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As if Queen Hatshepsut wasn’t enough, we now headed for the Valley of the Kings. Virtually all of the kings of the New Kingdom chose to be buried here, so there are 500 years of royal burials -roughly 1500 – 1000 BC. Pretty much all have been found including that of Thutmose II – found since we were there, washed out by floods shortly after he was buried, but a royal tomb none the less. His new burial place seems on the verge of being discovered.
Our first tomb was KV8, King Meremptah. The tombs are numbered in order of discovery and Meremptah has been open since antiquity. It was badly damaged by flooding in antiquity, but large sections of painting remain: the Book of Gates and the Amduat that appear in almost all tombs are there. We got to recognise them eventually.
I quickly realised that I was not going to see as many tombs as I’d possibly hoped. They each consist of a series of long corridors connected by long stretches of steps that lead down to the burial chamber deep in the rock. En route there will be several rooms and a well shaft. That could involve way over a hundred steps which at my age is asking for trouble. The walls and ceilings are usually painted so it is all extremely interesting, just exhausting. Theo saw more than I.
We next visited KV8, the tomb of Rameses IX. It’s another one open since antiquity and was only about half finished at the time of the King’s death. Most of the wall paintings are crudely executed. It was the first time I’d seen any indication of the erotic life of ancient Egypt. Though the Christian censors had been at work (of course), there were a few figures they missed. We only know ancient Egypt from its tombs and temples, neither of which were ever likely to give much indication as to the actual life of Egyptians, rich or poor. All the wall paintings of their houses are long gone. There is, however, one miraculous discovery giving a glimpse of their erotic lives and that is the Turin Erotic Papyrus (Museo Egizo, Papyrus 55001) from this period, 1150 BC, that is 2.6 metres (8.5 feet) long and depicts various sex positions. It’s a bit like stumbling upon the erotic frescos in Pompei. One gets the sense that that they had a much healthier attitude to sex than we do.
Theo went to K16 by himself; I saw how many steps there were. It is the tomb of Rameses I and looked very interesting with some large scale paintings. Like so many of the tombs it was unfinished at the king’s death and has suffered from flood damage.
The best tomb we saw, the one you mustn’t miss, you have to pay extra for: tomb KV17, Sety I (died 1290 BC). It is regarded as the pinnacle of New Kingdon tomb painting. The paintings are superb, the colours fresh, and the images as surreal as only Egyptian tombs can be. Here in the circumpolar astrological star map on the ceiling of the burial chamber we have the Goddess Taweret, protector during childbirth: a pregnant hippopotamus standing upright with the paws of a lion holding an ankh. The crocodile on her back is her husband Sobek, father of Horus, who is sometimes shown as her back. In Egyptian astrology Taweret represents the stars of the Hippopotamus Constellation in the northern sky though as yet no-one is sure exactly which ones.
There are lots of pictures of Sety being embraced by the Gods: Isis, Neith and Hathor – he can’t keep his hands off them. There is also a great painting of Hathar. I was most intrigued to see that the Paul McCartney painting I have above my fireplace is taken from this image of Hathor. For some reason I thought it must be from something galloping about on his ranch in Arizona. I recognised it immediately. (Photo by Suzy Treister). This tomb is like looking at two or three retrospective art exhibitions. I don’t normally look carefully at more than about 60 pictures in a show because you burn out, you can’t appreciate more than that, whereas here it is image overload. I staggered out, in as much as it is possible to stagger up a steep set of steps.
To finish with Sety I. A large number of rooms have the preliminary drawings for the wall paintings in place, but they were never completed because he died before they finished their work and the tomb was sealed. These drawings are often of the highest quality, therefore it is disturbing to see how poorly they are treated by the curators of the tomb. It’s all very well for Zahi Hawass to demand the Rosetta Stone back, but it was being used as the roof of a chicken coop when the French archaeological survey discovered it and is now under maximum protection in the British Museum. Whereas now, in contrast we can see these amazing, priceless preliminary drawings remaining totally unprotected in Sety’s tomb. There is a doorway with four steps down into the next room. Naturally people steady themselves against the wall on either side to descend. There is no protective glass screen, there is no handrail. The 3500 old drawings are stained black from the tourists’ hands as they steady themselves against the drawings to get to the next room. How long this tomb will last is hard to tell, but unless proper protection against damage from backpacks and the like is provided soon, the cash cow of the Egyptian economy will ultimately disappear, and the world will be a poorer place because of it. This tomb is one of the world’s greatest treasures, fix it up!
Fortunately there is a cafe in the very centre of the Valley of the Kings where one can sit and contemplate what one has seen and enjoy a cup of coffee. Even there, staring out at the barren cliff face, you are faced with the old ethical questions. Are we no different from the tomb robbers of old? We open the tombs, steal their treasures and these days place them in museums rather than private collections but what is so different? They wanted to be left there for eternity. To sit in the café surrounded by tourists who know virtually nothing about the lineage of the New Kingdom, who care nothing for their Gods and Goddesses, who just take a bunch of selfies that they will probably never even look at, I certainly felt out of place, and wondered, ‘where is Sekmet when we need her?’ No, I’d reserve her for taking out Trump and his criminal gang rather than the sheep-like tourists, such as myself, trudging round the sacred ground of the first Western civilisation, despoiling everything, eyes open in wonder.
