments of the canopic chest I just show a couple of them hopefully one day these can be taken to the Cairo Museum once the dust settles there after the recent events and maybe hopefully incorporated into the reconstructed canopic chest of Horemheb there we found also quite a few beads I mentioned those already no dart from necklaces and bracelets and armlets that kind of thing and something I'm still talking about the material found in this gigantic pile of debris in the room behind the sarcophagus these builders know that they're not just yet I think is it and we just go back here for a moment no they're the beads yes I'm going to mention now fragments of sand stone grinders they don't look very much but they were there for a certain reason but no doubt for processing flour we also found a quern the kind of things that these grinders would have been used on and Tutankhamun had similar objects in his tomb thinking about of course provision of food in the afterlife there was another one I'm saying so I'm going go back just for a second maybe I'm pressing the buttons too quickly yeah this is it yes these parts would be for a split second because I was down in the tomb with my workmen dr. van Dijk was working on material I'd explained in a moment where but these puzzled me for a split second and then I realized what they were I wonder if if you can guess if you if you visualize on the other way up in that sense perhaps they are the notched ends of arrows and Tutankhamen of course as we know perfectly well had many arrows as well as beautiful bows in his tomb and of course these so bows and arrows were not least in the tomb of a man who was a military officer before he became Pharaoh would have been during a the beats we've already seen and we found examples of in the debris there several indications of ancient administrative activity for example seal impressions from the seal of the Royal necropolis depicting as usual the jackal god Anubis above nine bound prisoners and those with perhaps good eyesight can make that out you can just see the tail of Anubis the bound prisoners these would have sealed boxes of beautiful objects and so on and kind of thing we found several of those we found a number of handles from wines from wine jars stamped with the inscription the estate of Horemheb there is one there one of these just one of these stamp handles named his wife queen would not read pottery ordinary pottery is notably lacking in the tomb equipment I mean there must have been plenty of pottery of course there but it seems to have been totally almost totally discarded by Theodore Davis's mission he even mentioned pottery in his book I suspect that his workman threw threw away most of it we didn't find very much even in the in the shaft where so much of the debris was subsequently dumped by Theodore Davis although we did find some pottery which I shall come on to in a moment but one of the shirts we found is a typical painted shirt from a painted vessel so-called blue painted ware with decoration typical of the time during Carmen to Horemheb late so-called eighteenth dynasty and see we can't afford to ignore anything can we in these reacts give Asians nothing to write home about it so it's simply a mud jar stopper from very very large storage vessel and that's just a shadow of an stamp on it we weren't able to make anything out of it why don't we move now to the well shaft which which I've mentioned more than once and I Kyra archival photograph taken over a hundred years ago showing as you were if we were entering here you see we come to the well shaft about a third of the way in in one of her in one of Theodore Davis's photographs you can see that the debris which he found when he entered the tomb came up to somewhere roughly there so it wasn't very difficult for him and Edward Ayrton and his work went to throw planks across from here to there in order to penetrate into the interior of the tomb and got it must have been a wonderfully exciting moment for them all wondering what was lying ahead this photograph by the way all the original photographs in Theodore Davis publication have disappeared but here in the Egyptian Department of Egyptian art in the Met is a wonderful series of negatives of just a of scenes in the tomb not identical with the ones in the publication but other scenes and this is one of them we are looking now this is the north doorway penetrating into what was originally the chariot Hall undoubtedly and then steps going down and down and down and corridors and so on and so forth after Horemheb's burial in his magnificent sarcophagus which we shall see in a moment this area was was bricked up was was was blocked with limestone blocks plastered over and the scheme of decoration carried across cuz the that didn't interest the plunderers they simply smashed their way in they demolished the tomb blocking there and the blocks tumbled down into what was then of course and completely open shaft we found many of the actual blocking stones in the debris at the bottom of the shaft where they'd been thrown by the original plunderers but apse I was hoping very much that fragments of the original painted decoration which is absolutely magnificent we would find there and they must have been down there of course when Theodore Davis got to work but I they here they were crushed by later debris coming in or his workmen simply didn't recognize them and they were thrown out with the debris and we shall never see them lost totally in fact now we are talking about the shaft there was there's always been some doubt whether Dero Davis actually excavated the shaft down to the bottom but if you look in Theodore Davis's publication there is in fact a cross-section of the shaft made by his architect another Frenchman called emile baraize which shows quite clearly that it was in fact excavated to a depth of over six meters so it's quite deep and by the way the shaft itself is 4 meter square it's an enormous area there was when when I decided to ask for a concession to work there I found out there was a local rumor on the West Bank on the West Bank at look saw the area of the value of the King's current to the present day a century after the excavation that there were in fact two rooms at the bottom of the shaft though these two rooms do not feature in Barry's drawing or in Davis's commentary Davis writes this is what he says in his publication if I may read it out or rather and yes he says we came to an open well or pits this was for the purpose of receiving any water which might find its way from the mouth of the tomb and to aid in the discharge of the water a smaller room had been cut in the rock next to the well he says well it's a somewhat enigmatic statement and it probably does not refer to this kind of natural rock crevice which we encountered when we were reacts cavae ting all the debris that he himself had thrown in it can't refer to that in fact it must refer doubtless to when we we ourselves got to the bottom eventually after terrible job of emptying the shaft of all Theodore Davis's debris we the the bottom of the shaft is just about seven meters just a shade under seven meters perhaps and there we've found to not room so much-- as short corridors each three meters in length one in the middle of the west wall here and another in the north west corner of the well shaft both were completely crammed with debris which had set almost like concrete from floor to ceiling consisting mostly of broken blocking stones from the doorway above which I've already mentioned though objects were found in these rooms which must have had some kind of symbolic function in the royal mortuary cult one imagines other royal tombs have not many but some have rooms at the bottom of the shaft but to my knowledge there's no textual explanation of their use that sums kind of symbolism of the underworld anyway they were obviously digger in some instances in the shaft itself in Theodore Davis is debris has come on to that now we found a number of objects I just show a few examples in the time that we have by the way we all this debris of course this terrible debris we took out or rather our wonderful workmen took out and where other gangs are working were busy sitting everything so we could rescue ever hopefully every tiny fragment we found so-called sure web tea equipment you know the sub so called substitute labor of figures which were in many instances equipped with special equipment in this case small hose the idea being that the substitute laborers would do agricultural work for the tomb owner in the afterlife we found yokes and baskets for the use of these laborer figures with curiously I was hoping we would but we didn't we found no actual sure Web T figures of King horemheb and in fact to my knowledge none is recorded none is recorded in any Museum of the world or private collection if you can contradict me I would be very very pleased to hear it but I've made inquiries from people who know about these things and there are no sure web T figures of Horemheb which is a very very curious inexplicable circumstance he must have had them probably as many as Tutankhamun did as you know he had an enormous number so that's a puzzle we found fragments of example of lousy foam cups and other fragments of files vessels of different kinds we found bronze nails nothing to write home about but they were there doubtless from of a large item of funerary equipment just speculating of course such as one of horemheb's gold shrines which he must have had as two in common did covering his sarcophagus which contained his his coffins also and this made the whole enterprise worth struggling for large quantities of quite large quantities of sherds just broken pottery vessels of a well-known type of wine jar typical of the period Tutankhamun to Horemheb many bearing inscriptions in ink as you see here there's one here now many a quite a few of the jaw fissures we found on the second slide you'll see a selection of these shirts and these I handed over to my colleague dr. van Dijk who's a specialist in higher Attic and he was busy for the rest of the season joining them together recording them and so on and of course instantly we recognized in things like this you see this was a year date this is year 14 and when sherds were joined and so on it said year 13 and 14 of king horemheb that's a safe the two of his regnal years 13 and 14 as well in in some instances the names of the vintners the wine makers and other details with where the wine work came from and so on and so forth and this material which has been discussed today in this colloquium in the Metropolitan Museum is we feel of crucial interest in the current discussion about the length of the reign of King Horemheb which until this discovery was nobody queried that he was that he reigned twenty-seven years in fact for reasons that I can't go into now you'll have to accept what I say this new material we think we can not prove in a court of law that would be necessary but seems to indicate that he reigned no more than 14 years which is excited the Egyptologists and just he may just have reined in to his 15th year so we've at a stroke we've eliminated 12 years from Egyptian chronology and this is important because Egyptian chronology is crucial I mean the because linked to it are the chronologies of the ancient Near East the Aegean world and so on the Levant even as far afield as Babylonia to some degree linked to the Egyptian the the Egyptian chronology so this is really quite exciting totally unexpected how it was that and by the way or these shores were found in the debris of the well shaft they must have been they were suddenly found by Theodore Davis's men presumably further in the tomb where the wine jars which they come from was stacked in one or more of the storage rooms down there how it was I mean these may have been mentioned in Edward Aaron's report we shall never know that they weren't thought worth collecting which is lucky for us of course we're not complaining from a count of rims and bases of these wine jars we know that Horemheb had at least ninety two large wine jars in his funerary equipment and the the actual fabric of these vessels were examined by my colleague dr. David Aston who is the great authority on this material 92 he had in his Plus now we've turned finally to the sarcophagus the King's sarcophagus and extremely important item of Fury equipment in any royal tomb because it enclosed the embalmed body of the divine Pharaoh here we see it before the final restoration of the lid the lid must have been pieced together you saw the earlier photograph it must have been pieced together soon after 1908 and put back but the final restoration wasn't done until relatively recently I can't found out exactly this photograph was taken it's from professor horns major study on the tomb of Horemheb the inscriptions and reliefs beautiful photograph and you can see that the leader has not been finally repaired you can see the crack going across the top the lid was dropped in antiquity doubt perhaps during the funeral can you imagine the chaos and confusion that would have caused and it was repaired with by cutting in a you see - there but in fact there are three there's another one on the other side little emplacements four clamps that held the fractured lid together exactly the same thing happened in the tomb of Tutankhamun his lid was also dropped the workmen were real butterfingers with these enormous with these enormous ly heavy things anyway when the young and as you can see it when this restoration was done the lid was put on wooden beams over the years during the period when the tomb was opened to visitors which was down I suppose from mortis the discovery until about 1994 when there was a terrible flood in the value of the Kings the tomb was closed thereafter and it was open to the public for many many many years and it seems to have served as a kind of large post box because items were pushed in under the lid by members of ie a tourists and others and by holding a flashlight under the lid at this end here you could see this that's the e stay and you could see that some inside the sarcophagus you could see bones skeletal material and one or two bits and pieces of objects not only that but the lead was incorrectly oriented when it was put back it's the wrong way round it may have been the wrong way round in antiquity for all we know anyway it was on the wrong way round and so of course one of the tasks that was necessary was to reorient to lift it up can you imagine not knowing whether the restoration had been carried out with steel pins or not or whether it was simply held together with plaster we've received permission to lift the lid and to turn it round and here's the marvelous bandar or some of them - - expert stonemasons from karnak temple were brought in and with this father difficulties enormously heavy thing was lifted with primitive but effective equipment but you can imagine the tension when this was going up if it had dropped on the marvellous sarcophagus which is more or less in perfect condition you can imagine I wouldn't be speaking to you now this evening anyway we got it up and before putting it back excavated the contents here and you can see some of the human remains I said we simply can't afford to neglect it it's kind of if we're looking down into the sarcophagus you can see there's a fragment there of a coffin perhaps all the kind of modern debris across was removed you see bones everywhere Theodore Davis actually at this part of the skull that Theodore Davis in his report he doesn't mention bones but a good here but he he doesn't he didn't bring in any expert to examine them which was a great tragedy allegedly they were sent to Cairo but this was denied by Sue Grafton Elliot Smith the man who would have received them it's a great tragedy because we only have these tiny fragments from the sarcophagus one or two my new fragments which I myself collected from some of the side rooms but Theodore Davis mentions skulls here and there clearly but this is even problematic as I say he doesn't say whether they would complete skulls or whether they were fragments of skulls he says skulls so we shall never know really but the examination of the material which we found in the sarcophagus and in the side rooms only a handful of bits and pieces the physical anthropologists we brought in seems to feel feel that it may represent the remains of three persons I decided while the yes there are some of these bones while I was the very first season I was on my own for a couple of weeks just to initiate the work and I noticed creeping around in the tomb in one of the tiny side rooms on the ceiling there was this lamp black just show it part of it lamp black inscriptions on other marks which notes it doesn't they don't seem to have been noticed by anybody graffiti the kind of thing that you find in other royal monuments in the 19th century before the invention I suppose of flash lamps and so on and so forth or electric lights people went into these monuments with with them with burning flares and so on there they are and to a date at 1887 and one it seems to be 1896 there one graffito is a surname apparently Bo n a curious sign probably a C II bonus or Bonacci and access to the Internet shows that this is in fact a family name they've got a few notches or one asks we don't know in America as well that it's an italian or french name clearly and here it seems that we have evidence the tumors entered years before it was officially discovered in 1908 and these years they mean the late 1880s beginning of the 1890s it was the time when no official work was going on in the Valley of the Kings and it got donkey's years before the advent of mass tourism so it may well you know it and a curious thing it may it may even account of course for the appearance on the art market for we know of other I mentioned them already these weird magical figures that protected a king Horemheb in the British Museum of course we shall never know these were acquired by the British Museum in 1912 this just showed one of them another one a really weird one with a turtle head these deserve a lecture in themselves in a way here we go oh by the way I decided it's almost time to finish the I decided that or it suddenly dawned on me that while work was going on in the tomb it dawned on me that no Royal sarcophagus from the Valley of the Kings has ever been published in true fact simile so I decided to I'd already recorded the lead which had never been recorded even in printed hieroglyphs or hand copies tablet that I copied in fact simile but then I thought before we finished the work it would be a good idea to record all the texts in this magnificent object the only drawback I mean ordinarily it would have been simplicity itself because the monument is in such superb condition but I've already mentioned the wooden flooring here and the sarcophagus itself many years ago the authorities as with all the royal tombs which have sarcophagi in position or moreless all of them a wooden framework was erected all the way round a kind of a fence almost so I had the enormous difficulty of recording these texts by squeezing between these uprights and so on and it wasn't at all easy in fact I miscalculated the amount of time it would take me and I had to come back to Egypt again on my own for about a week or so just to finish off the work now at least we have a reasonable facsimile copy of the of these texts I thought it was worth doing while the opportunity was there lastly ladies and gentlemen you see it on the screen a slide showing our Foreman he's the film star on the left there excellent man who the workman respected and not the entire team because the air these were the small specialist team of local workmen chosen to lift the lid of the sarcophagus in the middle by the way some of you will know mr. Edwin brach an American Egyptologist who is very very knowledgeable indeed about royal sarcophagi and other things while the lid was lifted I asked him if he would generously examine in detail the interior of the sarcophagus a unique chance and detailed measurements were taken and so on and so forth and on in each corner on the floor there's a little kind of scooped emplacement on which there would have been a funerary bed on which the what must have been magnificent series of coffins were containing the body of the King the last one but placed on this funerary bed the so he did that work for me but this final image shows only a small part of my team of workmen as I said I had fifty altogether they shared with me the dust the terrible dust in that shaft and the room behind the sarcophagus room they shared with me the dust and the heat and burden of the day and I show this image as a fit as a kind of tribute to them because they are usually anonymous in the many publications of Egyptian sites which i think is a pity because these wonderful dedicated local men I think Egyptology owes them much there is more I could have told you ladies and gentlemen had time permitted but I thank you for your interest you

Channel: The Met

Views: 52,000

Rating: 4.6574306 out of 5

Keywords: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Egyptian Art, Egypt, Ancient Egypt Haremhab, Pharaoh, Valley Of The Kings, Tomb

Id: 7jrjNcBNF7A

Length: 64min 28sec (3868 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 27 2012