Kent Weeks, the Egyptologist who grabbed world headlines last month with his discovery of a mammoth 3,200-year-old tomb, was in town this week talking about his triumph and displaying a finely tuned sense of humor.
Moving along a buffet line at a luncheon held in his honor earlier this week at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, Weeks, 54, joked about experiencing short-term memory loss as he gets older.
“For an archeologist,” he said, “that means you can’t remember anything that has happened in the last 1,000 years.”
Weeks is a big sun-reddened affable man with beefy hands. He would look as much at home in a Midwestern cornfield as sorting through rubble in Egypt’s fabled Valley of the Kings at Luxor for some of humankind’s oldest memories.
It was there that Weeks announced in May that his team discovered an unusual mausoleum that may be the most important archeological find in Egypt since Howard Carter’s 1922 discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. It is the first multiple royal burial site to be found in the Valley of the Kings, and Weeks believes it may hold remains of 50 of 52 sons born to Ramses II, the most flamboyant of Egypt’s ancient pharaohs.
Weeks, professor of archeology at American University in Cairo, is on a lecture tour of major U.S. cities, raising funds to underwrite his life’s work.
Weeks heads the Theban Mapping Project, which painstakingly records the position, structure and inscriptions of all the monuments and tombs at ancient Thebes (now called Luxor). Many of them already have disappeared due to exposure to elements and to vandalism and day-to-day wear and tear of tourist traffic.
Chicago was worth a three-day stop for Weeks, because it is a city steeped in Egyptology. The Oriental Institute was founded by James Henry Breasted, America’s pioneering Egyptologist who started Chicago’s archeology department 100 years ago this year.
Breasted also founded Chicago House, the institute’s field headquarters at Luxor, where Weeks worked as the director from 1973 to 1976.
Arriving here Sunday, he made appearances before some privately organized groups of potential donors, as well as delivering his spellbinding standing-room-only public lecture at the institute’s auditorium.
Weeks talked about how his mundane fear that heavy tourist traffic was damaging the tombs dug into the hillsides of the Valley of the Kings led directly to his most recent find.
The tomb’s small, unadorned entrance was first noted in modern times by a French archeologist in 1820. A century later, Howard Carter, before discovering King Tut, also found the entrance. He was so unimpressed, he used it as a dump for his later digs, covering it with 8 feet of debris.
“I thank him (Carter) for that,” Weeks said, “for protecting it until we could uncover it, again.”
In 1986, he grew concerned when the government announced plans to widen a tour bus parking lot in an area above where he thought the tomb might be. He soon found it right behind a line of tent stalls set up by Egyptian souvenir sellers hawking film and fake antiquities.
It took years of laborious hand excavation, however, to work his way into the tomb to find its intricate passageways leading to the 67 chambers so far discovered.
Up to 12 feet in height, most of the chambers are filled with 11 feet of debris collected by 32 centuries of occasional flooding in the area. Looted by ancient grave robbers shortly after completion, the tomb exhibits no evidence that anybody has been inside since, Weeks said.
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The tomb has at least five blocked doorways that remain to be opened and explored, and Weeks believes there is a second tier of chambers below those he’s found already.
He and his crew are uncovering wall inscriptions that promise whole new chapters in the story of Ramses II. They also are pulling out bits of furniture, funerary jars, clay jewelry and human remains, presumably of royal sons, that Weeks said he intends to submit to DNA experts for testing (“if they ever finish in L.A.”).
As he reeled off the names of some of Ramses II’s more intriguing sons whose remains he believes he may eventually find, the lights in Oriental Institute’s darkened auditorium suddenly went on, startling the audience. Someone standing in the rear had inadvertently leaned on the lighting system’s wall button.
“Did you ever hear of the curse of the mummy?” Weeks quickly blurted, not missing a beat. “I mean, I no more than mention the name of Prince Seti, and suddenly the darkness becomes light.”