Archaeologists may have found second Thutmose II tomb

A British archaeologist believes his team may have found a second tomb in Egypt belonging to King Thutmose II.

The potential find comes just days after Piers Litherland announced the discovery of a tomb more than a century since Tutankhamun’s was revealed.

Mr Litherland told the Observer he suspects this second site will hold the pharaoh’s mummified body.

Archaeologists believe the first tomb was emptied six years after burial, due to a flood, and relocated to a second.

Mr Litherland thinks the second tomb lies below a 23-metre (75 ft) man-made pile of limestone, ash, rubble and mud plaster, that was designed by ancient Egyptians to look like part of a mountain in the Western Valleys of the Theban Necropolis near the city of Luxor.

The first was located behind a waterfall, and it is thought to have flooded as a result.

When Egyptologists were searching for the initial tomb, they found a posthumous inscription that indicated the content could have been moved to a second location nearby, by Thutmose II’s wife and half-sister Hatshepsut.

The British-Egyptian team are now working to uncover the tomb by hand, after attempts to tunnel into it were deemed as being “too dangerous”.

“We should be able to take the whole thing down in about another month,” Mr Litherland said.

The crew found the first tomb in an area associated with the resting places of royal women, but when they got into the burial chamber they found it decorated – the sign of a pharaoh.

“Part of the ceiling was still intact: a blue-painted ceiling with yellow stars on it. And blue-painted ceilings with yellow stars are only found in kings’ tombs,” said Mr Litherland.

He told the BBC’s Newshour programme earlier this week that he felt overwhelmed by the find.

“The emotion of getting into these things is just one of extraordinary bewilderment because when you come across something you’re not expecting to find, it’s emotionally extremely turbulent really,” he said.

Thutmose II is best known for being the husband of Queen Hatshepsut, regarded as one of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs and one of the few female pharaohs who ruled in her own right.

Thutmose II was an ancestor of Tutankhamun, whose reign is believed to have been from about 1493 to 1479 BC. Tutankhamun’s tomb was found by British archaeologists in 1922.