![]() 42) but no corresponding modern plan was provided. Romer's book actually showed part of a plate from the great French Description of Egypt that showed a small, roughly accurate, plan of the tomb of Amenhotep III (p. The latter was often mentioned because Howard Carter used it as a laboratory for the objects brought out of Tutankhamon's tomb. Reading books about Egypt from about 1962 to 1994, I never saw a plan of the tomb of Ramesses II, Amenhotep III, or even Seti II. Romer had a few extra tomb plans in his book, including the known part of tomb KV 5, which later turned out to have large unexplored parts, but no unusual royal tombs. In the Penguin Guide the emphasis was probably on tombs that could easily be visited by tourists at the time: Thutmose III, Amenhotep II, Tutankhamon, Haremhab, Seti I, Merenptah, Ramesses III, Ramesses VI, and Ramesses IX. In Desroches-Noblecourt, besides that of Tutankhamon himself, we see the tombs of Thutmose III, Amenhotep II, Thutmose IV, Akhenaton (from Amarna), Haremhab, Seti I, and Ramesses IV. Pretty much the same tombs are shown from Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt's Tutankhamen in 1963 to the The Penguin Guide to Ancient Egypt, by William J. Usually, books showed a few plans, typically the same ones, made some general comments about the tombs straightening out after Akhenaton, and that was that. ![]() Before finding Romer, I had read many books about Egypt without ever seeing a general discussion of the tomb plans. At the time I saw the model in the Museum, it didn't seem quite right but I had to go back to Romer's book, which I vaguely remembered, to see just how arbitrary the model was. The first discussion I ever saw of the pattern and individual parts of the tombs was in an appendix of John Romer's Valley of the Kings. This has only been well understood for over a century - see The Pronunciation of Ancient Egyptian.Īlthough the royal tombs of Valley of the Kings are fascinating and numinous objects, it is rare to find any explanation of their structure. Since so much about Egypt anymore seems derived from fiction, imagination, mythology, and even politics, it is not surprising that such inattention to history and detail should have occurred: It is of a piece with the items in the museum gift shops, there and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that show children, or even adults, how to write their names in hieroglyphics, without bothering to inform them that the glyphs identified as vowels were actually consonants - since the Egyptians didn't write vowels, as is usually still the case in modern Arabic and Hebrew. ![]() The model tomb may owe more to Hollywood than to Egyptology. The tombs, for all their individuality, share a basically identical plan, which evolves slowly. If there were no common features to these tombs, that would be understandable. No attempt was made to reproduce the plan of any particular tomb, or even a general plan that demonstrates the common features of the tombs. The AMNH museum model, however, bears little resemblance to any actual tombs, except for having a succession of descending corridors, stairs, and chambers. the " under the earth" (Latin singular, hypogeum, Greek singular ὑπόγειον). The Greeks evocatively called the tombs ὑπόγεια, "hypogea," i.e. This valley is across the river, on the edge of the desert, over the first ridge of cliffs, from the contemporary Egyptian capital at Thebes, - the modern Luxor,, ʾal-ʾuqṣur, "the palaces" (singular, qaṣr, "palace"), and the temple of Amon at Karnak, ( Ipet or Opet-sut to the Egyptians Coptic, prefixed with the definite article), ʾal-Karnak,, in Arabic (glossed by Hans Wehr as "a village near Luxor"!). a "wash" or arroyo, subject to flash floods. To match the name in English, this is often now stated as the, with Wādī, a valley, especially a dry watercourse, i.e. Such tombs were carved into the sides of the Valley of the Kings,, Bībān al-Mulūk ("the Gates of the Kings"). In the American Museum of Natural History of New York City, in the Africa section of the Anthropological part of the museum, there is a cut-away model of an Egyptian Royal Tomb of the New Kingdom (XVIII, XIX, & XX Dynasties, c. Egyptian Royal Tombs of the New Kingdom Egyptian Royal Tombs
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