The Treasury of Ancient Egypt: Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and ArchaeologyWeigall, Arthur E. P. Brome (Arthur Edward Pearse Brome)
History
The Treasury of Ancient Egypt: Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology
Weigall, Arthur E. P. Brome (Arthur Edward Pearse Brome)
Archaeology; Egypt -- Antiquities
The party which made the entrance consisted of Mr Davis; his assistant,
Mr Ayrton; Mr Harold Jones; Mr Max Dalison, formerly of the Egypt
Exploration Fund; and myself. Wriggling and crawling, we pushed and
pulled ourselves down the sloping rubbish, until, with a rattling
avalanche of small stones, we arrived at the bottom of the passage,
where we scrambled to our feet at the brink of a large rectangular well,
or shaft. Holding the lamps aloft, the surrounding walls were seen to be
covered with wonderfully preserved paintings executed on slightly
raised plaster. Here Horemheb was seen standing before Isis, Osiris,
Horus, and other gods; and his cartouches stood out boldly from amidst
the elaborate inscriptions. The colours were extremely rich, and, though
there was so much to be seen ahead, we stood there for some minutes,
looking at them with a feeling much akin to awe.
The shaft was partly filled with rubbish, and not being very deep, we
were able to climb down it by means of a ladder, and up the other side
to an entrance which formed a kind of window in the sheer wall. In
entering a large tomb for the first time, there are one or two scenes
which fix themselves upon the memory more forcefully than others, and
one feels as though one might carry these impressions intact to the
grave. In this tomb there was nothing so impressive as this view across
the well and through the entrance in the opposite wall. At one's feet
lay the dark pit; around one the gaudy paintings gleamed; and through
the window-like aperture before one, a dim suggestion could be obtained
of a white-pillared hall. The intense eagerness to know what was beyond,
and, at the same time, the feeling that it was almost desecration to
climb into those halls which had stood silent for thousands of years,
cast a spell over the scene and made it unforgetable.
This aperture had once been blocked up with stones, and the paintings
had passed across it, thus hiding it from view, so that a robber
entering the tomb might think that it ended here. But the trick was an
old one, and the plunderers had easily detected the entrance, had pulled
away the blocks, and had climbed through. Following in their footsteps,
we went up the ladder and passed through the entrance into the pillared
hall. Parts of the roof had fallen in, and other parts appeared to be
likely to do so at any moment. Clambering over the _debris_ we descended
another sloping corridor, which was entered through a cutting in the
floor of the hall, originally blocked up and hidden. This brought us
into a chamber covered with paintings, like those around the well; and
again we were brought to a standstill by the amazingly fresh colours
which arrested and held the attention.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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