“As my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold – everywhere the glint of gold.
For the moment – an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by – I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, ‘Can you see anything?’ it was all I could do to get out the words, ‘Yes, wonderful things.”- Howard Carter, the Tomb of Tutankhamen
This was in 1922 and the discovery of the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun took the world by storm, with its treasures telling tales of opulence and grand artistry of the ancient Egyptians like never before. Despite continued excavations, not a single tomb of a pharaoh was unearthed for over a century. The chance discovery of the tomb of Thutmose II last week re-ignited a sense of excitement and marvel that had escaped the world of Egyptology for over a century. With its unearthing, the last undiscovered royal tomb of the 18th Egyptian dynasty came to light. King Thutmose II has now been pushed into the limelight having been overshadowed by his famous wife and half-sister Queen Hatshepsut, one of the most celebrated female pharaohs in Egypt.
The grand discovery
A team headed by British-Egyptian archaeologists in the Western Valleys of the Theban Necropolis near Luxor believed the burial enclosures of the 18th dynasty pharaohs were 2km away, close to the Valley of the Kings.
The team found it in a location associated with the resting places of royal women, but when they got into the burial chamber they discovered it adorned with the mark of the pharaoh. A section of the awning remained unbroken: with a blue-painted canopy of yellow stars on it. “This finding is significant as blue-painted ceilings with yellow stars were found only in the tombs of the kings, the field director of the mission Dr. Piers Litherland told the BBC.
The mummified head of Thutmose II and a relief of the pharaoh at Karnak
“The emotion of getting into these things is just one of extraordinary bewilderment because when you come across something you’re not expecting to find, it’s emotionally extremely turbulent really,” he said. “And when I came out, my wife was waiting outside and the only thing I could do was burst into tears.”
This discovery unravelled the secret of where the burials of early 18th dynasty kings were located.
The mummified remains of Thutmose II were discovered two centuries ago, but its initial burial location had never been found. An ancestor of Tutankhamun, Thutmose II’s reign is thought to have been from about 1493 to 1479 BCE. Dr. Litherland said of the tomb with its large staircase and a huge descending corridor depicting grandeur, “it took us a very long time to get through all that,” as it was obstructed by the residue of the deluge while the ceilings had collapsed.
“It was only after crawling through a 10m (32ft) passageway that a small 40cm opening at the top that we got into the burial chamber.”
There they located a blue canopy filled with embellishments of scenes from the Amduat, a sacred text reserved only for kings. That was another key sign that they had found a king’s tomb, according to Dr Litherland.
The excavators worked towards clearing the rubble, hoping to uncover the granulated remains of a crypt underneath. However, the tomb was empty, and according to Dr Litherland, this was not due to any robbery but more likely it was intentionally emptied.
The excavators concluded that the tomb had been flooded. This was probably because it was constructed close to a waterfall. A few years following the king’s burial, the contents shifted to a different place.
While filtering through tons of limestone within the chamber, they discovered pieces of alabaster jars, bearing the inscriptions of Thutmose II and Hatshepsut. These chunks of alabaster, according to Dr. Linterland, were probably broken while the tomb was being moved from the present location to another. This turned out to be an accident of providence as these missing fragments were the key to identifying to whom the tomb belonged to. The uncovered artefacts were the first objects to be discovered associated with Thutmose II’s tomb.
According to Dr. Litherland, his team had a general supposition where the second tomb lay hidden and most excitingly, it could be intact with treasures as it had been with Tutankhamen. The finding of Thutmose’s tomb rounds off over 12 years of hard work by the joint team from Dr. Litherland’s New Kingdom Research Foundation and Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
Who was Thutmose II?
Thutmose II sometimes called Akheperenre reigned during the first half of the 15th century BCE, which made him the fourth ruler of the 18th Egyptian Dynasty, and also marked the start of the New Kingdom period. Thutmose II ruled well over a decade, although some scholars consider his reign to have endured only three years.
He was the son of a great pharaoh Thutmose I and his lesser wife, Mutnofret. He married his half-sister Queen Hatshepsut by royal custom, to strengthen the rule and bloodlines. Together, they had a daughter named Nefrure. The mummy of Thutmose II was uncovered in 1881 at the Deir el-Bahri Cache above the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut, but his actual tomb remained unknown until now.
Following his demise, his wife Hatshepsut took over the reins of Pharaoh as the sixth pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty, becoming one of the most celebrated and successful female rulers of all time. Thutmose II, as the successor of his father, Thutmose I, resumed his father’s military approach towards the Southern regions of Egypt.
According to conserved inscriptions, he summoned the ruthless suppression of a revolt against Egyptian control in the land of Kush (present-day North Sudan). As a consequence, a substantial number of inmates were conveyed to Egypt – perhaps as part of a campaign.
The military campaigns of Thutmose II were inconsequential in comparison to the extravagant conquests of his precursors and successors. Most historians consider him to be a weak ruler and Hatshepsut probably had a significant function in overseeing the State, long before his death.
Thutmose II’s brief rule left traces of construction in Karnak, one of the most extensive religious centres in ancient Egypt, located in modern-day Luxor. Of its structure, only fragments have survived which feature a striking decoration illustrating Thutmose II and Hatshepsut as his royal wife well before she became the ruler, and their daughter Nefrure. Its origins remain undetermined, but it is probable that Thutmose II initiated it and Hatshepsut completed it. The monument was rebuilt by French researchers and can now be seen at the Open Air Museum in Karnak.
This new discovery rekindles much interest among Egyptologists and promises to unfold a series of new finds in the near future.
