BOB Cribbs was an unusual American friend who loved Egypt very much and Egypt loved him too.
In the past, I have written articles of how Bob Cribbs and I worked together, using new technologies to discover the second boat chamber of King Cheops and to rediscover the musical scale of the Ancient Egyptians.
In this article and the one that follows, I am going to talk about the third scientific adventure concerning the tomb of Seti I.
The tomb of Seti I is situated in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor. It is one of the largest tombs there and one of the most beautiful.
It was discovered by the Italian traveller Belzoni in the beginning of the nineteenth century (1817). The tomb was very tricky; Seti I was trying to fool, as much as he could, the tomb robbers and prevent them from reaching his burial chamber.
At the entrance of the tomb and after few dozen steps, you end in what appears to be a burial chamber with a shaft in the ground to give the impression that this is the end of the tomb. Belzoni knocked on the wall and found out that it was a ruse. He broke the wall to find a continuation of the descending corridor behind it.
He continued following the steps in the newly discovered corridor, which had fully decorated side walls, for quite a long distance. He ended up in a four columned hall simu¬lating the entrance to the burial chamber. This hall led to what was supposed to be a burial chamber.
In order to give the impression that this was definitely the burial chamber, there were unfinished sketched draw¬ings on the walls of that chamber in order to insinuate that the chamber was under construction when the king died, so it was left unfinished.
Again Belzoni doubted the concept and started testing the different walls until the wall to the left of the entrance indi-cated a cavity behind it.
He knocked down part of this wall to find the beginning of another corridor that lead further down to another six columned hall followed by a beautiful vaulted hall that had a nice astronomical sky presentation known today as the “Astronomical Ceiling of Seti I Tomb”.
In this beautiful astronomical hall, he found a unique sar¬cophagus made out of transparent alabaster so that if you put light source inside, you see the transparency of it.
Around this hall there were many antechambers. All the halls, chambers and antechambers were well decorated by different scenes and religious texts. The sarcophagus was empty; Belzoni removed it and took it back home.
In the wall behind the sarcophagus, he found again the beginning of an unfinished tunnel, went into that tunnel, from which a number of birds and owls flew out, for few metres but couldn’t continue because it was in very bad condition.
He stopped there with the unanswered question: Does the tunnel lead to the real burial chamber? Belzoni took with him the alabaster sarcophagus and some fragments of different walls back with him. He made sketches of all the walls and organised an exhibition of this magnificent tomb in Piccadilly Circus, London in 1821.
In the next article, we will see how we followed the steps of Belzoni to see if there were missing chambers in the tomb of Seti I.
