Title: Excavating in the Valley of the Kings
Speaker: Stephen Cross
We were given a fascinating talk by an Egyptologist who is also a geologist. His was a detective story with a careful scrutiny of evidence taken mostly from a close examination of the terrain in the Kings’ Valley. He began to wonder whether there could be intact tombs lying beneath flood debris that might have preserved them from too much desecration. We were given new understanding of changes in the formation of the Valley through periodic flash floods. The tomb builders’ attempts to preserve their tombs from flood water often created more damage than if they had done nothing.
Exploratory digs have given very promising indications that Stephen Cross may be correct in believing in the possibility of tombs still to be found. Painstaking dating of the workmen’s huts above the lower levels of compacted flood debris suggests that any tombs below them are likely to date from a time very soon after the death of Tutenkhamun. We can only speculate as to whom the tombs belong to but from the area that Steve pointed out and the period when they would have possibly been created leaves us with the intriguing possibility that they may be reburials from the Amarna period, and if we accept that the body in kv55 is Akhenaton and we know that Dr Joann Fletcher and Dr Steven Buckley have identified the body of Nefertiti in the tomb of Amenhotep 2 then we may be close to finding some of the Princesses from this family.
by Mary Bonsall