Otto John Schaden (August 26, 1937 – November 23, 2015) was an American

Egyptologist Egyptology (from ''Egypt'' and Greek , '' -logia''; ar, علم المصريات) is the study of ancient Egyptian history, language, literature, religion, architecture and art from the 5th millennium BC until the end of its native religiou ...

. He was the field director of the Amenmesse Tomb Project of the

University of Memphis } The University of Memphis (UofM) is a public research university in Memphis, Tennessee. Founded in 1912, the university has an enrollment of more than 22,000 students. The university maintains the Herff College of Engineering, the Center for Ea ...

(

Tennessee Tennessee ( , ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked state in the Southeastern region of the United States. Tennessee is the 36th-largest by area and the 15th-most populous of the 50 states. It is bordered by Kentucky to th ...

). In addition to his work on the tomb of

Amenmesse Amenmesse (also Amenmesses or Amenmose) was the fifth pharaoh of the Nineteenth dynasty of Egypt, Nineteenth Dynasty in Ancient Egypt, possibly the son of Merneptah and Queen Takhat. Others consider him to be one of the innumerable sons of Rames ...

(

KV10 Tomb KV10, located in the Valley of the Kings near the modern-day Egyptian city of Luxor, was cut and decorated for the burial of Pharaoh Amenmesse of the Nineteenth Dynasty of Ancient Egypt. However, there is no proof that he was actually burie ...

) in the main arm of the

Valley of the Kings The Valley of the Kings ( ar, وادي الملوك ; Late Coptic: ), also known as the Valley of the Gates of the Kings ( ar, وادي أبوا الملوك ), is a valley in Egypt where, for a period of nearly 500 years from the 16th to 11th ...

, he has also cleared and reinvestigated tombs

WV23 Tomb WV23, also known as KV23, is located in the Western Valley of the Kings near modern-day Luxor, and was the final resting place of Pharaoh Ay of the Eighteenth Dynasty. The tomb was discovered by Giovanni Battista Belzoni in the winter of 18 ...

, WV24, and WV25 in the Western Valley.

Biography

Schaden taught the Middle Egyptian language at the University of Minnesota in the early 1970s. On 8 February 2006, it was announced that his team had discovered

KV63 KV63 is a recently opened chamber in Egypt's Valley of the Kings pharaonic necropolis. Initially believed to be a royal tomb, it is now believed to have been a storage chamber for the mummification process. It was found in 2005 by a team of arc ...

, an intact chamber at first thought to be a tomb. The tomb was slowly excavated from March to July 2006 and appears to have been a mummification storage area for another royal tomb—possibly an unsanctioned tomb prematurely labeled KV64. '' Harper's Magazine'' for January 2008 contains a long essay by Gregory Jaynes about his March 2006 visit to the

tomb, in which he describes Otto Schaden's dispute with his superior Lorelei Corcoran from the

. The

and Dr. Schaden severed their relationship and Schaden's research was to continue under the auspices of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, a very unusual move because most are conducted under a university. He died on November 23, 2015, at the age of 78.Otto Shaden Obituary
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References

External links

KV63 Official Website
Managed by Bill and Roxanne Wilson
KV10: The Amenmesse Project
Managed by Bill and Roxanne Wilson
MSNBC Science online.
"Egyptian ‘tomb’ was mummy workroom: Sarcophagi contained supplies, not royalty, top archaeologist says." American Egyptologists University of Missouri faculty 1937 births 2015 deaths {{Egyptologist-stub