7 - 13 June 2001
Issue No.537
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 7 - 13 June 2001 Issue No.537 |
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Hidden chamber and sleeping pills
I stayed on the West Bank of Luxor for two months when I was working with the University of Pennsylvania expedition in 1978. We were excavating the ruins of the palace of King Amenhotep III at Malkata, where there was once a beautiful lake on which the king and his consort, Queen Tiy, a powerful woman at that time, went for leisure excursions on a boat called Aten. That was when I met two great Egyptologists: David O'Connor of the University of Pennsylvania, and Barry Kemp of Cambridge University. I worked alongside them to learn excavation techniques and every evening I would meet my friends working in the Valley of the Kings with different foreign missions.
Abdel-Fattah El-Sabahi was inspector of antiquities for the West Bank at the time and it was he who came to pick me up each day and who introduced me to Sheikh Aly at El-Marsam Hotel, a memorable man whose stories cannot easily be forgotten.
One night, Sheikh Aly said to me: "I am a man who can foretell the future, and I can tell that you will find a hidden chamber in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings. You are young now, but one day you will be a famous archaeologist and fulfil the dreams of your family."
Sheikh Aly told me about the chamber, and Howard Carter's excavations. "After the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922," he said, "many members of my family were working with Carter, including myself, although I was only a young boy then.
"Before Carter started his last season of excavation, they recommended that he work between the tombs of King Merenptah, son of Ramses II, and the tomb of Ramses VI."
I was surprised to hear this, because in none of his publications had Carter ever mentioned this sage advice. I felt, however, that Sheikh Aly was speaking the truth.
He continued: "Carter used the tomb of Seti I as a storage area for the artefacts that came from the tomb of King Tutankhamun. Registration and restoration was carried out there. I and my cousins used to stay in the tomb for long periods of time while this work was being carried out, and we examined every inch of it. We knew that there was a hidden chamber that had not been discovered. Later, when Sarwat Okasha was minister of culture, we were able to start the search for this hidden chamber and then, for unknown reasons, we were stopped and could not continue. We were almost at its very entrance when we were stopped."
I thought long about what Sheikh Aly had told me. No artefacts from the tomb of Seti have ever come to light, so there is every possibility that there is a hidden chamber. Sheikh Aly himself never lost hope of finding it, and he tried by every possible means to get permission to search for it. However, an Egyptian Egyptologist who headed the Antiquities Department at that time refused to give him permission, saying that his ideas were based on myth and legend, not on scientific analysis.
Was it possible that Sheikh Aly was right? After all, many of the great discoveries on the necropolis have been made through the oral traditions of people who live there. Am I, indeed, to be the discoverer, as foretold by Sheikh Aly?
When Sheikh Aly decided to get married late in life to a young woman who was 20 years old, he invited us to his wedding and asked my friend El-Sabahi to give him some vitamins for potency. El-Sabahi decided to play a joke on him, and instead of giving him vitamins, he gave him sleeping pills. Sheikh Aly slept beside his bride and woke up at noon the next day. He was the laugh of the people in the village of Qurneh.
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