The great day of Spanish Egyptology: the two tombs of the Djehuty Project are opened to the public in Luxor after 22 years

José Manuel Galán, to whom everyone respectfully addresses himself as the

, the director, looks up and there they are again, in the sky over the Dra Abu el-Naga site, on the west bank of the Nile in Luxor (Egypt ), the two black kites, flying towards the escarpment behind which lies the Valley of the Kings.

Kites are known to bring good luck, apart from the fact that the ancients said that their majestic flight purified the air.

"Isis and Nephthys, the protective goddesses, were incarnated in kites," Galán recalls to himself as we walked followed by the mestizo dog

a tiny Anubis, by the perforated hill truffled with secrets.

It is true, this is how they are represented at the foot and head respectively of the bed of Osiris in the temple of the god at Abydos.

And the goddess Amentit also took the shape of a kite... The Madrid-born Egyptologist smiles, barely a passing expression on his weather-beaten face that over the years has hardened like the austere desert landscape of the necropolis he excavates.

For 22 years, Galán, 59, has directed here, one of the landmark places of Ancient Egypt, the Djehuty Project, which by force of arms he and his Spanish-Egyptian team (with the occasional collaboration of scientists of other nationalities) have turned currently the most important in Spanish Egyptology.

And today is his big day.

This noon, in the midst of a massive celebration in keeping with the transcendental nature of the event and which has included authorities, colleagues, family members and friends and has taken place in a huge tent that seemed destined for the mummification of a pharaoh and out of tune flaming conspicuously in the The sober environment of the site, which featured new signage, has been officially opened to the public, carefully prepared, precious, the two tombs from 3,500 years ago that are at the core of the project: those of the nobles Djehuty (who gives it its name) and Hery.

Anyone who had seen them 22 years ago, dark and full of rubble, melancholic and pregnant with mysteries, would not recognize them: two luminous candy boxes in which Ancient Egypt - with the modern science and technology of midwives - flaunts its many wonders. .

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ten years into eternity

The popular Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, with his inseparable hat (somewhat worn: they would come from digging), has been among those who did not want to miss the opening and has supported it with his pharaonic personality.

The event, which started very late (“two dynasties”, as a joker has said), was chaired by the Spanish ambassador, Álvaro Iranzo, the president of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), Eloísa del Pino, and the secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt, Mostafa Waziri, and has been especially dedicated to the Egyptian workers of the site (today all with the

of the holidays), to the point that Galán, skipping the protocol, He has given his foreman the floor before the authorities, the impressive

Ali Farouk, who has accompanied him since the first campaign.

Gallant who seemed to speak quoting the old text of the

, has considered himself a lucky man for the professional and human quality of his team.

Galán and his family have been supported by a broad representation of Spanish and international Egyptology and other missions, such as the “heracleopitana” Mari Carmen Pérez Die;

Josep Cervelló, who excavates in Saqqara and wore a cap with a neck flap like a Japanese officer, or José Ramón Pérez-Accino, who had just finished a successful C2 Project campaign in the nearby Wadi de la Cachette DB320, in Dehir el Bahari.

It attests to Galán's human category that so many colleagues —and potential rivals in popularity, sponsorship and subsidies— have come to witness his great moment of triumph.

Placement of indications for the tombs of Djehuty and Hery.

With the stick, the foreman Ali Farouk.

In the spring of 2000, Galán, a senior scientist from the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) who received a scholarship for work on inscriptions related to the Egyptian empire in the 18th dynasty, arrived in Luxor by train in search of a long-term research project. , important and that could grow over time.

He cycled to the

, the office of the Antiquities Service on the western bank (where the funerary temples and necropolises of old Thebes are displayed), and explained its purpose to the director, the legendary Mohamed el-Bialy (one of the many guests today at the celebration).

Together (in the Egyptian's car) they toured different tombs until they found the one that would seal the fate of Galán as much as that of Tutankhamen that of Carter: that of Djehuty, indeed.

With Djehuty, it's not just that Galán —who has the best possible rais in Ali since Ahmed Gerigar— has found an ideal grave, it's that he has found an

High official of Hatshepsut, the famous queen who reigned as pharaoh, Djehuty was, like Galán, passionate about texts and a meticulous and obsessive man who loved intellectual challenges.

His tomb is full of inscriptions and has revealed surprising and even unprecedented formulations of the Ancient Egyptian funerary canon, including cryptographic hymns.

It is not uncommon for the Egyptologist to fall in love at first sight with the enclosure.

José Manuel Galán (wearing a hat) accesses the tomb of Djehuty with the general secretary of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities Mostafa Waziri and the Spanish ambassador Álvaro Iranzo.

The Djehuty tomb, officially TT 11 (Theban Tomb number 11), had as an added bonus the Hery annex (TT 12), belonging to another official who lived some fifty years earlier, and which also offered very interesting potential.

Neither of the two, although registered by classics of Egyptology (in Hery's was none other than Champollion), had been properly investigated.

In 2001, the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt granted permission to Galán to start his scientific project, whose final objective would be the consolidation, restoration and publication of the two tombs, which should be opened to the public.

To point out that both officers, Djehuty, overseer of the treasury, and Hery, overseer of the granary of Ahotep, royal wife (of Sequenra-Tao II) and mother of the king (of Ahmose), were in the service of women,

And here we were this morning at the construction site about to deliver to the world to enjoy them, like brand new apartments (that is to say), the two graves.

Yesterday, Galan could be seen happy in his restless way, with so much to oversee, in the bright Djehuty funeral chapel (illuminated by hidden solar panels behind the tomb's reconstructed pylon, an unusual application of Ra's power), in the background. of the tomb, with the roof stabilized thanks to a complex system of metallic lattice devised by Nacho Forcadell and with the inscriptions and scenes in relief on the walls perfectly visible.

He remembered the

how he and José Miguel Serrano had to enter this room with the flashlight in their mouths and crawling over rubble, which it took them years to remove.

All the Egyptological adventure fits in the tomb of Djehuty, which even has a harpist.

While Galán was speaking, at his feet you could see the mouth of the well that leads, 11 vertiginous meters below, to the chamber (not visitable, thank God) where the owner's mummy rested, which was looted and burned in ancient times.

The Egyptologist consoles himself for the loss with the fabulous discovery they made on the walls and ceiling of the inscription chamber of the Book of the Dead.

Relief with the ceremony of opening the mouth to the mummy of Djehuty, in his tomb.

The two tombs, which from today can be visited after obtaining a ticket, have had a hectic life (apart from the fact that they are connected to others).

We do not know why Djehuty was sentenced to

and his name and face (and those of his father, who was not an Egyptian) were obliterated in many places.

And both tombs were reused and converted in a later period (2nd century BC) into sanctuaries and catacombs where mummies of animals offered by the faithful were buried, especially ibis (the hieroglyphic name of Djehuty shows one of these birds associated with Toth and scribes) and falcons, species of which it is estimated that there are up to 70,000 in the tomb of Hery, but also pelicans, owls, shrews and snakes (of which you live, by the way, the site is free: no seen not one, although one worker was stung by a scorpion).

These mummies were burned to reduce their remains and to be able to put more, which has smoked several sections of the graves.

The two tombs are the icing on the cake and the emblem of a cake that was unimaginable when the project started: in the two decades since then the area of ​​work has progressively expanded as other graves and related structures were found (and neighboring modern houses demolished). , and today what Galán and his multidisciplinary and international group are investigating and excavating (the scientific team this campaign is made up of 9 men and 15 women) is a huge portion of the northern Dra Abu el-Naga necropolis, which includes up to 40 wells with chapel, and new ones continue to appear, as the site is very much alive.

And one of the attractions of visiting the tombs will be precisely being able to see the mission work.

On Tuesday itself there was a moment of great excitement (“

, you should go down!”), as if the one for the imminent inauguration was not enough, when what appears to be a large chamber was discovered in one of the wells being dug.

Members of the Djehuty Project team, in front of the grave.

"This," the Egyptologist points out with a gesture that reaches the road behind which the alabaster shops for tourists accumulate, "was an area of ​​enormous political and religious importance, opposite Karnak, from where the processions came across the river." .

Djehuty was buried here, he says, because it was already a place with tradition, where monarchs and great figures of the 17th dynasty had been buried;

there were even small pyramids;

and after Djehuty, others buried themselves, who in turn wanted to be where he was.

"We have a two thousand year arc of Ancient Egyptian history and a lot is mixed up."

For Galán, the archeology of the site is like a sudoku game, the answer is sometimes not in the square you fill in but in the one next to it.

"What we are doing is tracing the complete history of the necropolis," he emphasizes.

The ground beyond and around the tombs of Djehuty and Hery is littered with 17th Dynasty burial pits which in turn filled voids left by earlier burials, such as the 12th Dynasty (Middle Kingdom, 2000 BC) tomb. Christ) in whose patio a unique funerary garden was found, one of the exceptional objects of the excavation, which is exhibited

a copy created by Factum Arte, the same people who have made the facsimile of Tutankhamun's tomb that can be visited a stone's throw away, next to Howard Carter's old house as a museum.

Several discoveries from the Djehuty Project have been produced under the rubble piled up by 19th century looters or explorers in their searches, or in unusual places, such as the coffin of the archer Iker, one of the stars, with the bows and arrows of the shooter, of the exhibition of "the best of the best" from the excavations of Galán's team that opens this afternoon at the Luxor Museum and that includes, in a luxurious space, the apprentice table, the

(with drawing in the form of wing feathers), the endearing miniatures of mummies in coffins, the gold earrings found in the tomb of Djehuty or the ostraca on which appears what appears to be a portrait of him.

Burial chamber of the tomb of Djehuty.DJEHUTY PROJECT

A mummy with a wart and another with a stroke

The guests at the opening of the tombs have not been able to see the torso of a human mummy (or whatever it is called now) that was these days next to the path that is traveled to reach them, after passing through the guard's booth.

She withdrew before the ceremony.

"It wasn't ours, they left it there in case we could X-ray it," says Jesús Herrerín, the team's anthropologist.

The researcher, however, has shown a group in which Camila Navarro, a very brave girl, stood out (it was not for nothing that her father, Miguel Ángel, spent weeks working on Hery's tomb with two standing ones), an impressive mummy with an air to Seti I, from the mission warehouse (in total, adding up pieces, a hundred human mummies have been found at the site).

The mummy, named

originally until cleaning it revealed a notable circumcised male sex (“he has everything phenomenal”, he asserted with excusable enthusiasm as a specialist Herrerín), he even retains a wart.

Of the set, one stands out, which is the first known case of stroke in mummies.

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