It's never exactly been off the beaten track. The Valley of the Kings, in which Tomb 5 is located, is just across the Nile River from Luxor, Egypt. Says Emily Teeter, an Egyptologist with Chicago's Oriental Institute Museum: "To find large tombs is one thing, but to find something like this, that's been used for dozens of royal burials, is absolutely amazing." The cheeky London Daily Mail carried this headline: PHARAOH'S 50 SONS IN MUMMY OF ALL TOMBS. That would make Tomb 5 the biggest and most complex tomb ever found in Egypt - and quite conceivably the resting place of up to 50 sons of Ramesses II, perhaps the best known of all the pharaohs, the ruler believed to have been Moses' nemesis in the book of Exodus. Although the tomb is mostly unexcavated and the chambers are choked with debris, Weeks is convinced that there are more rooms on a lower level, bringing the total number to more than 100. "On each side were 10 doors, and at the end there was a statue of Osiris, the god of the afterlife." Two more corridors branched off from there, with 16 more doors on each one. "We found ourselves in a corridor," Weeks remembers. Eventually he was able to pry open a door blocked for thousands of years - and last week announced the discovery of a lifetime. Kent Weeks, an Egyptologist with the American University in Cairo, embarked in 1988 on one final exploration of the old dumping ground. Wanting to be sure the new parking facility wouldn't destroy anything important, Dr. from King Tut's resting place, just beyond a few rubble-strewn rooms that previous excavators had used to hold their debris. But for that parking lot, in fact, no one would have ever known the treasure that lay only 200 ft. Had long since lost interest in the site of Tomb 5, which had been explored and looted decades ago, and was about to give way to a parking lot.
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