Egyptology with all the dirt and none (well, very little) of the treasure. American Egyptologist Kent Weeks is the principal on the Theban Mapping Project, an effort to produce a three-dimensional digital map and database of all the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. I wrote a little note on Valley of the Kings nomenclature a while back; basically tombs are numbered with the prefix “KV” and the order of discovery; thus Tutankhamen is KV62 and the most recent tomb is KV63. However, there were 12 tombs open since ancient times and thus KV1 (Ramses VII) though KV12 (unknown) are instead numbered in order from the valley mouth. (Because additional tombs were discovered later, KV1-KV12 are no longer the first 12 tombs from the valley entrance, although KV1 is still the very first).


KV5, then, was known for millennia as a small and not particularly interesting tomb of unknown ownership and without decoration or painting. It received some cursory further investigation in 1825; the tomb was unfortunately in the pathway of flash flood water and thus, after the initial rooms, was packed to the ceiling with caked mud and debris. Howard Carter rediscovered the entrance in 1902, thought that the tomb was small and uninteresting, and immediately reburied it. When Dr. Weeks began additional clearance in 1988 not too much was expected and the work was expected to be difficult as the millennia of washed in mud was hardened to “cement-like” consistency.


As it turned out, the entrance stairway opened up into a two successive chambers, and then into a large pillared hall with side chambers and a corridor and more stairways going down, until the thing became the Egyptian equivalent of the Energizer Bunny. At the time (2000) of this book, there were more than 150 chambers and KV5 was the largest tomb in the Valley by a factor of three and contained the largest single subterranean room. Work continues and the end still hasn’t been found.


The repeated flooding had wreaked havoc on what must have originally been extensive decoration – there are little chips of painted plaster all over the place. Thousands of objects were discovered – some from the tomb and others washed in. Enough evidence remained to determine the tomb was intended for the sons of Ramses II. (The archeological record isn’t clear on how many sons Ramses II had – I think 167 is the current number).


Thus, there are no spectacular wall paintings in this book, or Tutankhamen-like treasures; just chamber after chamber of more or less identical afterlife apartments. Still, the work involved is awe-inspiring. The rooms have to be dug out with scalpels and brushes to avoid missing anything. What plaster remains on the walls needs to get stuck back in place. The pillars in the pillared halls are cracking from stress and need to be restored. Some of the most interesting stiff for me was in the Appendices, where project geologists worked out the local structure; the Thebes Formation is interbedded limestone and shale of varying quality, with the shale layers particularly vulnerable to shrink-swell from wet-dry cycles. The Esna Shale underlies the Thebes formation and is even more prone to shrink-swell, although not exposed in the Valley it’s not too far from the tomb floors and probably doesn’t help matters much. KV5 is partially overlain by KV6 (Ramses IX), which in turn is partially overlain by KV55 (mysterious since its discovery but now believed to be Akhenaten based on DNA from the mummy); another appendix includes a report from a Colorado mining engineer on the stress fields in KV5, including effects of the other nearby tombs.


Although well-written (for an excavation report; these are not generally known for stirring prose) I can’t really recommend it except for die-hard Egyptophiles. I got my copy from a remainder house for less than 1/10 of what’s it’s currently going for on Amazon, and you can see all the details on the Theban Mapping Project web site (linked above). But definitely visit that site and see what’s going on in the hills west of Luxor. ( )