Archaeologists found a tomb of Pharaoh near the Egyptian Valley of the Kings, the country’s ministry of antiquities announced this week, in what officials called the first excavation of a real tomb since Tutankhan’s reach was brought.
The newly identified tomb belonged to Thutmose II, which is believed to have reigned around 1480 AC was “the last real tomb that disappeared of the 18th dynasty”, said the Egyptian ministry in a note.
The excavation was a joint project of Egyptian and British researchers who began in 2022, when the entrance and the main corridor of the tomb were found.
Archaeologists initially thought that the tomb belonged to a real consort, due to its position near the burial places of the real wives and that of Thutmose II’s wife, Hatshepsut, who took the throne alone after his death.
Despite the statement of the ministry according to which this was the first discovery of the genre since 1922, archaeologists reported having found Tombs Pharaoh in other parts of Egypt in the following decades, also in 1940 in Tanis and 2014 in Abydos. A member of the research team did not immediately answer questions in search of clarifications.
“I think what the first royal tomb mean in the area of the Valley of the Kings or the 18th Dynasty,” said Josef Wegner, professor of Egyptian archeology at the University of Pennsylvania and leader of the 2014 excavation. “There are other cases of royal tombs that have been found. “
But he said that the newly identified tomb was an “important and interesting discovery”, especially for the tests that provides that Hatshepsut was “a truly fundamental sovereign” of his time.
The excavation suggests that Hatshepsut built burial places for his father, and for Thutmose II, who was his husband and his half -brother – and who later transferred them to a new tomb he had built.
“The two most important men of his life buries all together in this type of fundamental tomb,” said Wegner, who is also a curator at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. “It really produces the importance of Hatshepsut in the anchoring of the Valle dei Re in the future.”
The just carved tomb was also in an unlikely place for a burial of a king: under two waterfalls and on the bottom of a slope, during the much more humid conditions of the fifteenth century BC
But the tests from inside the tomb showed that it had actually been built for a king, including fragments of alabaster jars that appoint Thutmose II as the “deceased king” and the inscriptions that appoint Hatshepsut. Part of the ceiling was still intact, showing the blue paint with yellow stars on it, archaeologists said.
The most important, said Wegner, were fragments that the team found containing elements of the Amduat, “the book Royal Netherworld who is starting to appear at this moment”.
“Sometimes they are discovered, but only later their true meaning becomes clear with a further exploration,” said Peter der Manuilian, professor of Egyptology in Harvard who was not involved in the excavation.
He noticed a similar case when, a few decades ago, a tomb in the Valley of the kings proved to be “larger and more unusual than anyone who had previously made”. It turned out to have been built for the many children of Ramses II, one of the most powerful pharaohs of ancient Egypt.
Thutmose II, Manuilian said: “He lived during a fascinating period of Egyptian history: the 18th imperialist and cosmopolitan dynasty”. His kingdom was perhaps obscured by those of his father, his son and his queen, who ruled for almost 20 years and built a great temple and tomb for herself.
“We are still trying to understand the details of this era,” said Manuiliano, “and a” new “tomb will undoubtedly provide us with further clues”.
The Secretary General for the Supreme Council Egypt of Antiquities, Mohamed Ismail Khaled, described the discovery as one of the most significant of the decades. “This is the first time that funerary furniture belonging to Thutmose II have been discovered,” he said in a note.
But unlike Tutankhamen’s tomb, whose rooms were found full of artifacts during a 1922 excavation, Thutmose II’s tomb had been almost emptied.
Archaeologists believe that it is flooded shortly after the king’s death and that his content has been moved to another position.
“The water damage caused a serious deterioration, leading to the loss of many original contents, which are believed to have been transferred during ancient times”, according to Mohamed Abdel Badie, the head of the Egyptian side of the archaeological mission.