Exploration of the Valley of the Kings

Transcription

In a few minutes, you're going in to see what i think is one of the finest collections of egyptian antiquities ever to travel the united states better in fact from the previous Tutankhamun exhibits that came here to Seattle one in the nineteen fifties and the other in the whenever it was... late seventies, early eighties better because it is more representative of more periods of egyptian art i'm not going to talk about that exhibit you're going to discover it for yourself in a few minutes and i want to move on to something else but let me just point out one thing the galleries in the exhibition and i believe there are ten of them are not arranged chronologically, they are arranged topically. so in the first gallery, for example, you will see representations of egyptian pharoahs and in the second gallery representations of egyptian nobility and members of royal families and in the third gallery representations of gods and so forth before finally you get to the collection of to tutankhamun this is an opportunity to see all periods of egyptian art from the earliest periods in the old kingdom around twenty seven hundred BC to more recent materials as recently as says seven hundred eight hundred BC it's a good opportunity to see the breadth of the egyptian art and if you pay attention to the nuanced differences between the pieces of sculpture and the other objects and the differences in technology for example in the jewelry i think you'll be very impressed and informed by the way in which culture that is supposed to have been changeless for three thousand years did in fact change over time and sometimes change very dramatically what i'd like to do in the next few moments is to give you a bit of background on that material it comes from several archaeological sites in egypt but most of it comes from ancient thebes modern luxor of village that lies about three hundred and fifty, four hundred miles south of modern cairo on the nile the east bank at the bottom right of the slide the site of modern luxor city and the site of ancient thebes the town and temples of carnac and luxor my concern right now is with the other side of the river the west bank of the nile because it was here that in antiquity the pharaohs of egypt's new kingdom a period of about five hundred years from fifteen hundred BC to one thousand BC made their preparations for the afterlife Now, those preparations involved two basic kinds of structures they built a tomb and they also built mortuary temple or a memorial temple in which their spirit could be celebrated both at the time of the funeral and in years subsequent to it because of the geography of thebes, the mortuary temple and the tomb were separate from one another the temples live along the edge of the cultivation you don't want to build tombs there because the ground water is too high and it's uh... certainly not going to allow things to be preserved and so the tombs are often the hillside the limestone hills beyond to the west everything as far as we know in the new kingdom built a temple and tomb in this area i know you can't read the labels on this but the yellow area is the edge of the desert adjacent to the cultivation and wherever you see a line of text is the name of one of those memorial temples these temples are an integral part of the ancient funeral ceremony because when an individual pharoah died, his body was taken by a boat down the Nile or up as the case may be and across channels cut through the agricultural land to his memorial temple where services were performed prayers uttered before the body was then carried overland in a procession up to the valley of the kings nearly the top center of the slide the memorial temples are perhaps less well known than the tombs themselves but they are no less impressive in fact some of them are huge this is a temple of ramseys III called Medina Habut today a huge complex, a large stone temple surrounded by mud brick storerooms stables, palace buildings priests quarters kitchens you name it everything necessary for the regular performance of ceremonies not just for phaorah but for the various gods with whom he was going to be allied in the afterlife the temples are wonderful sources of information they tell us a great deal about egyptian religion and funerary beliefs but all those mud brick buildings around are filled with remains popyri texts and austirca the tell us a great deal about the lives of the priests the lives of the of the temple officials and indeed the lives of the pharoahs themselves unfortunately most of these temples like most of the monuments in egypt are falling apart this is due in part to the fact that for several hundred years europeans have treated the temples as archaeological cornucopias -- someplace where you could go in cart away monuments to your heart's content knowing full well that you could come back the next season and find plenty more egypt would never be exhausted the antiquities would never run out that's why it was possible to come in the early nineteen hundreds with five hundred workmen set them o work the archaeologist setting up a tent away from the dust saying if you workmen find anything of gold come and bring it to me and i'll pay you its value the weight of the gold if you find anything else if it's a whole pot bring it to me if it's a broken pot don't bother the result of course it is that the archaeological materials that were collected in the nineteen th dynasty in early twentieth dynasties materials about filled huge galleries and museums around the world are very selective and represent a very small percentage of what archaeologists let's be fair, let's call them tomb robbers or grave diggers actually uncovered there are other problems in the protection of the monuments as well more modern problems groundwater from agriculture since the building of the azwan damn, the annual nile flood no longer occurs and instead we have a system in egypt of flood irrigation fields are filled with water for months at a time water six inches deep that groundwater raises the level of water all along the edge of the cultivation destroying the foundations of the temples some of which you can see there that's the temple of Ramses II causing the foundations of the temple to weaken it its walls to collapse worse, there is no better place in the world than luxor to grow sugar cane sugarcane requires even more water than most crops and after it's been harvested farmers prefer burning the sugar cane fields in order to return vital nutrients to the to the soil but this burning produces a very acrid smoke that causes the stone of which the temples are made to be destroyed the paint on the walls of the temples crumble to dust it's a nightmarish situation our project has been actively engaged in trying to relocate many of these temples there not all like medina they're not all well preserved many of them are tiny in small places just be low in this slide there's a little milder looks like a and and english muffin with all kinds of holes in it that actually is a hill under which is the burial temple the mortuary temple of to Tutandhamun it was only partially excavated about fifty years ago still hasn't been fully explored but in the last fifty years agricultural land has been moving westward into the archaeological zone raising the groundwater further destroying monuments and excavations in future years whenever somebody gets around to it of the memorial temple of friends of Tutankhamun are going to find temple much less well preserved that it was even a few decades ago this is the temple of Amenhotep the first, one of the first temples to have been built in egypt by one of the for one of the first kings of the new kingdom--it's in the parking lot of an alabaster factory and you can see practically nothing remains there's the base of a column over on the right-hand side of the slide and that's about it our project has been using various geophysical devices to try and relocate the remains of these temples we found more than thirty or forty of them and see if we can't better protect them we've also been using the material to generate computer driven reconstructions of what the temples look like since many of the temples follow fairly standard patterns they change but in in minor detail it's possible for us on the basis of the magnitude metric surveys to get an idea of what the plan is in from that to reconstruct the walls of the pylons and so forth eventually we hope that we'll better be able to protect these monuments and at at the same time allow agriculture to continue because after all it is one of the main ingredients in the economics of upper egypt but also i think will be better able to reconstruct what life in ancient thebes might have been like and to reconstruct the temples in such a way that they will become a tourist destination bringing more people into thebes -- important for the economy -- but at the same time providing other places than the valley of the kings for those tourists to visit thereby lessening the pressures on the monuments in the balance this is a valley of the kings itself as it looked in 1906 where this little cliff is in the foreground that's been cut away and that's the road that you know drive up in a little jitneys to get to the valley from the parking lot near by the valley of the kings consists of a series of small tombs -- you usually go down the stair case into a small chamber with the sarcophagus of stone in the center the walls decorated with religious scenes designed to ensure the safe journey of the pharoah from this life into the next and his union with the gods an important point because once the king gets there he can talk directly to the gods and make known to the gods what you and I we ordinary mortals require for our happy existence the tombs were important important to get the king to the next life important to provide the texts and scenes that would have him talk to the gods on our behalf and important to preserve the materials that he needed for survival in the afterlife his body wine, bread beer all the offerings that were made and placed in the tomb were put here in order to survive in theory for an eternity unfortunately the tombs are also elegantly decorated beautifully beautifully painted this is the tomb of ramsey's the sixth huge theories of rooms in corridors covered with scenes of religious texts generically we can call them the book of the dead although there were about twenty different texts serving different religious functions in them these unfortunately are suffering today like those memorial temples are suffering because of numerous factors --theft used to be a problem vandalism, used to be a problem those are no longer serious threats what is serious today is the fact that they're so popular when i first went to the valley of the kings in 1963 i was one of about ten people that day to visit the valley in the days before the revolution eighteen months ago, or so there would have been five thousand people in the valley of the case today in spite of the revolution and in spite of a drop in tourism there are still six or seven thousand tourists coming to the valley of the kings. Mostly eastern european tourists who are coming as day trippers from their red sea vacations who come in in the morning visit the valley of the kings, turn around and go back to the red sea but who during the few hours they're here generate a lot of pressures on the monument. What pressures? rising humidity caused by their sweating bodies rising temperatures in the tomb caused by their sweaty bodies temperature and humidity changes up and down -- if they're rapid enough -- cause the paint to deteriorate, the plaster on which the paint is applied to turn almost to a chocolaty mush and fall to the ground and the limestone behind it to exude naturally occurring salts which cause further deterioration of the surface our project has been very active in trying to figure out ways of preventing the impact of deleterious impact of tourists on these monuments. We can't stop tourism it's too important to the economy of egypt -- it's the single most important source of foreign income, but what we can do is to develop management plans for the valley of the kings that will allow us to control that tourism in a way that will allow the monuments to survive for future generations we began doing this, gosh, almost forty years ago now we found that even mapping project on our first chart was to make a map of the area -- a topographic map and an archaeological map -- because we reasoned if you couldn't tell where the objects were you wanted to protect there's no way you could protect them and so we did elaborate topographic surveys of the entire theban area with an emphasis on the valley of the kings in the process we're able to trace the development of the tombs in the valley tombs from the early new kingdom the middle new kingdom, the late new kingdom or to put it technically -- eighteenth and nineteenth and twentieth dynasties show how the tombs involved in plan priests decided to make changes in the design of the tombs because the plan of the tomb was in effect the roadmap to get the pharoah from this life to the next and the scenes on the walls of the chambers were in effect a guidebook telling him what he could expect along the way in the process of our work, we also found looking at historical photographs and journals of early travelers we uncovered what can only call i guess lost tombs--tombs that had gone missing we found several of them here in the picture on the left is a photograph taken by howard carter's photographer at the time they were digging looking for the tomb of Tutankhamun for looking for tombs and finding the tomb of Tutankhamun it would lie -- they would discover the tomb a few days after the slide has taken this photo was taken -- in the lower right hand portion of the photo but you can see carter's workmen carrying buckets of dirt away from the excavation in the lower right hand corner of the slide off to the left hand part of the slide and they're dumping it on the hillside there at the base of which there is a covered area where tourists would park their donkeys to provide shade for the animals while the tourists when in to visit the tombs well, one of the tombs we had seen referred to him early texts was a tomb that we thought lay on the very hillside that howard carter buried under another six feet of limestone chips and sand this is what it looked like on the right when we started our excavations and lo and behold in only a few days of clearing along the base of the hillside we rediscovered a tomb the entrance to which had in fact been seen in eighteen twenty two by an english traveler nobody had gone into the tomb explored it nobody knew much about it but over the next few months we decided we would try and find the extent of the tomb so we could include it on the valley of the king's map we were drawing we began digging in the tomb chambers extremely difficult work the tomb was filled chock a block with muck and debris that had washed it down from the hillsides around the valley maybe every fifty / seventy five / one hundred years you get torrential rain storms in the valley of the kings and they wash hundreds of tons of debris down the cliffs and down the hillsides and over the cliffs and it comes from racing down the valley floor and of course it is in the valley floor that the entrances to these tobms are dug, and so all of this day previous pushed into the tombs where it comes at thirty miles an hour boulders sometimes the size of watermelon racing into the tomb, doing damage to anything in its path the walls of the tomb the objects in the tomb, whatever, and then over a thousand of two thousand years it slowly dries to the consistency of concrete and our workmen on the left using a fourteen pounds sledgehammer is trying to dig through that cement like matrix to clean out the tomb chamber at the same time we have two or three people watching him because imbedded in that matrix are antiquities, objects, pieces of pottery we found over nine hundred and eighty thousand pieces of pottery so far every one of which we've wash labeled studied. we found hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of objects i'm not going to show them to you, I could I'm proud of them but believe me they pale in terms of contrast to what you're going to see a few minutes so enjoy those take my word for these are nice too using pick axes is too dig the debris out, we still have to sift it to make sure we don't miss anything and it's very slow going very meticulous work indeed but in the process we found a tomb unlike any tomb ever found before in the valley of the kings with long corridors and doorways off the corridor multiple doorways side chambers going off in every direction this corridor leading to at the end a representation nearly life size of the god of cyrus if you can call the statue of a god life-size. that doesn't work very well but you know what i mean this is the quintessential god of the afterlife osiris, or more correctly i guess it's Ramses the great Ramses II represented as the god osiris who is standing there looking out over the people who are buried in this tomb who are they? why is he protecting them? well because we know from the texts on the wall of the tombnd that they include the sons of ramses the second he was a prolific man he had over forty sons, whose names we know. Undoubtedly, he had many more than that he had forty sons by principal wives He had secondary wives, and tertiary wives, and concubines, and all the rest and he probably fathered many more children than that but they were at least forty sons and we have twenty representations of sons in our tomb there could be that many of his son's buried here or there are four names in the tomb there could be four sons buried here there are four mummies or skeletal materials of mummies in the tomb again suggesting that maybe four sons are here who were they? they were the principal sons of the king they were the heirs apparent to the throne who'd pre-deceased their long-lived father and were buried in this tomb because they held such important positions of power in their lifetime this may be the first born son of Ramses the second -- Amun-her-khepeshef if it is and you accept the biblical story of the exodus and you believe that Ramses the second is the pharaoh of the exodus then here he is, the firstborn son the tomb we found is unlike any other tomb ever found in egypt the yellow tomb which was carved later. above it is the tomb of Ramses the ninth and it looks like most of the royal tombs in the valley of the kings a long syringe like tomb because that's the way the greeks described the tombs were long tubes cut into the bedrock, into the hillside look at the blue tomb -- that's us -- that's KV 5 kings valley tomb number five we've designated it it's not a syringe like tomb at all it's rather like the tentacles of an octopus going off in every which direction and i must say that this drawing is incomplete, because since it was made we have been finding more corridors and more chambers and the tomb gets bigger and bigger and bigger and the inset in the upper left-hand corner indicates the new chambers that we found ... year before last i don't have a more recent a slide of our drawings but this last season -- april and may of this year -- we found another set of corridors that would allow us to draw another inset like this one of more chambers most tombs in the valley of the kings have six seven eight nine chambers you saw that little video of a typical tomb. it had only three chambers. this tomb has a hundred and thirty chambers and still counting the tomb of Tutankhamun covers approximately sixty cubic yards in size occupies sixty cubic yards of space this occupies approximately four thousand it's the largest tomb ever found in the valley of the kings one of the largest if not the largest tomb ever found in egypt and we're going to be here a long time digging it out because the debris is tough to get through exactly what the history of the tomb is i can tell you hopefully that will be able to be the subject of another lecture some years down the line In the process of doing this we've been very concerned about protecting the valley of the kings as a whole and this has become a major part of our theban projects work we've been building flood control devices in front of the tomb so that if there is another flash flood water will be deflected away from the tomb entrance and will not enter the tomb and do damage there was another flood by the way in two thousand four it did damage to the tomb of Tutankhamun and several other tombs in the valley of the kings because simple little things as building a little walls around the entrance had not been put in place we're also putting down soil treatment to minimize the amount of dust in the valley and to waterproof the surface so any flood waters that do get into the valley can go directly through the valley and down the road beyond it without doing any damage in the interval we've been putting in an electrical generator to replace this one on the left we've been instagating a new trash system to replace that one on the right we put in new signage it in the valley of the kings giving tourists an opportunity to look before they go into a tomb see an isometric drawing of the tomb photographs of its highlights and brief text indicating its date and its importance and we're doing something else it is an archaeologist when i was a student at UW i never thought i would be doing we have been spending a lot of time designing toilets because when you get a thousand tourists a day in the agent four thousand of whom are probably suffering ? jippy tubby (sp?) this is a very important consideration we have replaced the old tram line-- up on the left with a new trim non-polluting electrical one on the right it's already made a big difference there's no noise pollution there's no smoke pollution no vibration It's certainly been a welcome change in the valley we've installed a visitor center working with the government of japan they paid for it we designed it a visitor center that provides information for tourists before they go into the valley giving them a potted history of it telling them who the various gods are that they will encounter in the release who the kings are and what their chronology is. We have reconstructions of the geology of the valley and so forth, and, here we have comfortable shaded place where the local villagers can sell their wares their postcards and their fake antiquities and so forth to tourists. we can't not have that-- the local economy depends on it for many people in the on the west bank this is their only source of income but we can provide a place that is more aesthetically attractive than what they're used to be we've had training courses to convince the local villagers that hassling tourists is not profitable that they would do better being nice and laid back and quiet and they're beginning to adopt that and their income is coming up -- they're convinced of it -- it's a pleasant change for the tourists and a pleasant change for the egyptian local as well we've also been extensively photographing -- we now have complete photographic coverage of all of the tombs in the valley of the kings. This is the first time this is ever been made possible and the photographs that we have are detailed photographs of every decorated wall, every accessible tomb All of this material, by the way, is up on our website thebanmappingproject.com KV5.com or kentweeks.com or .edu , or .org ... it's all there it's the most visited archaeological site on the internet we get a million hits a month and one of the reasons is it's not only comprehensive in scope but it's fun to use for the egyptologists this is one of its most useful attributes complete photographs of every wall of every tomb and these photographs are zoomifiable, you can zoom in and and not just look at a photograph like this a general section of a wall, but you can look closely enough to see the artists brush strokes as he tried to indicate the the feathers on the wing of the small quail chick it's been very very well received by our colleagues we've taken the old incandescent, or, sorry, fluorescent bulbs that lighted the tombs bulbs that just lay on the dust-covered the floor and are replacing them with LED lighting and putting in temperature and humidity controls and dust controls to make the visitor experience more pleasant, but also to minimize damage to the tomb and its paintings because of bad lighting and dust and heat and so on and we're developing extensive plans to control the number of tourists, so they don't have to stand in the sun a hundred and ten a hundred and twenty degrees in the shade for an hour to get into a tomb and that in turn is beneficial to the tomb itself by enhancing the visitor experience, we think we make the tomb safer by controlling tourism we think we make the tomb safer and our site management plan the first one ever designed for tomb in egypt sorry -- any archaeological site in egypt -- will be published by the end of the year the arabic version of it will be published also at the end of the year and it's the first monument in the middle east the first archaeological site in the middle east to have an extensive management plan published for it one other thing we are doing and this is for the long term not the short term in our office on the west bank We have established a library mostly arabic also in english and some french and some german their is no such library available to tour guides or members of the antiquities organization who are charged with protecting these monuments for them to go and do reading or researche this library provides a resource for all the people involved with the archaeological monuments where they can come and learn and better their knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge to the tombs and monuments of thebes but we decided if we're going to do this why not go the whole way and we have actually converted it into what in effect is a small public library and it's one of the things i'm proudest of, i must admit we have books here that, that cover everything from prenatal care ... proper diet for pregnant women and young children to motorcycle repairs and air conditioning and the building of mud brick valuts, and all the sort of thing we have books on every aspect of history we have a huge children's book section all of it in arabic we have each day now we're open from three to ten each day egyptologists, tour guides and so forth come in and use the library from five to ten but from three to five it's open for kids and children from schools come in. We have a woman the school teacher who is there along with our regular male librarian and the reason for that is we want to encourage young women to come and there has to be a woman there or their fathers or their brothers or husband would not be very happy but they come they have books that they can read and women have been given really short shrift in the educational system in egypt literacy rate in egypt is rising but the literacy rate among young women in egypt is dropping its gone from eighty five percent under the latter years of Sadat, to about seventy percent we're trying to remedy that. We've made a clean, well-lighted place for books where people in the local villagers can come teachers are bringing students who are having reading difficulties, we're offering remedial classes and we just got a wonderful gift from a group of french college students who were out in egypt on the study tour who saw our library one of them had a friend who had met a family in egypt and the family had blind child he went back to france and collected a whole series of books in arabic braille so we now have braille library and there are half a dozen blind children in the luxor area who are now able to come in once a week and they are reading books including books on the history of ancient egypt now this is a long-term solution to the problem of protecting the monuments because by educating the people who live around those monuments because by educating the people who deal directly with the monuments we're, I think, doing more than we could do in any other way to insure that twenty thirty forty fifty years from now these people are going to play a significant role in protecting these monuments, and that's the whole purpose of our project not simply to dig a tomb like KV5, which is exciting, but that is really gung-ho uh... indiana jones kind of archaeology. I don't mean to denigrate it, it's a very educational important historical discovery, but the protection of the monuments here is equally important and i would hate our generation to have gone down in history as the people who are looked upon by future generations as they say of us, "Why, when you knew the problems, why didn't you try and solve them?" We're trying to solve them we're trying to develop management plans for Thebes that will guarantee the protection of what i think is one of the most beautiful and important archaeological sites in the world and having said that and you look at this huge hillside that covers about five square miles keep in mind that, although it is already one of the largest archaeological sites anywhere on earth, i don't think we have excavated yet fifteen percent of what is there Are there more discoveries to be made? You bet there are. But the most important thing is protecting what we've already done What've we dug up? Well, you're just about to find out by going out there and going into a collection of deduction antiquities that really is second to none. You're really blessed to have such a lovely collection here and doubly blessed to be able to go in and see it on your own. enjoy it. Thank you very much.