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Recent Discoveries

© Lucy Charlotte Acland Johnson

""We have finished, Doctor."

Mohammed, one of our senior workmen, stood at the top of the deep pit we had exposed at the entrance to the Valley of the Kings. He pointed down into a doorway cut through the bedrock on its eastern end, clearly the entrance to a tomb. For several weeks, we had been digging a trench along the base of the hillside here, searching for KV5, a tomb that had been seen 170 years earlier [by an archaeologist called Burton], then forgotten.

Crawling into the tomb was difficult: Burton's channel was only about fifty centimetres (twenty inches) wide, not even that in height, cut through debris that consisted of thousands of razor-sharp fragments of limestone. We slithered forward, using our fingers and toes to pull and push ourselves farther into the tomb's first chamber.

The air was hot and humid and the smell was foul. In a matter of minutes, our clothes were soaking and we were covered with a thick layer of dirt and mud and things that didn't bear thinking about. My glasses kept slipping down my nose; the lenses fogged and I had to peer over the top of the frames.

As we continued farther into KV5, through a broken doorway and a second chamber that seemed to be about the same small size as the first, I remembered that, according to Burton's sketch plan, the tomb's third chamber was a huge pillared hall. Almost on cue, as we crawled through another doorway, the tops of broken pillars could be dimly seen jutting up through the debris, just visible in the few centimetres of open space below the ceiling. Things began to get dicey almost the moment we crawled into the room: Burton's channel made a sharp turn to the right to avoid a pillar, then began weaving between huge blocks of limestone that had fallen from the ceiling. We had to crawl over and around two-and three-ton slabs lying at the top of the debris. These fallen blocks were unnerving, and a headline flashed through my mind: EGYPTOLOGISTS FLATTENED AS TOMB COLLAPSES: PHARAOH'S CURSE RETURNS.

Soaking wet, sweat streaking my glasses, covered in mud, flashlight almost dead, I turned to Mohammed. "Do you remember where the entrance is?" "No"."

The above edited extract was taken from "The lost tomb" by Egyptologist Kent Weeks. It describes his first exploration of the tomb which proved to be undoubtedly the greatest discovery in the Valley of the Kings since Tuthankhamun's tomb: The tomb containing the mummies of around thirty of Ramses the Great's sons.

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