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DISCOVERY OF THE TOMB OF KING TUT

Moment Carter opens Tutankhamun's tomb

The discovery of King Tutankhamun's Tomb is regarded as perhaps the most spectacular archaeological find of all time. Tutankhamun was by no means one of the great pharaohs — he didn't build a pyramid and he died when he was 18 — but it just so happens that the room of his tomb where the treasures were found was one of the few in the Valley of the Kings unmolested by looters. The tomb of Ramses II, the greatest pharaoh of all, probably contained a greater horde of treasures but we will probably never know what those treasures were — his tomb was looted only 150 years after his death.

The tomb of King Tutankhamun-was discovered by British explorer Howard Carter on November 26, 1922 in the Valley of the Kings. According to one story an opening to the tomb was discovered by a water boy who had dug a hole on a barren hillside under three feet of debris under an ancient workman's hut to keep his personal water bottle cool. The water-carrier stumbled on the corner of a door that was almost completely buried in sand. It opened up to a steep flight of stairs that led to what became known as KV62 (Valley of the Kings 62). A total of 61 royal tombs had been found up until that time, all of them looted.

After Carter made the discovery, he showed incredible restraint and patience. Instead of entering the tomb, he ordered the stairs filled in, to hide the the discovery, placed some of his most trusted workmen as guards and he sent a famous cable to Carnarvon: “At last have made wonderful discovery in Valley a magnificent tomb with seals intact recovered same for your arrival congratulations.”

Carter waited for three weeks for Carnavon to arrive from his castle in Hampshire England. It took Carnarvon and his daughter, the 21-year-old Lady Evelyn Herbert, two and a half weeks to reach Luxor by train and boat. To reach the Valley of the Kings, the earl and his daughter crossed the Nile by ferry and rode donkeys to Carter’s excavation site.

Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone is a black basalt slab 45 inches long and 29 inches wide. Inscribed in three languages: 53 lines of Greek, 32 lines of a cursive script now called demotic script and 16 lines of hieroglyphics. Both the demotic script and hieroglyphics were initially indecipherable. It was written by a group of priest assembled in Memphis to mark the ascension to the throne of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes in 190 B.C. and carried a Memphis decree concerning the cult of the king.

The Rosetta Stone was unearthed in August 1799 by French soldiers, excavating ruined Fort Rachid near the town of Rosetta at the mouth of the Nile. Around the time the stone was found France went to war with Britain. When the French were forced out Egypt the stone fell into the hands of the British and was taken to the British Museum in 1802, were it remains today. Egypt wants the Rosetta Stone back.

Rosetta Stone Hieroglyphics in their developed form were phonetic symbols not merely pictures. The first man in modern history to realize this was a German mathematician named Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) who discovered that hieroglyphics were an early form of the Coptic language. Up until his discovery it was thought that the hieroglyphics were symbols of ideas and objects not the phonetic symbols that they really were.

The Frenchmen Jean-Françious Champollion (1790-1832) is given credit with the deciphering the hieroglyphics using the Greek on the Rosetta Stone. Champollion became aware of the Rosetta Stone when he was 12 and, the story goes, he became obsessed with deciphering it. Before he reached the age of 20 he had mastered Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew, Latin and Coptic (a language related to ancient Egyptian).

Champollion was given clues by Dr. Thomas Young, a British scholar who theorized the hieroglyphics were phonetic and had an alphabetical base using a bilingual-Greek-hieroglyphic text on an obelisk in Philae, Egypt. He found that seven elongated ovals or cartouches spelled something phonetically — the name of Ptolemy and also found the name of Cleopatra.

The proper names of Ptolemy, Cleopatra and Ramses gave Champollion the necessary clues to crack the ancient Egyptian written language. Using his knowledge of Coptic, Champollion went much further than Young and devised a complete system of decipherment rules and basic grammar. He realized that hieroglyphic language was alphabetic in principal but included pictorial signs representing complete words and other signs, when attached to words, represented the word’s category (e.g. "an animal name").

The stress of the intensive work is believed to have contributed to Champollion's death from a stroke at the age of 42. The genius of his work wasn't fully appreciated until 30 years later. After his death German scholars figured the full complexity of the hieroglyphics and gave accurate translations for texts misunderstood by Champollion. Today hieroglyphics can be read about as well as the writing for most languages.

Royal Cache at Deirel-Bahri — Home of the Missing Pharaohs

Many of the great monarchs of the New Kingdom — Ahmose I, who expelled the Hyksos, the sacred queen Ahmose-Nefertari, Amenhotep I, Thutmose II, Thutmose III the great conqueror, Seti I, and the great Ramses II — and many others were taken from their original tombs and taken to a tomb near Deirel-Bahri near present-day Luxor where they rested unmolested until the 19th century. Around 1875 villagers in Kurna on the West Bank of the River Nile opposite Luxor found the tomb in the the Theban necropolis, found this pit. They guarded their secret with care until the summer of 1881 when it was discovered by Egyptian authorities. On July 5, 1881 the tomb was entered officers of the Bulak Museum who telegraphed what they found to Europe.

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Valley of the Kings Maite Mascort wrote in National Geographic: Royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings typically hold just one ruler. In 1881 a tomb near Deirel-Bahri in the Theban necropolis defied these assumptions. Rather than one royal mummy, a cache of mummies was discovered there. Among the dead, scholars identified no fewer than 11 pharaohs of ancient Egypt’s New Kingdom period, including Seti I, whose body was missing from his magnificent tomb, and Ramses the Great. [Source: Maite Mascort, National Geographic, June 15, 2023]

Nicknamed the Royal Cache, this tomb (known to experts as TT320 or DB320) originally housed the bodies of the high priest of Amun and his family, who lived around 960 B.C. When Egyptologists documented the tomb’s contents in 1881, more than 50 bodies were found there. Many of them, like Seti I and Ramses II, were kings and queens missing from the tombs that were built for them. Although the Deir el-Bahri discovery revealed the whereabouts of these missing royals, many more were still unaccounted for. Another impressive cache would be discovered in 1898, this time in the tomb of one of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs: Amenhotep II.

During the 21st Dynasty (circa 1077 B.C. to 950 B.C.), the mummies of monarchs from previous centuries were taken out of their original burial places in the Valley of the Kings and eventually hidden in a high priest’s tomb near Deir el-Bahri and in the tomb of Amenhotep II (KV35). Victor Loret discovered the KV35 cache less than two decades after French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero had stumbled on the mummy cache at Deir el-Bahri in 1882.

Discovery of the 'Lost City' of Tanis — Featured in an Indiana Jones Movie

Brian Handwerk wrote in National Geographic History: The treasures found in the "lost city" of Tanis rival those of King Tut's. Yet for more than six decades the riches from its rulers' tombs have remained largely unknown. Many who know of Tanis at all remember the city as portrayed in the Indiana Jones movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the famous film the city was buried by a catastrophic ancient sandstorm and rediscovered by Nazis searching for the Ark of the Covenant. In reality, the Ark was never hidden in Tanis, the sandstorm didn't happen, and the Nazis never battled Indiana Jones in the site's ruins. But the true tale of Tanis is also fit for the silver screen. [Source Brian Handwerk, National Geographic History]

It was known that the ancient city was hidden somewhere in the area, but not where. "People kept trying to identify different places with it," said Salima Ikram, a professor of Egyptology at American University in Cairo and a National Geographic Society grantee. "It's not like the Valley of the Kings, where everyone knew they'd been burying [pharaohs] for ten generations or so," said David Silverman, an Egyptologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1939 a French archaeologist named Pierre Montet brought Tanis into the 20th century after nearly a dozen years of excavations. He unearthed a royal tomb complex that included three intact and undisturbed burial chambers—a rare and marvelous find. The tombs held dazzling funereal treasures such as golden masks, coffins of silver, and elaborate sarcophagi. Other precious items included bracelets, necklaces, pendants, tableware, and amulets.

Statues, vases, and jars also filled the tombs, all part of an array that still bears witness, after thousands of years, to the power and wealth of Tanis's rulers. One of the kings, Sheshonq II, was unknown before Montet discovered his burial chamber. But he wore elaborate jewelry that once adorned the more famous Sheshonq I, who is mentioned in the Bible. "That shows you that [the kings of Tanis] were very important at least during that time period," Silverman said of the biblical reference.

Tanis was found largely as it was abandoned, so the city is home to many archaeological treasures in addition to the tombs. Temples, including a Temple of Amun and a Temple of Horus, have been found. Even urban districts of the ancient city remain, and the site continues to host archaeological expeditions in search of more finds.

With so much to discover, how did Montet succeed so spectacularly where others had failed? "It takes somebody who is really persevering to conquer the odds," Silverman said. "Pierre Montet worked very, very hard to finally discover what is referred to in the Bible—what was known from contemporary history but had been lost." But if Montet's achievements were extraordinary, his timing was atrocious. His discovery of Tanis was completely overshadowed by the nearly simultaneous eruption of World War II. Even today, few know the tale of the treasures Montet discovered. And though the objects reside in Cairo's Egyptian Museum, they draw far fewer visitors than their more famous counterparts. "Had the Second World War not intervened, the royal burials of Tanis would have been as well, if not better, known that the tomb of Tutankhamun," Ikram notes.

Excavating the Royal Bark of Khufu

The royal bark of Khufu was discovered in 1954 when a mountain of debris was removed from the south face of the great Pyramid and investigators found two pits carved in the bedrock. The chambers were covered with limestone blocks that weighed 15 tons and were up to two meters thick. The first boat was excavated in the 1950s. It was almost perfectly preserved in a chamber that was so well sealed a person who entered it after it was opened said he smelled “vapors, perfumes of the wood, sacred wood of the ancient religion.” Excavating the bark and carefully reconstructing it took several years.

The second chamber was examined with an underground camera in the 1980s. Drilling through the two-meter-thick limestone block took 48 hours. It was hoped that this chamber was sealed but it was not. The air in it was almost the same the air outside the tomb. The boat there was not in nearly as good of condition as the first boat. Why was there more than one boat? There are depictions of funerary barks being pulled by another vessel.

See Remote Sensing of Tombs and Chambers Under Archaeology

Discoveries in the Late 20th Century

In 1972 a 3,300 year old ancient Egyptian outpost was discovered on the Gaza Strip. The Bedouin, who helped archaeologists locate it used a long screw driver like a divining rob to find it. When the archaeologists asked the man to explain how he performed his magic, the man said enigmatically, "Some days it's honey, some days onions." But surprising on a day he predicted beforehand would be honey the site was discovered. [Source: Trude Dothan, National Geographic , December 1982]

In 1991, a hieroglyphic-covered colossus of Ramses the Great, nearly 50 feet long, was discovered in the little-known Sohag area, 500 kilometers south of Cairo.

Tomb of Ramses Sons

On February 2, 1995, American archaeologist Ken Weeks discovered a huge tomb with at least 108 chambers in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor. Archaeologists considered it the most significant discovery in Egyptology since the discovery of King Tut's tomb. Known officially as KV5 (the 5th tomb discovered in the Valley of the Kings) and located about 100 feet from the tomb of Ramses the Great, the tomb is believed to have been a burial place for many of Ramses the Great' sons.

KV5 is the largest and most complex Egyptian tomb every discovered and the only multiple tomb for pharaoh's children. Inscriptions on the walls mentions two of Ramses' sons, which is what led archaeologists to believed it may be a tomb for his sons. The tomb was found under an area that had been earmarked for a parking lot and discovered by digging a series of tunnels. The entrance was beside an asphalt road about ten feet below the grade and behind a boot that sold T-shirts and souvenir scarabs. In 1825, an Englishman named James Burton crawled partway inside but was turned by debris and rubble.

Most of the chamber had been looted it gave scientist new insights into a side of Egyptian culture that had appeared before. Many have of the chambers have been damaged by looters and water from flash flood. Few pieces of jewelry, gold or silver or other valuables were found.

Book: “ The Lost Tomb” by Kent R. Weeks (William Morrow & Co.) is the story of the tomb of the children of Ramses II.

Discoveries in the 2000s

Ramses III mummyIn April 2004, archaeologists announced the discovery of 50 mummies dating as back as 664 B.C. in deep shafts im Saqqara, 23 kilometers south of Cairo, the main cemetery for Memphis.

In 2006, a big deal was made about the discovery of a new tomb with seven coffins in the Valley of the Kings—the first such find since the discovery of King Tut’s grave in 1922. The tomb, called KV-63 because it was the 63rd tomb found in the Valley of the Kings, was found by a team led by Otto Schaden, a member of a Bohemian brass band affiliated with the University of Memphis.

Based on inscriptions found on some pottery archaeologists speculated they could contained the mummies of King Tut’s mother Queen Kiya. Four of the wooden coffins had been badly eaten away by termites. With great fanfare the last of the coffins was opened and no mummy was inside, but it did contain embalming materials and colors made by dried flowers. It seems that “tomb” was used mainly for storage and may have possibly been an embalming studio.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons, The Louvre, The British Museum, The Egyptian Museum in Cairo

Text Sources: UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, escholarship.org ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Egypt sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Tour Egypt, Minnesota State University, Mankato, ethanholman.com; Mark Millmore, discoveringegypt.com discoveringegypt.com; Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Discover magazine, Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, BBC, Encyclopædia Britannica, Time, Newsweek, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated July 2024