The Shadow King Read Online Free PDF Page A

was a disappointment. Though the mummy was in good condition, the pharaoh’s face was completely covered with a mass of black resin. It was enough for the Khedive, who seems to have been unimpressed by meeting his illustrious predecessors. At twenty past eleven, he walked out.
    Unwrapping of other inhabitants of the cache soon followed, and revealed various pieces of information. Seqenenre Tao (Ahmose I’s father, and the penultimate king of the Seventeenth Dynasty), was found to have been killed by a succession of dreadful wounds to the head, perhaps inflicted in battle by Egypt’s dreaded enemies, the Hyksos. Seti I turned out to have been great-looking, with a face that apparently amazed the investigators with its beauty.* One king not subjected to the procedure was Amenhotep I. His wrappings were in near-perfect condition, still adorned with blue flowers and even the fragile body of an ancient wasp. Maspero couldn’t bear to ruin the mummy, so he left it wrapped.
    Overall, it was an amazing haul—talk about bringing history to life. These kings and queens, with fame that was almost legendary, had ruled the most powerful country on earth more than three thousand years before. Now, instead of being distant historical figures, they were real people, with bodies, faces, personalities, and weaknesses. In all of history, there had never been anything like it; no wonder Maspero, like Brugsch before him, sometimes had trouble believing it was real. “I am still wondering if I’m not really dreaming,” he said, “when I see and touch what were the bodies of so many characters of whom we thought we would never know more than their names.”3
    I went forward with my candle and, horrible sight, a body lay there upon the boat, all black and hideous its grimacing face turning towards me and looking at me, its long brown hair in sparse bunches around its head.
    —VICTOR LORET, 18984
    IT WAS OVER A DECADE before any more royal mummies were unearthed. But when they were, the find was just as dramatic. By this time, the antiquities service had a new director, another Frenchman (it was the 1950s before the service was headed by an Egyptian) called Victor Loret, who cut a distinguished figure with wire-rimmed glasses and a pointed goatee. During his three-year tenure, he discovered a total of sixteen tombs, but is remembered for one of them in particular.
    Work in the Valley of the Kings had been continuing, though no more pharaohs’ tombs had been found since Belzoni’s discoveries in 1817. In February 1898, Loret discovered the tomb of Thutmose III, the original resting place of the battered mummy unwrapped by Brugsch. The tombs in the Valley were given numbers, starting with KV1,* according to the order of their discovery, and this one became KV34. Like all the previous finds, it had been heavily robbed in antiquity. All that remained were a few odds and ends—boxes of veal and beef, plants, alabaster jars, and some model boats.
    That March, when Loret came across the doorway of the Valley’s thirty-fifth tomb, he didn’t expect anything different. His workmen cleared away the stones that covered KV35 until there was a hole big enough for Loret and his foreman to clamber into a steeply descending corridor. After coming to a deep well, which they had to cross with a ladder, they ended up in a large chamber supported by two square pillars.
    The floor was covered with smashed up funerary equipment and broken pieces of wood. The tomb had clearly been robbed in antiquity, but didn’t seem to have been entered since then. Then, deep inside the chamber, Loret saw by candlelight what must rank as one of the most scary-looking boats in history. The wooden vessel was topped by a hideous corpse, lying on its back with its head turned toward the entrance, teeth bared as if in a gruesome warning. It turned out to be a mummy, robbed while the oils and resins poured on it were still fresh, then thrown across the room, where it had stuck