Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings (3 page)

If Smenkhkare was the mysterious mummy in Tomb 55, then the sealing of the tomb with his successor Tutankhamun's cartouche means that it must have been reopened within a few years of the original interment. Indeed, this is exactly what the evidence from Tutankhamun's own tomb reveals.

From more than a century's excavations in the Valley of the Kings, a fairly detailed picture of contemporary royal burials has emerged. Within a series of chambers housing opulent grave
goods and an ornate Canopic shrine, the king's mummy would be enclosed by a series of progressively smaller wooden shrines, together with a decorative frame over which was draped an embroidered linen cover. Within the shrines stood a stone sarcophagus containing a nest of three coffins, one fitting neatly inside the other like a set of Russian dolls. All that remained in Tomb 55, however, was the innermost coffin, the Canopic jars, a few minor artefacts, and the dismantled shrine panels. It is quite clear from tell-tale clues in the tomb that it originally contained far more. The broken clay seals that littered the floor reveal that treasure boxes had been broken open and removed, and the shrine panels being stacked as they were against the wall, with more in the entrance corridor, indicates that they were in the process of being removed when the operation was for some reason abandoned.

In 1907, Davis discovered something in Tomb 55 which seemed unimportant at the time, but later led directly to the whereabouts of the plundered treasures. Two gilded copper discs, worked in the shape of flowers, were found among the debris near the stacked shrine panels, and correctly identified as pall medallions from a shrine drape. Two decades later they were found to be identical to the medallions sewn on to a black linen pall covering the inner shrines in Tutankhamun's tomb. But the shrine pall is not the only item that was looted from Tomb 55 to furnish so lavishly the tomb of Tutankhamun. On both the gilded shrines and the stone sarcophagus in Tutankhamun's tomb, original text had been erased and reinscribed with Tutankhamun's name. The second of Tutankhamun's three coffins was also appropriated: its gilded portrait mask bears no resemblance to Tutankhamun's appearance on the other two coffins or on his statues. The same likeness can be seen on the lids of four gold coffinettes, used instead of Canopic jars to
contain the king's internal organs. Made to exactly the same design, they and the coffin clearly all belong to one set that was made for someone else. When he was clearing the tomb, Howard Carter was amazed to discover that inscriptions on the interior of the coffinettes had the owner's cartouches altered, and closer inspection revealed evidence of the original name: Ankhkheperure, the throne-name of Smenkhkare.

As Carter continued to clear the tomb of its hundreds of precious artefacts, item after item was found to have belonged to Smenkhkare. Treasure boxes bore his name, as did various figurines; even much of the jewellery that so intimately decorated the mummy had been appropriated from the tomb of Smenkhkare. Just how many of Tutankhamun's fabulous grave goods had been appropriated is now impossible to determine, as most bear no name at all. However, when he had finally finished clearing the tomb in 1929, Carter estimated that a considerable part of Tutankhamun's celebrated treasure may have once belonged to Smenkhkare.

A remarkable postscript to this discovery is that the king's golden image from the lid of the second coffin is today almost invariably used to illustrate text books, holiday guides and posters. This famous image that the world has come to recognise as Tutankhamun – the imposing pharaoh, hands crossed majestically over his chest to hold the pharaonic crook and flail – is not, it appears, Tutankhamun at all, but his enigmatic brother Smenkhkare.

So little attention has been drawn to this fact that in 1963, when D. J. Kidd, the medical artist to the faculty of Medicine at Liverpool University, made a facial reconstruction from the skull of the Tomb 55 mummy, he was surprised to find that the resulting features bore a striking resemblance to the face of Tutankhamun from the famous middle coffin. Unaware of
Carter's original discoveries, a number of scholars took Kidd's work to suggest that Smenkhare and Tutankhamun were identical twins. Not only do Tutankhamun's other coffins show that this was not the case, there was also about a decade's age difference between them. It seems much more likely that facial reconstruction of the Tomb 55 mummy matches Tutankhamun's image on the middle coffin because the coffin originally belonged to Smenkhkare.

Tutankhamun, or someone working on his behalf, is almost certainly responsible for the strange condition of Tomb 55. Looting the tomb to furnish his own may explain the lack of burial goods, but the macabre desecration of the mummy still remains as mysterious as ever. If Tutankhamun detested Smenkhkare to the extent that he robbed his tomb and expunged his name, why not destroy the mummy altogether? Why deliberately leave it safe in its golden coffin, with its organs undamaged in their Canopic jars? The desecrators had seemingly taken the trouble painstakingly to remove all evidence of his name and identity from both, evidently in the belief that this would negate his influence from the afterlife, yet they had deliberately left his mummy and organs fully intact so that his spirit would survive. This seems to make no sense, unless of course it was intended as some kind of curse. The desecrators' apparent intentions are clarified by two aspects of the strange entombment: the lack of decorations in the burial chamber and the condition in which the tomb was left.

The wall decorations of a royal burial chamber served a very important purpose, as they depicted the journey of the pharaoh's soul to the next incarnation – the realm of the gods. Without such decorations the king's spirit could not leave its resting place. Furthermore, the way in which the tomb was abandoned and sealed is evidence that they not only feared the
pharaoh's earthbound spirit, but made doubly certain that it could not leave the tomb.

The final condition of the tomb shows that the desecrators had ultimately been scared out of the place before they had finished stripping it of all its treasures. The shrine, for instance, had been dismantled and stacked against the north wall and was in the process of being removed, when suddenly, and for no apparent reason, it was completely abandoned and the tomb was sealed up. As two of the valuable shrine panels were left within a few feet of the entrance, the desecrators must literally have dropped them and fled. The fact that they had time to brick up the entrance with these valuable gold-covered artefacts lying within arm's reach, could only mean that the outer portal to the tomb was regarded as a magical barrier against whatever evil they imagined to be inside. To re-enter, even by a few inches, was presumably considered too perilous. Whether they had to complete the procedure in a specific period of time, or whether they had been spooked by something in the tomb itself, we shall never know. What is apparent from the discovery of chisels, a mallet and other workmen's effects found lying on the floor of the burial chamber is that the desecrators departed so quickly that they even left their tools behind. The unusual entrance, therefore, appears to have been prepared as a magical barrier, not to protect the tomb from influences from the outside as was usually the practice, but to prevent whatever was inside from escaping.

It would seem that Tomb 55 was not so much a final resting place as a prison. In the eyes of his contemporaries, Smenkhkare must have committed a crime so heinous that oblivion was not considered sufficient punishment. Rather, they had sentenced him to spend eternity sentient and alone in the silence and darkness of this empty underground vault.

What Smenkhkare had done to warrant so unique and terrible a fate is mystery enough, but his interment in the funerary effects of a woman is even more puzzling. The coffin and Canopic jars had been carefully modified to make them suitable for a pharaoh, with, for instance, a beard being attached to the chin of the face mask, and inscriptions had been altered from feminine to masculine genders. The question is, were these items from the original burial, or were they substitutes from the time of the desecration? Although it has been suggested that the items were the originals – female equipment appropriated and altered to accommodate Smenkhkare because he had died suddenly, before his own burial equipment was ready – this does not sit with the evidence. We know from Tutankhamun's tomb that Smenkhkare did have his own elegantly designed organ coffinettes fully prepared, so there was certainly no reason to use the female Canopic jars. The balance of evidence clearly indicates that the mummy's final condition was the work of the desecrators. This reasoning is further supported by one ofthe gold mummy bands from Tutankhamun's tomb, which was found to have originally been inscribed with the name of Smenkhkare. This intimate funerary item comes from the very mummy of Smenkhkare, and clearly demonstrates that his remains were completely re-dressed by those who had plundered his tomb.

It now seems clear that the desecrators believed that, for their ritual violation of Smenkhkare's remains to have its desired effect, it was necessary to replace the mummy in a new coffin and the organs in new Canopic vessels once the originals had been looted. However, was the fact that they were female burial accoutrements of special importance? Were the woman's coffin and Canopic jars simply discarded items that were at hand and used for expediency, or was there some specific purpose in using
female equipment? The answer appears to be that it was deliberately chosen, as the mummy itself was laid out in the attitude of a woman, with only one arm across the chest rather than both.

What can be gathered from this assorted evidence is that shortly after Akhenaten's death, Smenkhkare was entombed conventionally with his own elaborate grave goods. Sometime during the next nine years of Tutankhamun's reign, the king's followers had plundered Smenkhkare's tomb to furnish Tutankhamun's own. Then, in the belief that they could doom Smenkhkare's spirit to survive imprisoned in the tomb, they completely refurnished the mummy and its organs in a macabre transsexual fashion. In the hope of shedding more light on the thinking behind this morbid procedure, attention must turn to the identity of the woman for whom the burial effects were initially intended. Presumably, the excised cartouches had originally bone her name, and perhaps the torn-away face mask had even been in her likeness.

In the 1980s, when the German scholar Rolf Krauss attempted to put a name to this anonymous woman, he discovered something that, far from throwing new light on the mystery, simply made the matter all the more perplexing. From thorough examination and microscopic analysis of the inscribed panels on the Canopic jars, he recovered hieroglyphics that had been all but obliterated. They revealed that a female title had indeed been removed from columns of text and replaced by that of a man. Incredibly, however, it was not the name Smenkhkare, as Krauss expected, or any other title pertaining to that king, but Neferkheperure – the throne name adopted by Akhenaten. Following this discovery, other eminent authorities, such as Cyril Aldred, curator of the department of Egyptian Art at the
New York Metropolitan Museum, re-examined the inscriptions on the coffin itself and concluded that they too had been reinscribed in a context that was only applicable to Akhenaten.

These new findings, taken together with Weigall's earlier identification of contextual references to the same pharaoh on the now-lost mummy bands, illustrate almost conclusively that the intimate burial apparatus in Tomb 55 was expressly adapted for Akhenaten, and not for Smenkhkare at all. Yet how
could
the mummy be Akhenaten? Although his mummy has never been found, unless virtually every eminent Egyptologist for more than a century has been completely mistaken, Akhenaten was far too old to have been the mummy in Tomb 55. If it was a king from the period immediately preceding Tutankhamun, as dated and determined from every item in the tomb, and it was the age indicated by the most modern forensic techniques available, then it could only be Smenkhkare.

The enigma of Tomb 55 as it now remains is not only a complete mystery, it is utterly bizarre. A body which is almost certainly Smenkhkare is heartlessly robbed of its riches, subjected to an odious ritual curse, laid out in the parody of a woman, and re-interred in a queen's funerary equipment which had already been adapted for another man. Add to this the fact that the 'magic bricks' had been made for Akhenaten's tomb, the shrine had been made for Queen Tiye's, and the treasure boxes removed from the tomb had been sealed with Tutankhamun's cartouche, and we have a mystery so complex that it has remained unsolved for almost a century.

With the mystery of Tomb 55 there begins an exciting historical detective story. Unfolding step by fascinating step, a trail of ancient arcane clues ultimately takes us way beyond the borders of pharaonic Egypt. It is an investigation which leads to startling new evidence of an epoch-making cataclysm, and
rediscovers the most extraordinary series of events ever to have shaped the course of human history.