Affordable Housing Institute : US

From the Guardian (serendipitously named for this piece) comes a great piece of news, the discovery of the oldest continuously occupied human dwelling known:

 

American archaeologists have made the first discovery of a new tomb in the Valley of the Kings since King Tutankhamun’s was uncovered in 1922, debunking the view that there was nothing left to find at the site in eastern Egypt, it emerged yesterday.

 

 

The deaths within a few years thereafter of Lord Carnarvon and several of the tomb’s first visitors led to the urban legend of King Tut’s Curse; but it is now thought to be airborne mold that infected the explorers’ lungs because they did not allow the tomb to fumigate.

 

Has the EPA checked this site for mildew?

 

The tomb, the 63rd discovered since explorers first started mapping the area more than 300 years ago, included five mummies in intact sarcophagi and more than 20 large storage jars bearing intact pharaonic seals, according to Zahi Hawass, the head of the supreme council of antiquities.

 

Though it houses the dead, not the living, an Egyptian tomb is both a sophisticated structure:

 

Tutankhamen’s tomb, cutaway view

 

a micro-museum of life (admittedly, of the upper class):

 

It was found four metres below ground level by a team of archaeologists from the University of Memphis, led by Otto Schaden. The burial site was under rubble and stones, about five metres away from Tutankhamun’s tomb.

 

The occupier of the tomb remains unknown. One expert not involved in the excavation said images suggested that it was probably not that of a king. “It could be the tomb of a king’s wife or son, or of a priest or court official,” Kent Weeks said.

 

The Valley of the Kings is a blasted land of east-facing escarpments that rise brokenly from the rich black alluvial soil (among the earliest names for Egypt was kemet, the black land) that supported agriculture and hence civilization. 

 

The walkway up to the tomb of Thutmose III, 18th dynasty

 

The tombs are sophisticated concealments, with false doors, trick passages, and ‘rabbit gardens’ (sub-rooms of lesser value meant to be discovered and looted, leaving the real sarcophagi undisturbed).

 

Finding Thutmose III’s tomb requires several abrupt and unexpected turnings.

For a spectacular interactive map, click on Theban mapping project and choose KV 34 (lower right), the tomb of Thutmosis III.

 

The Boss heading back from Thutmose III’s tomb

 

The tombs are significant not just because of their window into the past; building them was a central organizational challenge of Middle Kingdom society, for which the Egyptians established whole new towns and established extensive and complex work order systems. 

 

The Valley of the Kings was used for burials for around 500 years from 1540BC onwards.

 

Just as Egypt was the cradle of spontaneous communities, so too is it the birthplace of the world’s first planned unit developments: the workers’ village of Deir el Medina at Luxor.

 

The workers’ village, 1,500 years older than Pompeii.

 

Civilization comes from cities, and cities arise only in ambitious societies that seek to create new things.  In the act of seeking to send a few to the eternal afterlife, Egypt innovated new skills, new social structures, new towns, all of them inventions of lasting value much more worthy than simply preserving a single pharaoh’s ka.

 

Deir el Medina, Luxor: 3,500 years old.

 

Even though probably not royal — hence less gold — the discovery is even more exciting than King Tut’s –

 

 

– because of our much more sophisticated analytical technology.  Earlier excavations were little more than grave plundering or primitive chisel-and-brush excavation:

 

The site was not properly charted until the 18th century, when the early Egyptologists confirmed the presence of 47 tombs – although many artifacts were plundered. In 1922 Howard Carter found King Tut’s tomb, the first that was still largely intact.

 

Any tomb may offer a very useful time series:

 

The new tomb is a single chamber, meaning it was probably intended for a single mummy, he said. Other sarcophagi may have been put in at a later time. “The objects could be 200 to 400 years later than the original cutting of the tomb. Some could be original, some may have been introduced later.”

 

It’s also stimulating because, as everyone who visits the Valley of Kings must think, underneath these huge sandstone ridges, there might be more treasures yet to find:

 

“It clearly proves that the Valley of the Kings is still not exhausted” [said Weeks.]  “There are probably more tombs to be found in it.”

 

Here’s hoping:

 

 

Born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia

Born in Arizona, got a condo made o’ stone-ah

 

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