Another New Tomb in the Valley of the Kings?

Praxiteles writes "A radar survey in 2000 found KV63, the tomb excavated near King Tutankhamen's tomb earlier this year. (KV stands for Valley of the Kings). Just announced is that this same radar survey shows an image of what appears to be a shaft to another tomb just 15 meters north of KV63. Will radar stratigraphy change the multi-millennial tradition of destructive excavation and open new opportunities in the search for buried treasure?"

Comments

What??

[jlowery]

"Will radar stratigraphy change the multi-millennial tradition of destructive excavation and open new opportunities in the search for buried treasure?"

Let's hope it will open up new opportunities to learn about history, which contributes to the wealth of everyone.

Re:What??

[Tx]

"Will radar stratigraphy change the multi-millennial tradition of destructive excavation and open new opportunities in the search for buried treasure?"

Let's hope it will open up new opportunities to learn about history, which contributes to the wealth of everyone.

Maybe, but "Lara Croft, Radar Stratigrapher" just doesn't have that ring to it.

Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be

[Anonymous Coward]

My aunt works in Egyptology, and she doesn't have a lot of good things to say about this Reeves guy, so take this all with a grain of salt. The scan has found *something*, but not necessarily a tomb - limestone is naturally porous, and this could very well just be an air bubble. Basically, he's announcing a tomb that hasn't been discovered, which might not be a tomb at all, on the off-chance that, should it actually *be* a tomb, he'll get the credit for it.

He also isn't even allowed in the Valley of the Kings. He got the boot because he's been known to work with smugglers. Generally not a reputable character.

Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be

[hey!]

He also isn't even allowed in the Valley of the Kings. He got the boot because he's been known to work with smugglers.

Shades of E A Wallis Budge, a man so vain and unscrupulous, that the British Museum, the organization that he worked for, can only say this of him:

Budge's works are still in print, but this is because they are out of copyright, and so the text can be cheaply reprinted. While they are well illustrated, full of information and extremely cheap, they are at best unreliable, and usually misleading.

They only stopped short of slapping a red banner across his photo with the world "Crackpot".

Yet, nobody says Budge was stupid. Nor that he was unenterprising. He brought home lots of archaeological treasure that the Museum might not have received otherwise, which makes the Museum an important place for scholars. The down side is that he destroyed priceless and possibly irreplaceable knowledge in the process, which undermined the Museum's mission.

So, it isn't out of the question that a freebooting antiquities smuggler found a new, possibly unlooted, probably even royal tomb. IIRC we don't have tombs to match up every ruler we know to have existed from the period where the Valley of the Kings was in use. Furthermore, while most people I know are marginally unethical, very few of them view themselves as ruthlessly bad. Therefore he might not scruple to support antiquities smuggling, but might draw the line at looting a newly discovered tomb. Or the tomb, if it exists, may not be excatable without a fairly major engineering effort.

Or it may not exist at all. But I hope it does. Even a looted tomb is bound to be very interesting, unless all the inscriptions and paintings have been removed.

Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be

[techno-vampire]

Basically, he's announcing a tomb that hasn't been discovered, which might not be a tomb at all, on the off-chance that, should it actually *be* a tomb, he'll get the credit for it.

If you'd bothered to RTFA (Yeah, yeah, I know this is Slashdot; people never RTFA before posting.) you'd have seen two things. First, he's not saying it is a new tomb but that it might be. Second, he gives credit for the discovery of the other new tomb to the person who excavated it, even thought it had been found earlier in the radar survey.

Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be

[barakn]

FTFA, with the part you omitted highlighted in bold:

Reeves was falsely accused of involvement in antiquities smuggling and his permit was revoked. In August 2005, he was officially cleared of any wrongdoing by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), though not allowed to return to his work in the Valley.

Perhaps they just didn't have enough evidence.

I guess it's not...

[Jeian]

... the Valley of Kings in Loch Modan.

I should play WoW less.

Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom

[Quantum Fizz]

Neutrinos are notoriously difficult to detect, for precisely the same reasons that you propose using them as imaging - they can travel through nearly everything. I used to work for the SNO project back around 1996, the amount of engineering and technological sophistication that goes into a detector like this is quite amazing.
.

Back in the day there were proposals about using neutrinos to communicate with submarines and other military vehicles around the planet, since neutrinos can travel through the Earth. Since a military vessel would have to have a very small neutrino detector (to keep its mobility), the detection of neutrinos by this thing would be super low. IIRC, expected usable bandwidths (not sure if they actually did the experiment or not) would be something like a byte per day, which is obviously too low to be useful for military.

Plenty of false positives...

[posterlogo]

...called "dry holes" in the KV and surrounding areas, where tomb builders would build the antechamber, but then change their minds and go to another spot. So a supposed shaft, while exciting, even if what rader is picking up really was a product of ancient tomb builders, may still be a dead end.

Whenever they talk about tomb robbers I laugh

[voss]

Good for the tomb robbers...That treasure was collected off the backs of thousands of
slaves and from the pockets of honest egyptians for thousands of years. The "tomb robbers"
are not thieves, that stuff was abandoned the same as a sunken treasure ship. The egyptian government didnt even care until they realized they could make money off it.

At least the tomb robbers did something with the gold and treasure instead of just taking
from innocent people and burying it. What good does it do history yet another
Golden mask sitting in some museum somewhere. At least the tomb robbers enjoyed the
treasure and put the gold into the economy.

You want to talk about a treasure...the palimpset of archimedes is a treasure, the Rosetta stone is a treasure, the ruins of pompeii and karnak are treasures, Gold should be used for the living not the dead.

Oblig Stargate Quote

[Gryle]

Col O'Neill: "Don't matter what kind of radation suit we have. If you'd been listening you'd know that Nintendos pass through everything."

Typical /. story...

[Tiro]

Come on, this stuff is Ancient History!!

Re:We should leave some stuff where it is.

[MjrTom]

You are entirely correct. Funding does play a big part (archaeology is incredibly expense if it's done right), however the truth is that for the most part, those of us who do archaeology today are worlds better than those who went before us. We also realize that those who come after us will be much better than we are due to advances in methodology, theory, and technologies such as gradiometry and resistivity. When I was working actively in the academic research side of things we tried to excavate no more than 5% of a site, leave the rest for future archs who will know things we don't, and thus will be able to get information we cannot. It must always be remembered that archaeology is at its heart a destructive science - we can't just do it over again if we screw up, screw ups mean that information is permanently lost.

On the salvage side of things it's slightly different, for example if there was a new interstate highway going through an archaeological site and there was absolutely no way to reroute that road, we would attempt to do 100% recovery of the site. This almost never happens (it'd have to be a really small site - digging right takes a long time and the road builders get pissy if you sit there and delay them for too long. Can't stop progress). In salvage or "Section 106" or whathaveyou style archaeology the rule is to reover as much as possible as quickly as possible.