Four thousand years ago, the well dressed Egyptian mummy went to the tomb decked out in all manner of jewels-not for decoration but as insurance. If you wanted a full and happy afterlife, then you needed a whole and well preserved body and a plentiful supply of those luxuries you enjoyed during your earthly existence. And if you were to hang onto all this stuff, you needed protection from the tomb raiders who found easy pickings among the dead. To ward off evil-including the attentions of plunderers- relatives sent their loved ones to eternity adorned with jewels and amulets bearing charms and spells prescribed in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
The Riqqeh pectoral is a masterpiece of gold inlaid with turquoise, lapis lazuli and carnelian. It was almost certainly the work of a royal jeweller, perhaps the gift of a king to a favourite courtier. Each part of the design has meaning. The 鈥渨edjat鈥� eyes flanking the Sun have great protective powers. The two birds, hooded crows rather than the usual falcons, represent the god Horus, who triumphs over evil. If their purpose was to see off any would-be plunderer, then they did their job well.
THERE was absolutely no doubt about it. Lying on the splintered remnants of a wooden coffin was a badly crushed skeleton-with more than the usual number of limbs. More precisely, the corpse had an extra pair of arms. To the young English archaeologist Rex Engelbach, this could mean only one thing. He had unearthed the scene of a foul crime.
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The second set of arm bones belonged to a tomb robber-frozen in the act for 4000 years. Just as the thief reached for the brilliant jewel that lay on the mummy鈥檚 chest, the roof of the tomb cracked apart and tonnes of rubble engulfed both the dead and the living.
Engelbach had begun excavating the extensive cemeteries at Riqqeh in Middle Egypt in December 1912. It was a huge task, made more frustrating by the fact that many of the tombs had been plundered in ancient times. Tomb 124 was part of a necropolis dug out of a hill during the 12th dynasty-between 1991 and 1786 BC. Most of the graves lay at the bottom of deep shafts that plunged up to 12 metres into the hillside before opening out into one or more chambers.
The tomb builders had designed the necropolis carefully, burrowing through the crumbly rock of the hillside and carving out the chambers just beneath a seam of gypsum-which provided a more solid ceiling. After each burial, the undertakers bricked up the entrance to the chamber and plastered over it with mud.
Yet brick-and-mud walls hardly hindered the plunderers, who had ransacked most of the tombs at Riqqeh. Nevertheless tomb 124 had given them pause for thought. They had removed only the middle four bricks from the first four courses of the walled-up entrance. The likeliest explanation is that they had seen a crack above the wall, a sign that the chamber roof might be unsafe. They decided to take a risk.
Four millennia later, Engelbach stood surveying the scene of the crime. Once most of the debris had been cleared from the chamber, Engelbach found the remains of a coffin in the middle of the room. Its occupant had clearly been moved. 鈥淥ver what had been the foot of the coffin, and across it with the head to the east, there could easily be traced the remains of a skeleton which appeared to be male,鈥� Engelbach wrote in his excavation report for 1913. 鈥淥ver this were the arm bones of another body.鈥� The rest of the second body lay in a heap a short distance from the chest of the first body. 鈥淚t appeared as if it had been suddenly crushed while in a standing or at least a crouching position when the fall occurred.鈥�
When Engelbach removed the extra arm bones he discovered several pieces of jewellery-first a winged beetle atop two lotus flowers, then a golden shell bearing the symbol of a king, Senusert III. Finally, there was the pectoral, which lay over the mummy鈥檚 heart. The Egyptians believed the heart was the seat of the emotions and the intelligence: it was vital in the next life and worth a powerful protective charm.
Combining the role of forensic scientist and detective, Engelbach pieced together the events that had led to catastrophe. He was certain that the plunderers were men employed to guard the graves. They clearly knew the layout of the tombs and which bodies were worth robbing. Worried about the crack overhead, the men removed just enough bricks to allow one of them to crawl inside. He opened the coffin and lifted out the body so he could rip open the wrappings and get at any valuables tucked among them. First he found a collar of beads, which he flung to his mates out in the shaft. The archaeologists found a few beads that the robbers had missed. Beneath a layer of bandages, the intruder found the jewelled beetle and placed it to one side. Then, just as he reached for the pectoral, the roof collapsed.
Grave robbers had always been a worry for Egypt鈥檚 wealthy. Those who had the means went to great trouble to keep robbers out. Coffins were fitted with ingenious locks. Obstacles were set in the robbers鈥� way-portcullises to block the shafts, trapdoors and fake entrances, blind alleys and empty chambers to lead thieves along a false trail. Yet almost no body was safe. If the thieves couldn鈥檛 break through the obvious entrance, they dug around until they found a way in. In most cases, though, the robbers knew exactly what they were doing-because they were the necropolis guards, the very people paid to watch over the bodies.
At Riqqeh, the plunderers undoubtedly had inside information. Most of the graves were robbed almost as soon as the last mourners had left. The state of some of the bodies showed that they hadn鈥檛 had time to stiffen before the robbers went to work on them. In some cases the thief shoved the body down towards the foot of the casket as he searched for jewels hidden beneath the head. 鈥淚n two burials, the knees of the body were pressed against the lid of the coffin. If this had been done in later times, the ligaments would have been stiff and the limbs would have broken at the joints,鈥� wrote Engelbach. Added to this is the fact that the only intact tombs the archaeologists ever found contained nothing of value. The ancient robbers knew perfectly well what was in the tomb, he concluded.
When catastrophe struck in tomb 124, the dead thief鈥檚 mates made every effort to hide their crime. 鈥淭he robbers. . . having seen the fate of their accomplice, and knowing that to clear away the fallen roof would be a labour of many days, filled in the tomb-shaft so that their doings would not come to light, and they never had a chance to reach the jewel again.鈥�