Secrets of Discovering Royal Mummies

Dr. Zahi Hawass revealed a story about the secrets of discovering royal mummies in Luxor.

Hawass writes: The Valley of the Kings was calm and hot in July 1871. Ahmed Abdul Rasul, a member of the famous Abdul Rasul family, was grazing his sheep in the valley. One of the herd suddenly fled up the valley south of the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut in Deir el-Bahari. He followed the ewe till he reached the top of the mountain to grab it; he found a deep well in front of him about 20 meters deep. He left the ewe and began to descend to the bottom of the well.

Abdul Rasul found that there was a dam in the north side of the well, and then began to remove the stones until he found in front of him an entrance to a cemetery carved in the mountain. He entered and found before him a surprise he did not expect at all.

Inside the well, he found gold, silver and coffins and about 40 royal mummies. He did not touch any piece of mummy cache inside but went to meet his brothers, telling them about the dangerous revelation. They agreed to keep the secret and not talk to anyone about this disclosure.

At the time, foreign countries appointed consuls in Luxor whose main task was to buy antiquities and send them to Europe and America. An English consul was a friend of the family, so he knew the secret and began to discuss with the sons of Abdul Rasul. They entered the cache three times and obtained some royal monuments that began to appear in Europe.

Marit Pasha was on a visit to Paris, where he observed that monuments were being sold in the market. He realized that a royal cemetery was discovered in the Valley of the Kings; so he sent a group of archaeologists to Luxor, headed by Ahmed Kamel Pasha, the first Egyptian archaeologist, to cooperate with the police to reveal the secret.

After a lot of investigations, they found that the family of Abdul Rasul had a hand in the matter of discovery, so Qena police arrested one of the family members and remained in prison for a whole month.

He went out of prison and entered the village in Qurna to declare his innocence from theft of antiquities. He entered the house and met with his brothers and told them that he was tortured in prison. Therefore his share of the cache must be more. The fight and quarrel among the brothers began ensued, until one of them went to the Qena security director and reported as having a cache of the monastery in 1881, 10 years after its discovery.

The archaeological and police workers visited the spot where cache was and continued for a month digging, extracting the mummies and putting them inside a boat to be transferred to Cairo.

When the mummies arrived in Cairo in a customs zone, a customs officer refused entry of the mummies because there is no name in the notebooks. His boss pointed out that there is a word "Salted fish," and the mummies entered as salted fish.

"The creative man Shadi Abdel Salam directed this story in a movie called «Mummy.» Unfortunately, all who worked in this work died except the great beautiful artist Nadia Lutfi. She lives in Maadi Hospital, and when I visit her always tells me about the most beautiful days I lived in the Qurna acting the movie “Mummy,” said Hawass.

When the mummies were being transported to Cairo, women stood in black clothes screaming for the departure of their grandparents from Luxor.

Contributed by Ahmad El-Assasy