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.

  • Silver gelatin on glass
  • 23.5 x 29.5 cm
  • $300.00