 The
Mummy of Amenhotep II.
Amenhotep II was the paragon of the athletic kings of the early Eighteenth
Dynasty and boasted of physically Homeric deeds. Victor Loret found the
king's mummy in 1898, still resting in his own sarcophagus in his tomb
in the Valley of the Kings. At that time, before the discovery of the
tomb of Tutankhamun, he was the only pharaoh whose mummy had survived
the vicissitudes of continued robbery and defilement and remained in his
own sarcophagus in his own tomb. Amenhotep II lay there, wrapped, until
guards plundered the tomb in 1901. Howard Carter tracked down the latter-day
robbers, using, among other clues, the imprints of their feet in the dust
of the tomb. The mummy, exposed from the waist up by this desecration,
was returned to the sarcophagus, and a lamp was placed at its head. In
1931 the mummy was removed for safekeeping to the Cairo Museum.
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