simple facts
Milestone: Stairs to King Tut’s tomb discovered
When: November 4, 1922
Location: Valley of the Kings, Egypt
People: Archeology team led by Howard Carter
On a sunny morning, Egyptian workers were removing sand in the Valley of the Kings when they discovered the remains of stone steps some 4 meters below the tomb of Ramses VI.
An almost exclusively Egyptian excavation team led by British archaeologist Howard Carter was removing sand near a hut in the Valley of the Kings. Some stories say that waterboy Hussein Abd El Rasul may have first discovered the staircase.
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When they found the stairs, the group felt they had discovered something important. The team worked diligently until they reached the 12th step, where they discovered a small doorway covered in plaster, Carter wrote in his diary. A partial inscription from the Royal Necropolis was visible on the door, depicting the god Anubis as a king standing over the bodies of nine vanquished enemies.
Carter wrote in his diary on November 5, “There was sufficient evidence here that it was in fact the entrance to the tomb, and the seal showed that it was apparently intact.”
Upon further investigation, the team discovered that the entrance was filled with debris. This was probably done by priests intending to seal the tomb, and this was further evidence that the tomb had not been plundered.
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Over the next few weeks, the team excavated the stairs and doorway, and on November 24 discovered a seal with King Tutankhamun’s cartouche (an oval filled with hieroglyphs depicting the ruler’s name). However, the team still wasn’t sure who was buried inside. That’s because the rubble that filled the entrance, a jumble of pottery shards and broken boxes, contained traces of other ancient Egyptian monarchs. Akhenaten, father of Tutankhamun.
On November 25th, they opened the first door to the tomb. The next day they found a second door and cut a small hole inside to see what lay beyond. Egyptian officials were not allowed to see the tomb, but Carter was accompanied by Lord Carnarvon, who had financed the excavation of the tomb. Lady Evelyn Herbert, daughter of Caernarfon. and Mr. Arthur Callender, engineer in the drilling department. Everyone was anxiously waiting to see what was inside.
“It was a while before I could see anyone, and the heat escaped and the candles flickered, but as soon as my eyes had adjusted to the twinkle of light, the interior of the room gradually loomed before me, becoming a strange and wonderful combination of unusual and beautiful objects piled one on top of the other,” Carter wrote in his diary.
King Tutankhamun’s tomb was the first tomb of a pharaoh discovered in modern times that had not been robbed, and contained a wealth of treasure. One of the most famous artifacts discovered is an ornate death mask weighing 22 pounds (10 kilograms) of solid gold, inlaid with semi-precious stones. However, Tutankhamun was also buried with a board game, some beds, and even a mannequin to try on costumes in the afterlife.
Tutankhamun was placed in three nested coffins (two made of gilded wood and the third (the smallest) of solid gold), and his body was soaked in oil to turn it black before being mummified.
About a month after the tomb was opened, Lord Carnarvon died from a mosquito bite he contracted following a shaving accident. And in 1923, Pearson’s Magazine published a fictional story called “The Bird’s Grave,” in which Carter’s canary was found dead in a cobra’s mouth shortly after the grave was opened. Rumor-mongers and media reports fabricated these and several other flimsy coincidences as evidence of the mummy’s curse, the idea that anyone who opened the pharaoh’s tomb would face an early or unnatural death. However, a 2002 study found that 25 Westerners exposed to graves (hence the “mummy curse”) lived almost as long as expected at the time.
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