The Historians' History of the World 01 [Prolegomena; Egypt, Mesopotamia]

Queen Nubkhas

Bands were organised, in which civil employees, officers, workmen, even women, figure indiscriminately, and these set to work to exploit the necropolis. They forced the doors of the tombs, that they might carry off the objects of value, the jewels, furniture, and gorgeous arms which the piety of relatives had deposited with the corpses.

Soon, not content with attacking private individuals, they ventured to lay their hands upon the kings. The government of Ramses made vain attempts to stop their depredations. An inquiry, opened in the XVIth year of Ramses IX, informs us that the king’s commissioners found one royal tomb violated for every ten that they were authorised to visit. It is curious that one of the hypogees examined belonged to a prince whose mummy we found in the secret chamber of Deir-el-Bahari, namely Amenhotep I; it was still intact.

The report of the opening of the tomb of Sebekhotep [VI] tells us in what the booty of the thieves consisted: “We opened the coffins of the king and his wife, Queen Nubkhas, as well as the funeral caskets in which they lay. We found the august mummy of the king, and beside it his sword, as well as a considerable number of talismans, and ornaments of gold about his neck. The head was covered with gold, and gold was scattered all over the mummy: the coffins were plated with gold and silver within and without, and incrusted with all kinds of stones. We took the gold which we found on the mummy, as well as the talisman and the ornaments of the neck and the gold of the coffins. We likewise took all we could find on the royal spouse, then we burned their funeral caskets and we robbed them of their furniture, which consisted of vases of gold or silver and of bronze, and we divided them among us in eight portions.” One might fancy he was reading the description of that mummy of Queen Aah-hop, whose jewels now form an ornament of the museum at Bulaq.

Let us now examine the condition of the coffins and mummies found at Deir-el-Bahari. Seqenen-Ra, Aahmes and his son Se-Amen, Nefert-ari, and Aah-hotep are certainly in their original coffins, as is proved by the style and the absence of inscriptions indicating a restoration. Amenhotep I and Tehutimes II appear to have retained only the covers of their original coffins; the case is of wood, very roughly shaped, and in order to introduce the mummy of Tehutimes II, it has been found necessary to reduce the thickness of the sides at the level of the shoulders. The inscriptions assert that the wrappings have been renewed: this may have been as much because they were worn out in the natural course of things as because of the violence of human hands, and the restoration does not in itself prove that the mummy has suffered by thieves. But do not the two false mummies of Princess Meshent-themhu and the Princess Set-Amen furnish us with proof of a violation analogous to that to which King Sebekhotep and his wife Nubkhas were subjected?

The robbers, after breaking open Sebekhotep’s coffin, had dispersed the bones of the king, and the tomb was empty. Something similar must certainly have occurred in the case of the Princess Meshent-themhu. The coffin was broken open, and the inscription which it bore, inlaid with blue enamel, partly disappeared; for it was necessary, as I have shown above, to restore it roughly in ink. As for the bones, they had disappeared: probably the thieves, fearing they might be disturbed in their sacrilegious work, made haste to carry off the mummy with them; then abandoned it, once it had been despoiled, in some place where no one thought of looking for it. On the other hand, religion did not allow that the disembodied soul could enjoy a full existence in the other world if the body it had owned during its earthly life should completely disappear.

In default of the real body, the commissioners charged to inspect and restore the tombs adopted the plan of manufacturing the semblances of bodies for Seti and Meshent-themhu. A fragment of broken coffin simulated the bust of Meshent-themhu, a bundle of rags the head, another bundle of rags the feet, and the whole, duly encased in wrappings, was deposited in the coffin, which was more or less carefully restored. Was the soul satisfied at recognising the counterfeit body?

For my part I am very glad to have discovered, thanks to that pious fraud, the principal, if not the only, reason for the collection of so many royal mummies in one place.

It was to save the dead Pharaohs from thieves that it was decided to hide them away. It was hoped that a pit, thirty-eight yards deep, followed by a narrow corridor of two hundred and fifty feet, would protect them from profanation; and experience has proved that the reckoning was not so far out, since centuries rolled away from the day that they were deposited there, before that on which the Arabs of Sheikh Abd-el-Gurnah discovered the hiding-place.

Some Egyptologists will, at first sight, be amazed at the rude character of this supposed tomb, and will object that it is a far cry from a chamber without ornament and roughly hollowed out of the rock, to the magnificent hypogees of Biban-el-Moluk. I answer that the difference between the tombs is not greater than the difference between the kings. Amenhotep III, Ramses II, even Ramses V and Her-Hor, reigned over all Egypt, over Ethiopia, over at least a part of Syria, and had command of the men and money needful to hew out and decorate immense syringes.[9]

Painet´-em II and the people of his family possessed only the poorest region of Egypt and Nubia: it was as much as they could do to secure their mummies the same burial as that of the wealthier men of their time. No more special monuments for each of the dead, but one common vault for all; no more immense sarcophagi in hard stone, but mere coffins in polished wood, sometimes stolen from earlier kings or private persons. There is nothing which more clearly marks the decadence of Thebes than this increasing poverty of the last Theban kings.b

Female Head-dress, Ancient Egypt

FOOTNOTES

[7] [Vases with tops of human forms or divinities, used to hold the entrails of embalmed bodies.]

[8] [Hieratic writing is a modified form of hieroglyphics.]

[9] [Syringes (plural of syrinx) are narrow and deep rock tunnel-tombs.]