Kent Weeks – In South Africa

MAKING HISTORY WHILE INVESTIGATING IT
A report by Keith Grenville

On September 5th 2000, Dr. Kent Weeks and his wife Susan arrived at Cape Town International Airport  for their first visit to South Africa and a 10-day National Lecture Tour arranged by the Executive Committee of The Egyptian Society of SA with the assistance of generous sponsors and benefactors.

As a national society with international recognition it was time for us to ‘test the waters’ with this style of lecture tour by a world-renowned Egyptologist. Our objective was accomplished with a total of 6 lectures delivered country-wide by Dr. Kent Weeks. The first lecture at the University of Cape Town swiftly sold out and Kent Weeks willingly agreed to deliver a repeat lecture the same evening. The second lecture was very well attended. Subsequent lectures were enthusiastically received at the Universities of Stellenbosch, Natal, Witwatersrand and Pretoria. The success of the project was enhanced by wide radio coverage with Kent Weeks being interviewed on local and national radio, some press coverage, and culminating with a television interview on M-Net’s Carte Blanche on Sunday 10 September, accompanied by excellent visual material and presented by Ruda Landman.

In his lecture, entitled The Lost Tomb, Kent Weeks briefly covered the history of exploration in Egypt, with the plunder, exploitation, destruction of valuable papyri, artefacts and other excesses, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries. The presentation continued with details of the appalling threat to the existence of tombs and monuments by modern farming methods, the rising water table, pollution and the damaging effects of tourism and its development. Aware of this massive threat to the 6 square kilometre Theban necropolis and the need for a dependable and comprehensive atlas of this World Heritage Site, Kent Weeks founded the Theban Mapping Project (TMP) in 1978. The lecture then moved to the discovery by Dr. Weeks and his team of the lost tomb of the sons of Ramesses II (KV5) and his eventual breakthrough into areas of the tomb hitherto unknown and unrecorded since antiquity. It was from this point that he led the audience through a series of photographs showing the gradual and methodical exploration of the tomb, the painstaking excavation and conservation, the retrieval of items of jewellery, pottery, and painted fragments of limestone plaster. Finally, he spoke of the mummy of a royal male with arms crossed in the Osiris position found with three other skulls lying in a pit near the entrance to the tomb. It is supposed the mummy remains had been dragged to the entrance by tomb robbers in antiquity to search in the light for associated gold items. Having said that work in the tomb has revealed 150 chambers, Kent Weeks confidently prophesied that the number of chambers will increase to 200 by the end of the April 2001 excavation season. Undoubtedly the largest tomb ever found in Egypt, KV5 represents a unique royal family mausoleum which will continue to be excavated for many years to come and is likely to throw light on many aspects of the lives of Ramesses II, his sons and the New Kingdom period. Kent Weeks finished his lecture with a CD-ROM presentation showing an impressive example of the planned Theban necropolis database, comprehensive search and visual facilities to be available on a CD-ROM at a later date.

Susan Weeks accompanied her husband throughout the South African tour. She is an integral member of his team in Egypt, specialising in pottery. Her art work illustrates her husband’s book The Lost Tomb which was on sale at all lecture venues.

Their first day in a very wet Cape Town was spent entirely with live and recorded radio interviews, newspaper and a television interviews. Unfortunately, the hectic schedule allowed very little time for sightseeing but meals were taken at carefully chosen venues affording some impression of each of the cities. A short tour of the Cape Town area and peninsula, the drive to Stellenbosch and a free day in that area gave our guests a feeling of the Cape. In Durban a visit to the Valley of a Thousand Hills and the city environs, with lunch at Umhlanga was appreciated and then in Johannesburg a meeting with Professor Phillip Tobias and a private viewing of the Taung skull followed by a visit to the Sterkfontein caves proved to be a highlight of their short visit.

The Egyptian Society is delighted to have presented Kent Weeks in South Africa – a man whose name is as synonymous with KV5 as Howard Carter’s is with KV62, the tomb of Tutankhamun.