The usual thanks to Jane for going to the trouble of taking notes at the Mummification Museum lectures in Luxor and for sharing them on her blog.
Recent Investigations of Undecorated Tombs in the Valley of Kings
8/11/8 Donald Ryan
If you ever get a chance to attend one of his lectures I do encourage you to go. Not only is he knowledgeable and interesting but he is amusing as well. First class lecturer
His work is the unglamorous side of excavation and not normally seen by tourists as it is tucked away behind the mountain in the middle of the Valley.
He gave a brief background of how he got into Egyptology, started young ready National Geographic’s. In 1981 he was working in the Faiyum and got a chance to visit Luxor. He came in July, on a bike, that remark caused a ripple of laughter. 18 months later he came on a 2 month visit to Egypt and went round everywhere. The Valley of the Kings contains the new kingdom burials of the Pharaohs of the New Kingdom. The 18, 19, 20 dynasty Pharaohs but he was intrigued by the undecorated tombs. He then started researching one of his sources being the great book The Royal Necropolis of Thebes by Elizabeth Thomas http://www.brown.edu/Research/Breaking_Ground/results.php?d=1&first=Elizabeth&last=Thomas
In early times the undecorated tombs were considered very uninteresting, with no decoration therefore no owner and o treasure the early archaeologists were singularly unbothered about the tombs and their contents. Often they were just a shaft leading to a single room.
He wanted to know the WHO, WHEN and WHY of KV21, 27, 28, 44, 45, 60
If you look at the list of tombs in the Valley of Kings from the Theban Mapping Project http://www.thebanmappingproject.com/ you will find a number of tombs with question marks against them. Some like Tutankhamen (KV62), Yuya and Thuyu (KV 46), and Maiherperi (KV36) were discovered intact and the last two if made today would attract huge attention as they were spectacular discoveries. But many others we have no clue about.
See the above page for the rest of Jane's comprehensive lecture notes.
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