What Happened to the Missing Mummies of Egypt's Lost Queens?

[cinrit]

On 2nd February 1925, the photographer from the Harvard-Boston archaeological expedition was setting up his camera tripod on the rocky plateau of Giza close to the base of the Great Pyramid. Having some degree of difficulty in his attempt to get the legs on an equal footing, he dislodged what he assumed was a small piece of limestone, but which closer inspection revealed to be a fragment of plaster, the kind of plaster traditionally used in ancient times to seal up the entrance of a tomb.

With the same archaeological team having already made a series of spectacular discoveries at Giza over the previous 20 years, most notably a large group of superb statues of King Menkaure, builder of Giza's third pyramid, this new discovery was so unexpected the excavation's director George Reisner was still in the US. So the task of opening the tomb fell to his British assistant Alan Rowe and his Egyptian head foreman Said Ahmed Said, whose removal of the plaster covering revealed a 100 foot vertical shaft cut down into the limestone bedrock, filled solid with limestone masonry and yet more plaster. Only after a month when this had all been removed was it then possible for the archaeologists to descend to the very bottom of the shaft to reach the doorway, marked with the official seal of King Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid.

Although the rock-cut rectangular chamber which lay beyond was only 15 by 8 feet, the archaeologists could see 'the dazzle of gold' through a small gap at the top of the doorway. They could also see the chamber was crammed full with all manner of wonderful things whose inscriptions, initially read with the aid of binoculars and later at close quarters, revealed the contents had belonged to Khufu's mother, Queen Hetepheres (c.2600 BC). With her status as queen mother making her 'first lady', at that time of greater importance than the king's wife, she was certainly the most important woman to her son Khufu since the first tomb he built at Giza was for her, located "in the most important point in his own royal cemetery" noted Reisner's colleague Noel Wheeler.

More: What happened to the missing mummies of Egypt's lost queens? - Telegraph

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