Tutankhamun’s Tomb lies in the central area of the Valley of the Kings at Thebes, where it now bears the number KV 62. It was originally made for a private individual, but pressed into service as a royal tomb when Tutankhamun died with his own intended tomb incomplete. It comprises a passageway leading to an antechamber, off which opens a storeroom. To the right is a large room, running at a right angle to the first chamber, its floor lying around a meter lower. This difference in levels was intended to provide sufficient clearance for the items placed in it, surrounding the king’s quartzite sarcophagus.

The sarcophagus itself was closed by a granite lid, apparently broken while being lowered into place. The cause of this accident was probably the discovery that the toes of the outermost gilded wooden anthropoid coffin of the king were higher than the rim of the sarcophagus coffer, and needed adzing down. The middle coffin was also of wood, but elaborately inlaid as well as gilded; it had been made for the burial of Tutankhamun’s elder brother, Smenkhkare/Neferneferuaten, in traditional style. It had not apparently been to the revolutionary taste of the latter’s co-regent, the sun-worshipping Akhenaten, who was responsible for Smenkhkare/Neferneferuaten’s burial, following his premature death. Smenkhkare/Neferneferuaten had thus been interred in an adapted Atenist coffin, leaving his original one in store, along with other pieces, to be employed for his brother a decade later.

Tutankhamun’s innermost coffin was made of solid gold. Like the outer coffins it was adorned with a feathered, rishi, pattern that represented the king as a kind of humanheaded bird. The mummy within was equipped with a gold portrait mask, gold hands, and inlaid bands containing religious formulae. The mummy wrappings contained huge quantities of jewelry, but the cloth was in a very poor state at the time of its discovery, having carbonized through the chemical reaction of the unguents with which the royal body had been drenched at the funeral. These had badly damaged the flesh of the mummy itself, which had also been stuck to the floor of the gold coffin by then.

The sarcophagus was surrounded by four gilded wooden shrines, each covered with visual representations from the various Egyptian funerary texts and a linen pall. The walls of the burial chamber were the only ones of the tomb to be decorated, being adorned with scenes painted on a yellow background. One wall shows the king’s mummy receiving the last rites from Tutankhamun’s successor, King Ay. Other elements of the decoration include depictions of the king standing before various deities, vignettes from the Book of Imyduat, and a depiction of the king’s catafalque, drawn by his officials. Like the scene with Ay, this latter depiction seems to be unique for a royal sepulcher, although it is a type common to private tomb chapels.

A doorway opposite the foot of Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus led into a small room, dubbed the “Treasury” by the tomb’s excavator. A large shrine-shaped chest, upon which rested a canine image of the god Anubis, lay at the threshold of the chamber. The most important item within the room was Tutankhamun’s square canopic shrine, which contained the calcite canopic chest, a goddess carved at each corner, and inscribed with formulae associated with the protection of the embalmed internal organs. Inside were four miniature coffinettes of inlaid solid gold. Each of these was of identical design to the full-sized middle coffin, and they too had all been made for Smenkhkare/Neferneferuaten. These coffinettes each held a linen-wrapped bundle of embalmed viscera, heavily anointed with unguents.

The Treasury also held a large number of resin-varnished shrines, containing wooden figures of the king and various deities, overlaid with gold leaf; some of these were also leftovers from earlier reigns, including possibly the early years of Amunhotpe IV. Similar figures have been recovered from other royal tombs, but they were less ornate, being merely covered with black varnish. Other containers in the room held a large number of shabti figures. Also present were a model granary, two chariots, model boats, and three miniature nests of coffins, the largest set containing a gold figure of a king and a lock of the hair of Queen Tiy, grandmother of Tutankhamun. The other two nests, with designs appropriate to private persons of the later Eighteenth Dynasty, contained the mummies of two premature infants; both were female, and one had suffered from spina bifida. They almost certainly represent the offspring of Tutankhamun and his sister and wife, Queen Ankhesenamun.

The burial chamber was separated from the antechamber by a false wall and sealed doorway, the latter guarded by a pair of gilded and varnished wooden statues. These are of a type familiar from royal tombs of the Ramesside period. Against one wall of the antechamber three gilded wooden couches were stacked, each with a different pair of animal heads, under and on top of which were piled all kinds of food containers and furniture, including a richly gilded and inlaid throne. Half of the other side of the room was taken up by four dismantled chariots.

A door under one of the stacked couches gave access to the so-called Annex, a storeroom crowded with all kinds of funerary equipment, badly disturbed by tomb robbers and those who had cleared up after them. The tomb had apparently been entered by robbers on two occasions, not long after the funeral, perhaps in the reign of Horemheb, when the tomb of Thutmose IV was certainly plundered. Considerable damage had been done, but the innermost shrines and sarcophagus remained intact, the thieves perhaps being caught in the act.

After the last robbery, and the resealing of the sepulcher, the tomb, which lay in the very bottom of the valley, was progressively covered by debris, in part from the construction of neighboring tombs, until the huts of the artisans working on the tomb of Rameses VI (KV 9) were erected directly above its entrance. Accordingly, the tomb remained undetected during the period of intensive tomb robbing that occurred during the social disorders of the late Twentieth Dynasty. Because of the depth of its burial and its position near the entrance to the much-visited tomb of Rameses VI, Tutankhamun’s tomb escaped discovery by the nineteenth-century excavators in the Valley of the Kings, although a number came fairly close. Its entrance was revealed only during the systematic clearance of hitherto-uninvestigated parts of the valley by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon after World War I. The first step of the access stairway was uncovered on 4 November 1922, and work on the tomb and its contents continued until the spring of 1932, when the last objects were removed to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The royal mummy, the outer coffin, and the sarcophagus remain in the tomb.

The importance of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun lies in the fact that, alone of all New Kingdom royal tombs, it was essentially intact, thus providing detailed evidence on the kind of equipment that accompanied a king of that era to the grave. It also allowed the reconstruction of some of the fragmentary items that had been recovered from the badly robbed tombs of the period, and provided useful comparison with the burial outfits found in the intact Twenty-first Dynasty tomb of King Psusennes I at Tanis, and the partly robbed tomb of Thirteenth Dynasty King Hor, at Dahshûr.

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