HIt is said to have been ussein Abd el-Rassul. Born in Qurna, on the west bank of the Nile opposite Luxor, to a family sometimes involved in tomb robbing, he was twelve years old and employed in the water supply for the excavation team in the Valley of the Kings. On Saturday, November 4, 1922, the boy sat in the shade of a depression below the monumental entrance to the rock-cut tomb of Pharaoh Ramses VI, while the workers of the British archaeologist Howard Carter were digging in the limestone debris interspersed with chert rocks on the other side of the tomb entrance. Where Hussein now idly played with the stones, Carter’s people had previously found only the remains of simple huts, rest rooms for the craftsmen of the sixth Ramses.
His grave is now a beautiful attraction. Last but not least, its exquisite ceiling painting in golden yellow and deep luminous blue is worth the 100 Egyptian pounds (about 4.20 euros) that it costs extra to visit. But if you want the former shady spot of the water boy – today it is built over by a low building – pay a whopping 450 pounds. Otherwise each of the up to several thousand visitors to the desert valley every day would probably come there: to the tomb of Tutankhamen, probably the most famous ancient Egyptian site after the pyramids of Giseh. The pharaoh was buried here around 1323 BC, a good 180 years before his neighbor Ramses VI.
A step into the underworld
Here, on that Saturday, Hussein Abd el-Rassul noticed a hewn edge under the rubble, which turned out to be a step. By late Sunday afternoon, a total of twelve steps had been uncovered, leading down into the bedrock to a roughly plastered wall. Several impressions of large oval seals with Egyptian hieroglyphs were visible in the plaster. Carter had to pull himself together now. He had the stairway filled up again and the next day telegraphed the sponsor of the dig, George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon: ‘A wonderful discovery made in the valley at last. A splendid tomb with seals intact; it covered again until your arrival. Congratulation.”
How glorious the tomb really was was only to be known after his lordship’s arrival three weeks later – and even then not immediately. Because the corridor behind the sealed plaster was not only full of dust and stones, but also showed unmistakable traces of a filled grave robber tunnel. In addition, debris from grave equipment was found in the rubble.
Tutankhamun must be down there somewhere: the buried entrance to the underground tomb
:
Image: Ullstein
In fact, this tomb had also been broken into, twice in quick succession and only a few years after Tutankhamun’s burial. Both times, however, the robbers had been disturbed and their holes walled up and resealed. But the intruders had come a long way, the second time into all four chambers of the crypt, had ransacked chests, apparently mainly for jewelry and cosmetics, and also otherwise caused a mess. In the burial chamber, Carter and Lord Carnarvon found the door of the outer gilded cedar casket bolted only with a wooden stick. But the second of the four shrines surrounding the granite sarcophagus was sealed. The king’s rest had never been disturbed.