|
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.
|
