Chapter One New Year's Day 1901 Deir el-Bahri, Southern Egypt Everyone who was anyone was in the desert that day. an excited crowd had gathered beneath the stark cliffs that rose dramatically behind the two ancient temples. One was dedicated to the soul of Queen Hatshepsut, 1550 bc, and the even older one next to it, Mentuhotep I's, had stood there in the relentless sun for four thousand years. It was a place of great desolation and silence. Behind the temples towered the lifeless cliffs; and before them, the blinding white sand stretched endlessly to meet the empty sky. Djeser djeseru, the ancients called it, the holy of holies, the dwelling place of Meret?singer, the cobra goddess: She Who Loves Silence. And it was here that the noisy crowd descended, chattering, speculating, filled with the nervous restlessness of modernity. In search of sensation, treasure, beauty--how could the goddess bear them as she watched from her barren heights? First and foremost was the British viceroy, Lord Cromer, a man whose word was law in Egypt. He'd dropped everything, leaving Cairo in the midst of one of Egypt's endless crises. After ordering his private train, he'd traveled five hundred miles south, then taken a boat across the Nile, and then a horse-drawn calèche out toward the desert valley. The price of Egyptian cotton had plummeted on the world market, pests were ravaging the crops, and starvation stalked the countryside. But what did that matter next to the fact that a royal tomb had been discovered? After months of laborious excavation, the diggers had finally reached the door of a burial chamber with its clay seals still intact--and His Lordship wanted to be present at the opening. As did an assortment of idle princes, pashas, and high-living riffraff from the international moneyed scene . . . along with the usual hangers-on of the very rich: practitioners of the world's oldest profession. Which in Egypt didn't refer to--to what it usually does, but meant grave robbers (or archaeologists, as they are more politely known). To dig with any success ("to excavate," in the polite lingo), one needed knowledge. And one needed money--a great deal of it. Thus, they often came in pairs, the archaeologists and their sugar daddies. There were famous "couples"--inseparables for all their differences of temperament and background. For example, looking back on turn-of-the-century Egyptology, can one think of the American millionaire Theodore Davis apart from the young Cambridge scholar Edward Ayrton? Together they discovered a long list of tombs and burial shafts, Pharaoh Horemheb's, Pharaoh Siptah's, and "the golden tomb" (KV #56)* among them. As well as the mysterious Tomb Kings Valley #55--and the animal tombs (#50, #51, and #52): the mummified and bejeweled pets of Amenhotep II. The beloved crea- * The tombs in the Valley of the Kings are numbered from one to sixty-two. The general rule is that tombs with lower numbers have either lain open since antiquity or were discovered earlier than those higher in the sequence. The tombs in the adjoining valleys (the Valley of the Queens, the Nobles, the West Valley, and Deir el-Bahri) are referred to by their own numbering sequences. DB #320, for example, refers to tomb number 320 from the Deir el-Bahri sequence. It is to John Gardner Wilkinson that we owe the numbering system still in use. In the 1820s and 1830s, Wilkinson lived in Gurna, at the edge of the Valley of the Kings, where he studied those tombs that were accessible and devised his numbering system. tures had been stripped of their jewelry by ancient robbers who had even decided to create a "joke"--perhaps the oldest in existence--leaving pharaoh's monkey and dog face-to-face. Which was how Davis and Ayrt Excerpted from In the Valley of the Kings: Howard Carter and the Mystery of King Tutankhamun's Tomb by Daniel Meyerson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
