Silver gelatin on
glass 23.5 x 29.5 cm Epigraphic Survey, Oriental Institute,
University of Chicago |
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The
Mummy of Amenhotep II. Amenhotep II was the paragon of the athletic
kings of the early Eighteenth Dynasty and boasted of physically Homeric
deeds. Victor Loret found the king's mummy in 1898, still resting in his
own sarcophagus in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings. At that time,
before the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, he was the only pharaoh
whose mummy had survived the vicissitudes of continued robbery and
defilement and remained in his own sarcophagus in his own tomb. Amenhotep
II lay there, wrapped, until guards plundered the tomb in 1901. Howard
Carter tracked down the latter-day robbers, using, among other clues, the
imprints of their feet in the dust of the tomb. The mummy, exposed from
the waist up by this desecration, was returned to the sarcophagus, and a
lamp was placed at its head. In 1931 the mummy was removed for safekeeping
to the Cairo Museum.
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