Tomb DB320 - The Royal Cache of Hidden Mummies - The Discovery of the Great Kings of Egypt from the New Kingdom

During the summer of 1871 Ahmed Abd el Rassul who lived in a 'bab el haggar' - a dwelling in a New Kingdom tomb on the Theban hills with his family, in the Village of Shiek Abd-el-Qurna on the West Bank of Luxor, was wandering the mountain at the side of Hatshepsut's Mortuary Temple at Dier El Bahari looking for one of his lost goats, he heard it bleating so he followed the sound and it lead him to a shaft that was 30ft deep. He fetched a rope and descended to retrieve his goat, once he arrived at the bottom of the shaft it lead him to a series of underground chambers and corridors and to his joy he found an extraordinary cache of mummified remains and funeral equipment of more than fifty kings, queens,royalty,and various nobility. Ahmed was ecstatic, so he retrieved his goat and climbed back up the rope and went in search of his brothers to tell them of his find. The brothers decided it was best to keep the tomb a secret incase any of the villagers became jealous of their new found wealth, and reported them to the moudir of the province or to the Director of Excavations.They threw a dead donkey down the shaft so that it would cause a stink, and put off any other local who might come across the hole. 

Then one night when it was dark the  brothers went back down the shaft to the tomb to steal some of the artifacts, they unwrapped some mummies so that they could remove the amulets that had been placed in the mummy wrappings during the mummification process, for the protection of the mummy in the afterlife. Over a period of ten years they went down the tomb three times to steal treasures. They obviously couldn't remove large objects so they satisfied themselves with stealing funerary figurines, canopic jars, papyri, and anything that was small enough to hide and every winter they would sell these treasures to visiting tourists and collectors. They even sold the mummy of Ramses 1 to a Canadian man who then sold it to a museum at Niagara falls.

In 1874, Gaston Maspero, the head of the Antiquities Service in Cairo, noticed that  figures bearing royal names from the 21st Dynasty, a wooden tablet inscribed in scribal ink, a papyrus belonging to Queen Nedjmet, and other artifacts were being sold. Other important objects like papyri, shabti-figurines, bronze vessels, inscribed wrapping, and perhaps even at least one mummy were also leaking out onto the Luxor antiquities market. Maspero knew these had not come from a licensed excavation, and so it must be an illegal find. He sent investigators to Luxor to try to discover where the artifacts were coming from, but they learned nothing for years, and yet antiquities continued to appear around the world. Finally in 1881 Maspero enlisted the aid of Charles Wilbour, a wealthy American collector, who was known to be willing to pay high prices for authentic antiquities. Within a few days of his arrival in Luxor, Wilbour made contact with a local guide who brought him to the village of Qurna and the house of Ahmed Abd el Rassul. Wilbour was shown a quantity of red leather, looking as fresh as if it had just been opened, and stamped with the titles of an 18th Dynasty king. Wilbour immediately telegraphed Maspero to inform him of the situation.

Maspero decided to send M. Émile Brugsch a German born Egyptologist who was the deputy curator of the Musée de Boulaq to Luxor to investigate. He used various tactics to find out more about Ahmed Abd el Rassul.  His investigations were extensive and led him to Ahmed's main buyer, Moustapha Agha Ayat, Consular Agent of England, Belgium, and Russia in Luxor, unfortunately he was covered by diplomatic immunity, and therefore he escaped all prosecution. Having no success here, Emile decided to relentlessly pursue the Rassoul brothers whom he had been told were selling the objects, and so on 1st April 1881 the Chief of Police at Luxor was sent over to the West Bank to the Village of Shiek Abd-el-Qurna to arrest Ahmed. He was  seized the moment he returned home, and was brought on board the boat that Emile was using for an initial interrogation in the hope that he would confess to selling artifacts. Ahmed denied all the facts presented to him and the testimonies of tourists which fall directly under the cut (le coupe) of Ottoman law: Clandestine excavation, unauthorised sale of papyrus and funerary statuettes, destruction of coffins and objects of art and curiosity belonging to the Egyptian State. 

Protesting his innocence Ahmed offered for them to search his house, Ahmed was then imprisoned for two months, and suffered interrogations and severe beatings to the soles of his feet, he told them that he was a servant of Moustapha Agha Ayat, the man that had managed to use his diplomatic immunity to save himself from prosecution.  Ahmed had sold the artifacts to Moustafa Agha Ayat who had led him to believe he would also be covered by diplomatic immunity, but once the Authorities were involved he purposely distanced himself from the investigation and left Ahmed to defend himself.

Ahmed managed to extract many people 
from his village that offered favourable testimonies on his behalf in this close-knit, Saidi community where the chiefs and notables of Qurna repeatedly affirmed under oath, that Ahmed Abd el Rassoul was a most loyal man, who never looted before and would never loot again, who was incapable of stealing the most insignificant object of antiquity, let alone violating a royal tomb, so consequently Ahmed was provisionally released, with the guarantee of two of his friends, Ahmed Serour and Ismail Sayid Nagib. He returned to his home around the middle of May, however his arrest, and the two months of imprisonment that he had suffered, and the vigour with which the investigation of Daoud Pacha had been conducted, had clearly shown the inability of Moustapha Agha Ayat to protect Ahmed with diplomatic immunity, as he had suggested to him when he was selling him the artifacts.

A few months later Emile received some new information from people that were prepared to denounce Ahmed and his brothers. Some of the villagers had received assistance from the Rassoul family, but the police continued harassing them and they became divided on how to deal with the problem, some of them  believed that the danger of prosecution was over, and that Museum would not be pursuing the case any further, whilst others thought that it would be safer to cooperate with the Museum and tell them the about the secret hoard that the Rassoul family had profited from for over ten years.

Meanwhile Ahmed was feeling confident that he was not going to be prosecuted, and thinking the case was dropped, Ahmed told the villagers that they owed him compensation for the months in prison that he endured, and he demanded the majority of the treasure for himself, he told them if they refused to grant his demand, he threatened to go immediately to the director of excavations. After a further month of harassment in the village from the police,  the eldest of the brothers, Mohammed Abd Rassoul, decided to inform on his brother Ahmed to stop the harassment of the Village by the authorities.  In secret on the 5th June he went to inform the Moudir that he knew the location of the Tomb where the artifacts and mummies could be found. Mohammed then took the officials of the Antiquities Society to Deir el Bahri. He led them the actual tomb chamber, which contained coffins of some of ancient Egypts greatest Kings of the New Kingdom. The funerary trappings had disappeared, the gold sarcophagi had been melted down, some of the mummies were on the floor, as the robbers had ripped the bandages apart to get the amulets inside. On descending into the tomb they found it is disarray with sarcophagi piled up one on top of another, but they were covered in inscriptions and had the images of serpents, so together with the ornaments they found, it also proved that it was in fact a royal burial place. 

The Kings that were found in this cache were Seqenenre-Taa, who had fought the Hyksos and bore a great head wound as apparent evidence, his son Ahmose I the founder of the New Kingdom, Amenhotep I,  Tuthmosis 1, 11 and 111, Seti I, Ramesses II, III and IX, and the empty coffin of Ramesses I. Queen Nefertari's sarcophagus was so heavy it took nine men to lift it. Within a matter of days, in great urgency, the tomb was emptied by the authorities.It was strange that all these kings had been removed from their own tombs, and placed in other tombs, and then to finally arrive in this undecorated tomb not fit for a beggar let alone a king. Gaston Maspero speculated that the kings had been moved from their own tombs to avoid the attention of tomb robbers at the end of the New Kingdom period. The last great Ruler of Egypt had been Ramses 111 and after his rule Egypt went into economic decline, then in the 25th dynasty I think it was the High Priest Pinudjem 11 that ordered the removal of the Kings from there original tombs and placed the Kings in his family vault so that he would have the wealth  of the Royal Tombs. 

For his assistance of leading the authorities to the tomb Mohammed el-Rassul was offered a job as foreman for the Antiquities Society. In 1891 he led an inspector to yet another site in Deir el Bahri, where bodies of almost 160 successive high priests from Karnak, lay at rest. Since it was suspected that Mohammed had known for quite a while about this cache, he was dismissed from the Society.

Today the descendants of Ahmed Rassoul own the Rammessium Restaurant & Coffee Shop at the Side of the Ramesseum Mortuary Temple of Ramses the Great, it was here that I met Mohamed Rassoul who showed me a tinted photograph of his great great grandfather Ahmed who was an old man of about 90  years of age when the photo was taken in 1907 and was probably taken by Robert de Rustafjaell a phtographer and author who wrote 'The Light of Egypt', and had known Ahmed Abd er Rassoul for many years. Ahmed's mother Fendia dominates the photograph, supporting herself with two strong sticks, they said that she was about 120 when the photograph was taken, she certainly looks old, which means she had been alive when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt bringing with him his army and a huge force of scholars, artists and mathematicians, who recorded all the history of the temples during their Graphic Exploration of Egypt.

I took a photograph of the  tinted photograph and when I came home I painted it. Magnifying and looking closely at the image, I realized that Fendia was wearing a pair of gold earrings and a pharaonic collar! And she had a proper pair of shoes on her feet when normally the villagers walked barefoot,and even some of the children walked around naked. Ahmed's Daughter also wears a beautiful shawl so compared to the rest of the village they were wealthy.