Excavation adventures in the Valley of the Kings

CNN (Paul Sussman)

Thanks to Dr Nick Reeves of the Amarna Royal Tombs Project for sending me the link to this article, which is a good summary of the ARTP's work in the Valley of the Kings, near Luxor. Paul Sussman was a team member of the ARTP when the Project was excavating in the Valley, and he explains how the excavations of the Royal tombs can lead to an insight into the lives of those who were far less exalted.

While Deir El-Medina has been exhaustively dug, no detailed study has ever been carried out of similar remains in the Valley. So far as their daily work lives are concerned, the craftsmen who cut and decorated tombs that today wow millions of visitors have to all intents and purposes disappeared from history (there is an interesting parallel here with modern Egyptian laborers, whose crucial contribution to the uncovering of their country's past has also been shamefully overlooked).

This was the gap we were hoping to fill, specifically by excavating a series of ancient workers' huts that once sat on the Valley floor and which are now, 3000 years later, buried beneath five meters of compacted sand and rubble.

The existence of these huts has long been known (Howard Carter dismantled one such group to get to Tutankhamun). We were the first expedition to systematically dig and record them, however, in the process turning up numerous artifacts from which we were able to build a picture, albeit an incomplete one, of what life was like in the Valley three millennia ago.

Now I freely admit that, on the face of it, the fact that a group of navvies once snacked on fish and bread, worshipped at small, makeshift shrines, scribbled notes to themselves, practiced their drawing and amused each other with scurrilous graffiti of stubble-chinned pharaohs and men with giant penises -- none of this is especially glamorous or earth shattering, particularly when measured against the amazing objects found a few meters away in Tut's tomb.

For me, however, it is their very mundanity that makes these type of discoveries so powerful, offering as they do a glimpse into the daily workings of a world far removed from our own.

See the above page for the full story. To read summaries of the ARTP's excavations in the Valley of the Kings, see their website.