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A great story:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,,1342400,00.html
A pharaoh to remember
It's not often you find the grave of a god. Tim Radford on the mapmakers transforming Egyptology
Thursday November 4, 2004
The Guardian
Kent Weeks, the American archaeologist charged with planning the rescue of the Valley of the Kings originally went to Egypt to make a map. While there, he poked around in a dirty, unimportant-looking hole in the ground and discovered the biggest tomb in the Valley of the Kings. In doing so, he secured a place for himself in the history of archaeology.
Weeks's career began in Nubia in the 1960s, salvaging stuff about to be submerged by the Aswan Dam, and at Giza and in the Nile delta. But it was in 1979 that he and his colleagues decided to make an accurate map of the 60-odd tombs in the Valley of the Kings. The earliest maps had been little more than fantasies: no accurate study of the whole valley had ever been done. He thought it would take a few seasons. "I'm always a hopeless optimist. I don't know where on earth I ever got that silly idea," he says. "And 20 years later, the project was finished."
He began with theodolites, bulky electronic measuring equipment and draughtsmen, and ended with computerised technology that could have done the job - had they waited - in five years. It took 20 years because they decided to make sure the details were right.
"The tombs were so much more carefully dug than I had anticipated they would be, so it required a lot more detailed surveying to reflect the care that the ancient engineers took," Weeks recalls.
"The difficulty is accurately showing the precision of the angles at the corner. We wanted to go in there and take a few taped measurements and assume that every corner was a 90 angle. We could have probably knocked off a tomb in a week. But as it turned out we couldn't, because there were some potentially significant differences: angles in a tomb might be consistently 85 rather than 90. That's an interesting point, in itself. Did the man doing this have a carpenter's square that was 5 off and he kept using it throughout the tomb? Why the consistency of the error?"
Then Weeks looked at a nondescript tomb under threat from a tourist car park: the tomb was KV5, known for more than a century. "It was thought to have two or three small rooms. It was thought to be uninscribed. It was thought to be filled with debris, to have been robbed and to have no objects of any kind in it: undecorated, unimportant, uninteresting, unnecessary to save," he says.
He argued that even an unimportant tomb deserved a closer look. It had been choked by boulders, gravel, silt and other debris washed in by at least 11 flash floods in 30 centuries. In 1989, he and his team crawled into the tiny space that survived between the rubble and the ceiling, and discovered on the walls the names of some of the sons of Rameses II. This is the pharaoh traditionally linked to the story of Moses; known to the poet Shelley as Ozymandias. Rameses II reigned for 67 years, and had 49 officially recognised sons.
The tomb took on a new importance. Excavation in those circumstances is not something you can do with a pickaxe and a jackhammer. Imagine, he says, a modern office, suddenly filled with concrete, and you want to excavate it and still find the calendars on the walls and the executive toys and the in-tray on the desk, all in the right place: you take your time and get it right. It took five years to excavate the first chambers, and they found very little. In February 1995, the researchers wondered if they might be wasting their time.
"So we began crawling through the debris, in a sense leapfrogging over many chambers, crawling through them, above the debris that filled them, without exposing their walls, just to get an idea of the extent of the tomb. And it was at that point that we found a doorway on the back wall of one chamber.
"We cleaned enough of that door that we could crawl through it, under the lintel, and we found ourselves at that point in a corridor that went 100 metres back into the hillside, with corridors to its left and right, each of them going 100 metres further into the hillside. And we knew that we had stumbled upon something unique," he says.
"With most Egyptian kings, we don't know the names of their children. They are never mentioned. We don't even know the names of their wives. They are often never mentioned.
"Here, Rameses II went to great lengths to carefully identify his children, and he showed them at least 10 times in temple reliefs, always standing on processions and always represented in what we think to be birth order," he says. But then Rameses II had a unique relationship with his sons. He was one of the few kings to have himself declared a god before his death. As a god, Rameses needed an assistant king.
"A king can cut the ribbon at a shopping mall but a god doesn't do this kind of thing. A king can adjudicate in a court case but a god doesn't do this. So of necessity, the king needed an assistant, and who more logical to draft into this role than his firstborn, the crown prince, the heir apparent and son of god?"
Rameses survived into his eighties: many of his sons died before him. As sons of a living god, they needed the big send-off. "Crown prince died, another crown prince came along, you suddenly had this whole host of crown princes who had filled roles that required some recognition in their burial beyond that of just an ordinary prince in the royal family."
KV5 is now known to have at least 130 chambers, corridors and pillared halls. There could be many more, waiting for discovery. In April, Weeks found another corridor, leading perhaps to yet another set of rooms. The tomb has been comprehensively robbed, but canopic jars, jewellery, grave goods, meat offerings and assorted objects still have to be studied and recorded, and wall paintings conserved. The dig continues.
Now the Theban Mapping Project team at Thebes has the wider challenge of protecting the whole valley, and the temples nearer the Nile. They are the only foreigners since the revolution in 1952 to be entrusted with responsibility for saving a large chunk of Egypt's heritage.
Weeks is professor of Egyptology at the American University of Cairo, the city where he lives. His interest was originally in Egyptian medicine, with all its passion for purgatives and enemas. There was, he says, an ancient Egyptian palace post called overseer of the royal anus. "It sounds like an awful title," he says "and not one you would want on your business card."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,,1342400,00.html
