Speaker: Stephen Cross
By Kate Phizackerley. Published on Egyptological, Magazine Edition 2, September 9th 2011.
Introduction
As described in the overview of the 2011 AWT Conference which I co-authored with Andrea Byrnes (see bottom of this review), the closing keynote lecture was delivered by Stephen Cross. His lecture created a buzz in the room and that has continued since Andrea Byrnes and I first posted about it on our respective blogs. We have both received a lot of correspondence: some people want to know more; some are nakedly sceptical. In this account of his lecture, I shall present the theory as described by Cross: this is intended as reportage not as as detailed critique, although obviously a certain level of commentary is included.
Cross has been interested for many years in the question of why the tomb of Tutankhamun, KV62, had remained undiscovered for centuries in the Valley of the Kings near modern-day Luxor until the discovery of the tomb by Howard Carter in 1922. That led him to ask why the tombs of KV55 and KV63 were also sealed until modern times. He thought that concealment by a natural phenomenon may offer an explanation. His first theory was that the tombs had been buried by faulting, but investigations revealed that the faults in the Valley of the Kings are not geologically active. His second theory was that the tombs had been buried by silt carried by flash floods and deposited in the central area at the confluence of three streams. He published an article on the topic in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology (Cross, Stephen W. (1993). “The Hydrology of the Valley of the Kings”. JEA 94: 303–310). In this lecture he was able to provide updates about excavation and Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) work that has since taken place.
Cross believes there is a capacity for another unknown tomb, or tombs, in the central area of the Valley of the Kings with an entrance cut immediately below, and sealed by, this flood deposit at an elevation of about 170m above mean sea level. At the end of the 2008/9 season, Dr Hawass arranged for the Glen Dash Foundation for Archaeological Research to conduct a radar survey of the central area and Cross reported to conference that this revealed...
(Click here to read full article)
Related articles:
AWT Conference 2011 (Amarna) – Overview
(good synopsis of Amarna period history and topics discussed in AWT conference)
AWT Conference 2011 Review: House and Home at el-Amarna by Kate Spence
AWT Conference 2011 Review: House and Home at el-Amarna by Kate Spence
(Dr Kate Spence of the University of Cambridge introduced the audience to an area of the city of Amarna which formed an equivalent of modern urban suburbs. Challenging the view that this residential area had been built to a formula set down by the Pharaoh and his advisers, she set out to show how this part of the site had evolved and developed, with interesting variations on a basic concept of how space should be organized.)
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