By the 1910s, most people thought the Valley of the Kings had given up all its tombs. Howard Carter, who had trained as a young man with Petrie at Amarna, disagreed. He knew of objects naming Tutankhamun, a short-reigned king of the 18th Dynasty whose tomb had never been found.
Key idea
On 4 November 1922 Carter's workers found a step cut in the rock under ancient workmen's huts. With his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, he looked inside on 26 November. The tomb, numbered KV62, was nearly intact: about 5,400 objects. Carter and his team spent about ten years recording and clearing it; the last objects went to Cairo in 1932.
Why it works
KV62 was the first royal tomb of the New Kingdom found with most of its contents in place, so every object's position mattered. Carter did not rush it. Each object got a number; Harry Burton photographed it where it lay; each was described on a record card and drawn; the chemist Alfred Lucas and the conservator Arthur Mace treated fragile pieces before they were moved. That record, now kept at the Griffith Institute in Oxford, is what scholars still use.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 4 November 1922 | the first step is found |
| 26 November 1922 | Carter and Carnarvon look into the antechamber ("wonderful things") |
| 16 February 1923 | the sealed burial chamber is officially opened |
| 5 April 1923 | Lord Carnarvon dies in Cairo of blood poisoning from an infected mosquito bite |
| 1925 | the mummy is examined; the gold mask is lifted |
| 1932 | the last objects are sent to the Egyptian Museum |
Worked example: Why so slow?
The antechamber alone held hundreds of objects piled together. Why did clearing it take about two months, and the whole tomb about ten years?
- Each object had to be numbered, photographed in place and drawn before it was touched.
- Many were fragile: wood had shrunk, beads had lost their threads, textiles were brittle. They had to be stabilized first.
- Moving one object without a record would destroy the evidence of where it lay. Slowness was the method.
Answer: Because recording and conserving each object came before moving it.
Worked example: Weighing a "curse" story
Newspapers in 1923 linked Carnarvon's death to a pharaoh's curse. How would a historian test that idea?
- Check the cause: Carnarvon died of an infection, a known risk at the time, in a man already in poor health.
- Check the others: Carter, who spent the most time in the tomb, lived until 1939; a 2002 medical study found no shorter lives among those present at the openings.
- Check the source: no curse text was found in the tomb. The story started in newspapers competing for news, since one paper had exclusive access to the dig.
Answer: The evidence does not support it: a newspaper story, not a finding.
Common mistake
Believing in a curse. Carter and most of the team lived for years; the "curse" was a newspaper story. Check the dates: Carter died in 1939, sixteen years after the opening.
Unlike most earlier finds, almost all of the tomb's contents went to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo; a few small pieces that went astray have been returned over the years. Today the collection is shown together at the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza.