The Tale of the Tomb of Thutmose II

“When a tomb is created, all materials imbued with the magic of the pharaohs have to stay with it. These are placed at a respectful distance in guardian pits or foundation deposits,” said Dr Judith Bunbury, a Fellow and Senior Tutor at Wolfson College.

“There are usually two deposits – one on each side of the tomb.”

“We unearthed a foundation deposit with a whole sacrificed calf, which seemed lavish. We were looking for the other pit when we found an entrance buried by a metre and a half of rockfall, with a step going down. Then another step, and another… Well, that's not a foundation deposit!”

Bunbury is Deputy Mission Director of a long-term archaeological project in the Theban Mountain area led by the New Kingdom Research Foundation (NKRF), in conjunction with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. The latter recently confirmed that the project’s discovery in autumn 2022 is indeed a lost tomb of the pharaoh Thutmose II.

It is the last missing tomb of the 18th Dynasty kings of Ancient Egypt and the first royal tomb to be found since the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922.

“Getting hard hatted up and exploring the tomb chamber is a long adrenaline burn,” said Bunbury, a geo-archaeologist who has taught at Cambridge for decades, and is a member of the Department of Earth Sciences.

“It's nerve-wracking stuff. The team are down in the darkness and dust, carefully scraping all the debris into buckets by the light of solar-charged LEDs. Definitely not ideal conditions for spotting fragments of ancient artefacts.”

The corridors to the tomb had been badly damaged by repeated flooding. After navigating collapsed ceilings and debris “set like concrete”, the team made it into a chamber with evidence of decoration: a patch of ceiling painted blue with yellow stars.

On the north wall they found scenes from the Amduat, a funerary text similar to the Book of the Dead. Divided into hours, the Amduat portrays the daily journey through the underworld of Ra the sun god, and is almost exclusively reserved for royalty.

“Initially we thought we might have found the tomb of a royal wife, but the wide staircase and the large doorway suggested something more important,” said Piers Litherland, Director of the NKRF and Honorary Research Associate at Cambridge’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

“The discovery that the burial chamber had been decorated with scenes from the Amduat, a religious text which is reserved for kings, was immensely exciting and the first indication that this was a king's tomb,” he said.

“The lower part of the chamber had been oddly protected by the pressure of sediment from a previous flood, but above it the wet plaster had kind of melted, slumped down and folded over,” said Bunbury.

“One of our team, Aude Gräzer-Ohara, painstakingly cleaned and photographed all the pieces of the Amduat scenes, and now she's sticking them back together digitally.”

The hours depicted are from hour seven, when Ra is faced with the serpent Apophis, the embodiment of chaos, to hour twelve, the final hour, when Ra is reborn. While the team knew they had the tomb of a king, they didn’t know which one.

The tomb chamber had been deliberately emptied just a few years after initial burial, possibly because of the flooding, or even threats from other rival dynasties. 

“The state was starting to break down soon after this time,” said Bunbury.

“Royal remains were vital for legitimacy. If you didn't want a rival family to have any legitimacy you would go and destroy their forebears, and remains were often moved to prevent that.”

The team worked in a chaîne opératoire – an excavation production line. “Our top digger, Heraji Said Mohamed, is nicknamed ‘father of the brush’, because he says a trowel is too rough,” said Bunbury. “The team are hugely experienced and can detect even tiny changes to the soil.”

Everything is sieved and rechecked in daylight, and the patience and diligence of the excavators paid off when they found inscriptions on a few alabaster fragments of duck-shaped vessels, likely broken when the body was originally moved.

The team found an initial inscription beginning: “Son of Re, of his body, Thut[.......]”. Then another reading: “The perfect god the Lord of the Two Lands Aakheper[...]re...”. This suggested the king was either Thutmose I (Aakheperkare) or Thutmose II (Aakheperenre). 

“We found enough to know it was a Thut, but there are several Thutmoses,” said Bunbury. “We went around photographing every version of Thutmoses in the Luxor Museum to see if we could do a stylistic comparison, but it wasn't enough.”

Finally, a further fragment was found in a separate chamber which read “... great chief wife his beloved... Hatshepsut, may she live...”, indicating that the king was married to a still living Hatshepsut and so could only be Thutmose II.

“When we found the bit that nailed it, the team held a ‘hafla’, a spontaneous party, and there was dancing and singing,” said Bunbury. “There was a sense of ‘this is it’. The next day we had a big feast and roasted a goat.”

The reign of Thutmose II is thought to date from approximately 1493 to 1479 BCE. His life has been overshadowed by his more famous father Thutmose I, his wife Hatshepsut, (one of the few women who reigned as king in her own right), and his son, Thutmose III.

Litherland suspects that a body found in the Royal Cache in 1881 and previously identified as Thutmose II is in fact not the pharaoh, as it has been consistently dated as over thirty years of age, whereas Thutmose II was likely younger.

“Thutmose II was described as ‘the falcon in the nest’ when he came to throne and ruled just long enough to father the infant Thutmose III before dying after a reign unlikely to have been more than four years,” he said.

Bunbury’s years as a geo-archaeologist working in Egypt have given her an eye for the types of rock formations the ancient tomb builders preferred – to the point where she can spot the work of specific tomb builders prior to excavation.  

“It’s often four layers of rock, alternating hard and soft. You put your entrance in the top hard layer, and burrow down through the soft layer, then the next hard layer is the roof of your tomb chamber, and the final soft layer is the floor.”

“Central corridors were often formed at faults in the rock, making for faster work,” said Bunbury. “They bashed it all out with flint nodules that came out of the ground, only finishing with copper chisels towards the end because that's expensive to use.”

“Some hieroglyphs are phonetic, and we can identify the ancient quarrying work songs: ‘Hurrah for Djehuty, one big push for Djehuty’. Many of the people we work with on excavations still use these chants today, a bit like sea shanties. As far as we can tell, some of these songs date from the New Kingdom thousands of years ago.” 

<sub>All photographs and diagrams courtesy of the New Kingdom Research Foundation and Piers Litherland, other than the photos featuring Dr Judith Bunbury, which were provided by Dr Bunbury.

The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License</sub>