Secrets of the Pharoahs

This is a propos of nothing, but it was where my mental travels took me yesterday. My fascination with Ancient Egypt goes back to my childhood where there was a half-shelf of books on the subject in our local library where (as a special privilege) I had an adult reader’s ticket from the age of about 9. I was captivated by them, even as I was slightly terrified by the photographs of mummies. The spell has never quite been broken.

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Dorothy Eady who fell down stairs at her home in about 1907 and was taken as dead before reviving, and thereafter increasingly identified with the Egypt of Seti I, the pharoah who came to visit her in her teenage dreams. It is worth saying that there was never any independent witness of any of these events so we will never know the truth of them. Dorothy became an entirely self-taught Egyptologist, and moved there in 1931, eventually living in a tiny adobe house in Abydos, worshipping the ancient gods, dreaming of encounters with Seti whose lover she was convinced she had been in a past life, and acting as a consultant to more orthodox students of the subject. She had a son who she insisted on calling Seti, hence her adopted name of Omm Sety, ‘Seti’s mother’. Despite being clearly quite odd, she had an unerring feel for Egyptian folkways and habits and her predictions of what features might be found in a particular place usually proved uncannily accurate when a dig was eventually carried out.

Omm Sety reserved an abiding hatred for the ‘heretic pharoah’ Akhenaten who had turned the kingdom away from the old gods she and her spectral lover revered. She claimed that she knew where Akhenaten's queen Nefertiti was buried, and that it was ‘in a very obvious place, yet where nobody would think of looking’. But why wouldn’t she reveal it? Although Omm Sety conceded that Nefertiti must have been ‘a very courageous woman’ for sticking to her principles, however misguided, she quoted what her beloved Seti had told her - ‘We don’t want anything more of that family known’. The location was near the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings, she maintained (against all opinion at the time, that no tombs remained to be found there), and that was the most she would give away: ‘you’d never believe it if I told you’, she chuckled to her collaborator Hanny el Zeini.

It was known since 1976 – when Omm Sety was still alive – that there were two anomalies, empty spaces, beyond the north wall of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber; a radar scan in 2000 suggested that these were rooms, and five years later an unrelated excavation broke into one, finding mummification equipment relating to the period, but no human remains. So what is the other void space?

Nicholas Reeves, late of the British Museum and many other places, adamantly holds that that space is the tomb of Nefertiti. In 2015 he wrote a paper arguing that newly-released high-resolution photographs of the north wall of the tomb suggested that it was at least partially not natural rock but a construct to close off whatever lay, and still lies, beyond it, and that the form of Tutankhamun’s tomb is one more associated with a queen than a king; he also argued that the most charismatic artefact we have from Ancient Egypt, Tutankhamun’s great gold burial mask, was in fact made for Nefertiti. Then there is the decoration of the tomb’s north wall. The traditional interpretation of the figures is that they show Ay, Tutankhamun’s successor, performing the ritual of the Opening of the Mouth on the boy king’s mummy; not surprisingly, because this is what the hieroglyphs on the wall say is going on. But it’s always been a bit funny. Ay was a man in later middle age when he succeeded, and this figure is very youthful: even by the stylised standards of Ancient Egyptian art, that’s odd. Dr Reeves points out that the subtle distinctive features of these figures suggest that what we think is Tutankhamun is in fact Nefertiti, in male garb as a female pharoah would be, and what we have taken to be Ay is Tutankhamun. The strongest argument against all this is that it requires we assume Nefertiti did reign, jointly with Akhenaten and then as pharoah in her own right, disguised beneath the name of the hazy Smenkhkare, a title in the king-lists and little else. That’s a plausible interpretation of what we know, but not the only one.

Of course, he may just be seeing things that aren’t there, convinced by his own conviction. A crack in a wall, a different sort of plaster here or there, the curve of the jawline of a painting, the shadowy hint of pictures beneath pictures: it’s not a watertight case, and never will be proved until that void space behind Tutankhamun’s north wall is opened. And you can only open it by burrowing down through the rock from behind. In 2018 another radar study reported there wasn't a space behind the wall at all. Despite conceding right from the start that he could well be wrong, Nicholas Reeves isn't ready to give up yet; late last year there was a bit of a flurry of media coverage when he announced that close examination of the names of the figures showed that they’d been repainted, confirming his identifications. We're all a little like this: we start out open-minded about our ideas, and gradually they become part of who we think we are.

Yet what a thing it would be if the heretic Queen is there, waiting beyond a few inches of wall, wrapped perhaps in her thirty-two-century-undisturbed splendour: as Omm Sety hinted, hidden in plain sight? I don’t think it’s just the glint of gold that’s so attractive in that idea, nor even the romance of what she was and stood for, but that suggestion that something very powerful is just a tiny distance out of reach. At any moment, we could break through a wall into a different reading of what is real.