Children of Ramses: Inside a 150-Room Tomb

In 1987, American Egyptologist Dr. Kent Weeks uncovered the entrance of what was initiallydeemed an unimportant tomb called KV5, which is located in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. In the last 14 years, Weeks and his team have unearthed 150 rooms in the chamber. Most tombs in the Valley of the Kings contain no more than eight rooms. Weeks has been able to clear out only 7% of the rooms because they’ve been filled with debris from flooding over the centuries. But from the bones and artifacts found, it appears that KV5 may be the final resting place of the male children of Ramses II, who ruled ancient Egypt for 67 years. Ramses fathered more than 100 known children, and their resting place was unknown. With KV5, Weeks has apparently solved the mystery of the missing princes.

Weeks’ amazing discovery is chronicled in the new four-hour History Channel documentary “Egypt Beyond the Pyramids,” which can be seen tonight and Tuesday. Hosted and narrated by actor Peter Woodward, the documentary examines not only KV5, but the spectacular Temple of Karnak, the daily life of the ancient Egyptians and Egyptian burial techniques and ancient rites.

Recently in America on a brief lecture tour, Weeks talked about KV5.

Question: Since the documentary was filmed last year, what else have you discovered in KV5?

Answer: When the film crew was out there we had at that point 108 chambers in the tomb. We have been digging through the spring and we are now up to 150 and it’s still growing. The tomb is just incredible. To give you an idea, King Tut’s tomb covers about 80 square yards, and our tomb at the moment covers about 3,000. It runs off in every which direction. Most tombs in the valley are just a long series of corridors leading straight into a hillside and a burial chamber. Ours is more like the tentacles of an octopus.

We have found one room [recently] that is a burial chamber and also a side chamber where there were 60 huge pots about the size of a clothes washer in which food offerings were placed.

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Q: Is KV5 the resting place for all of Ramses II’s sons?

A: Strangely enough, he was the only pharaoh to give the names of any of his children in his text. We know from texts carved on temple walls around Egypt he had 29 sons and 28 daughters who can be considered principal children by principal wives. He had secondary wives and tertiary wives and hangers-on and so forth, and probably had children by them too. But these 29 sons and 28 daughters are basically the ones who were the royal family members. The 29 sons were the potential heirs apparent to the throne. Of those 29 sons, we know that two were buried elsewhere. That leaves 27 sons and they could all be buried in KV5. We have basically got four mummies, six names on objects and on wall decoration and 20 representations of sons on the tomb walls.

It’s not only the largest tomb ever found in Egypt and the most unusual plan of a tomb ever found, it is the only tomb we know of that served as a family mausoleum. Or course, since Ramses was one of the most powerful and longest-lived rulers in ancient Egypt, it makes it all the more intriguing if we can learn something about this family and why he built this tomb.

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Q: Where are his daughters buried?

A: We don’t know. There are four of them buried in the Valley of the Queens, which is nearby. But beyond that we don’t know.

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Q: Are the mummies you have found in KV5 in decent shape?

A: I call them mummies because originally they were, but because of flooding that has hit the tomb about 10 or 11 times in the last 3,000 years--flooding caused by rainfall--most of the soft tissue and the bandages have simply washed away or dissolved, so we are left with what looks more like skeletons than mummies. And in a couple of cases we only have the skulls and neck vertebrae.

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Q: Do any of the food offerings still exist?

A: We have found the remains of boiled beef. I haven’t tasted it and I don’t intend too.

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Q: You and your workers must have the patience of Job to excavate KV5.

A: This is the hardest part of archeology. It is very slow work. First of all, because the flood debris in the tomb fills the chambers from floor to ceiling with silt and sand and so forth. When it dried, it dried to an almost concrete-like consistency and to dig it, we have to go at it with pick axes. By the same token, in it there are delicate pieces of pottery, jewelry, pieces of wood, food offerings and decorations that have fallen off the wall--very fragile--which have to be gotten at with a toothbrush and a dental pick. So it is very slow going. We move forward at the rate of two inches a day.

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Q: How many people are digging in KV5?

A: It varies. It depends on how far into the tomb we are. We basically always have one person digging, one person watching the digger and another person scrapping the debris. Everybody else forms a bucket brigade and the farther in the tomb we are, the longer the bucket brigade. We can’t have any more than one or two people digging at a time because otherwise we would lose control. It is very slow and meticulous work, but it pays off because even tiny little fragments of pottery--if you look at the pottery you can tell from the wear and its shape what kind of pot it was and where it was made and what things it was likely to contain. We have over half a millions fragments so far we can eventually put back together. All of the pieces are there, it is just a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle with 500,000 pieces--that’s all.

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Q: Why had KV5 been ignored by Egyptologists for nearly a century?

A: People who had seen it before in the 19th century assumed it was undecorated, uninteresting, unimportant. They assumed that because the entrance of the tomb had been carved about 100 or more years before Ramses took it over. He took what was a small and perhaps even unfinished tomb and usurped it for the burial of his sons. So the entrance of the tomb looked like the entrance of a tomb of a minor court official. People just assumed there is nothing there. So they ignored it. In fact, they were so convinced it was unimportant that when Howard Carter was digging for the tomb of King Tutankhamen, he actually used the entrance of this tomb as a dumping ground for the debris from King Tut’s tomb.

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“Egypt Beyond the Pyramids” can be seen tonight and Tuesday at 9 on the History Channel.