At this home in Tallmadge, Doctor Earl Ertman looks over photographs of the Egyptian site designated as KV 63. For much of the winter, the retired University of Akron art professor and some of his former students were digging into the white limestone floor of the Valley of the Kings, on the west bank of the Nile river. In February, the team broke through the doorway of the tomb.
Earl Ertman: You can see them here. Here is one of our photographers here, Heather Alexander of Bedford. This is the drywall closing. Some of the drywall had been knocked in. She is short and small; she gets her camera in there. And the next few shots are just what the camera saw.
Looks like a wooden casket?
Earl Ertman: Yeah, a wooden coffin. We thought at first there were five - once we got in... there were seven. This is the coffin that came out last week - a youth coffin. Now so far, we found no mummies. On the 'net they said 'you found this many mummies' - we've found none yet.
Ertman is still hoping - one of the best preserved coffins has not been opened yet. Just this week it was announced that mission director Otto Schaden of Chicago opened the child's coffin and found a remarkable gold coffinette - about two feet long - inside. Information on all discoveries leaks out slowly as they all have to be reported first to the Egyptian government.
Finding this site at all was a surprise. Dr Ertman's team was working nearby - just five to ten yards away from King Tut's tomb. Doing some exploration just a few feet deep they found the remains of a workmen's hut about 3,200 years old. But digging through that they found the entrance shaft to this new tomb, which is centuries older.
Earl Ertman: And right there is where Otto found three of the four sides of the tomb shaft.
What indication (did you have) that something was under the old ruins?
Earl Ertman: No indication. It's just good archeology - you go to the bedrock.
I would have thought that area would have been picked through by now.
Earl Ertman: Well, a lot of people have. There's much to be found there in a lot of places, and I'm not going to tell you where to go yet, because I may live a little longer, and If I ever get money we might find some more places. We lucked out. We have a shaft, we have a tomb. And it has been... it's been entered once but has not been robbed heavily. The problem is, as you'll see in another slide, we have termites - we've had termites since antiquity.
Those termites destroyed most of the wooden coffins but some parts that have paint survived - like the one that resembles a beautiful young woman.
Earl Ertman: This is not the first coffin. This is the one with the prettiest face. But look at the wood - there's nothing left! But this is the face that would stop 1,000 ships. There's no damage to her. But here headdress everything else is eaten up. Because she is just painted, her face is and her ears.
Does it have a particular smell when you first get in?
Earl Ertman: Yes, when I first entered it was very aromatic. Like a very nice potpourri - I don't really like potpourri very much, but there was a nice fragrance. Now maybe it was the flowers disintegrating or what... it didn't last long but I thought, 'maybe I shouldn't be sucking up this stuff.'
The crew found several woven wreaths of flowers that were actually worn as collars. Ertman says that's an indication of a burial. It's possible that some mummies were buried there and then later moved.
What intrigues Egyptologists about this tomb is its proximity in both space and time to Tutankhamen's tomb. Dr. Ertman says his team has found seals that were stamped in soft mud that match some found in King Tut's tomb.
Earl Ertman: We assume at some point, maybe not, when the coffins were made, at some point we're in the time period of Tut or King who buried him. How much of the other things date to that precise time I can't tell you yet.
Any hunch who was buried?
Earl Ertman: No, plenty of suppositions and as soon as you say something somebody jumps on you. I'll be glad to wait. A lot of people would like to make it an Amarna cache - they'd like the daughters of Akhenaton to all have died and interred there. Well, without mummies, that's going to be tough and without inscriptions, that's going to be even harder.
Earl Ertman also says this tomb and the nearby royal tombs were cut into the stone with a particular kind of overhang that indicates the same builder was responsible. And even though some objects have yet to opened and examined, he already considers this a significant find. Mark Urycki, 90.3.