Qualla: The Royal Cache https://qualla.com/royal-cache en-us © 2026 Bendyline Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:34:06 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/x/4/royal-cache-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: The Royal Cache https://qualla.com/royal-cache The Royal Cache: Introduction https://qualla.com/royal-cache/ Photo credit Keith Hazell, CC BY 3.0. The antiquities dealers of Luxor had a problem in the 1870s. Genuinely royal objects were appearing on the market, papyri and canopic jars inscribed with the names of pharaohs who should have been three thousand years dead and accounted for. One Book of the Dead sold in 1876 for four hundred pounds, a fortune. Egyptologists realized something extraordinary was being quietly looted, and that someone knew where the kings were hidden. The answer lay in a vertical shaft in the cliffs above Deir el-Bahari, a tomb now catalogued as TT320 but long known as DB320, the Royal Cache. Inside, packed into a single rough corridor, lay more than fifty mummies, including some of the greatest rulers Egypt ever produced. They had not died here. They had been moved, in secret, by people trying to save them.

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Image: Keith Hazell | CC BY 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/x/4/royal-cache-wp/ssx4-the-royal-cache-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full The Royal Cache: Who Was in the Tomb https://qualla.com/royal-cache/ Photo credit G. Elliot Smith (1871-1937), Public domain. The names recovered from the cache read like a roll call of the New Kingdom. Ahmose I, who expelled the foreign Hyksos and founded the Eighteenth Dynasty. Amenhotep I. Thutmose I, II, and III, the warrior kings who pushed Egypt's empire to its greatest extent. Seti I and his son ...

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Image: G. Elliot Smith (1871-1937) | Public domain

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/x/4/royal-cache-wp/ssx4-the-royal-cache-who-was-in-the-tomb.mp3 0:06 2 full The Royal Cache: A Rescue, Not a Burial https://qualla.com/royal-cache/ Photo credit Egyptian General Survey Authority (Maṣlaḥat al-Misāḥah), Public domain. These kings were never meant to share a tomb. Each had been laid to rest in his own grand sepulchre in the Valley of the Kings, surrounded by treasure. But by the end of the New Kingdom, around 1100 BC, Egypt's grip on its own necropolis was failing. Tomb robbery had become epide...

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Image: Egyptian General Survey Authority (Maṣlaḥat al-Misāḥah) | Public domain

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/x/4/royal-cache-wp/ssx4-the-royal-cache-a-rescue-not-a-burial.mp3 0:06 3 full The Royal Cache: The Family Who Kept the Secret https://qualla.com/royal-cache/ Photo credit G. Elliott Smith (1871-1937), Public domain. The hiding place worked for nearly three thousand years, and then it worked for one family in particular. By most accounts the Abd el-Rassul family of the nearby village of Qurna found the shaft around 1871, possibly earlier. The story passed down was that a man went down after a...

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Image: G. Elliott Smith (1871-1937) | Public domain

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/x/4/royal-cache-wp/ssx4-the-royal-cache-the-family-who-kept-the-secret.mp3 0:06 4 full The Royal Cache: Cracking the Case https://qualla.com/royal-cache/ Photo credit Gaston Maspero, Public domain. As the inscribed objects accumulated, the antiquities service traced them back to Qurna and to the el-Rassul brothers. The men were interrogated and, by the accounts of the period, harshly treated, yet they gave nothing away. What finally broke the secret was not the authorities ...

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Image: Gaston Maspero | Public domain

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/x/4/royal-cache-wp/ssx4-the-royal-cache-cracking-the-case.mp3 0:06 5 full The Royal Cache: The Kings Come Home https://qualla.com/royal-cache/ Photo credit Alyssa Bivins, CC BY-SA 4.0. Local lore holds that as the steamer carried the royal dead north, villagers lined the banks of the Nile, the women wailing and the men firing guns in the air, mourning their ancient kings as they passed. The mummies eventually reached the museum in Cairo, where many were studied...

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Image: Alyssa Bivins | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/s/x/4/royal-cache-wp/ssx4-the-royal-cache-the-kings-come-home.mp3 0:06 6 full