Egyption Tomb 5 Essays - Ancient Egyptian Mummies, Free Essays

Egyption Tomb 5 Essays - Ancient Egyptian Mummies, Free Essays Egyption Tomb 5 Early Western Civilization Egyption Tomb 5 Egyptologists had lost interest in the site of tomb 5, which had been explored and looted decades ago. Therefore, they wanted to give way to a parking lot. However, no one would have ever known the treasure that lay only 200 ft. from King Tuts resting place which was beyond a few rubble strewn rooms that previous excavators had used to hold their debris. Dr. Kent Weeks, an Egyptologist with the American University in Cairo, wanted to be sure the new parking facility wouldnt destroy anything important. Thus, Dr. weeks embarked in 1988 on one final exploration of the old dumping ground. Eventually he was able to pry open a door blocked for thousands of years, and announced the discovery of a life time. "We found ourselves in a corridor," he remembers. "On each side were 10 doors and at end there was a statue of Osiris, the god of the afterlife." The tomb is mostly unexcavated and the chambers are choked with debris, Weeks is convinced that there are more rooms on a lower level, bringing the total number to more than 100. That would make tomb 5 the biggest and most complex tomb ever found in Egypt, and quite conceivable the resting place of up to 50 sons of Ramesses II, perhaps the best known of all the pharaohs, the ruler believed to have been Mosesnemesis in the book of Exodus. The Valley of the Kings, in which Tomb 5 is located, is just across the Nile River from Luxor, Egypt. It is never exactly been off the beaten track. Tourism has been brisk in the valley for millenniums: graffiti scrawled on tomb walls proves that Greek and Roman travelers stopped here to gaze at the wall paintings and hieroglyphics that were already old long before the birth of Christ. Archaeologists have been coming for centuries too. Napoleon brought his own team of excavators when he invaded in 1798, and a series of expeditions in 19th and early 20th centuries uncovered one tomb after another. A total of 61 burial spots had been found by the time the British explorer Howard Carter opened the treasure-laden tomb of King Tutankhamun in 1922. Britains James Burton had burrowed into the site of Tomb 5 in 1820, and decided that there was nothing inside. A dismissive Carter used its entryway as a place to dump the debris he was hauling out of Tuts tomb. In the late 1980s, came the proposed parking area and Weeks concern. His 1988 foray made it clear that the tomb wasnt dull as Burton said. Elaborate carvings covered walls and referred to Ramesses II, whose own tomb was just 100 ft. away. The wall inscriptions on the companion crypt mentioned two of Ramesses52 known sons, implying some of the royal offspring might have been buried within. Then, came last months astonishing announcement. For treasure, the tomb probably wont come to close to Tuts because robbers apparently plundered the chamber long time ago. No gold or fine jewelry has been found so far, and Weeks does not expect to find any riches to speak of. The carvings and inscriptions Weeks and his friends have seen, along with thousands of artifacts such as beads, fragments of jars that were used to store the organs of the deceased, and mummified body parts which tell historians a great amount about ancient Egypt during the reign of its most important king. "Egyptians do not call him Ramesses II," Sabry Abd El Aziz, director of antiquities for the Qurna region said. " We call him Ramesses al-Akbar which means Ramesses the Great." During his 67 years on the throne stretching from 1279 B.C. to 1212 B. C., Ramesses could have filled an ancient edition of the Guinness Book of Records all by himself: he built more temples, obelisks and monuments; took more wives(eight, not counting concubines) and claimed to have sired more children (as many as 162, by some accounts) than any other pharaoh in history. He presided over an empire that stretched from present-day Libya to Iraq in the east, as far north as Turkey and southward into the Sudan. Today, historians know a great deal about Ramesses and the customs of his day. However, the newly explored tomb suddenly presents scholars with all sort of puzzles to ponder. For one thing, many of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings are syringe-like, plunging straight as a needle into the steep hillsides. For reasons nobody yet knows, says