Valley of the Kings

The Valley of the Kings is a desert valley on the west bank of the Nile, across the river from ancient Thebes and modern Luxor, where the pharaohs of the New Kingdom were buried in tombs cut deep into the rock. It served as the main royal burial ground for nearly five centuries, from roughly 1539 to 1075 BCE. Some 65 tombs and chambers are now known there, from simple pits to vast underground complexes, and the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 turned it into one of the world's best-known archaeological sites.

Once the Hyksos had been driven out and Ahmose I had reunited Egypt, the Theban kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty began to build elaborate tombs to match their new power. They chose a remote wadi overlooked by a pyramid-shaped peak, al-Qurn, which could be guarded by special necropolis police. The first royal tomb there is generally attributed to Thutmose I, though some scholars credit Amenhotep I. His official Ineni boasted in his own tomb of overseeing the work in secret. The kings' mortuary temples, where their cults were kept up, stood separately on the edge of the cultivated land.

The tombs were dug and painted by craftsmen from the village of Deir el-Medina nearby, whose daily lives are unusually well documented; their records include what may be the earliest recorded strike by workers. A typical tomb was a long corridor sloping down through halls to a burial chamber, its walls covered with religious texts such as the Amduat and the Book of Gates, which trace the sun's passage through the twelve hours of the night. Early tombs, like that of Hatshepsut, which winds down more than 200 metres, have bent or twisting plans; later ones run straight.

Only about twenty tombs actually held kings; the rest belonged to queens, princes and favoured nobles. Akhenaten moved the royal burial ground to Amarna, but after his reign Tutankhamun, Ay and Horemheb returned to the valley. The Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties added many more tombs. The tomb of Seti I is usually judged the finest in the valley, while Ramesses II enlarged an older tomb, KV5, for his many sons; with more than 120 rooms it is probably the largest in the valley.

Almost every tomb was robbed in antiquity. Court papyri from the late Twentieth Dynasty record the trials of thieves, among them workmen from Deir el-Medina. As central power weakened and the High Priests of Amun came to govern Upper Egypt, the priests themselves opened most of the tombs during the Twenty-first Dynasty, stripped them of their valuables and gathered the royal mummies into caches, above all one near Deir el-Bahari, to protect them. Later, intrusive burials were placed in open tombs. Greek and Roman visitors came as tourists, leaving more than 2,100 graffiti, the earliest firmly dated to 278 BCE. In Coptic times some tombs served as churches, as stables and even as homes.

Scholars with Napoleon's expedition mapped the known tombs in 1799 and recorded the West Valley for the first time. Giovanni Belzoni found the tombs of Ay in 1816 and Seti I in 1817. John Gardner Wilkinson, working in the 1820s, introduced the KV numbering system still used today. Later in the century the Egyptian Antiquities Service took over exploration, and in the early twentieth century the American Theodore Davis held the permit and declared the valley exhausted.

He was wrong. Working for Lord Carnarvon, Howard Carter found the tomb of Tutankhamun, KV62, on 4 November 1922. It was the first royal tomb found largely intact, although robbers had entered it, and clearing it took until 1932. Its survival is partly due to spoil from the later tomb of Ramesses VI, which had buried its entrance. Discoveries have continued since, including the forgotten extent of KV5 in the 1990s and the chamber KV63 in 2005.

The valley was inscribed in 1979 as part of the UNESCO World Heritage site of Ancient Thebes with its Necropolis, together with Karnak and the other monuments of Thebes. Flash floods, which have carried debris into open tombs over the centuries, and the sheer number of visitors, often 4,000 to 5,000 a day, both endanger its fragile decoration, and only a rotating selection of tombs is open at any time.