THE RESURRECTION OF ANCIENT EGYPT 



989- 



royal and princely, proved to have been 

 all huddled together in this obscure pit. 



The discovery of this astonishing cache 

 of ancient royalties, and especially the 

 fact that some of the bodies discovered 

 were those of men who must have been 

 in touch with scriptural heroes and 

 events, gave a great impulse to popular 

 interest in Egyptology. The mummies 

 were found, by hastily scrawled inscrip- 

 tions on their bandages, to have been 

 gathered in their hiding-place by the 

 priests of the twenty-first and twenty- 

 second dynasties. At that time the de- 

 caying authority of the later Pharaohs 

 had proved insufficient to protect the 

 royal tombs from the raids of the tomb- 

 robbers, who have always found a profit- 

 able business in Egypt. 



In vain the panic-stricken priests 

 shifted the bodies of their dead masters 

 from tomb to tomb, recording each re- 

 burial as it was made. Each successive 

 hiding-place was violated, until at last, 

 about 940 B. C, they found in the pit of 

 Deir-el-Bahari a resting-place sufficiently 

 obscure to baffle their relentless enemies. 

 There this grim company of ancient dig- 

 nities slept undisturbed for nearly 3,000 

 years, till modern science, as remorseless 

 as ancient knavery, dragged them from 

 their rest to become a gazing-stock in 

 modern museums. 



A KING WHO RKSTKD UNDISTURBI:d 



Since Maspero's great find, there has 

 been no discovery of royal mummies on 

 anything like so extensive a scale; but 

 now and again research in the Valley of 

 the Kings at Thebes has added another 

 royalty or two to the stock. The most 

 important of the later discoveries have 

 been that of the mummy of Amenhotep 

 II, the only Egyptian king whose body 

 has so far been found resting within its 

 own tomb ; that of Merenptah, supposed 

 to have been the Pharaoh of the Exodus, 

 the actual opponent of Moses, and that 

 of the bones of Akhenaten, the heretic 

 king, which were found in the grave of 

 his mother, Queen Tyi, by the American 

 explorer, Mr. Theodore M. Davis, whose 

 good fortune in this form of exploration 

 has been phenomenal. 



The tomb of Amenhotep II was dis- 

 covered in 1898 by M. Grebaut. The 

 great king was found lying in state in 

 his rock-hewn sepulcher with its gold- 

 starred blue-painted roof, his bow, of 

 which he boasted that none save himself 

 could bend it, lying beside him. The 

 Egyptian authorities have allowed him to 

 rest in the grave where his mourning 

 subjects laid him; but his tomb has been 

 made the scene of an exhibition whose 

 taste is perhaps rather more than doubt- 

 ful. 



''The royal body," says Mr. H. R. Hall, 

 ''now lies there for all to see. The tomb 

 is lighted by electricity, as are all the 

 principal tombs of the kings. At the 

 head of the sarcophagus is a single lamp, 

 and when the party of visitors is collected 

 in silence around the place of death, all 

 the lights are turned out, and then the 

 single light is switched on, showing the 

 royal head illuminated against the sur- 

 rounding blackness. The effect is in- 

 describably weird and impressive." Some 

 might feel tempted to say indescribably 

 vulgar; and one wonders what Amenho- 

 tep's own opinion of it all might have 

 been. 



THE PHAROAH OF THE EXODUS 



Amenhotep's tomb contained also an- 

 other mummy, which occupied a coffin 

 bearing the name of Set-nekht. When 

 the coffin was opened the mummy was 

 found, by means of a scribe's inscription 

 on one of the bandages, to be really that 

 of the Pharaoh who is above all others 

 most interesting to students of biblical 

 history — Merenptah, the Pharaoh of the 

 Exodus. Hitherto the absence of his 

 body from its sarcophagus in the royal 

 tomb in the Valley of the Kings had been 

 accounted for by careless readers of the 

 Bible as quite natural, seeing that the 

 Pharaoh of the Exodus was drowned in 

 the Red Sea. The Exodus narrative, of 

 course, makes no such statement, and 

 Merenptah's absence from his own tomb 

 is now accounted for. He had simply 

 been moved to Amenhotep's tomb for 

 greater security against the attempts of 

 tomb-robbers. 



On July 8, IQ07, Merenotah's mummy 

 was unwrapped by Prof. Elliot Smith in 



