In 1904, a group of archaeologists entered one of the largest tombs, and the most richly decorated, in Egypt’s Valley of the Queens at Thebes. In this small wadi, a dried riverbed in the western Theban desert, Egyptians of the New Kingdom (c.1539-1075 BC) buried members of the royal family and high-ranking officials and courtiers. Nearly 100 tombs were cut into the rock of the main wadi, most with a series of rooms leading to a burial chamber, where an eminent figure was interred in a stone coffin.
It was in this wadi, known to the ancient Egyptians as Ta-Set-Neferu (‘The Place of Beauty’), that a team from the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy, was given licence to excavate by the Egyptian Antiquities Service. Their mission was to explore the valley systematically and publish their findings, but also to acquire artefacts for the museum, to fill in chronological gaps in its collection, while obtaining important contextual data that would be lacking for objects that had been acquired on the antiquities market in Egypt, fairly common practice for museums of the time. And so the director of the museum, Egyptologist Ernesto Schiaparelli, started digging in the valley with his team over three seasons between 1903 and 1905. They investigated several tombs, including those of Princess Ahmose, four children of Ramesses III, and Imhotep, the vizier under Thutmose I, but perhaps their most significant discovery was in the 1904 expedition, when, led to the right place by a local guide, they excavated the great tomb of one of Egypt’s great queens: Nefertari.
As Schiaparelli wrote in his report on the work of the Italian Archaeological Mission:
Salt of the earth