Talk:Tomb of Tutankhamun

message: ===Untitled===
I think it's irresponsible to not make mention of the questionable colonialist British practice of ransacking Egypt's historical burial sites in general, not to mention the multiple controversies that surround this tomb's excavation specifically.  To quote Dr. Christian Loeben, an Egyptologist at the August Kestner museum in Hanover, Germany, "All objects from the tomb should be in Egypt, and if they're not in Egypt, they didn't get out legally"http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/europe/howard-carter-stole-from-tomb-of-tutankhamen.  Howard Carter was an eager participant in this Western grave-robbing fad, and this page should accurately report that he violated even what little law was in place to protect these sites.  "A little-known document written by a member of Carter's team, Alfred Lucas, in 1947 claimed that Carter knocked a hole into the doorway linking the antechamber to the actual burial chamber, and illegally entered it without waiting for Egyptian officials"http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/europe/howard-carter-stole-from-tomb-of-tutankhamen.
In addition, Carter was caught on a number of occasions stealing or attempting to steal artifacts from the various sites for his own personal possession and use.  Carter and his compatriot, the Earl of Carnarvon, "gave a clasp that showed the pharaoh on a war chariot as a present to Egyptian King Fouad I, for example. American oil baron Edward Harkness received a gold ring"http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,671993-2,00.html.  There is evidence that the looting and historical damage goes beyond what history has recorded: "Doubts about Carter's methods are not new but the debate keeps resurfacing with the discovery of Tutankhamen artefacts in museum collections around the world. This, Egyptologists claim, suggests that they were secretly brought out of Egypt by Carter or members of his team"http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/europe/howard-carter-stole-from-tomb-of-tutankhamen.  In addition to the multiple incidents of material losses, it is a real tragedy that "experts claim that his actions did lasting damage to research into ancient Egypt, because it will never be reliably known what the tomb looked like when he found it"http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/europe/howard-carter-stole-from-tomb-of-tutankhamen, which is a disservice both to academia and to the cultural heritage of Egypt.
I'm also posting this in the Howard Carter talk section.SymWebb (talk) 08:14, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Criticism 

message: I think it's irresponsible to not make mention of the questionable colonialist British practice of ransacking Egypt's historical burial sites in general, not to mention the multiple controversies that surround this tomb's excavation specifically.  To quote Dr. Christian Loeben, an Egyptologist at the August Kestner museum in Hanover, Germany, "All objects from the tomb should be in Egypt, and if they're not in Egypt, they didn't get out legally"http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/europe/howard-carter-stole-from-tomb-of-tutankhamen.  Howard Carter was an eager participant in this Western grave-robbing fad, and this page should accurately report that he violated even what little law was in place to protect these sites.  "A little-known document written by a member of Carter's team, Alfred Lucas, in 1947 claimed that Carter knocked a hole into the doorway linking the antechamber to the actual burial chamber, and illegally entered it without waiting for Egyptian officials"http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/europe/howard-carter-stole-from-tomb-of-tutankhamen.
In addition, Carter was caught on a number of occasions stealing or attempting to steal artifacts from the various sites for his own personal possession and use.  Carter and his compatriot, the Earl of Carnarvon, "gave a clasp that showed the pharaoh on a war chariot as a present to Egyptian King Fouad I, for example. American oil baron Edward Harkness received a gold ring"http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,671993-2,00.html.  There is evidence that the looting and historical damage goes beyond what history has recorded: "Doubts about Carter's methods are not new but the debate keeps resurfacing with the discovery of Tutankhamen artefacts in museum collections around the world. This, Egyptologists claim, suggests that they were secretly brought out of Egypt by Carter or members of his team"http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/europe/howard-carter-stole-from-tomb-of-tutankhamen.  In addition to the multiple incidents of material losses, it is a real tragedy that "experts claim that his actions did lasting damage to research into ancient Egypt, because it will never be reliably known what the tomb looked like when he found it"http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/europe/howard-carter-stole-from-tomb-of-tutankhamen, which is a disservice both to academia and to the cultural heritage of Egypt.
I'm also posting this in the Howard Carter talk section.SymWebb (talk) 08:14, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: This is the area for noting clearly and succinctly the arguments for and against.--Keerllston 00:00, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Arguments Synopsis

message: Hi, can we move this discussion to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Ancient Egyptian), as it no longer applies only to this article. Cheers. Markh (talk) 21:15, 20 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmmm... Agreed.--Keerllston 21:59, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

text: The place for the discussion is Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Ancient Egyptian). I think that's what you meant. Agree we should move there. Andrewa (talk) 10:54, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Ok, shall I archive this discussion and then link from the above page? Markh (talk) 12:37, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds good.--Keerllston 18:51, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, an excellent idea. We're making good progress, and I hope we may be back to WP:RM before too long... this time for sure. Andrewa (talk) 01:17, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move name discussion 

message: "underneath the remains of workmen's huts built during the Ramesside Period; this explains why it was spared from the worst of the tomb depredations of that time"
How does it explain why the tomb had not been re-discovered sooner?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.53.124.87 (talk) 19:22, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Elaboration needed 

message: I've removed the term "officially opened" and replaced it with "opened". Carter's diary is used as a source for "officially", but it says "Opened sealed doorway before officials Etc", which, according to me, is not quite the same thing as an 'official opening'. Feel free to revert if I'm hopelessly wrong. Yintan  14:21, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Officially opened 

message: Shrine diagram is incorrectly interpretated in the 'Contents' section. Number 2 (the blue outline) is not the second shrine, but a wooden framework between 1st and 2nd shrines, on top of which pall linen was thrown. Second and third shrines are 3 and 4, and innermost shrine is the unnumbered black outline. --Mikoyan21 (talk) 19:28, 11 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Shrine diagram 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: There may not be additional chambers after all:  http://www.livescience.com/54708-nefertiti-missing-no-chambers-in-king-tut-tomb.html?cmpid=NL_LS_weekly_2016-5-11  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.68.104.232 (talk) 11:13, 12 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Updated radar scans 

message: I've read the above opposition and I'm afraid I'm not convinced. 'KV62' is an incredibly indescriptive and ineffective title, regardless of its designation. I vote instead for 'Tomb of Tutankhamun'. Per the naming convention guidelines:
A good Wikipedia article title has the five following characteristics:
* Recognizability – The title is a name or description of the subject that someone familiar with, although not necessarily an expert in, the subject area will recognize.
* Naturalness – The title is one that readers are likely to look or search for and that editors would naturally use to link to the article from other articles. Such a title usually conveys what the subject is actually called in English.
* Precision – The title unambiguously identifies the article's subject and distinguishes it from other subjects.  
* Conciseness – The title is no longer than necessary to identify the article's subject and distinguish it from other subjects.
* Consistency – The title is consistent with the pattern of similar articles' titles. Many of these patterns are listed (and linked) as topic-specific naming conventions on article titles, in the box above.
---
According to Google Trends, "KV62" is by far the least recognizable term used in searching for this article. The unnaturalness and imprecision of the term is demonstrated in the apologetic opening line of the article: "KV62 is the standard Egyptological designation for the tomb of the young pharaoh Tutankhamun in the Valley of the King". Is the article about the designation or the tomb? Because the tomb's been around for a good 3300 years, and in that time it's always been the Tomb of Tutankhamun, but the designation 'KV62' has only been around for about a century.
I'll grant that it's concise, though the KV designation doesn't wholly distinguish it from the Köchel-Verzeichnis catalogue of Mozart music or the KV designation of the Kliment Voroshilov tank series, but the discussion of consistency is a little more interesting. Granted, the title of this article is consistent with the other articles related to the Valley of the Kings tombs, it's the naming conventions used in the Valley of the Kings which are the issue. The brevity is clearly designed to benefit the context of someone working within the narrow range of excavating that valley, not the encyclopedia reader. The conventions used are inconsistent with UNESCO World Heritage naming conventions and nearly every other archaeological site in the world, including other Egyptological sites. Even when the sites are serially named (Stonehenge 1-3, Troy I-IV), they are descriptive enough to allow the reader to identify them. Is the unfortunate naming convention of the Valley of Kings the cross of the reader to bear? Is this an encyclopedia for Egyptologists? It is and has been the Tomb of Tutankhamun since he was laid to rest there over 3 millennia ago. KV62 is just an arbitrary name assigned much later for the convenience of one select group. It's not only less convenient, it's less accurate. Scoundr3l (talk) 21:27, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Just noticed this discussion on passing through.  I can't believe such an obvious violation of WP:COMMONNAMES has stood for so long. This title doesn't even suggest that the subject of the article is a tomb, or that it is an archaeological site, or anything with the least meaning to someone who isn't already conversant with the subject. Even very Egypt-specific sources provide more useful titles, like "KV 62 (Tutankhamen)" at the Theban Mapping Project. Zerotalk 05:56, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rename proposal (again) 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: The veracity of the story of a water boy, said to be Hussein Abdel-Rassoul, finding the tomb has been questioned. It doesn't appear in any of Carter's diaries, but first appears in Hoving's book 'Tutankhamun: The Untold Story'. A great summary and further information can be found on Christina Riggs' blog, in the post Water boys and wishful thinking. I know a blog post isn't an ideal source, even if it is by a respected Egyptologist/historian. In light of this, I feel we should either delete the mention of the water boy, or expand it to acknowledge the factual murkiness/prevalence in popular thought. Let me know what you think! Merytat3n (talk) 09:04, 24 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Veracity of water boy story 

message: :The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 
The result of the move request was: Consensus to move. Opposers make an argument from consistency, but consistency is only one criterion of the article titles criteria and others, such as recognizability ("The title is a name or description of the subject that someone familiar with, although not necessarily an expert in, the subject area will recognize.") and naturalness ("The title is one that readers are likely to look or search for and that editors would naturally use to link to the article from other articles.") can take precedence.   (t · c) buidhe 03:22, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: KV62 →  – The present title is a clear violation of WP:COMMONNAME, which states that . It additionally fails the WP:CRITERIA of Recognizability and Naturalness for article titles, and arguably Consistency as well since the construction "Tomb of X" is widespread on Wikipedia (though see paragraph below for discussion of consistency with other Egyptian tomb articles). WP:TITLE states that , and according to Google Ngram, "Tomb of Tutankhamun" is considerably more common than "KV62". Google Scholar results also support this: 2,760 for "Tomb of Tutankhamun", but only 1,540 for "KV62". Note that several of the results on the first page use "KV62" only as a parenthetical and treat some variation of "Tomb of Tutankhamun" as the primary name. These results are also biased towards "KV62" since it can refer to things besides the tomb (some of the results on the first page of Google Scholar have nothing to do with Egypt) and because variations in the spelling of "Tutankhamun" mean that the query "Tomb of Tutankhamun" does not capture all relevant uses. The present title of the article also forces the first sentence to be the awkward  rather than, e.g., the more natural .
I am specifically not proposing the renaming of any of the other articles about tombs in the Valley of the Kings, which all use the same "KV" format. While this is inconsistent, it is justified in this case because the tomb of Tutankhamun is vastly better known than any of the other tombs in the Valley of the Kings, which are plausibly more widely known by their official designations.
This renaming was previously proposed in 2007, with the result of "No consensus". You can read a summary of the arguments at Talk:KV62#Arguments_Synopsis. There was a second try at renaming in 2016, which received no objections but didn't go anywhere. Rublov (talk) 01:04, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

text: The timing of this move request is good, though. I'm working on a rewrite of this article and a subarticle about its discovery, in preparation for the discovery's centennial in November 2022, and whichever way it goes, I'd like to have the question of the article title settled well in advance. While I'm I've been thinking it should be titled "discovery and clearance of [tomb name]", because the article has to cover the nearly decade-long process of conserving and removing the tomb's contents, but "discovery and clearance of the tomb of Tutankhamun" feels very lengthy. Should it simply be "discovery of [tomb name]"? A. Parrot (talk) 04:55, 24 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:  re: the title of the subarticle, I agree that "Discovery and clearance of [tomb name]" is excessively lengthy, and I think "Discovery of [tomb name]" is sufficient. re: consistency, I do acknowledge that that is a concern, but it seems to me that the argument for "KV62" is strictly weaker since "Tomb of Tutankhamun" has both WP:COMMONNAME and the WP:CRITERIA of Recognizability and Naturalness in its corner. I also think the supposed consistency is a bit of a false equivalence since Tutankhamun's tomb is singular in every way, e.g. 24,243 page views for KV62 versus 1,187 for KV11. Most, if not all, of the other tombs are known primarily to specialists so it makes sense that their article titles use an academic designation, but Tutankhamun's tomb is widely known so the title of its article should reflect that. Rublov (talk) 01:10, 25 April 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Requested move 22 April 2021 

message: I mentioned a while ago that I was planning to rewrite this article, as well as create a separate article about the tomb's discovery. I hope to bring this article up to GA status. Unfortunately, my writing process, where I compose nearly everything myself in an offline text file, is more unilateral than many Wikipedians prefer. In the case of this article, which is far from terrible (unlike some others I've rewritten), it may not seem necessary to redo all the text, but I'm afraid that's just how my brain prefers to work. Therefore, now that I'm nearing completion on my draft of this article, I've put it in my sandbox so others can see it: User:A. Parrot/sandbox.
I've retained all the information that I think is important to this article, but I've put much more focus on the burial goods, which are, after all, the main reason this tomb is significant. I have also deemphasized subjects that I think receive disproportionate attention in the current revision. Details about the first moments of the tomb's discovery can be covered in the upcoming subarticle on that topic, and the recent claims about undiscovered chambers can be summarized in less detail than in the current revision. I have a link to the article on the meteoritic iron dagger, but I don't see why it should merit its own subsection, as the current revision has it.
Some parts of the article still need to have their references filled in or text added (%percent signs% are my way of noting to myself that something is still incomplete), but my general plan for the rewrite is clearly visible in the sandbox. If any editors have suggestions or criticisms, this section will be a good place to note them. A. Parrot (talk) 01:42, 11 April 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: This is awesome, thank you for your hard work!!! Some small corrections of things that stood out to me. First sentence of the last paragraph of the intro - Tutankhamun's mummy has been displayed in temp controlled case since 2007 and is no longer housed inside the outermost coffin in the sarcophagus (citation from the Tutankhamun page here). In the 'Burial chamber and treasury' section, the sarcophagus is said to be calcite - it is made of yellow quartzite, supported on at each corner by a block of calcite. The lid is red granite painted yellow (Reeves 1990: p.105) Merytat3n (talk) 05:29, 11 April 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Man, why did I write calcite? Thanks for these corrections. A. Parrot (talk) 05:40, 11 April 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I've uploaded the rewritten version. A. Parrot (talk) 06:28, 18 April 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Draft of rewrite 

message: I was pinged on user:Ceoil's talk page. 
Here are my two cents.  Writing an article offline and adding it to mainspace all at once is not something I'm entirely comfortable with. In part, this is because many editors of Wikipedia who might be interested in the topic, the anonymous, for example, are not given the chance to read the article, and in good time serve as informal peer reviewers. But, in equal part, I'm uncomfortable also because a previously existing text, the work of many other editors, has been replaced in an opaque manner by another.  By opaque, I mean: we are not given the chance to observe gradually, in bits and pieces, how the sentences were improved, and learn. Many new editors learn by observing how articles change. 
Consider the two sentences in the lead,  
In the first sentence, the participial phrase, "consisting of four chambers and an entrance staircase ..." is the main information, as the common reader has no idea how big or small a standard tomb is, or at least at this stage of reading, particularly care about this comparison.  So we can't really make "The tomb is smaller ..." the main clause. (I mean we can, but it is the kind of thing that will make a reader fleetingly pause in their reading.) In the normal course of evolution, another editor might notice this and turn it around by subordinating the less accessible information, i.e.: "Smaller than many other Egyptian royal tombs, Tutankhamen's tomb consisted of four chambers and an entrance staircase and corridor." Yet another might feel that the two "tomb"s, now almost back to back, sound repetitive, and change the second instance to "mausoleum," or somesuch ... and so it would evolve ... or not evolve, for obviously, I can't divine the future. 
Or consider, "it probably originated ..."  Well, "originate" has the meaning of coming into existence, springing, ... Tombs, on the other hand, are more purposefully made by humans.  You could say "the tsunami originated in a minor earthquake six miles below ..."   You could say the tomb's plan originated in the idea that ... 
When you don't give the IPs a chance, the burden falls on the peer-reviewers and GA/FA reviewers, and they are depleted already in more senses than one. (I don't mean to overplay this hand either: in the end, you do need the peer-reviewers, but the article does settle with time, its tangles untangled a little.) So, without belaboring the point, how you proceed is for you to decide, but I would urge you to think about the sound moral principle here.  
In terms of practical advice, next time, if writing off-line is what you prefer:  add a section at a time, give it a week, then add another section, ... It is probably also a good idea to wait for a few months, as Ceoil says, before nominating this article as a FAC.  Pinging some others.   Not trying to be intimidating, only requesting a more experienced body of opinion so you might be better served.  PS I note with sadness the absence of  who in the past had contributed richly to such discussions.   Best, Fowler&fowler«Talk» 13:42, 15 June 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I haven’t looked at the changes but your analysis is impressive! But User:A. Parrot is IMHO one of our best editors on Ancient Egypt so I doubt that there is much to worry about and he did discuss how he did this above. Doug Weller talk 14:12, 15 June 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree with Doug, and have no concerns; obv A. Parrot is already highly regarded and trusted in this area. Thanks once again Fowler for your look over and thoughts. To reiterate the pointers I picked up over the years- all of which mr/ms Parrot was anyway following . Ceoil (talk) 15:44, 18 June 2022 (UTC)

text: The tomb, rather than the discovery, is the more substantial and of wider interest. Best of luck anyhow with either or both :) Ceoil (talk) 04:18, 19 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  My thoughts about off-line writing