The Last Pharaoh’s Tomb?

Also: A new history of Madrid, Florida’s Walton-DeFuniak Library, portraits behind masterpieces, and more.

Source: The Egyptian Museum

Good morning. The last undiscovered tomb of the Tutankhamun dynasty has been found:

Archaeologists have found the last undiscovered royal tomb of the 18th Egyptian dynasty, which included the famous pharoah Tutankhamun. The uncovering of King Thutmose II’s tomb marks the first time a pharoah’s tomb has been found by a British-led excavation since Tutankhamun’s was found over a century ago.

The British-Egyptian team located it in the Western Valleys of the Theban Necropolis near the city of Luxor. Researchers had thought the burial chambers of the 18th dynasty pharaohs were more than 2km away, closer to the Valley of the Kings.

More from Piers Litherland, who led the excavation:

His team found the pharaoh Thutmose II’s tomb underneath a waterfall in the Theban mountains in Luxor, about 3km west of the Valley of the Kings. It contained almost nothing but debris, and the team believe it was flooded and emptied within six years of the pharaoh’s death in 1479BC.

Now Litherland has told the Observer he believes he has identified the location of a second tomb belonging to Thutmose II. And this one, he suspects, will contain the young pharaoh’s mummified body and grave goods.

Archeologists believe this second tomb has been hiding in plain sight for 3,500 years, secretly buried beneath 23 metres of limestone flakes, rubble, ash and mud plaster and made to look like part of the mountain.

“There are 23 metres of a pile of man-made layers sitting above a point in the landscape where we believe – and we have other confirmatory evidence – there is a monument concealed beneath,” he said. “The best candidate for what is hidden underneath this enormously expensive, in terms of effort, pile is the second tomb of Thutmose II.”

While searching close to the first tomb for clues about where its contents were taken after the flood, Litherland found a posthumous inscription buried in a pit with a cow sacrifice. This inscription indicates the contents may have been moved by the king’s wife and half-sister Hatshepsut – one of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs and one of the few women to rule in her own right – to an as-yet undiscovered second tomb nearby . . . For Litherland, who became fascinated with ancient Egypt as a young boy, the thought of finding Thutmose II’s final resting place is breathtaking. “You dream about such things. But like winning the lottery, you never believe it will happen to you.”

Here are some more pictures from The Sun and Sky News.

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In other news, Benjamin Riley reviews a new history of Madrid:

De Madrid al cielo goes the proverb—after Madrid, Heaven. Ernest Hemingway expressed a similar sentiment in Death in the Afternoon (1932). Madrid, he wrote, “makes you feel very badly, all question of immortality aside, to know that you will have to die and never see it again.” But the wily Madrileños have a workaround. “De Madrid al cielo y un agujerito para verlo” runs the whole phrase: “After Madrid, Heaven, and a little hole still to see it.”

In Luke Stegemann’s perceptive “new biography” of the kaleidoscopic capital of Spain, he chides Hemingway for possibly being “responsible for any number of dreadful clichés about the country” while recognizing the American’s appreciation for both greater Spain and Madrid itself, which Hemingway called “the most Spanish of all cities, the best to live in, the finest people, month in and month out the finest climate.” Any visitor to modern Madrid cannot help but be impressed by its world-class museums, Baroque architecture, manicured green spaces, and of course the justifiably famous culinary culture. With Stegemann as a trusty guide, always both interested and interesting, the reader learns how a place that began as a Muslim fortification in the ninth century A.D. has become one of the world’s most dynamic cities and a major draw for tourists the world over.

The C.I.A. book smuggling operation that helped undermine communism: “The volume’s glossy dust jacket shows a 1970s computer room, where high priests of the information age, dressed in kipper ties and flares, tap instructions into the terminals of some ancient mainframe. The only words on the front read ‘Master Operating Station’, ‘Subsidiary Operating Station’ and ‘Free Standing Display’. Is any publication less appetising than an out-of-date technical manual? Turn inside, however, and the book reveals a secret. It isn’t a computer manual at all, but a Polish language edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s famous anti-totalitarian novel, which was banned for decades by communist censors in the eastern bloc.”