Photo: Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities / AFP
When British archaeologist Dr Piers Litherland noticed that the ceiling of the burial chamber was painted blue with yellow stars, he knew he discovered the first tomb of an Egyptian king in over a century.
After more than a decade of investigating Egypt's Valley of the Kings, Litherland uncovered a staircase leading to the tomb of Thutmose II, who reigned from 1493 to 1479 BC. It took months to clean flood debris from the descending tunnel, and during that time, he and his colleagues believed the tomb belonged to a royal wife.
The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities released images showing the entrance of Thutmose II's tomb, the Guardian reported.
But when he discovered that the roof of the burial room was painted with scenes from the Amduat, a sacred scripture reserved for monarchs, he realised he had made what has since been heralded as the most important discovery since Tutankhamun.
He told the BBC World Service that he felt an "extraordinary sort of bewilderment" at the time. “When I came out, my wife was waiting outside and the only thing I could do was burst into tears.”
He then began cleaning the flood debris, expecting to discover the crushed remains of a grave beneath it.
“In fact, the tomb turned out to be completely empty, not because it had been robbed, but because it had been deliberately emptied. We then worked out that the tomb had been flooded. It had been built underneath a waterfall, and it had filled with water at some stage within about six years of the burial.”
The king's remains were removed through a subsidiary passageway and moved elsewhere, he stated. “It was only gradually, as we sifted through all the material – tons and tons of broken limestone – that we discovered these small fragments of alabaster, which named Thutmose II.”
He stated that when the tomb was moved, the fragments probably broke apart. “And thank goodness they did actually break one or two things because that’s how we found out whose tomb it was.”
The discovery was made by a collaborative mission led by the New Kingdom Research Foundation, a British independent academic foundation, and the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, which is a project affiliated with the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge.
Thutmose II was the spouse and half-brother of Hatshepsut, one of Egypt's greatest pharaohs and one of the few women who ruled independently, as well as the father of Thutmose III.
Litherland told PA media: “This discovery solves a great mystery of ancient Egypt: the location of the tombs of the early 18th dynasty kings. The tomb of this ancestor of Tutankhamun had never been found because it was always thought to be at the other end of the mountain near the Valley of the Kings.”
Mohsen Kamel, assistant field director, stated that based on the evidence, the contents of the tomb were relocated to a second tomb, “The possible existence of a second, and most likely intact, tomb of Thutmose II is an astonishing possibility."