What the Lost Tomb of Thutmose II Really Proves

Welcome to History for Granite. Join me to explore ancient Egypt. Please subscribe, and together we'll uncover secrets from the past written in stone. The discovery of a pharaoh's tomb from ancient Egypt is a rare event, and amazingly, the original resting place of Thutmose II was recently uncovered. The tomb itself, however, was unremarkable, with only a few damaged artifacts indicating the king had been laid to rest there before being relocated due to flooding. The family history of Thutmose II, his half-sister wife Hatshepsut, and the politics of kingship during that era are a popular historical topic other creators will cover with better knowledge than myself. Personally, I find the incestuous palace intrigue of the 18th dynasty a far less interesting topic than the mighty pyramids of the Old Kingdom. So, it was with great surprise that I found myself pulled down a rabbit hole about Thutmose II due to comments in the press from the lead Egyptologist on this project. Piers Litherland spent a decade of work on this mission before the tomb was uncovered in late 2022. A year later, he predicted that this tomb was built for Thutmose II in an article published in the magazine Egyptian Archaeology. Then recently, it was announced that funerary artifacts found in the tomb proved this to be the case. However, Litherland says there is more to find, and stated that he believes the final resting place for Thutmose II is in another undiscovered tomb located nearby. Apparently, there are plans to excavate this potential new tomb in the coming months. Contrary to popular belief, I prefer to take Egyptologists and archaeologists at their word and assume their statements are well-founded and credible. This provoked a feeling of excitement. A potential new discovery, akin to the famous Tutankhamun's tomb, which also comes from the 18th dynasty? Who wouldn't be enthralled by such a possibility? Litherland's evidence for this There are no burial goods of any sort relating to the burial of Thutmose II in any museum or private collection. The body of a 30-year-old found in 1881 in Deir el-Bahari and previously identified as Thutmose II is too old to belong to the pharaoh. Some Egyptologists believe he reigned only 3-4 years and died shortly after fathering Thutmose III. This evidence seemed worthy enough for consideration, and so I decided to take a closer look. The first question to ask is, why would a mummy found in a royal cache of buried pharaohs have the name Thutmose II if it's not actually him? Amazingly, this would not be unprecedented, given the messy condition in which royal mummy caches were discovered. Some royal mummies are found inside coffins with other people's names on them, and some are lacking written evidence entirely. It would seem the process of reburying these pharaohs was a bit hasty and haphazard. Far more attention was given to stripping their valuable grave goods than keeping track of who was who when laying them back to rest. Compounding this confusion is that this horde of royal mummies was excavated in under 48 hours by Emil Bruksch in July of 1881, who was concerned that any delay would lead to theft. Bruksch did not document nor could remember the original arrangement of the burials, and thus important context about them was lost. We can only infer from coffins that have names on them and the faces and styles of mummification on each body to determine who is who. As luck would have it, one of these coffins and the mummy inside of it was labeled as Thutmose II. This is about the highest standard of evidence for such mummies. The evidence was so poor for which mummy was his father, Thutmose I, that the visual similarity to this unlabeled mummy was long considered the strongest indicator for a candidate. So, if the mummy labeled Thutmose II is not actually Thutmose II as Litherland speculates, at least we have something to consider. This was a fun thought exercise. Why would the body be a fake, and what evidence might reveal this to be the case? If Litherland was correct and Thutmose II was never found, I can imagine a scenario whereby the officials charged with rounding up the previous pharaohs for treasure recycling and reburial wouldn't want to admit they couldn't find one. Rather than admitting failure, they simply take some random prince's mummy and inscribe a new coffin as Thutmose II to present a full set of pharaohs to complete the job. The wooden coffins for this royal mummy cache are apparently recycled, although it's unclear which ones may have previously belonged to other people, or if some were original, stripped bare of their gilding, and re-inscribed afterwards. They are undignified for such famous kings, but at least some decorative work was done to make each coffin appropriate for its final inhabitant. I'm not at all qualified to evaluate the nuances of 18th to 22nd dynasty coffins, but I figured it would be fun to look anyway. After all, if we have a fake Thutmose II, perhaps something about the coffin would be apparently different. It wasn't long before the first major clue caught my eye. While many coffins of the royal cache are similar, only two coffins appear nearly identical. The coffins of Thutmose II and Amenhotep I are decorated in the exact same manner. This anomaly was not ignored by Egyptology, but the explanation has been that the same workshop reprocessed both mummies at similar times. Okay, that's plausible enough, but how does the workshop determine the decorative scheme for each new coffin? If it's not important, you might as well make all of them the exact same. Or, if you're inventing a new decorative scheme each time, why would any two of them look so similar? I found the most likely explanation to be that the scribes would simply copy the original design onto the new coffin. Given the new coffin's modest quality, that minimum effort seems the simplest and most appropriate workflow. But it's less likely that two pharaohs would have identical coffin designs in their original state, especially considering that Amenhotep I is the grandfather of Thutmose II. Their original burials would be far removed from each other in space and time. Litherland's theory of a fake Thutmose II was starting to seem more likely. If your workflow is to copy the old coffin design onto the new one, what do you do if you don't have an original to copy? You simply duplicate the design of another example from the same era and change the names. When looking closely at these two coffins, I find this explanation to be the most probable. Even their faces look alike, and it's amusing how Thutmose II's coffin is similar and yet so inferior at the same time. Look at how the bird is supposed to be the same, but the one on Thutmose II was inscribed with far less skill. His ears look as if they were glued on separately from the head. Ancient architects and I had a long laugh about how much of a Scooby-Doo mask it was starting to seem like. Maybe Litherland was right, and Thutmose II had escaped desecration for thousands of years, with nobody the wiser except for a workshop that produced an ugly replica. Remember, Thutmose II is not known to have lived long enough to match this body as well. As satisfying as this explanation was, one last thing needed to be scrutinized before agreeing with Litherland about Thutmose II. While the coffins are nearly identical, I needed to understand what about them was also unique. Amenhotep I has a hieratic inscription across the chest, which Egyptologists refer to as a docket, meaning it's an official account of These dockets are quite standardized, and there are two types. One type identifies the mummy's name and their social status. The other type is an official record of activity carried out in connection with the corpse. At first you might say, aha, Thutmose II has no docket on his coffin, and of course a fake replica would not have a docket either. But the dockets are also written inside coffin walls and also on the linen wraps of the mummies themselves. The information contained in these dockets is obscure Egyptology lore, and I had to go back to a book by Nicholas Reeves from 1990 to get any useful information about their contents. Even with the contents of the dockets spelled out, their meanings are not always clear. Docket type B gives the official record of activity with the mummy. There are only five types of activity noted, and four of them are inspection, burial, restoration of burial, and osirification, which means some official act relating to the god Osiris. But as it turns out, the fifth type of activity for an official docket appears on only one pharaoh. Only the linen wrap of Thutmose II has this official act recorded. This unique docket record for Thutmose II says that there was a repetition of interment, meaning the body was interred in a tomb more than once. At the time these dockets were being studied, it was assumed this referred to Thutmose II being moved to a royal mummy cache. A potential move was with other pharaohs to King's Valley Tomb 39, which may have been a temporary resting place before their final move to the royal cache at Deir el-Bahari. There wasn't any other explanation for what Thutmose II's docket could mean by repetition of interment. But thanks to Pierre Litherland's discovery of the original yet flooded tomb of Thutmose II, we now know exactly what the docket is referring to. For it was only Thutmose II that needed an official re-interment because his first tomb was entirely spoiled. The docket isn't referring to mummies being relocated in caches, either in KV39 or Deir el-Bahari, because no other mummy has this unique record on their dockets. All of those other mummies were relocated to caches just like Thutmose II. What Pierre Litherland has proved with the discovery of the tomb is the exact opposite of his speculation regarding the mummy of Thutmose II. He has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that this mummy is in fact Thutmose II because a fake or incorrectly labeled body would not have a docket testifying to the archaeological evidence we now see. If the burial of Thutmose II was lost or forgotten, nobody would know or remember that he had been re-interred due to flooding of his first tomb. This was an event that happened only to Thutmose II, and only Thutmose II has such a record written on the docket of his mummy. And with that evidence, I think we can lay the mystery of the mummy of Thutmose II to rest for good. Egyptologists can now move forward with confidence in using Thutmose II's body as a reference for understanding his reign and comparisons to other royal mummies of lesser provenance. Finally, what about the potential second tomb of Thutmose II that Litherland is keen to excavate? I suppose it could be another tomb for Thutmose II, but if it is, there won't be any treasure inside. Everything of value would have been removed along with the body, although perhaps some painted reliefs may survive to tell the tale. I suggest that if the original tomb was greatly flooded, there might not have been much left of value to preserve in the first place. Maybe even the original coffin of Thutmose II was ruined, and this is why he acquired a crude facsimile of Amenhotep I's coffin at a later time. A better discovery for Egyptology would be an undisturbed tomb of a forgotten prince or princess rather than one more plundered pharaonic crypt. Either way, I look forward to the findings, and I'll leave the corpse comparisons to the Egyptologists. A benefit of comparing pyramid stones is that the vast majority tend to stay in place. If clues to the past are the real treasure, there's a lot more out there waiting to be found. Thanks to everyone who watched this video to the end. Please subscribe to the channel to see more of this content. Give a like or comment as you see fit. And above all, remember to ask your if they take their history for granted.