AN UNDISTURBED royal tomb has been detected deeply buried in the Valley of the Kings, a British Egyptologist claims. The find, using remote-sensing equipment, lies only a few yards from the tomb of Tutankhamun, discovered in 1922, and is likely to date to the same early New Kingdom period between 1550BC and 1300 BC, and perhaps even to Tutankhamun’s own 18th dynasty.
“From its location this tomb could prove to be a find of the greatest possible significance,” said Nicholas Reeves, director of the Amarna Royal Tombs Project. “Situated in a part of the Valley which was out of bounds to earlier excavators, moreover, the new find is almost certain to be undisturbed.”
Dr Reeves believes that the site, neighbouring tombs KV62, that of Tutankhamun, and KV63, the most recent discovery, is likely to represent another burial of the period after the reign of the “heretic” pharaoh Akhenaten. It may even be of those who once lived in his abandoned capital of Akhetaten at Tell el-Amarna.
The find was made during the survey that located KV63, which this year yielded coffins empty of mummies, but containing embalmers’ gear. The latest issue of the Egyptological journal KMT illustrates many of the the KV63 finds, including the naturalistic faces painted on the coffins and the feather-stuffed “pillows” found crammed into one of them.
Although KV63 was located using ground-penetrating radar in 2000, a false accusation of antiquities smuggling led to Dr Reeves’s permit being suspended, he said in an interview with Archaeology. Although he was cleared last year, Dr Reeves has yet to be allowed back into the Valley of the Kings, and KV63 was uncovered by Otto Schaden, of the University of Memphis. The new discovery comes from further analysis of the earlier radar data.
The project was driven by a physical threat that the rubble fill of the Valley, and with it most of the archaeology, might be removed wholesale to combat flash-flooding on the open tombs. In the course of work to potentially locate the burial place of Akhenaten’s wife and co-regent, Nefertiti, Dr Reeves found that much more lay undisturbed than previously thought. He thus turned his attention to potential unlocated tombs.
Dr Reeves said: “Radar is a tricky technology, but well-suited, it seems, to the Valley of the Kings terrain. The radar signal is emitted as a pulse, with the time and the force of the reflection echo measured and appearing on screen as real-time data.
“It’s important to note that these data are mere patterns and do not represent the actual form or dimension of the object detected. I have every faith in the skills of our radar specialist, Hirokatsu Watanabe, one of the best in the world. He’s confident that what we have here is the same as we had with KV63 — a significant void, a tomb.”
“It’s a feature which I guess hasn’t seen the light of day for several millennia. We’re calling it “KV64,” he said.
If the tomb is there, several 18th-dynasty royals are potential occupants, including Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s secondary wife, Kiya, and daughter, Meketaten.
www.archaeology.org/online/interviews/reeves.html; www.valleyofthekings.org; KMT Vol. 17 No. 3: 18-27.
Trace of trade in early bananas
THE discovery of Africa’s earliest bananas in Uganda has pushed back the potential beginnings of Indian Ocean trade. Excavations at the site of Munsa, in the Rukiga Highlands near the border with Rwanda, suggest that one of our favourite foods had spread thousands of miles from its origins by at least 5,000 years ago.
Bananas originate botanically in New Guinea, as does sugarcane, and these crops reached India at least 4,000 years ago, probably via Vietnam and Thailand. Professor Peter Robertshaw says in the current issue of Archaeology that the earliest documentary reference to them in Africa dates to the 6th century AD.
He says: “Historians and archaeologists thought that bananas were probably introduced to Africa via Madagascar, which was colonised by people from South-East Asia in the 1st millennium AD but this was thrown into doubt some years ago by studies of the names used for the plants, fruit and cultivars, and their geographic distribution, all of which suggested that bananas might have been introduced much earlier.”
Bananas, being soft, do not preserve well in the archaeological record. The new evidence has come from phytoliths, tiny silica crystals found in plants, and with distinctive shapes for many species. Much recent palaeobotanical work across the world has been based on phytolith evidence (which has, for example, suggested earlier dates for maize in South America).
Some years ago Belgian scientists identified banana phytoliths dating to 500BC in Cameroon, a millennium before the first written evidence: the new data from Munsa push that back to 3000BC, Professor Robertshaw claims.
The Munsa material comes from a papyrus swamp, where Julius Lejiu, of Mbarara University in Uganda, has collected several long cores of swamp sediments and analysed the plant remains, including macroscopic fragments, pollen and phytoliths.
Charcoal was used for radiocarbon dating. The banana phytoliths came from the exotic cultivated Musa family and not the Ensete “false banana”, which is native to Africa.
Cultivated bananas are known from at least the 5th millennium BC in New Guinea, and in Pakistan in the 3rd millennium BC. “Thus, people could have brought bananas to Africa directly from South-East Asia or from the Indian subcontinent, assuming that the earliest dates there will eventually match our Ugandan evidence,” Professor Robertshaw says. “These people presumably did not carry bananas and nothing else across the Indian Ocean, but there is not a lot of other evidence for that time.”
African crops are known to have spread in the opposite direction — sorghum millet had made its way as far east as Korea by 1400BC — and rice is another early Asian domesticate that spread widely, from China through Thailand to India and eventually to Africa.
The evidence from Munsa is a reminder that long-distance trade involved perishable as well as imperishable goods, such as obsidian, upon which archaeological reconstructions have hitherto been based. The humble banana has much to tell us about the orgins of seaborne contact between the continents.
Archaeology Vol. 59 No. 5: 25-29.
