Newsletter 18

Thebes Revisited

For the second time this year John Johnson is off to Egypt, this time with his night school class. Unfortunately I won't be joining them but I haven't given up hope for the future - I had my fling earlier this year. On that trip we got to see a rare treat when our group was invited to a special viewing of the tomb of Seti I (see Newsletter 10). This tomb is particularly significant to John who studied Seti I (father of Ramesses the Great) for his University course.

Recently, new survey work has been carried out in the Valley of the Kings by the same team (headed by Kent Weeks), who re-discovered KV5 in 1987. Here are some details from their web site of the work carried out on the tomb of Seti I.

KV17

This is the longest, deepest and most completely decorated of all the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. It is the first tomb to be decorated with what is called a "complete programme" of religious texts. It is also the first tomb with a vaulted burial chamber and consists of seven corridors and eleven chambers. The tomb was re-discovered and explored by Belzoni in October 1817, who took wax casts of the wall reliefs and made watercolours of some of the painted scenes. He began to build a dyke around the entrance of the tomb and even took up residence in the tomb with his wife for a short while.

Robert Hay also made copies of the painted wall reliefs. In 1825, James Burton finished the dyke around the tomb entrance and cleared the well of debris that had been dumped by Belzoni. In 1844-1845, Richard Lepsius surveyed KV 17 for the first time and made a plan of the tomb and drawings of the wall and ceiling decoration. Champollion and Rosellini removed two doorjambs from corridor G and took them to the Louvre and the museum in Florence. In 1883, Eugene Lefebure recorded the hieroglyphs in the wall decoration. Between 1902 and 1904, Howard Carter did some conservation work in the tomb, stabilising walls and ceilings with brickwork and replacing pillars that had been removed with brick. In 1979, the Theban Mapping Project completed plans and sections of KV 17, publishing the first plan of the tomb to include passage K. Passage K is the feature that makes KV 17 unique. Belzoni was able to descend 300 feet down this corridor, as did Wilkinson. In the 1950's, Sheikh Ali Abdel Rassul dug 100 feet further than Belzoni in what he was convinced was a corridor leading to the real burial chamber filled with gold. He stopped work before reaching the end of the passage.

TMP

For the past fifteen years the Theban Mapping Project has been preparing a comprehensive archaeological database of Thebes. For the last ten years they have concentrated on the Valley of the Kings, often for the first time using modern surveying techniques to measure the tombs. Some, like Seti I's, required thousands of separate measurements to produced the 3D-computer model. Treasure-hunters and curio-seekers have plundered these sites in the past, pollution, rising ground water, and mass-tourism threaten them in the present day. Even early archaeologists destroyed information in their search for museum-quality pieces. The TMP believes that the first and most essential step in preserving the heritage of Thebes is a detailed map and database of every archaeological, geographical and ethnographic feature in the area. Only then can sensible plans be made for conservation and further study.

( full details on - www.kv5.com/intro.html )

Next Meeting

The next meeting of our society is on Wednesday 4th November at the history shop at 7.30 pm as usual. This month's speaker is Peter McCrones of Lancashire Archaeology Services who will be giving us a talk on Archaeological Reconstruction.

Hope to see you at the meeting - B.A.