Tomb May Yield the Sons of Pharaoh

Archaeologists are on the brink of identifying at least one of three human skulls and a complete skeleton found in a 3,200-year-old tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings.

They suspect that they have the remains of four sons of Ramses II, the pharaoh traditionally identified with the biblical story of Moses, and also the mighty ruler celebrated by the poet Shelley as Ozymandias. One skull bears evidence of a lethal head wound. Kent Weeks, the US archaeologist who has spent 20 years mapping the tombs of ancient Thebes, believes that the skull may have belonged to Ramses, son of Ramses II, and chief military spokesman for the greatest of the pharaohs.

The tomb is one of the most astonishing stories in Egyptology - it had been considered a "dirty, unimportant hole in the ground" until the revelation in 1995 that it was a significant historical site.

Ramses has been identified by generations of historians as the pharaoh who enslaved the people of Israel. Pharaoh released Moses and the Israelites after 10 terrible plagues they believed were sent by God. According to the Book of Exodus, in the 10th plague God took the lives of all the first-born sons of Egypt.

"We have thought all along that these four skulls and skeletons belonged to the sons of Ramses II. And it is possible that this one in fact can be more specifically identified as a son who was killed on a field of battle. We know he was killed by a blow to the skull. It seems logical to assume he was killed on a field of battle because of the nature of the wound," Professor Weeks said.

The four bodies were found in a pit near the entrance to a tomb in the Valley of the Kings now famous as KV5. The tomb itself had been mapped by French scientists in 1799, and visited by a Victorian explorer in 1835, but was believed to be tiny and without interest. In 1995, Prof Weeks announced that it had more than 60 chambers - all choked with rubble from flash floods - and contained a number of hieroglyphic references to the sons of Ramses II. At the latest count, the tomb has more than 110 chambers.

"We have found an additional doorway leading in to additional corridors, so all bets are off as to how many there are going to be," he said.

In London on Saturday, he outlined the riddle of Ramses to a Bloomsbury Academy summer school in Egyptology. He has already worked with radiologists, orthodontists and pathologists to examine the skull shapes of mummies in the hall of pharaohs in the Egyptian museum. The next step is to compare the skulls of the four mysterious denizens of KV5 with x-rays of the mummies of Ramses II, his father Seti I and Merenptah, the 13th son and heir to Ramses II, all preserved in Cairo. DNA sampling has been ruled out. But scientists and archaeologists believe that skull comparisons could establish at least a statistical likelihood of a genetic link.

"I think what happened was that shortly after the tomb was closed, tomb robbers broke in, went to the back of the tomb where the burial chambers lay, removed the mummies that were buried there and carried them out to the front part of the tomb where the light was better," said Prof Weeks. "They could then rip open the mummies and take whatever amulets and jewellery they found. They left the bodies behind. Over the next 3,000 years floods came in, carrying vast quantities of debris, and the bodies were washed in to this pit, and other parts were washed back into the tomb. Indeed, as we dig further inside the tomb, we are finding human remains that could very well be parts of these same bodies."

The tomb has already yielded the names of two sons of the great pharaoh: his first born, Amon-her-khepeshef and Ramses the military leader.

History file

Ramses II reigned from1279 BC to 1212 BC

The pharaoh in the Exodus account of Moses and the Israelites is not named, and there is no Egyptian account of any such event

Ramses had another name: User-maat-re, or Ozymandias rendered in ancient Greek - Shelley's "king of kings"

The website of the tomb dig in the Valley of the Kings, www.kv5.com, gets 18m hits a year.