Secret_History

418 The Secret History of the World
we have noted above, these parents are assumed to be Ahhotep and Sekenenre
Ta’o II. Ahhotep, Ta’o II’s queen, supposedly attained to even greater celebrity
than her mother. A great stela found at Karnak, after heaping eulogies upon her
son Amosis I, its dedicator, goes on to exhort all his subjects to do her reverence.
In this curious passage she is praised as having rallied the soldiery of Egypt, and
as having put a stop to rebellion. One thinks, of course, of Hatshepsut and
Sobeknofrure.
Kamose’s tomb was the last of the row inspected by the Ramesside officials, but
later the mummy was removed in its coffin to a spot just south of the entrance of
the Wady leading to the Tombs of the Kings, where it was found by Mariette’s
workmen in 1857. The coffin was not gilded, but of the feathered rishi type
employed for non-royal personages of the period.
Horemheb’s tomb was discovered in 1907/08 by Theodore Davis. Bones were
found in the tomb, some still in the sarcophagus, but others had been thrown into
other rooms. The mummies belonging to Horemheb and his queen had not been
recovered in the cache of kings, and so it seems likely that these pathetic remains
are all that is left of this particular pharaoh and his queen (although there exist
some inspection graffiti on a door jamb within the tomb that cast a little
uncertainty on this assumption). If a correct and proper excavation had been
undertaken at the time, perhaps more questions might be answered, but Davis and
his team were true to form of the early “egyptologists” - greedy and careless and
determined to prove their theories more than to find out facts - and much of the
evidence has been lost.
We can note that the mummy of Amenhotep III - father of Amenhotep IV, also
known as Akhenaten - was actually “found” in the tomb of Amenhotep II. It was
supposedly moved there for protection, which is a reasonable explanation. The
point is, the provenance of so many things Egyptian cannot be firmly established
and that means one must be even more aware of the tendency to muddle things up
by adopting wrong hypotheses.
Part of the problem of sorting out the different kings and dynasties is, I think,
that we have the problem of what, exactly, constituted a “king” during those times.
It is beginning to seem likely that many of the kings whose tombs have been
found, who memorialized themselves, or were memorialized by their families,
were little more than local rulers, or even just glorified puppets of a still higher
king.
Another interesting item is the fact that a proposal to extract DNA samples from
different mummies to see what the familial relationships really might have been
was halted by the Egyptian government.
Egypt has indefinitely postponed DNA tests designed to throw light on questions
that have intrigued archaeologists for years: Who was Tutankhamun’s father, and
was he of royal blood? The head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities,
Gaballah Ali Gaballah, said Tuesday that plans for DNA tests on the mummies of
Tutankhamun and his presumed grandfather, Amenhotep III, had been canceled.
“There will be no test now and we have to see if there will be one later,” Gaballah
told The Associated Press. He declined to give a reason. […]
The announcement of the planned tests had sparked a controversy among Egyptian
archaeologists. Some said they were an unnecessary risk that might harm the