June 6, 2006 — I have never been in anything that even remotely resembles the royal Egyptian tombs. I've read about them and I've seen pictures, but nothing really prepared me for the experience of actually walking down into one.
There are 63 tombs in all, and I was pretty lucky to have been able to visit at least some of them between shooting: Rameses III (KV 11), Merenptah (KV 8), Tutankhamen (KV 62) and Amenmesse (KV 10).
I was also able to visit the tomb of Amenhotep III in the West Valley. This tomb is off-limits to tourists, so it was a special treat to be able to visit it.
You enter the tomb and immediately start down a long series of steps — about a 60- to 80-foot descent. Then you come to a "well shaft," which looks to be about 20 to 30 feet deep. It's a big hole that was basically an attempt to stop tomb robbers from getting access to the rest of the tomb.
There is a series of painted figures along the walls of the well shaft that are, for the most part, intact (some early 19th century explorers had removed a few sections of the paintings). They are, in a word, spectacular. I was walking with a small flashlight, so only portions of the decoration were revealed at any one time and it seemed as if the pictures kept changing.
From the well shaft, you enter another, larger room and then start to descend again for maybe 30 feet before entering yet another chamber with even more paintings. These scenes depict the king as Osiris along with Anubis.
Osiris was the king of the dead and the original mummy. But Anubis, the god of mummification, is my favorite god. Osiris is commonly portrayed as a green or black mummy. The color represents the rich soil that is redeposited by the annual flooding of the Nile and ties together life and death. Anubis is often seen holding an ankh (an Egyptian symbol that means "life") to the mouth of the dead king, bringing him life.
From here, you enter a much larger main chamber where the stone sarcophagus of Amenhotep III is located. There are five side chambers branching off from this main room.
At one point, while the film crew was getting some shots of the paintings, I took the opportunity to go into one of these side chambers. Now, I am not particularly prone to creepy feelings, but honestly, it was a little spooky to be alone in the ancient, dark room.
Back in the (well-lit) main chamber I got a quick lesson in reading hieroglyphs from Earl, a member of the dig team. It was pretty cool to be able to read ancient Egyptian. I would never have dreamt that I would be able to do that.
I had a little down time and I started to think about how, sometimes, it is hard to accept how old these things really are. Three thousand years is a hard number to grasp, but every now and again the weight of those years became real to me.
The thing that really caught my attention and just made me shake my head in disbelief was how vibrant the colors in these decorations were. Not only was I amazed at the thought and meticulous work that went into producing them, but also the amount of work that went into preserving them.
While many of the tombs have suffered at the hands of both explorers and grave robbers, the hard work of archaeologists like Dr. Otto and his team have halted the destruction and even restored many of these incredible tombs.
