The occupiers of the tomb remain unknown
Archaeologists say they've made a major new discovery in Egypt. An international team has unearthed an intact tomb in the Valley of the Kings. They say it is the most important find of its kind in more than eighty years. Ian Pannell reports.
Archaeologists were doing routine excavation work last year when they discovered what seemed to be a man-made shaft. Earlier this month, they came across a hidden chamber inside and on Friday, some of the stones blocking the entrance were removed, revealing a site hidden from the human eye for something like three thousand years.
There are five wooden coffins inside the small chamber, with rather beautiful faces painted in reds and yellows, their bodies in black and yellow stripes to mimic bandages. At least one of the coffins is slightly ajar, revealing a mummified corpse inside.
This is the first intact discovery in more than eighty years, just a stone's throw from the tomb of Tutankahmun. Archaeologists say this find could radically change their understanding of ancient Egyptian history.
LUXOR, Egypt (AP) — The painted 3,000-year-old face of a woman — her eyes lined in black kohl — stared from a funerary mask as authorities on Friday revealed to the world the first tomb discovered in eight decades in the Valley of the Kings.
The five mummies inside — possibly members of a pharaoh's court — were discovered by a team of American archaeologists working on the neighboring tomb of Amenmeses, a late 19th Dynasty pharaoh. (Photo gallery: Peeking inside the Valley of the Kings)
"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. This was totally unexpected," Brock said.
On Friday, 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 the British archaeologist 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 partially pried open. The brown cloth below the lid probably belongs to a mummy, the archaeologists said.
At the back of the chamber was the silhouette of another sarcophagus, the stately face painted on its funeral mask staring upward, hands folded on its chest.
Large pottery jars, some cracked, lined the chamber. Egypt's chief of antiquities, Zahi Hawass, told reporters the jars held food and drink to sustain the deceased in their journey to the afterlife.
Hawass said archaeologists hope to find hieroglyphs on the coffins that will identify the mummies.
"Whoever they are, they should be very important people. Nobody can be buried in the Valley of the Kings unless they are important," he said.
Brock and Otto Schaden, who heads the U.S. team, pointed out that the mummies were not necessarily royalty, however, as other tombs in the valley belong to favored royal servants or top officials.
"It could be the gardener," Schaden joked. "But it's somebody who had the favor of the king, because not everybody could come and make their tomb in the Valley of the Kings."
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 1500 B.C. to 1000 B.C. New Kingdom.
The archaeologists said the style of the coffins and pottery dates to the late 18th Dynasty, which ruled around 1500 B.C. to 1300 B.C. and included King Tut.
The Americans had been working at the tomb of Amenmeses since late 1992, clearing rubble and restoring its interior and exterior. Last year, they found the remains of ancient workmen's huts near the site, and then discovered a depression in the bedrock that they suspected was a shaft.
When they returned to work during this excavation season, they discovered, after weeks of digging, a door of stone blocks at the bottom of the 15-foot shaft.
"After all these years we've worked on tombs which have been known for a long time, and had been partly cleared, and we just followed excavators and restorers. Here we finally have something new for ourselves, so it's really very satisfying," said Schaden.
The archaeologists hope to enter the tomb within a few days, after removing the remaining rubble from the bottom of the shaft and carefully taking away the rest of the door.
The team hopes to remove the coffins before the end of the digging season, usually around May when the weather gets too hot to work in the deserts outside Luxor, Schaden said. _________________ "tout nèg a nèg
ki nèg nwè ki nèg klè
ki nèg klè ki nèg nwè
tout nèg a nèg
nèg klè pè nèg nwè
nèg nwè pa lè wè nèg klè
nèg nwè ké wéy klè
senti i sa roune nèg klè
mè nèg klè ké wéy klè a toujou nèg
sa ki fèt pou nèg vin' blang?
blang té gen chivé pli long?
pou senblé yé nou trapé chivé plat kon fil mang!!!
mandé to fanm...!
mè pou kisa blang lé vin' nwè?
ha... savé ki avan vin' blan yé té ja nèg!
a nou mèm ké nou mèm dépi nânni nânnan...
chinwa soti, kouli soti, indyen soti, blang soti
mèm koté nèg soti
Posté le: Ven 23 Juin 2006 17:12 Sujet du message:
Qui est cette femme?La femme de Tut ou sa mère?
Tut's mum's mummy? Cliffhanger in Egypt's Valley of the Kings
LUXOR (AFP) - Egyptologists are holding their breath over the mystery surrounding the first tomb discovered in Luxor's Valley of the Kings since that of the boy king Tutankhamun in 1922.
News of the surprise discovery in February by an American team from the University of Memphis has had repercussions far beyond this famous necropolis from the time of the pharaohs.
Could the small tomb, designated KV63, hold a royal mummy, perhaps that of Tutankhamun's widow or even his mother?
The theory is being openly discussed -- and argued over -- by American and native Egyptologists.
"It's very exciting, it's the joy of this unique discovery. But let's be very cautious," the director of the University of Memphis Archaeology Institute, Loreilei Corcoran , told AFP.
Mansur Boraik, director of antiquities at Luxor, is optimistic about the find.
"I think there is a 70 percent chance that is a royal mummy in the last coffin," he said, referring to the last of seven wooden coffins that lay for 3,000 years amid 28 earthenware urns.
The weekend announcement of the discovery in the tomb of three small gilded sarcophagi supports Boraik's theory, even though they were at first thought only to contain materials used in the mummification process.
Otto Schaden, the man who found them, leads the American team. He believes they may have located the mummy of Tutankhamun's widow Ankhesenpamon, after traces of her name were found on the seal of one urn.
The secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, thinks the final coffins may contain the remains of the pharaoh's mother, whose identity is unknown, and not the wife of Tutankhamun, the boy king who died at the age of 18.
"Tutankhamun's widow married again, to the high official Ay who later became pharaoh at the end of the 18th dynasty," Hawass said.
"She certainly lived long enough to be buried in a more dignified" tomb than this vault, he added.
When it was found, the sepulchre was buried under four metres (13 feet) of rubble. It lies just seven metres (yards) from KV62 -- the tomb of Tutankhamun himself -- which contained a hoard of extraordinary treasures.
If the pharaoh Akhenaton the Heretic was thought to have fathered Tutankhamun, the identity of his mother is not known for sure.
It may have been Nefertiti, a foreign princess or his wet nurse Maya, whose tomb was found in 1996 at Saqqarah by French Egyptologist Alain Zivie.
"This is exciting," Zivie told AFP. "This discovery could shed some light on the end of this crucial period."
If the Egyptian and American archaeologists are airing their different opinions about the find in public, a dispute within the US team itself is more muffled but no less real.
Hawass, the all-powerful antiquities supremo, has revealed that relations between Schaden and Corcoran are not the best.
He told the Al-Ahram Weekly magazine that their dispute centres on "the direction of the dig", and that these "excellent Egyptologists" also engage in acrimonious exchanges.
"Small curses have occurred, (such) as the fight between the two fine Egyptologists Otto Schaden and Loreilei Corcoran. They both want to be director of the excavation. They even argue over who can give interviews," Hawass told the magazine.
Corcoran told AFP: "People sometimes want to create a dramatic situation, but we have to focus on which is really important, and I don't have a personal hypothesis" about the opening of the last coffin.
She said the permit for the excavation has been extended until the end of June.
In-fighting within the American team is not the only controversy surrounding the discovery.
One of the top experts on the Valley of the Kings, British archaeologist Nicholas Reeves, claims it was he who first located the tomb.
As the head of the huge Amarna Royal Tomb Project (ARTP), Reeves worked in the area of KV63 until 2002, when he was wrongly suspected of trafficking in Egyptian antiquities.
"ARTP thought long and hard about KV63 for many months," Reeves wrote on his Internet website. "Sadly we were given no opportunity to put our strategy into practice."
"Otto Schaden... stumbled upon the shaft and our project was presented with a fait accompli."
ki nèg nwè ki nèg klè
ki nèg klè ki nèg nwè
tout nèg a nèg
nèg klè pè nèg nwè
nèg nwè pa lè wè nèg klè
nèg nwè ké wéy klè
senti i sa roune nèg klè
mè nèg klè ké wéy klè a toujou nèg
sa ki fèt pou nèg vin' blang?
blang té gen chivé pli long?
pou senblé yé nou trapé chivé plat kon fil mang!!!
mandé to fanm...!
mè pou kisa blang lé vin' nwè?
ha... savé ki avan vin' blan yé té ja nèg!
a nou mèm ké nou mèm dépi nânni nânnan...
chinwa soti, kouli soti, indyen soti, blang soti
mèm koté nèg soti
ki nèg nwè ki nèg klè
ki nèg klè ki nèg nwè
tout nèg a nèg
nèg klè pè nèg nwè
nèg nwè pa lè wè nèg klè
nèg nwè ké wéy klè
senti i sa roune nèg klè
mè nèg klè ké wéy klè a toujou nèg
sa ki fèt pou nèg vin' blang?
blang té gen chivé pli long?
pou senblé yé nou trapé chivé plat kon fil mang!!!
mandé to fanm...!
mè pou kisa blang lé vin' nwè?
ha... savé ki avan vin' blan yé té ja nèg!
a nou mèm ké nou mèm dépi nânni nânnan...
chinwa soti, kouli soti, indyen soti, blang soti
mèm koté nèg soti
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