One of the great treasures in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum is the funerary furniture and jewelry of Queen Hetepheres. Elegant furniture with beautiful gold bands of hieroglyphs are the main attraction, but there
are also spectacular silver bracelets inlaid with turquoise butterf lies, whose discovery came about under unique circumstances. Found in 1925, when Tutankhamen’s tomb was being excavated, Hetepheres’s tomb was another intact royal tomb with (hopefully) the same potential for treasures. Unlike Howard Carter’s discovery, which was the result of hard work and knowing what to look for, Hetepheres’s tomb was found by
pure luck. A photographer for the Harvard–Boston Museum team excavating at Giza was photographing the site when one of the legs of his tripod seemed to go through the bedrock on which it rested. Careful
examination revealed that the tripod leg had actually gone through ancient plaster that was covering a deep shaft. As the rubble filling the shaft was removed, it became clear that there would be a tomb at the
bottom. Thirty feet down, the excavators uncovered a sealed wall; behind it would hopefully be something rivaling Tutankhamen’s treasures.
When the wall was taken down, a small room was revealed with the remains of ancient furniture, an alabaster sarcophagus, and a few other objects. Not quite Tutankhamen, but still some wonderful things.
The inscriptions on the furniture showed that this was the burial site of Queen Hetepheres, the wife of Sneferu and the mother of Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid. It seems as if Khufu wanted his mother buried close to him, so he had her tomb dug near the base of his Pyramid. The one piece that didn’t fit was the size of the tomb; it was rather modest for such an important queen. Then things became even more puzzling. Now all the excavators had to do was remove the lid of the alabaster sarcophagus in the tomb and they would become the first people in more than four thousand years to gaze on the face of Queen Hetepheres.
First the furniture had to be removed to create enough space to work on the sarcophagus. This was extremely difficult as the wood had deteriorated and everything had to be photographed and mapped in
place first so that if it crumbled to dust it could be recreated in modern materials. Finally the time to remove the sarcophagus lid arrived and an imposing group of officials was invited to the opening. One by one the august visitors were roped into an armchair and lowered into the tomb. The master of ceremonies was George Andrew Reisner, field director of the expedition. Reisner had asked the expedition’s artist, Joseph Lindon Smith, to be present. He later published an account of the surprising events of that day.
Reisner’s theory is highly speculative and was perhaps influenced by his addiction to mystery novels. He read hundreds and hundreds of them, which were later donated to Harvard’s Widener Library. Each
one has Reisner’s evaluation on the front endpaper. He graded them like students’ papers—many have B+ and the really bad got a C. No tomb for Hetepheres has ever been found at Dashur, so we really don’t
know if there was a robbery and reburial. It could be that like her husband, Sneferu, Hetepheres had a southern and northern burial and her second tomb containing her mummy is still to be found .