KV55

KV55 is a tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. It was discovered by Edward R. Ayrton in 1907 while he was working in the Valley for Theodore M. Davis. It has long been speculated, as well as much disputed, that the body found in this tomb was that of the famous king, Akhenaten, who moved the capital to Akhetaten (modern-day Amarna). The results of genetic and other scientific tests published in February 2010 have suggested that the person buried there was both the son of Amenhotep III and the father of Tutankhamun. Furthermore, the study established that the age of this person at the time of his death was consistent with that of Akhenaten, thereby making it almost certain that it is Akhenaten's body. However, a growing body of work soon began to appear to dispute the assessment of the age of the mummy and the identification of KV55 as Akhenaten.

Both the tomb's history and the identification of its single occupant have been problematic. It is presumed to be a royal cache and reburial dating from the late eighteenth dynasty, prepared after the abandonment of Amarna and the dismantling of the royal necropolis there. On the basis of the recovered artifacts, it is also suggested that the burial once contained more than a single occupant, either interred on one occasion or over a period of time. Queen Tiye is most often named in this context.

It is also clear that the tomb was re-opened at a later time, almost certainly during the twentieth dynasty. At that time, any additional, hypothetical occupants of the tomb would have been removed and (possibly) relocated to KV35, while the remaining mummy and some of the other artefacts were desecrated and abandoned.

The tomb is often referred to as the "Amarna cache", given the mixed nature of its contents.

Discovery and excavations

The entrance to KV55 was uncovered by Ayrton on 6 January 1907. Its discovery was brought to Davis's attention on the following day. The tomb was first entered on 9 January by Ayrton, Davis, Joseph Lindon Smith and (as the representative of the antiquities service) Arthur Weigall. On 11 January 1907, the finds were photographed. Ayrton then began clearance of the tomb. On 25 January 1907, the coffin and mummy were investigated in situ.

According to a letter from Davis to Gaston Maspero, some of the objects found in KV55 were still in place in January 1908, and their study and attempts at conservation were still ongoing at that later date. In 1921, while excavating south of the tomb, Howard Carter discovered several items that seem to have originated in KV55. These include a jasper burnisher and some fragments of copper rosettes from a funerary pall.

After its excavation, the tomb's entrance was initially fitted with a steel door, which was later removed and replaced by stone blocking. By 1944, this blocking had collapsed and filled the tomb's entrance with debris. In 1993, the tomb was cleared again by Lyla Pinch Brock. In 1996, she undertook conservation work on the stairs and the plastering inside the burial chamber through a grant from the American Research Centre in Egypt.

KVC

Three days before the discovery of KV55, Ayrton uncovered a recess in the rock (now designated as KVC) located immediately above the entrance to KV55 and containing jars of twentieth dynasty type. This recess may have been an unfinished tomb commencement, and its contents may be analogous to the embalming cache found in KV54, but because the find was never properly published, the precise nature of its contents, the date of the jars, and its relation (if any) to KV55 are now unclear.

The tomb

Location and general appearance

thumb|300px|Tomb layout of KV55<br />A – Entrance<br />B – Corridor<br />J – Burial chamber<br />Ja – (unfinished) Ante-chamber

KV55 is a relatively small, undecorated, single-chamber tomb, its total length measuring only 27.61 meters.

Entranceway

The tomb is accessed by a flight of 20 steps, cut into the bedrock and covered by an overhanging rock. An ostracon found by Pinch Brock in 1993 has been interpreted as a plan of the tomb, and possibly indicates a widening of the entrance after its initial cutting. This possibility is also suggested by mason's marks found on the walls by the tomb entrance. It appears that the stairwell has been enlarged, its ceiling raised, and the number of steps increased. However, his statement is not corroborated by any of the other reports dating from the initial discovery, leaving Weigall's claim open to question.

The first wall had been partially pulled down in antiquity, and the tomb was closed again by a second wall made of loose limestone fragments, erected in front of the remains of the first wall. Because Weigall described these consecutive blockings in ambiguous terms, it is unclear whether the secondary wall was found intact or had already been partially dismantled, like the primary wall.

Corridor

The sloping corridor beyond the entrance was partially filled with rubble. Since the secondary wall was built on top of material originating from this rubble, the fill seems to date from the time of the original interment. By 1907 this rubble had spread down into the burial chamber. Stains on the ceiling and walls of the corridor indicate that water had infiltrated the tomb in the past.

Evidence that the occupant of the coffin was Akhenaten is provided by the four magical bricks found inside the tomb. Two were inscribed in hieratic, but they are poorly preserved and the name of their owner is lost. The other two, however, are of better quality, with hieroglyphic inscriptions naming the Osiris Neferkheprure Waenre, a reference to Akhenaten's nomen. The fact that all four bricks were oriented correctly and that three of them were positioned in close association with the coffin suggests that they were intended as a set and were made for the coffin's final occupant, who therefore, would be Akhenaten.

The identification of the mummy

thumb|The two daughters of Tutankhamun, and - according to DNA results of Hawass's team - paternal granddaughters of KV55. As father of their presumed mother, Ankhesenamun, Akhenaten should also be their maternal grandfather; however data shows KV55 male cannot be the princesses's grandfather from their mother's side.

The mummy found in the tomb was, however, at first identified as belonging to a woman by two visiting physicians who examined the remains in situ. This led Davis to conclude he had found the mummy of queen Tiye and he therefore published his account of the discovery as The Tomb of Queen Tiyi. As possible reasons for this initial identification the (typical female) position of the mummy's arms, post-mortem damage to the pelvic bones and the absence of male genitalia have been suggested. But when anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith examined the skull and bones in Cairo a few months later he concluded that they were those of a young male, with wide hips, a pendent chin, and distorted cranium brought on by chronic hydrocephalus. The age of death he estimated as being around 25 years although he later suggested the possibility that the body had suffered from Frölich's syndrome which delayed normal skeletal maturation. These results were seen to support the initial claims by Weigall, Maspero and Smith, based on other evidence found in the tomb (see above) that the body was that of Akhenaten.

Later re-examinations of the remains confirmed Smith's original identification of the mummy as belonging to a young male (although with feminine traits) but pushed the estimated age of death back to around 20 years. These re-examinations also indicated that the body showed no signs of delayed maturation, and that, while the skull was of unusual shape, it was not abnormal, However, as Akhenaten's depictions were highly stylised, the lack of similarity is not conclusive. After the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, a close resemblance was noted between his mummy and the body found in KV55 and later tests showed both shared the same blood-group (A2) and serum antigen (MN), all of which suggests Tutankhamun and the individual found in KV55 were closely related to each other, For these reasons the correctness of the age estimates was repeatedly called into question. Several studies estimated the mummy to be of a man who died around age 25–26; beside Smith, Douglas E. Derry and Ronald G. Harrison came to this conclusion. John R. Harris in the late 1980s offered 35 years as its age, while Joyce Filer in the early 2000s suggested early 20s. Finally, examinations using CT scans from the late 2000s, published in 2010 and 2016, showed the mummy to have died between age 35–45, which the examiners believe supports the theory that the mummy is Akhenaten's. However, a number of experts dispute these findings, claiming that Hawass et al. have not provided sufficient evidence to assume the older age at death. In fact, the original 2010 paper only cites a single point of spinal degeneration, while other analyses, such as Strouhal's However, he acknowledges that there are also possibilities that Tutankhamun fathered his children by different consort(s) than Ankhesenamun, or that KV55 is indeed Akhenaten but he was not biological father of Ankhesenamun because of Nefertiti's extramarital affair.

In March 2021, the results of a new forensic facial reconstruction were released.

Reconstruction

thumb|The Ancient Egyptian vulture [[pectoral (Ancient Egypt)|pectoral found on the head of the mysterious king in tomb KV55]]

The deposit, as it was found in KV55, presents a mixture of chronological and religious anomalies. Objects inscribed with Amenhotep III's nomen and prenomen might be contemporary with that king's reign and could be interpreted as possessions of Queen Tiye. Other items inscribed with Tiye's name (such as the shrine and furniture elements) also clearly belonged to her. Akhenaten's presence is indicated by items originally inscribed for him (such as the magical bricks) and items that were adapted for his use (such as the coffin and canopic jars).

It is nevertheless highly unlikely that either of these two burials within KV55 was original. In the case of Tiye, evidence found in tomb WV22 suggests that Amenhotep III prepared her burial in his own tomb. However, the fact that Tiye outlived her husband by possibly as much as twelve years seems to have disrupted such plans. On the other hand, from inscriptional evidence on the KV55 shrine, it seems likely that Tiye was buried at Amarna by her son Akhenaten. In the case of Akhenaten, it seems almost certain that he was originally buried in the tomb he prepared for himself in the Amarna royal wadi. Although it is unclear whether or not the original blocking of the tomb was stamped with Tutankhamun's seal, the several small seal-impressions carrying his prenomen are most likely related to the reburial(s) in KV55, since he was probably not involved in the original burial preparations of either Tiye (who died several years before Tutankhamun came to the throne) or Akhenaten (who, presumably, was buried by his co-regent and probable immediate successor, Smenkhkare).

One scenario, as suggested by Nicholas Reeves, is as follows: Akhenaten and his mother, Queen Tiye, were originally entombed in the Royal Tomb at Akhenaten's new capital Akhetaten (modern Amarna), but their mummies were moved to KV55 following the total abandonment of Akhetaten during the reign of Tutankhamun, who was Akhenaten's son. The door to KV55 was sealed with Tutankhamun's name. There, the mummies remained for about 200 years, until the tomb was rediscovered by workmen excavating the tomb of Ramesses IX (KV6) nearby. By this time, Akhenaten was reviled as the "heretic king" and "the enemy of Akhetaten"; consequently, Queen Tiye's sarcophagus was hastily removed from his defiling presence, except for its surrounding gilded wooden shrine, which would have had to be dismantled for removal. Akhenaten's likeness was chiseled off the shrine's carved relief. Moreover, the gold face mask was ripped from Akhenaten's sarcophagus and his identifying cartouche was removed from its hieroglyphic inscription, thus consigning its occupant to oblivion. As a final insult, a large rock was thrown at the coffin. However, a finely made vulture pectoral—a symbol of royalty in Ancient Egypt—was still found placed around this mummy's head.

Later use of KV55

In 1923, Harry Burton used KV55 as a darkroom to develop his photographs documenting Howard Carter's excavation of Tutankhamun's tomb.

In literature

The discovery and opening of KV55 is one of the events recounted in the novel The Ape Who Guards the Balance by the Egyptologist Barbara Mertz (writing as Elizabeth Peters).

References

2013, Lyla Pinch Brock, "Shooting in KV55; New Light on Early Photography", Papers in Honor of Richard H. Wilkinson, p. p. Creasman, ed., University of Arizona, Arizona, NM, pp. 241–254.

2012 L. Pinch-Brock, "The Pottery from the So-Called 'Tomb of Queen Tiye', Bulletin de Liaison de La Ceramique Egyptienne 23, Institute Francais d'archeologie orientale, Le Caire, 2012, pp. 195–208.

2000 Lyla Pinch-Brock, "An Unpublished Photograph of KV55", Göttingen Miszellen, no. 175 (2000) pp. 65–69.

1997 L.P. Brock, "The Final Clearance of KV 55", in Ancient Egypt, the Aegean, and the Near East. Studies in Honour of Martha Rhoads Bell, J. Phillips, L. Bell and B.B. Williams, with J. Hoch

and R. Leprohon, (eds), (San Antonio, 1997), vol. I, pp. 121–136.

1996 Lyla Pinch-Brock, "The Theban Flood of 1994 and the Case of KV55", IUBILATE CONLEGAE; Studies in Memory of Abdel Aziz Sadek, Charles Van Sicklen (ed), Part II, Varia Aegyptiaca II, no. 1, (April 1996), pp. 1–16.

1995 Lyla Pinch-Brock, "Theodore Davis and the Rediscovery of KV55", in Valley of the Sun Kings, Richard Wilkinson, Editor, University of Arizona, Tucson, pp. 34–46.