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By Root 549 0

took council on the problem of the dead, and the solution it proposed was the one we mentioned in the last chapter. One by one the despoiled bodies of the ancient kings were gathered together, repaired, and rewrapped (and, incidentally, stripped of any remaining valuables), and hidden away, most of them in a small rock-cut chamber tomb not far from Hatshepsut’s temple of Deir el Bahri. The coffins were shoved in, one on top of the other, until the small tomb was nearly filled. Then the weary officials retired, the entrance was concealed—and silence descended until a modern Egyptian named Ahmed went looking for a lost goat.

TOMB ROBBERS AND ROYAL MUMMIES

The Egyptians of the nineteeth century A.D. were among the most accomplished tomb robbers the world has ever seen. One cannot help but have a certain sympathy for their point of view. The tombs were on their land and had belonged, if not to their direct ancestors, to their predecessors. Ancient artifacts had no value to the dead (devout Moslems go to their graves without so much as a coffin), but they were fetching high prices from tourists and museums. Furthermore, the busy citizens of Gurneh and Giza could reasonably claim that their activities were no more destructive than those of many of the archaeologists of the time.

Among the busiest and most successful of these entrepreneurs were the members of a family of Gurneh, on the West Bank at Luxor. The Abd er Rassuls had a well-nigh uncanny instinct for locating hidden tombs. They are the only tomb robbers mentioned in Who Was Who in Egyptology. One of the brothers, Mohammed, was in the ser vice of Mustafa Agha, a consular agent at Thebes. Ahmed and Hussein, the other brothers, “dealt in antiquities.” Their most spectacular discovery occurred in the early 1870s—the precise date is unknown—when Ahmed Abd er Rassul was strolling around the western cliffs for purposes unknown. He said he was looking for a lost goat. One may legitimately wonder whether he was looking for something else. He could not have anticipated the magnitude of his actual discovery, in a cleft in the rock going down to a small tomb. Packed helter-skelter within were dozens of coffins and many other pieces of funerary equipment.

Ahmed couldn’t read the inscriptions that identified the occupants of the coffins, but he knew enough to recognize the shape of the cartouches, which were only used by royalty. No doubt overwhelmed by the richness of the find, he let his brothers in on the secret, and they began marketing some of the smaller objects such as ushabtis and funerary papyri.

The world of archaeology is a small one, and collectors and scholars keep in touch with one another. Within a few years after the Abd er Rassul brothers struck it rich, objects began to turn up in museums and private collections all over the world. They were important objects, and yet no new tomb discovery had been officially reported. The matter came to the attention of Gaston Maspero, the French director of the Egyptian Antiquities Ser vice. Maspero kept an alert eye on the antiquities market, and gradually a pattern began to emerge. The probable source of the new objects was narrowed down to the Luxor area; although they came from the burials of different persons, the fact that they had been put on the market more or less simultaneously indicated that they had been found together. What was sought, then, was not a single royal tomb, but a cache where many mummies were concealed. Maspero asked the police to look out for a man from Luxor who was spending too much money.

The Abd er Rassul family soon came under suspicion, but nothing could make them divulge their secret, although the methods of interrogation were brutal; Ahmed was permanently crippled by being beaten on the soles of his feet. However, it was the eldest brother, Mohammed, who finally cracked. Mohammed thought his brothers were getting the lion’s share of the loot, nor could he give them the complete trust which brothers ought to feel for one another. In pure self-protection, fearing they were about to betray