No comments The two tombs of Horemheb Horemheb began his funerary preparations long before he had any inkling that he would become pharaoh, meaning that he already had a private tomb at Saqqara when, as king, he started to build himself a large tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The tomb at Saqqara (like that of Maya, Tutankhamun’s Treasurer) had been partly discovered in the early 19th century AD when sculptures and reliefs were removed from both to European collections (principally to Leiden), but it was lost again until the excavations of the Egypt Exploration Society in 1975.
 |
| Tomb of Horemheb (found in 1975) |
Excavations at the Saqqara tomb revealed that the walls were superbly carved with scenes of Horemheb’s military and court career. From these we learn that there were at least two small campaigns Excavations at the Saqqara tomb revealed that the walls were superbly carved with scenes of Horemheb’s military and court career. From these we learn that there were at least two small campaigns during Tutankhamun’s reign against Libyans and Syrians – the faces of the prisoners are especially well represented in the carvings. The tomb was badly wrecked in antiquity, but enough remained of shattered funerary furniture and reliefs and a superb openwork gold earring that the robbers must have dropped to testify that Horemheb’s tomb was one of the finest in the area. He himself was not buried in the Saqqara tomb because of his elevation, although it appears that his two wives may have been. After Horemheb became pharaoh, he sent workmen to add the royal uraeus to his brow in the sculpted reliefs, even though he himself was not going to make use of the tomb (p. 138). Horemheb’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings (KV 57) was found by Theodore Davis in 1908. As with all the tombs in the royal valley, it was unfinished and had been robbed. Davis found large quantities of shattered furniture and wooden figures of the king, examples of which, some 14 years later, were to be found complete in Tutankhamun’s tomb, such as the king standing on the back of a striding panther (already known from the wall paintings in the later 20th Dynasty tomb of Seti II, KV 15). The painting of several rooms in the tomb had been finished to a very high standard. Work in other rooms, however, was still in progress when the king died, and these are particularly interesting because they show the manner of working – the outline grids and the corrections made.
In the burial hall Davis found Horemheb’s great red granite sarcophagus. Horemheb’s mummy was not discovered, although the remains of four individuals were scattered in the burial hall and a side chamber. These were probably members of Horemheb’s family, although it has been suggested that Ay’s body may have been brought here from his tomb in the Western Valley after it had been robbed. It is possible that a graffito found in the tomb refers to Horemheb’s body being moved to the tomb of Twosret and Setnakhte (KV 14) for restoration, but other than that there is no trace of it – it does not appear to be one of the unidentified bodies from the two mummy caches (p. 103).