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Back in 1820 an english amateur barcheologist named James Burton was poking around the Nile engaged in his favorite pursuit, looking for ancient monuments. He came upon the entrance of a tomb and noticed a cartouche- an inscription --of one of Egypt's greatest pharaohs, Ramses II. Burton tunneled into the crypt but, apparently thwarted by the debris, stopped burrowing and left. Nearly a century later, around 1910, the archeologist Howard Garter had his workmen dig through the same entrance, but he also gave up after a few feet. He assumed the tomb was insignificant-so trivial that he covered the entrance with dirt from his other excavations.
Too bad they didn't push a little harden Last week archeologists announced they had uncovered what appears to be the largest and most complex tomb ever found in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, making it the most significant find since Garter opened King Tut's spectacular chamber. The tomb, 3,200 years old, is a vast, elaborately designed mausoleum, containing at least 62 rooms, many laid side by side, and probably dozens more on a lower level. As one Egyptologist put it, reaching across the seas for a metaphor, "it's a kind of Levittown, Long Island" for mummies.
Why so big? Archeologists think the mausoleum, which is called Tomb 5, is a family crypt laid out by Ramses II, who certainly required a big one. He is said to have lathered more than 100 children, including 52 sons. But archeologists didn't know where any except for one were buried. Now Kent Weeks, the American Egyptologist who led the nearly decadelong dig, said he's confident at least four sons are buried in Tomb 5--which is only 100 feet away from Dad's separate resting place. And he suspects that nearly all of the other sons are burried in Tomb 5, too. Weeks theorizes that Ramses II built the tomb in preparation for his sons' deaths. Twelve died before he did.
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Experts have long thought that it was rare for anyone but a pharaoh to be buffed in the hallowed Valley of the Kings necropolis, about 800 miles south of Cairo. It's even conceivable, though doubtful, that Ramses II's daughters-at least 30 are known--are buried in Tomb 5 also. (His first wife, Queen Nefertari, is buried in the nearby Valley of the Queens. But no one knows where his half dozen other wives, and any number of concubines, are resting, though it's safe to speculate that they keeled over from exhaustion.) "Given the fact that no other pharaoh is known to have taken such great care over the burial of his sons," Weeks said, "it certainly shows him to be a very paternal fellow."
Egyptologists, often skeptical of supposed new finds, were elated at the discovery. They had no argument with Weeks's theory that Tomb 5 may be one humongous family plot -- 15 times the number of chambers as King Tut's. "It just seemed to go on and on," said Peter Dorman, a University of Chicago Egyptologist who visited the site in March. The tomb won't likely contain treasures similar to those found inKing Tut's; it was plundered in ancient times, and besides, even loved princes don't get the treasures of a pharaoh. But its wall decorations, mummy fragments and statuary could reveal important details about the powerful Ramses II, who ruled Egypt for 67 years, from 1290 to 1224 B.C. In one respect the tomb's magnitude isn't surprising; Ramses II was the Robert Moses of his time, building temples or major additions at Abu Simbel, Thebes, Karnak and Luxor. Ramses II is traditionally saidto have been pharaoh at the time of the Biblical exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.
The discovery of the tomb came almost as an adjunct to Weeks's main job--map-ping the monuments and tombs at the ancient Egyptian capital of Thebes, which in-eludes the Valley of the Kings. Since the 1970s, Weeks, a 53-year-old professor of Egyptology at The American University in Cairo, had done everything from flying in a hot-air balloon to slithering along the ground to chart the area's archeological features. Then, in the late 1980s, he decided to try to locate tombs that had been "lost" over the last hundred years.
Guided roughly by James Burton's journal, Weeks employed high-tech geophysical devices, like magnetometers, to try to detect the tombs. But they were of little help. So, resorting to "plain old archeological sampling," Weeks and his crew dug a series of trenches on the slopes near the Ramses II tomb to see if anything was there. In 1987 they finally found the narrow tomb entrance; on the doorjamb was the cartouche of Ramses II that Burton had noted in his journal. (They also found a Burton signature: using the smoke of a candle, he wrote his name and the year, 1820, on the ceiling of the tomb.)
The debris washed in by centuries of flooding slowed exploration. But crawling on his hands and knees through spaces no more than 15 inches high, Weeks began a trail that confirmed that this was a tomb for Ramses II's sons. He found two vestibules. On the walls of one he detected the names of Ramses II's first and second sons: Amonher-khepeshef and, in effect, Ramses Junior. In the second vestibule Weeks discovered a fragment of an alabaster canopic jar-used to hold the inner organs of the deceased-and on the surface were hieroglyphs that referred to Seti, the seventh son. A pottery fragment with the name of Ramses II's 15th son, Mery-Amon, had been found outside the tomb by archeologists 70 years earlier.
Weeks was just getting started. Only a few steps from the second vestibule, he entered a grand central hall, 50 feet by 50 feet, with 16 pillars, a room exceeded in size only by the burial chamber in the tomb of Ramses II himself. But it wasn't until February of this year that Weeks was able to remove debris blocking a rear door that led to the more astonishing discovery: a passageway that led to an array of 48 rooms arranged in a T-shape. At the intersection of the T, Weeks saw a deeply carved relief of the god of the afterlife, Osiris. Weeks said he realized he was seeing the "largest tomb in the Valley of the Kings and maybe the largest ever found in all of Egypt."
Indeed, most tombs in the Valley of the Kings consist of fewer than a dozen chambers, and these are small and laid out along a single axis. At Tomb 5, no room is smaller than 10 feet by 10 feet. Weeks speculates that the line of rooms were miniature chapels used to make offerings to many of the dead sons. He guesses that the actual burials took place on the still unexplored lower level. There seems little question that the site was used for burials. The rooms on the main level were littered with thousands of fragments, including pieces of stone sarcophagi, mummified human bodies and bones from offerings of cooked meat. Based on ancient papyrus scripts recounting the incidents, Weeks speculates that the body parts-including a nicely preserved knee joint--were actually dropped by grave rob bets as they fled.
Experts now wonder whether Weeks will be able to match each room to a particular son. Historians know the names of all 52 sons but little else. Of them, only Ramses II's 18th son, Merneptah, has a known tomb; he succeeded his father as pharaoh and used that perk to build a resting place in the Valley of the Kings. There are indications that the fifth son, Khaemwese, may be buried at Saqqara, near the Pyramids of Giza.
Archeologists say the tomb could also help sort out Ramses II's apparently dysfunctional family. David O'Connor, an Egyptologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, says that, like Egyptian gods, pharaohs were allowed to do things ordinary folk could not--like marry their sisters and, as Ramses II did, marry their own daughters. How these relationships played out "is one of the major issues that still needs a lot of exploration," says O'Connor.
The discovery raises many other questions. Does the crypt represent a drastic change in ancient mortuary customs, or are other family mausoleums waiting to be discovered? Why is it designed with perpendicular corridors rather than a straight or curving single corridor? Will it explain how his firstborn son died-conforming to the Exodus tale of the final plague that afflicted the Egyptians? Weeks figures he'll be dealing with such issues for the rest of his life.
And that's based just on what he's seen so far. It will take him a couple more years to burrow to the lower level, and many more to analyze the trove. Tourists won't be allowed in for at least a decade. If Ramses II wanted to secure his family's memory, at last, three millennia later, he succeeded.
By custom, the pharaohs of Egypt began building their tombs as soon as they were crowned. But Ramses II went one step further. Besides his own monument--which held his mummified remains --he had a mausoleum constructed for his sons. The discovery of that elaborate tomb was announced last week.
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