The work was finely done, with elaborate details in costumes and hairstyles, and the scenes are among the best-preserved in the valley. Or rather, they were.Belzoni and other visitors not only made water color copies of the walls but took squeezes, pressing wet paper against the relief carving, letting it dry, then pulling the three-dimensional copy off the walls. Naturally, this damaged the paint. Belzoni also cleared the tomb entrance and removed natural barriers to flooding. When a torrential rain hit the valley shortly after the tomb was opened, floodwaters poured into the first several chambers and did serious harm. A few years later, several pieces of wall decoration were hacked out and taken to Europe—by Jean-François Champollion and Ippolito Rosellini. Many other visitors followed suit. Clearing of the long passageway that had been cut deep below the floor of the burial chamber, an operation first attempted a century ago and restarted in the 1950s by the descendents of a wellknown tomb robber, created serious structural problems in the tomb that required adding brickwork and steel to correct. More projects have had to be undertaken in the last few decades to keep parts of the tomb from collapsing. Recently, the tomb was closed to visitors in order to make extensive conservation studies, but these have not been completed and no plans have yet been made to start the needed work. As a result, KV 17 is likely to remain closed for the foreseeable future.

CORRIDOR B A steep staircase leads down to the entrance of the tomb into corridor B. The walls of the corridor are decorated with the Litany of Ra, with a figure of the king standing before Ra-Harakhty on the left wall, followed by the “title page” of this text, shown here for the first time in a royal tomb. This is followed by the text itself, along with seventy-five invocations of the sun god. The text continues on the right wall. The ceiling is decorated with birds whose heads are alternately vultures and snakes.

CHAMBER C or STAIRWELL A large staircase was cut in the floor of stairwell C and large recesses were cut in the walls above it. The Litany of Ra continues, followed by the last part of the third hour of the Imydwat. Beyond the recesses, a figure of Isis kneels below a reclining Anubis jackal on the left wall. Nephthys is similarly posed on the right. Above the rear door is a figure of Ma’at and the cartouches of Sety I. In CORRIDOR D, the fourth hour of the Imydwat appears on theright wall, the fifth hour on the left. Black ink outlines mark the location of uncut recesses. Much on these walls has been badly damaged, but when Belzoni first visited the tomb they were in almost pristine condition.
CHAMBER E, with a well shaft, 6.7 meters (22 feet) deep, is decorated at the top on the left side with a single row of figures showing the king being led by Harsiese before Isis,offering wine to Hathor, and standing before Osiris and the Mistress of the West. In the right half of the chamber, a seated figure of Osiris is followed by Anubis and Harsiese and other scenes similar to those on the left. The rear wall of the chamber originally was blocked with stone and brick, then covered with plaster and painted, apparently in an attempt to thwart tomb robbers. Beyond the well shaft, CHAMBER F is a fourpillared chamber whose walls are decorated with the fifth hour (on the left) and the sixth hour (on the right) of the Book of Gates. In the lower register, the souls of the dead are united with their mummies, and these lie on a long snakeshaped bed. In the upper register, divine guardians keep the snake Apophis from doing harm to the sun god. At the left front corner of the chamber is a damaged scene that, a century ago, was wellpreserved and one of the277 BOTTOM CENTER  THE SNAKE APOPHIS, FROM THE BOOK OF THE
GATES.most-admired scenes in the tomb, frequently copied and commented upon. It shows a row of western Asiatics, Nubians, Libyans, and Egyptians, dressed in traditional costume and wearing traditional hairstyles. The white background on these side walls contrasts with the rear wall where, against a yellow background, Sety is led by Horus before a figure of Osiris who is seated before Hathor. A small section of this scene has recently been cleaned as a test by conservators and reveals how affectedthe pigments have been by dust and humidity over the last three millennia. Moving clockwise around pillar 1 (front left), we see the king standing before Ptah and embraced by Harsiese, then Anubis, then the Mistress of the West.

On pillar 2 (rear left), the king is embraced by Ra-Harakhty, Shu, Serqet, and Isis. Pillar 3 (front right) shows the king before a god, then Hathor, Harsiese, and Anubis. Finally, pillar 4 (rear right) shows the king with Atum, Nephthys, Neith, and Ptah-Sokar. Side CHAMBER FA, the two-pillared chamber beyond, has a lower floor than chamber F and was decorated only with figures and texts outlined in black ink. It is not clear why these walls were not painted like all other scenes in the tomb. Some have suggested that the chamber’s unfinished state, the jog in the tomb axis, and the possibility of hiding the succeeding staircase combined to provide yet another way of convincing tomb robbers they had reached a dead end. The scenes are taken from the ninth, tenth, and eleventh hours of the Imydwat. The skill of the artist is impressive: lines aredrawn with long and confident strokes.

 Note on the left wall the figures of those who have died by drowning and therefore require special assistance to enter into the netherworld. On the pillars the king is shown with Nefertum, RaHarakhty, Ma’at, and Atum; and with Ma’at, Osiris, Hathor, and Sokar-Osiris. A decorated staircase leads down to CORRIDORS G AND H. Its scenes are taken from the Opening of the Mouth ritual and show priests performing the ceremonies. They are dressed in the leopard skin costumes of Iwnmutef priests and stand before royal statues. Great care was taken in the painting of the leopard skin and the leopard-head-shaped clasp. Note also the unusual way the priest holds the paw of the leopard in his left hand. This is one of the bestdrawn representations of the Opening of the Mouth ceremony to be found in the Valley of the Kings, but much was destroyed by nineteenth century visitors who hacked pieces away for shipment to European collections. CHAMBER I, the chamber preceding the burial chamber, was called the Hall of Beauties by Belzoni because of its finely painted figures of the king and various gods. Unfortunately, the squeezes made by nineteenth century visitors seriously damaged the paint and stained the walls. What one sees today is a mere shadow of what once had been a masterpiece. Nevertheless, the quality of the relief carving can still be admired, especially details of faces and hieroglyphs. On the left side of the chamber, the king is shown seven times, embraced by Hathor, standing before Anubis, offering to Isis, standing before Harsiese, offering to Hathor, standing before Osiris, and with Ptah. The right side is similar, except at the far end, where the king stands before Nefertum.Sety’s Burial CHAMBER J has two sections, a front part with six pillars and a rear part with a lowered floor on which the sarcophagus originally sat beneath a dramatic vaulted ceiling. The pillars are damaged: one of them is missing; others were cut up and removed to museums in Europe. Originally, all of them showed the king with various gods, including Iwnmutef, Ptah-Sokar, Geb, Osiris, Khepri, Thoth, Harsiese, Shu, Ra-Harakhty, Anubis, and the souls of Pe and Nekhen. The latter three are arranged along the main tomb axis. The walls in the upper, pillared section contain texts and scenes from the Book of Gates, the second and fifth hours on the left side, the third on the right.On the side walls of the lower. vaulted part of the chamber, winged figures of Isis and Nephthys kneel. flanked by cartouches of Sety I. The Imydwat begins with the first hour on the left wall in both a long and an abbreviated version. The second hour can be seen on the rear wall, the third on the right.The VAULTED CEILING is one of the most impressive in the Valley of the Kings. It deals with astronomical subjects, many of them obscure. A hippopotamus and a crocodile near the midline of the ceiling are constellations the Egyptians located in the northern sky. SIDE CHAMBERS off both the upper and lower parts of the burial chamber are decorated with the fourth hour of the Book of Gates. The Book of the Heavenly Cow is in the first right-hand chamber.

 The left rear chamber has two pillars painted with figures of Osiris, and extensive wall decoration that includes the seventh through ninth hours of the Imydwat.In the lower part of chamber J, a square pit was dug in the floor, and into its rear wall quarrymen cut a small doorway. It leads into a narrow, well-carved tunnel extending at least 100 meters (325 feet) at a steep downward angle into the bedrock. When Belzoni entered the tomb, the tunnel was completely filled with dense debris. It still has been only partly excavated, so its ultimate destination is unknown. Some have expressed the hope that burial chamber J is not really the burial place of Sety I but a false chamber meant to fool tomb robbers. The tunnel, they claim, leads to the real burial place deep inside the mountain, and is still filled with treasure. This seems unlikely. Most Egyptologists argue that the tunnel was intended to join the burial of Sety I to ground water, and was similar to what Sety I had done in the Osireion at Abydos, where the “burial” of Osiris was symbolically joined to the primeval waters of creation.

From" The Illustrated Guide to Luxor" by kent R.Weeks ,published by the American University in Cairo Press. Copyright © 2005 White Star S.p.a