Out of the blinding light of a fall morning here in the Valley of the Kings, American archaeologist Kent Weeks led the way down a narrow, stone passageway and into the entrance of a tomb. Weeks lanced his flashlight into the enveloping darkness of "the hidden tomb," as he calls it, and pressed on through the damp, winding passages toward what may be his archaeological team's most significant find after years of methodical digging, scraping, and brushing.At the end of a long hallway, a human skull rested, propped up in a wooden box and framed in the bleak light of a bare bulb powered by a generator that rumbled through the stony silence of the tomb.This skull, Weeks believes, and new scientific evidence suggests, may be that of Amun-her-khepeshef, the oldest son of Rameses II, the pharaoh many historians think was the ruler of ancient Egypt more than 3,000 years ago at the time of the biblical story of the Exodus.If so, this may be the skull of a man the Hebrew Bible says was killed by the 10th of the horrible plagues, the death of the firstborn, that God sent to persuade the pharaoh to free the Hebrew slaves. And if so, it contains an important new piece of forensic evidence: The skull has a depressed fracture on the left hand side which pathologists say clearly occurred at the time of death.In other words, Weeks' discovery could have profound implications for understanding a biblical narrative that is at the core of Judaism and part of the foundation of Christianity and Islam. It raises the question as to whether the oldest son of the pharaoh of the Exodus was struck down not by the hand of God, as the Bible says, but by the hand of man. And if that is true, perhaps the 10th plague became a metaphor for the early death that befell the pharaoh's oldest son.
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