Archaeologists found dozens more rooms inside Egypt's largest pharaonic tomb this month but said Wednesday they were no closer to finding out exactly where the sons of the great warrior pharaoh Ramses II were buried.
Professor Kent Weeks, leading a team of 40 excavators in the Valley of the Kings near the town of Luxor, said he had found two new corridors inside the vast 3,000-year-old site, just months after uncovering the tomb itself.Both corridors were flanked by rows of chambers, possibly used as "offering chapels" for the dead princes, bringing to over 90 the total number of rooms in the pharaonic mausoleum, Weeks told Reu-ters in an interview.
Excavators found turquoise jewelry, pottery, jars and fragments of sarcophagi and food offerings left for ancient Egyptian gods inside the tomb, known to archaeologists as KV-5.
Weeks said each offering chapel was probably linked to a prince's burial chamber that the excavators believe are still hidden on a lower level of the tomb.
"Everything we have found points to the fact that this tomb was used to bury several of Ramses II's sons," said Weeks, a senior Egyptologist at the American University in Cairo.
But he said the actual resting places of up to 50 sons of Ramses, who held the Egyptian empire together for 67 years during its zenith in the 13th century B.C., remained elusive.
In three months of excavations since September Weeks' team cleared out one of two corridors branching off from the back of the tomb in the hope of finding the burial chambers.
He said they uncovered a staircase leading downwards, with steps on either side of a ramp down which a mummy's sarcophagus, or coffin, was often lowered to its burial place.
"We were quite ecstatic, thinking we were on the right track," Weeks said. "But then we ran into a wall - no door, and no indication of a lower level."
"But what we found two weeks ago was that in the front of the tomb, in exactly the opposite direction we had thought anything would go, were two more parallel corridors heading down at an angle of 30 degrees," he said.
Before returning to Cairo Tuesday, the excavators only had time to dig a few yards down one of the corridors, long enough to uncover 12 more rooms and see that it reached at least a few yards farther.
"I'm very unhappy I had to stop work just the day before yesterday," Weeks said. "I would have liked to have stayed there digging until my arm fell off."