Paser Accused Pewero. The Commission Opened Ten Tombs And Found Nine Sealed.

LONDON — Ten royal tombs were opened in the sixteenth year of Ramesses IX, about 1110 BCE. Nine were found sealed.

That table sits on page 41 of the first of these two volumes, set without adjectives, and it is the result the entire literature of the Theban tomb robberies rests on and almost never quotes.

The robberies were real. The gold has been gone for three thousand years. What survives is not a record of the theft — it is the paperwork of an argument between two officials about whose fault it was.

The charge

Paser was mayor on the east bank at Thebes. Pewero was mayor on the west bank and, in the same person, chief of the necropolis police: the man whose job the tombs were.

Paser told the vizier Khaemwaset that the royal burials across the river were being emptied and that Pewero was letting it happen. A commission crossed over.

It opened ten royal tombs and found one violated — that of Sekhemre-Shedtawy Sobekemsaf, a king four centuries dead by then. Of four tombs of the chantresses of Amun, two were open. Of the graves of ordinary Thebans, the report says, in one line, that thieves had been in all of them.

Two days later Pewero's workmen crossed to the east bank and celebrated outside Paser's gate. Paser lost his temper in the street, in front of named witnesses, and said he would write to the king over the vizier's head. A tribunal found the charge unsupported. Paser leaves the record and does not come back.

What the edition changes

All of that has been available in translation since 1930. What Batres-Wahba and Mkandawire-Rolt have done is set the denunciation, the interrogation notes and the confessions in one apparatus, at one type size, in the order the sheets were written.

The effect is not a revelation. It is a change of proportion, which is rarer.

Their count: 214 marginal notes across the corpus, in second and third hands — the sort a clerk makes while a room is in use. He was brought again. He said nothing. The stick. Sixty-one of the 214 record physical coercion or the threat of it. In the standard edition, nine of those sixty-one appear in the main text. The rest sit below the fold.

The stick

The confession everybody quotes is Amenpanufer's, a stonemason of the temple of Amun-Re, and it earns the attention: eight men, a tunnel, a king and a queen in their coffins, and 160 deben of gold — about fourteen and a half kilos — divided eight ways, twenty deben each.

It is one of the oldest first-person criminal statements that exists in any language, and it is genuinely extraordinary that we have it.

Four lines above it, the same sheet records that the man was examined with the stick, on the hands and on the feet. Most translations print that line and demote it. This edition prints it in the same type as the confession, immediately before it, because that is where the scribe put it.

The wave that left no file

The looting that actually emptied the Valley is not in these papyri.

It comes a generation later, under the last of the Ramessides and the priesthood that followed them, and it was less burglary than clearance: bodies unwrapped, stripped, rewrapped, labelled and moved in bulk into two caches, where the nineteenth century found them.

What that left behind is not court files. It is dockets — a few words in ink on linen, a regnal year, a name, the handwriting of people doing an inventory. No commission was appointed, because by then nobody in a position to appoint one thought there was anything to investigate.

Which is the thing this edition makes hard to walk away from. The archive is dense where the state was quarrelling with itself and empty where it agreed.

What it costs, and what it is worth

Three hundred and forty pounds for 1,088 pages, a print run of 600, of which 340 went to libraries on standing order, and no paperback announced. The plates are very good. We collated the new transcription of four sheets against published photographs and found two divergences from the 1930 text, both minor and both already flagged in the apparatus.

Dr. Anselm Odiase-Frankl, who had no part in the book and read this review before it ran, thinks its central claim is correct and that we have stated it too hard. He is probably right, and so is the co-editor whose reply runs below and takes our headline apart.

What this desk takes from the two volumes is smaller than the marketing and duller than the legend. Nine sealed doors is a boring result. It is also, so far as anybody can now establish, the correct one — and the man who asked for the inspection spent the following week in the street disputing it.