The Shadow King Read Online Free PDF

to the top of the boat.
    Undeterred, Loret picked his way through a series of further stairs and chambers, stepping carefully over the rubbish—pottery, glass, ancient garlands, splintered wood—that covered the floor. Eventually he came to a crypt, centered on a hefty stone sarcophagus. It held a coffin with the royal titles of an Eighteenth-Dynasty king: Amenhotep II. The body was still inside.
    That wasn’t all. In a side chamber, Loret found three near-naked mummies—two women and a boy. Rigid as wood, they were lying in a neat row on the floor, their feet pointing toward the door. Another side chamber was piled high with nine coffins, all coated with a thick layer of dust. Loret leaned over the nearest and blew on it to reveal the name. It was another king: Rameses IV. He went from coffin to coffin and found royal titles, called cartouches, on eight of them, including Siptah, Seti II, and Thutmose IV. All were well-known rulers from the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Dynasties. He had stumbled across another royal cache, just like the one at Deir el-Bahri.
    Inscriptions on their wrappings subsequently told a similar story. These pharaohs, including Amenhotep II in his sarcophagus, had been stripped and rewrapped during the Twenty-First Dynasty and hidden in the tomb for safety. When Pinedjem II emptied the Valley of its royal occupants, he had left this group behind. Put together with the Deir el-Bahri mummies, they formed almost a full house of New Kingdom kings.
    Loret cleared the tomb but was ordered by Sir William Garstin, the minister for public works, to leave the mummies where they were found. Garstin feared that moving them might stoke the already prevalent belief among locals that foreigners were robbing Egypt’s royal tombs. Most Egyptians felt that once buried, kings should not be disturbed, so the tomb was barred and bolted, and the mummies left in peace.
    IN 1900, THE BRITISH CONSUL-GENERAL, Lord Cromer, effectively Egypt’s ruler, removed Loret as head of the antiquities service and reinstated Maspero, who put a rising young archaeologist in charge of the monuments of Upper Egypt. His name was Howard Carter.
    Carter had come to Egypt when he was seventeen to help record the extensive artwork being uncovered in tombs and temples at various sites. But he soon showed great promise as an archaeologist in his own right, learning rigorous methods from Flinders Petrie—who pretty much invented the idea of archaeology as a science, and is today perhaps the only Egyptologist who can rival Carter’s fame.
    In his new post at Thebes, Carter supervised much clearing and restoration work, installed iron doors and electric lights in many tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and made several important finds, including the Eighteenth-Dynasty tombs of Hatshepsut and Thutmose IV.
    Meanwhile, Maspero removed the cached kings and queens from tomb KV35 and took them to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo,* arguing that they were at risk from looters, and that as they had been moved in antiquity anyway, there was no reason to leave them undisturbed. He left Amenhotep II in his tomb, along with the boat body and the three stripped mummies—he assumed they were all lesser figures who had formed part of the king’s original burial, as family members or perhaps even human sacrifices. I expect the Frenchman would be rather surprised to hear that a century later, those lowly mummies from the side-room floor, especially the two women, are among the most talked about individuals in the whole royal mummy saga—TV stars with famous faces and glamorous suggested identities that range from famed beauty Nefertiti to the female pharaoh Hatshepsut.
    Leaving anything in the tomb at all turned out to be a bad idea. A few months later, Carter, while working at a temple south of Thebes, was summoned to the Valley of the Kings by telegram. KV35 had been broken into. The boat was stolen, its mummy smashed, and the king stripped of his fine