Lasting Puzzle of the Unidentified KV35 Mummy: Is it Really Prince Webensenu Or Another?—Part I

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Collection of Egyptian Art, design by Anand Balaji (Photo credits: Dennis Jarvis/CC BY 2.0, Victor Loret/Wikimedia Commons, Richard Dick Sellicks); Deriv. By: Anand Balaji

Lasting Puzzle of the Unidentified KV35 Mummy: Is it Really Prince Webensenu Or Another?—Part I

A host of pharaohs who were removed to safety from their burial places in ancient times rested peacefully for millennia within the bowels of the magnificent tomb of Amenhotep II. Among the great names lay the desecrated mummy of a youngster whose identity has caused much debate among Egyptologists for over a hundred years. Who was he? Webensenu, the son of the owner of KV35; or an undocumented Amarna prince or king—perhaps Smenkhkare himself?

Detail from the head of a Diorite statue of the powerful Eighteenth Dynasty warrior pharaoh, Amenhotep II. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.

During his excavations, the renowned French Egyptologist Victor Loret made a stunning discovery in the Valley of the Kings on March 9, 1898 when he stumbled upon the tomb of the Eighteenth Dynasty king, Amenhotep II (KV35). It was not the endless riches of this pharaoh that caught the world’s imagination, but, something even more priceless. For, tucked away in the dark recesses of the upper and lower pillared sections of this sepulcher was an unimaginable assemblage of royal mummies that rivaled the nearly 36 priestly and pharaonic remains from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-first Dynasties found by Emil Brugsch in the Deir el-Bahri (DB320) cache in 1881, the date of its official discovery. So, this latest veritable bonanza of monarchs, hitherto missing from the DB320 list, and indeed to history itself, was now accounted for.


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