10 December 2015

Tutankhamun’s Other Curse

What will archaeologists find beyond the walls of the Boy King’s burial chamber?

By Neil Tidmarsh

Last week, the Egyptian antiquities ministry made an amazing announcement; radar scans have indicated that there is empty space behind the north and west walls of King Tutankhamun’s burial chamber deep beneath the Valley of the Kings. Could this hidden space be the long-lost tomb of Tutankhamun’s step-mother Queen Nefertiti? Or could it be something else altogether?

The world waits with bated breath as archaeologists prepare to make what could be the greatest discovery since Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon peered into KV62 almost a hundred years ago. (“Can you see anything?” “Yes. Wonderful things.”)

Imagine what the archaeologists’ log might look like once they start…

Day One, Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Egypt.

Today we pierced the north wall of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber with a minute hole and succeeded in obtaining a sample of air to prove that there is indeed some sort of cavity on the other side! We then enlarged the hole slightly in order to insert a small fibre optic camera. The film footage was initially disappointing – just its own light swallowed by darkness – and then we realised with excitement that this indicated that the space on the other side of the wall was vast – too vast for the camera to capture any images of its contents, walls or ceiling!

Day Two, Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Egypt.

Today we carefully cut out a segment of the north wall and crawled through into the space beyond. We found ourselves in a huge man-made hall bigger than the nave of a parish church. It appeared to be empty, but our electric lights picked out obscure hieroglyphs on the walls, a strange cavity cut into the floor, and a pile of woven textiles the size of beach towels abandoned in one corner.

A sealed doorway in the west wall indicates that there may be yet more chambers awaiting discovery…

Day Three, Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Egypt.

Today we cut through the sealed doorway and found ourselves in a passageway which led to a second vast hall. There is a similar absence of artefacts here, but a scatter of foodstuff was found across the floor which proved to be corn which had clearly been heated in a sealed vessel until ‘popped’ (a mystery here – corn is native to South America, not the Middle East – perhaps there is more to Thor Heyerdahls’s ‘Ra’ theory than is generally accepted?).

Another passageway led to a third empty chamber. Here there were what appeared to be pools of oil on the floor, and a single artefact – an iron tool with some resemblance to a modern spanner – was found in one corner.

A doorway in the north wall led to another passageway which opened into a fourth and final chamber. This chamber was also empty and almost devoid of artefacts. We found an alabaster jar containing a white powder which one of the team, equipped with expertise and experience, sniffed and announced to be an extraction from the coca plant (again, native to South America rather than the Middle East, but not a unique find from ancient Egypt).

The walls have collapsed in the north-eastern corner of this chamber, and we suspect that the rubble conceals the original entrance/exit to this vast underground complex, deep beneath the surface of the Valley of the Kings.

But what exactly could this complex have been?

Day Three, Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Egypt.

Examination of the somewhat obscure hieroglyphs on the chambers’ walls and of the seals on the door separating the first and second chambers is beginning to shed some light on this site’s mysteries.

It is clearly not a tomb (no body has been found) or cenotaph; the famous ‘royal necropolis seal’ (jackal and nine foes) is entirely absent, as is any sign of funerary ritual or monuments.

But a royal seal and a royal cartouche have been found throughout – those of Tutankhamun, not Nefertiti. So it seems that the boy-king built this complex, not his more illustrious mother-in-law.

But what is it?

In the first chamber, a repeated pictogram can be interpreted as ‘water-strength-room’, i.e. a room where aquatic exercise took place, i.e. a swimming pool.  In the second chamber, a pictogram reading ‘images-moving-joy-room’ indicates that it was a room where pictures which moved were somehow enjoyed, i.e. what we might call a ‘cinema’.  Repeated pictograms in the third room spell out ‘chariot-keep-roof’, suggesting an indoor shelter for chariots or other vehicles, in other words some kind of garage.  A pictogram repeated in the fourth chamber reads ‘dance-drink-joy-place’ which could be interpreted as ‘party-room’ or ‘night-club’.

What are we to make of these discoveries?

Day Four, Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Egypt.

A hieroglyphic inscription found on a the west wall of the fourth hall has proved to be a dedicatory inscription in the words of Tutankhamun himself;

“I, King Tutankhamun, ruler of Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt, Lord of the Nile, Son of the Great Akhenaten, had this mega-basement built in the first year of my reign.  My own tongue commanded the most skilled engineers of the land,  ‘Lo, dig deep beneath the sands of the Valley of the Kings and build me the biggest private cinema, the biggest private night-club, the biggest swimming-pool, and the biggest garage for my unparalleled collection of vintage chariots, in the biggest basement development which this kingdom or any kingdom has ever seen!’  And lo, it was done, and there was lamentation in the lands of the oil-rich Arab princes, and in the lands of the oil-rich oligarchs in the far north, and in the homes of the bonus-mighty bankers in the west, who gnashed their teeth and lamented, wailing ‘We are undone! Our mega-basement extensions are no longer mega! Our trophy wives will abandon us! Our colleagues will no longer envy us! Our bonuses will be as dust in our mouths!’  I, Tutankhamun the boy-king, have yet outdone my mighty ancestors Ramesses who smote the Assyrians and yet built no basement bigger than a two-roomed flat for his aged mother, and his son Ramesses who smote the Sea-Peoples and yet built no basement bigger than a medium-sized man-cave, and his son Ramesses who smote the Israelites and yet built no basement bigger than a bed-sit for his useless son Ramesses who refused to leave home…”

The rest of the inscription is lost by the collapse in the wall.  Once the rubble has been fully excavated, further fragments of it may be found to enable us to reconstruct it.  Excavations among the rubble have, nevertheless, already uncovered a tablet which appears to explain once and for all the mystery of Tutankhamun’s death, of his strangely battered body.  It appears that he was not killed in a horse-riding accident, or by a collision with a chariot on a battlefield, but was crushed to death when the wall in that fourth chamber of his mega-basement collapsed on him.  The tablet is a curse tablet, and reads as follows;

“We, the spiritual residents of the Valley of the Kings, curse King Tutankhamun for disturbing our eternal rest with the continual and unbearable noise and mess made by the excavation of his mega-basement and the building of the swimming-pool, night-club, cinema and garage which it is to contain.  We curse him for his anti-social lack of consideration – after all, he does not have to live with these disorders, he has moved back to his palace in Thebes until the work is over.  And then there is the danger that all this digging will make our own resting-places unstable and result in serious structural damage.  We curse him and call upon the gods to punish him for his presumption, arrogance and selfishness; may they bring the walls of his own mega-basement down on top of his head; may they crush him to death under the rubble of his own vanity…”

The manner of his death was confirmed by a late inscription found in one of the passages.

Day Five, Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Egypt.

No work done today; we have been inundated by requests for full details about that curse from residents of the London boroughs of Chelsea, Kensington and Knightsbridge.  Please go to our website to view high resolution photographs of the tablet, where we have published its full text, in both the original hieroglyphs and in modern English.  But please don’t forget to click on our legal disclaimer before invoking all or any part of the said curse…