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Weeks' team, meanwhile, plans to return to Tomb 5 for the month of July. Their goal is to get far enough inside to explore the staircases and lower level. Weeks estimates that it will take at least five years to study and map the entire tomb, protect the decorations, install climate controls and electricity and shore up the precarious sections. Says Abdel Halim Nur el Din, secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities: "We're in no hurry to open this tomb to the public. We already have 10 or 12 that they can visit." It is more important to preserve the tombs that have already been excavated, say the Egyptians, than make new ones accessible.
The recent find gives scholars hope, though, that more can be discovered even in this most-explored of Egypt's archaeological sites. Notes the antiquities department's Abd El Aziz: "We still haven't found the tombs of Amenhotep I or Ramesses VIII," he says. "We have 62 tombs in the Valley of the Kings, but in the Western Valley, which runs perpendicular to it, we have discovered only two tombs."
The pharaohs would be pleased to know they have held on to a few of their secrets. After all, they dug their tombs deep into hillsides, where the crypts would be safe, they hoped, from the rabble and robbers. What they never counted on was the need for parking lots.
--Reported by Andrea Dorfman/New York, Helen Gibson/London and Lara Marlowe/Luxor