Egyptian tomb find may yield little

Press, 13 February 1986, Page 13

Egyptian tomb find may yield little

NZPA-Reuter CAIRO A Dutch archaeologist says he does not expect any treasure to be found in the 3000-year-old tomb of King Tutankhamun’s Finance Minister, Maya, which he helped discover recently. He did hope to find historical texts of superb quality. “It would be a bit exaggerated to say it is the most important find since Professor Howard Carter found King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922,” said Jacobus van Dijk, “but it is an important find.” The tomb was discovered at Saqqarra, 20km south of Cairo, by Mr van Dijk and a British colleague, Geoffrey Martin, of the Anglo-Dutch Egyptian Exploration Society. Mr van Dijk said they hoped texts on the walls of the tomb would provide

information about Maya’s career under the boy king, Tutankhamun, and his successors. Two 20-metre deep shafts were found, one dating back to the New Kingdom, circa 1350 8.C., and a 2.5 m spiral staircase. A tomb robbers’ breakthrough was discovered also and Mr van Dijk said he expected that robbers would have carried away the treasures of Maya and unwrapped his mummy to get at gold. “But we might find his bones,” he said. Mr van Dijk described the inside of the tomb as very damp and hot with little oxygen. He said it would take up to six years to clear rubble, study the inscriptions, and catalogue the find in an area which he and Mr Martin started excavating in 1975. Mr Martin told the British Broadcasting Corpora-

tlon in an interview from Cairo that the tomb ' con- '* tained “the most wonderful reliefs and inscriptions ... in pristine condition.” “Suddenly, we glimpsed these wonderful reliefs and we were exceedingly startled to find ourselves in the ante-room leading to a burial chamber,” he said. “My colleague looked across and said, •My God, it’s Maya’.” Maya apparently had a close relationship with Tutankhamun, Mr Martin said. In 1922 Carter discovered two funerary figures in the young pharoah’s tomb, placed there by Maya. This indicated he had a special place in the royal household. . The site of Maya’s burial place was found by a Prussian archaeologist in the last century but not excavated. Winds covered the area with sand and the tomb was lost until recently.