Thursday, April 24, 2008

The Great Missing

 There is little doubt of three caches of kings from the end of the New Kingdom yet one cache is clearly missing and perhaps today represented only by its absence.

The great cache of 1881 found a prince named Ahmosis though sadly he is perhaps not the liberator king he is more likely a son of Amenhotep I by a concubine. This was hard to accept considering this cache contained fourteen members of his family.

The same cache had a king labeled as the second Thutmosis though he may be a better fit as Thutmosis I, either way, a king was missing. Then came Valley of the Kings cache 35 in 1898 and a mummy identified as the nineteenth dynasty king Seti II looks clearly like Thutmosis II.

The Amarna kings of Akhenaten and Ay inspired little love in their subjects as presented by both of their vandalized tombs and the dictator Horemheb may have suffered a similar fate.

The 1881 cache had at some point the mummy of Rameses I,  however, this became lost, myself I am convinced it will turn up on a shelf somewhere in the possession of the antiquities service, probably with the priest-king Pinudgem I.

Twentieth dynasty kings Ramesses 7, 8 and 10 and 11 are all missing and probably only Ramesses 7 and 8 were buried in the Valley of the Kings. Ramesses 7 almost certainly and the hope of finding the tomb of Ramesses 8 may be a pipe dream considering the collapse of the state and the ephemeral nature of that king.

Ramesses 8 tomb may have long been robbed and destroyed almost immediately after his burial in the troubled times that followed his death.

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