The site of abusir, 12 miles west of Cairo, is riddled with the tombs of ancient Egyptian kings and their officials. For the past 30 years, Miroslav Verner of the Czech Institute of Egyptology in Prague has been working at Abusir, methodically mapping, digging, and preserving. In 1995 his expedition started excavating a giant tomb. Two years later the team finally reached the burial chamber, 80 feet underground, and was amazed to find it untouched, because many such tombs are plundered before archeologists get to them. It was one of the few Egyptian tombs found in 50 years that had never been plundered.
Looters had apparently tried to enter the tomb but failed. Verner could see where their tunnels ended. "They stopped just a few meters above the burial chamber," he says. The shafts leading to the chamber had been dug not through a layer of solid bedrock but through ...
