Mummy of Amenhotep II
The French excavator Victor Loret found the mummy of Amenhotep II in 1898, still resting in his own sarcophagus in his tomb (KV35) in the Valley of the Kings.
At that time, before the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, he was the only king whose mummy had survived the vicissitudes of continued robbery and defilement and remained in his own sarcophagus in his own tomb.
Amenhotep II (sometimes called Amenophis II and meaning ‘Amun is Satisfied’) was the seventh king of the 18th Dynasty of Egypt.
Amenhotep inherited a vast kingdom from his father Thutmose III, and held it by means of a few military campaigns in Syria; however, he fought much less than his father, and his reign saw the effective cessation of hostilities between Egypt and Mitanni, the major kingdoms vying for power in Syria.
The mummy long brown hair, including some white ones and a patch of baldness over the upper occipital and parietal regions. The well‐worn teeth indicated that Amenhotep II was much older than Thutmose IV, somewhere between 40 and 50 years of age.
Related: Mummy of Thutmose IV
Historical sources described Amenhotep II as a strong, powerful and sportive man, with a sinister tendency to brutality in warfare, which would generally concur with the physical appearance of his mummified body.
His mummy was discovered still inside its original sarcophagus in March 1898 when it was excavated by the French archaeologist Victor Loret.
Related more: Mummy of Thutmose III
The tomb also contained a cache of the mummies of eight other kings and queens, moved there during the Third Intermediate Period to protect them from the ravages of grave robbers.
“The mummy of Amenhotep II was found in his sarcophagus in his tomb in 1898. The King was middle-aged when he died; his mummy has wavy brown hair that has started to turn grey.”
— Chronicle of a Pharaoh, The Intimate Life of Amenhotep III, by Joann Fletcher
View of the mummy of King Amenhotep II (r. ca. 1427-1401 BC) in the king’s original sarcophagus. Tomb of Amenhotep II (KV35), Valley of the Kings, West Thebes. Now in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, Cairo. CG 61069
