Free Tutankhamen by Joyce Tyldesley Page A

for Mr Davis in the Valley of the Kings. When I got to the house the front ‘lawn’ had about a dozen gigantic white pots lying on it where the men had placed them when they brought them back from the work. At that time Ayrton had
finished a dig up in the Valley of the Kings just east of the tomb of Ramesses XI [KV 18: now believed to be the tomb of Ramesses X]. He had quite a job on his hands to find something to amuse Sir Eldon Gorst, the British diplomatic agent who was to be Mr Davis’ self-invited guest soon. Sir Eldon had written a very strange little note, which I saw, saying to Mr Davis that he had heard that the latter’s men found a royal tomb every winter and requesting, as he intended to be in the Valley of the Kings in a few days, that all discoveries be postponed until his arrival… Davis had found the jewelry [sic] of Queen Tawosret in another tomb, but that was not sufficiently spectacular, and as he had opened up one of the great pots and found a charming little yellow mask in it, everybody thought they were going to find many more objects in the other jars … That evening I walked back over the hills to the Davis house in the Valley, and I have still got a picture in the back of my head of what things looked like. What in the morning had been fairly neat rows of pots were tumbled in every direction, with little bundles of natron and broken pottery all over the ground. The little mask which had been taken as a harbinger of something better to come had brought forth nothing and poor Ayrton was a very sick and tired person after the undeserved tongue-lashing he had had all that afternoon. 31
    Among the material discovered in the jars were seal impressions bearing Tutankhamen’s name, linen bundles of natron salt, floral funerary collars (which Davis tore apart in order to demonstrate their strength), and the miniature gold mummy mask mentioned by Winlock. The Antiquities Service was not interested in this valueless jumble and, while the small gold mask was sent to Cairo Museum, the other finds went the Metropolitan Museum with a different small mask (probably from KV 51); a well-meaning but ill-recorded substitution which was to cause much confusion to future generations of scholars. 32 Many years later, Winlock identified the jar contents as the remnants of the embalming materials and funerary feast of Tutankhamen. He
believed that these objects, which had ritual significance and so could not be simply thrown away, had been buried in an unfinished tomb near the main tomb. This idea was subsequently refined so that the cache became the material cleared from the passageway of Tutankhamen’s tomb after the first robbery, immediately before the passageway was filled with stone chips. Thus it included items which were deliberately left in the passageway of Tutankhamen’s tomb plus, perhaps, odd items dropped by the robbers. Finally, following the 2004 discovery of KV 63, a New Kingdom cache tomb yielding embalming materials, broken pots and floral collars, it has been suggested that the pit may have been a separate original and untouched part of Tutankhamen’s funerary provision. 33
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    Clue 3: In 1909 the team discovered the ‘Chariot Tomb’: a small, undecorated chamber (KV 58) which yielded an uninscribed alabaster figurine and the gold foil from a chariot harness inscribed with the names of Tutankhamen and his successor Ay, whose name is given both as a commoner and a king.
    Convincing himself that ‘the Valley of the Tombs is now exhausted’, Davis published the Chariot Tomb as the long-lost, and rather disappointing, tomb of Tutankhamen. 34 His book betrays a somewhat split personality. Its title – The Tombs of Harmhabi and Touatânkhamanou – leaves no room for doubt over the nature of the find. However, the chapter describing the artefacts is more cautiously titled ‘Catalogue of the Objects Found in an Unknown Tomb, supposed to be