Valley of the Kings

The small but legendary tomb discovered nearly intact by Howard Carter on November 4, 1922 — the most famous archaeological find in history. Though modest in size compared to other royal tombs (it was likely not originally intended for a king), its four chambers contained over 5,000 objects, from golden shrines to everyday sandals, because it was the only royal tomb to escape large-scale ancient looting. The burial chamber walls show vivid scenes of the young pharaoh's journey to the afterlife, including the iconic image of the Opening of the Mouth ceremony. Tutankhamun's mummy remains inside the tomb in a climate-controlled glass case — the only pharaoh still resting in the Valley of the Kings — making a visit here a rare audience with a 3,300-year-old king.

Widely considered the most beautifully decorated tomb in the Valley, KV9 rewards visitors with an extraordinary astronomical ceiling depicting the Books of Day and Night — the complete journey of the sun god Ra through the sky and the underworld, painted in vivid blues, golds, and ochres across the entire vaulted burial chamber. The tomb was originally begun by Ramesses V and completed by his uncle Ramesses VI, who usurped it and added his own decorations. Every corridor surface is covered in dense, perfectly preserved mythological texts and images — the Book of Gates, the Book of Caverns, and the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld — creating an overwhelming visual encyclopedia of Egyptian afterlife beliefs. Many visitors rank this as their single most impressive tomb experience, and it is consistently recommended over even Tutankhamun's more famous but far smaller chamber.

The longest and deepest tomb in the Valley at over 137 meters, KV17 was discovered by Giovanni Belzoni in 1817 and is renowned for its exquisitely detailed painted raised reliefs — the finest of any tomb in the valley, with a delicacy of line and richness of color that set the artistic standard for the 19th Dynasty. The tomb descends through multiple corridors and chambers adorned with scenes from the Litany of Ra, the Book of Gates, and the Amduat, culminating in a magnificent vaulted burial chamber whose ceiling is painted with a detailed astronomical chart. Seti I's alabaster sarcophagus (now in Sir John Soane's Museum in London) was itself a masterwork carved with scenes from the Book of Gates. Access is intermittent and requires a special ticket, but when open, it is an unmissable experience that reveals Egyptian funerary art at its absolute peak.

One of the valley's most distinctive tombs, notable for its unusual secular side chambers decorated with scenes that break dramatically from the typical mythological subjects — depictions of foreigners from Libya, Nubia, and the Near East, blind harpists playing music, boats on the Nile, and kitchen scenes showing food preparation. These 'secular' vignettes provide an invaluable window into the diversity of the ancient world and the cosmopolitan nature of the Egyptian court during the New Kingdom. The main corridors follow the standard religious program with beautifully preserved scenes from the Book of Gates and the Litany of Ra. The tomb also has a fascinating architectural quirk: a corridor jog where the builders accidentally broke into an adjacent tomb (KV10) and had to change direction mid-construction.

The oldest decorated royal tomb in the valley, dramatically tucked into a cliff face high above the valley floor, reached via a steep metal staircase that adds an adventurous element to the visit. The burial chamber is uniquely oval-shaped — said to resemble a royal cartouche — and painted in a distinctive simplified stick-figure style on a papyrus-colored background, depicting the complete text of the Book of the Amduat (the earliest known complete copy). This austere, almost cartoon-like artistic style is quite different from the elaborate later tombs and has a raw, powerful immediacy of its own. The chamber still contains the pharaoh's red quartzite sarcophagus, decorated with images of the goddess Isis and Nephthys protecting the dead king, and the tomb's remote, hidden entrance speaks to the New Kingdom's obsession with protecting royal burials from robbers.

After centuries of pyramid-building made royal tombs conspicuous targets for robbery — virtually every pyramid burial was looted within generations — New Kingdom pharaohs chose this remote, sun-blasted desert valley on the west bank of the Nile, guarded by the naturally pyramid-shaped peak of al-Qurn, hoping that secrecy would succeed where monumental architecture had failed. The valley's narrow entrance could be guarded by a small force, and its arid climate promised preservation. Workers from the nearby village of Deir el-Medina carved the tombs in secret over generations, and a dedicated police force called the Medjay patrolled the area. Despite all precautions, tomb robbers — sometimes including the very workers who built the tombs — eventually plundered nearly every burial, leading priests during the 21st Dynasty to gather the surviving royal mummies and hide them in caches that remained undiscovered until the 19th century.

After five years of fruitless searching funded by the increasingly impatient Lord Carnarvon, archaeologist Howard Carter's team discovered a step cut into the bedrock beneath the entrance to the tomb of Ramesses VI on November 4, 1922, leading to a sealed doorway bearing ancient necropolis seals. When Carter finally peered through a small hole in the second sealed doorway on November 26, Carnarvon asked if he could see anything — Carter's famous reply, 'Yes, wonderful things,' became one of the most quoted lines in archaeological history. The tomb contained over 5,000 artifacts packed into just four small rooms, including the iconic gold death mask, three nested golden coffins, and objects ranging from golden chariots to baskets of dried food. The discovery sparked a global wave of 'Tutmania' that made ancient Egypt a permanent fixture of popular culture.

Despite over two centuries of exploration, the Valley of the Kings continues to yield surprises and new discoveries that challenge assumptions about how much remains to be found. Tomb KV63, a storage chamber containing seven wooden coffins and large pottery jars, was discovered in 2006 — the first new tomb found since Tutankhamun's in 1922. Ground-penetrating radar surveys and thermal scanning have suggested that additional chambers or corridors may exist behind the walls of known tombs, including controversial claims of hidden rooms adjacent to Tutankhamun's burial chamber. Meanwhile, ongoing conservation work in existing tombs continues to reveal previously hidden details — pigments invisible to the naked eye that glow under ultraviolet light, showing that the tomb decorations were even more elaborate than they appear today.