A discovery of extraordinary interest was reported in the Times
of Friday week. Mr. Theodore Davis, a wealthy American gentleman, who has for some years devoted himself with great perseverance and success to excavating the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes, has, with the aid of his assistant, Mr. Edward Ayrton, discovered the tomb and mummy of Queen Teie, the foreign mother of Amen-hotep IV. of the Eighteenth Dynasty, the famous "heretic King" who proscribed the worship of Amon, and introduced a new but abort-lived religion, the symbol of which was the solar disc. But although the tomb bears at every turn evidences of the religious zeal of the victorious priesthood of Thebes—the name of her son and the emblems of his creed being everywhere erased—the mummy and the jewellery of the Queen have remained untouched. The tomb is described as "filled with sheets of solid gold," and the mummy was discovered in a wooden coffin entirely covered with a frame of gold inlaid with lapis lazuli, cornelian, and green glass, the head being encircled by a magnificent gold Imperial crown, representing the Royal vulture holding a signet-ring in either talon. Besides the crown and bracelets, a number of objects of faience, vases, and bronzes were discovered, while the covers of the oanopio jars were adorned with fine portraits of the head of the Queen in alabaster in place of the usual genii of the dead, The discovery bears striking evidence to the intensity of a religious revolution which had spent its force before the birth of Moses, and we can well imagine the feelings of awe which possessed the excavators as they handled "the symbol of ancient sovereignty which had risen up from the depths of a vanished world." -
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