THE SLAIN SOLDIERS OF TOMB 507: AN EGYPTOLOGICAL MYSTERY

Julian Heath investigates the grisly finds from the Deir el-Bahri rock-cut tomb.

- Julian Heath

In the Spring of 1923, the members of an archaeological team from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, led by the American Egyptologist, Herbert Winlock, were coming to the end of their season’s digging at Deir el-Bahri when they uncovered the entrance to a previously unknown tomb (Theban Tomb 507). This ancient burial place was found in the steep bay that forms a spectacular backdrop to the famous mortuary temples of the pharaohs Mentuhotep II and Hatshepsut. Ancient Egyptian workmen had dug Tomb 507 into the northern cliffs of the bay above Mentuhotep’s temple, locating it alongside that of the king’s chancellor Khety, in the middle of the row of tombs where the high officials of Mentuhotep’s court were buried.

The entrance had been hidden below an ancient landslide, raising hopes that the contents of the tomb remained untouched. However, as Winlock recounts, their hopes were soon dashed when they made a perfunctory inspection of the tomb’s interior: “

… it was seen that the place had been completely plundered ages ago, and had been left strewn with torn linen rags among which had been callously thrown a ghastly heap of robbed and mutilated bodies.”

Given that it was end of their excavation season, Winlock and his colleagues decided to reseal the tomb and return in the future to more fully investigate its grisly contents. They held out little hope, though, that they would find much in the way of artefacts among the piles of bones and linen bandages (in which the dead had once been wrapped,) that lay scattered on the floor of its roughly-cut corridor and adjoining chambers.

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