Climax of 10-Year Search : Tomb of Tut’s Treasurer Reported Found

Two archeologists today announced that they have found the 3,000-year-old burial chamber of King Tutankhamen’s treasurer. They said the find is the most important since the boy king’s own tomb was opened in 1922.

The claim comes after a 10-year search by Egyptologists Geoffrey Martin of University College in London and Jacobus Van Dijk of the Liden Museum in the Netherlands.

They said they climbed down a 50-foot shaft on a rope ladder Saturday morning, found a winding staircase to an anteroom and then to several burial chambers and deciphered some of the hieroglyphics on the walls.

“My God, it is Maya!” Van Dijk said he cried out.

They had been searching for the tomb of Maya, Tut’s treasurer, for 10 years and knew that it was near the Pyramid at Saqqara, site of the old capital of Memphis from which Tut ruled Egypt, about 20 miles southwest of modern Cairo.

They claimed the discovery was the most important since Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tut himself at the Valley of the Kings near Luxor in 1922. Tut ruled Egypt from 1354-45 BC.

Martin and Van Dijk said reliefs on the tomb wall are in pristine condition. “It is a miracle so little of it has been disturbed,” Martin said.

“We were in total darkness quite a long time, 15 minutes or so,” Martin said. “It was becoming hotter and hotter. But we did feel wonderful relief. We knew it was the treasurer Maya and his wife. But we haven’t yet had time to read the inscriptions properly and certainly not time to record them.”

Van Dijk told reporters that they do not expect to find treasures inside the tomb but do expect to find inscriptions and reliefs that will shed light on a hazy period of Egypt’s history.

“We are almost certain that no treasures are left there, except bits and pieces,” Van Dijk said. “We are sure the room was broken into”--unlike Tut’s tomb, which was found with all the treasures intact.

“We hope to find a lot of inscriptions, mainly in the reliefs, information about this shady period at the end of Tut’s reign and the beginning of the 19th Dynasty.”

The reliefs they saw Saturday showed Maya and his wife “adoring several divinities in the afterlife. These reliefs were carved in limestone blocks and painted yellow afterward to simulate gold,” he said.