Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings Read Online Free PDF Page A

appears to be that it was deliberately chosen, as the mummy itself was laid out in the attitude of a woman, with only one arm across the chest rather than both.
    What can be gathered from this assorted evidence is that shortly after Akhenaten's death, Smenkhkare was entombed conventionally with his own elaborate grave goods. Sometime during the next nine years of Tutankhamun's reign, the king's followers had plundered Smenkhkare's tomb to furnish Tutankhamun's own. Then, in the belief that they could doom Smenkhkare's spirit to survive imprisoned in the tomb, they completely refurnished the mummy and its organs in a macabre transsexual fashion. In the hope of shedding more light on the thinking behind this morbid procedure, attention must turn to the identity of the woman for whom the burial effects were initially intended. Presumably, the excised cartouches had originally bone her name, and perhaps the torn-away face mask had even been in her likeness.
    In the 1980s, when the German scholar Rolf Krauss attempted to put a name to this anonymous woman, he discovered something that, far from throwing new light on the mystery, simply made the matter all the more perplexing. From thorough examination and microscopic analysis of the inscribed panels on the Canopic jars, he recovered hieroglyphics that had been all but obliterated. They revealed that a female title had indeed been removed from columns of text and replaced by that of a man. Incredibly, however, it was not the name Smenkhkare, as Krauss expected, or any other title pertaining to that king, but Neferkheperure – the throne name adopted by Akhenaten. Following this discovery, other eminent authorities, such as Cyril Aldred, curator of the department of Egyptian Art at theNew York Metropolitan Museum, re-examined the inscriptions on the coffin itself and concluded that they too had been reinscribed in a context that was only applicable to Akhenaten.
    These new findings, taken together with Weigall's earlier identification of contextual references to the same pharaoh on the now-lost mummy bands, illustrate almost conclusively that the intimate burial apparatus in Tomb 55 was expressly adapted for Akhenaten, and not for Smenkhkare at all. Yet how
could
the mummy be Akhenaten? Although his mummy has never been found, unless virtually every eminent Egyptologist for more than a century has been completely mistaken, Akhenaten was far too old to have been the mummy in Tomb 55. If it was a king from the period immediately preceding Tutankhamun, as dated and determined from every item in the tomb, and it was the age indicated by the most modern forensic techniques available, then it could only be Smenkhkare.
    The enigma of Tomb 55 as it now remains is not only a complete mystery, it is utterly bizarre. A body which is almost certainly Smenkhkare is heartlessly robbed of its riches, subjected to an odious ritual curse, laid out in the parody of a woman, and re-interred in a queen's funerary equipment which had already been adapted for another man. Add to this the fact that the 'magic bricks' had been made for Akhenaten's tomb, the shrine had been made for Queen Tiye's, and the treasure boxes removed from the tomb had been sealed with Tutankhamun's cartouche, and we have a mystery so complex that it has remained unsolved for almost a century.
    With the mystery of Tomb 55 there begins an exciting historical detective story. Unfolding step by fascinating step, a trail of ancient arcane clues ultimately takes us way beyond the borders of pharaonic Egypt. It is an investigation which leads to startling new evidence of an epoch-making cataclysm, andrediscovers the most extraordinary series of events ever to have shaped the course of human history.
    SUMMARY
    • Ancient Egyptian tombs were always constructed with one purpose in mind: to keep intruders out. In 1907 archaeologists discovered a new tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. Known as Tomb 55, it was unlike any Egyptian tomb ever