We spent the longest portion of our time on the west bank of the Nile in the Valley of the Kings. After the Egyptians discovered that building pyramids was a great way to annonce to the grave robbers of the world where your treasure was buried, they began burying the pharaohs in the valley, a secluded area not too far from Luxor. Even this strategy was only slightly successful. Of the 62 tombs found in the valley, only one was not emptied out in antiquity — KV62, the tomb of King Tutankhamen, which was discovered in 1922.
The valley is, unfortunately, another one of those places where photography is not allowed. Or at least, it is currently not allowed. The numerous pictures I’ve seen on the internet of the valley suggests to me that the ban on photography is recent or only randomly enforced.
It was certainly being enforced when we were there. Carissa and I decided to go into King Tut’s tomb, which has a separate admission fee from the rest of the valley. While we were inside the tomb, I got the wise idea to post to Facebook a status update about where I was — I had seen earlier that, surprisingly, cell reception was very good in the valley.
I had no sooner taken my phone out of my pocket and turned it on when a man guarding the tomb walked up and demanded my phone. the phone has a camera built in, and apparently even the presence of the camera was not allowed, regardless of the fact that I wasn’t using the camera.
So I had to follow the man out of the tomb to the office of the director. The director wanted to see what pictures were on my phone and said that I would have to delete any pictures taken in the tomb. Well, there weren’t any picture of the tomb on my camera — I hadn’t been trying to take any. Unfortunately for me, the phone locked up when I was trying to open the photo application. This was not making the director happy because it seemed like I was trying to hide something. I eventually had to reboot the phone, which takes forever even in the best of circumstances but is absolutely excruciating when you are under pressure.
I think Einstein once used a similar analogy to help people understand how to think about how time slows down as the speed of an object approaches the speed of light. It’s like trying to sit on a hot stove. Time seems to move really slowly.
Eventually, the director told me to leave the phone with him, and I should come back when I was done visiting the other tombs. After I rejoined the group, our tour guide went back to the office and retrieved my phone.
No harm, no foul, I guess. I have to say that I was a little freaked out by the experience, though.
So obviously, I’m not going to be able to post any pictures of this part of the tour that were taken by us.
The really odd thing is that I can’t even tell you for sure which tombs we visited other than KV62. The tombs opened for tourists are rotated all of the time (except for KV62, which is almost always open). As I understand it, there are about 10 tombs that have been set up to be visited safely by tourists, and on any given day, 3 of those tombs are open. Unfortunately, I didn’t write down which ones we were going into at the time, so now I’ve completely forgotten.
Looking at the atlas from the Theban Mapping Project, I guess that we went to:
KV6 — Rameses IX. This one seems to be in the right location to be the first one we went into.
KV11 — Rameses III. This one seems likely to be the tomb we visited in this area as it seems to only be partially accessible, and one of the tombs we visited was only partially accessible in this same way.
KV16 — Rameses I. I think this was the last tomb we went into. The pictures of the burial chamber look familiar.
And of course:
KV62 — King Tutankhamen
Part of my confusion is that in some ways, the tombs are hard to tell apart. The burial rituals and the information written on the walls for the king to use when he is resurrected are very similar in style amongst all of the tombs. There really is a sense that once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Obviously, that isn’t really true, but as an amateur without any real skills in decoding the contents of the walls, it is very easy for everything you see to blur together.
KV62 was more memorable, though, partly because it was put together in haste when the boy king died at an early age. The tomb is very small but contains a beautiful mural on the back wall of the burial chamber that was unlike anything else we saw in the valley.
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