The Historians' History of the World 01

The first object which struck the eye of Herr Brugsch, when he reached the bottom of the pit, was a white and yellow coffin, with the name of Nesi-Khonsu. It was in the corridor, about two feet from the entrance; a little further was a coffin whose form recalled the style of the XVIIth Dynasty; then Queen TiuHathor Hont-tui, then Seti I. Alongside the coffins and strewing the ground, were boxes of funeral statuettes, canopic vases,[7] bronze libation vases, and right at the back, in the angle formed by the corridor as it turns north, the funeral canopy of Queen Isiem-kheb, folded and crumpled like a worthless object which some priest in a hurry to get away had thrown carelessly in a corner. All along the great corridor was the same confusion and disorder; it was necessary to crawl along without knowing where hands and knees were being placed.

Mummy in its Wrappings

The coffins and mummies, hastily scanned by the light of a candle, bore historic names—Amenhotep I, Tehutimes II, in the niche near the staircase, Aahmes I, and his son Se-Amen, Seqenen-Ra, Queens Aah-hotep, Aahmes, Nefert-ari, and others. In the chamber at the end, the confusion was at its height, but the predominance of the style proper to the XXth Dynasty was recognised at a glance. The report of Muhammed Ahmad Abd-er-Rassul, which had at first appeared exaggerated, was scarcely more than the attenuated expression of the truth: where I had expected to come on one or two obscure, petty kings, the Arabs had unearthed a whole hypogee of Pharaohs.

And what Pharaohs! perhaps the most illustrious in the history of Egypt—Tehutimes III and Seti I, Aahmes the liberator and Ramses II the conqueror!

Two hours sufficed for this first examination, and then the work of removal began. Three hundred Arabs were speedily collected by the efforts of the mudir’s people, and set about the work. The museum’s boat, hastily summoned, had not yet arrived; but reis Muhammed, one of the pilots on whom reliance could be placed, was on the spot. He descended to the bottom of the pit and undertook to extract its contents. Messrs. Brugsch and Ahmad Effendi Kamal received the objects as they were brought above ground, carried them to the foot of the hill, and ranged them side by side without relaxing their vigilance for a moment. Forty-eight hours of energetic labour sufficed to exhume everything; but the task was only half finished.

The convoy had to be conducted across the plain of Thebes and beyond the river as far as Luxor; several of the coffins, raised with great difficulty by twelve or sixteen men, took seven or eight hours to go from the mountain to the bank, and it will be easily imagined what this journey must have been like in the dust and heat of July.

At last, on the evening of the 11th, mummies and coffins were all at Luxor, duly enveloped in mats and canvases. Three days after, the museum’s steamer arrived; it only remained to load it, and it immediately started again for Bulaq with its freight of kings.

Then a singular thing happened, for from Luxor to Kuft, along either bank of the Nile, the fellah women followed the boat with dishevelled hair and uttering loud cries, and the men fired rifle-shots as they do at funerals.

HOW CAME THESE MONARCHS HERE?

And now a question arises. The greater number of the kings and princes of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties, had each his tomb, which exists to-day or whose site we learn from ancient documents; Amenhotep I at Drah-abu’l-Neggah, Seti I and Ramses II at the Biban-el-Moluk, and others elsewhere. How is it that their corpses were hidden away between Deir-el-Bahari and Sheikh Abd-el-Gurnah, huddled together with the corpses of the high priests of Amen? The Egyptians themselves have taken pains to furnish us with the materials for the answer. Several of the mummies or coffins which we possess, bear, written in ink by the hand of contemporary scribes, the date, the circumstances, and sometimes the reason of the transfer. These are veritable official reports, whose testimony on the subject is unimpeachable.

The three mummies of the XIXth Dynasty had a common fate. The coffins of Seti I and Ramses II bear three inscriptions, which are identical, or nearly so, and which date from three different periods: what is left of the coffin of Ramses II bears the remains of a hieratic text[8] analogous to the second inscription of the text of Seti I.