Valley of the Kings

A boy king in a borrowed tomb

When Tutankhamun died around 1 323 BC at the age of nineteen, his own royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings was not yet finished.

His successor Ay — who became pharaoh and married Tutankhamun's widow — arranged the burial in a much smaller tomb originally cut for a private noble. KV62 is the smallest royal tomb in the valley, only one hundred and ten square metres, awkwardly shaped, with the burial chamber painted in haste. The tight space is partly why the four shrines, two coffins and grave goods were crammed in so densely that Howard Carter took ten years to clear them after 1922.

Eighty days from death to burial

The Egyptian mummification process took seventy days, the funerary preparation around ten more.

The body was washed in the per-nefer — "house of beauty" — with natron solution. The internal organs were removed through an abdominal incision and stored in alabaster canopic jars. The brain was extracted through the nostrils with a bronze hook. The emptied body cavity was packed with natron salt and dried for forty days. Then the corpse was washed in palm wine, rubbed with myrrh and cedar oil, and wrapped in roughly four hundred metres of linen bandages interleaved with 143 amulets — protective talismans of gold, faience and semi-precious stones placed at specific points on the body according to the Book of the Dead.

A mask that hid a young face

The famous gold mask weighs eleven kilograms, fits over the head of the inner coffin, and is the most recognisable single object of ancient Egyptian art.

It probably was not made for Tutankhamun.

Recent analysis of the mask's ear-piercings — a female royal feature — and the joint between the face and the headdress suggests the mask was originally cast for Queen Neferneferuaten, possibly the previous pharaoh Smenkhkare. The face was replaced when Tutankhamun's death required an emergency reuse. Burial inscriptions on objects deeper in the tomb confirm at least eighty of the 5 398 items found were originally made for someone else and altered for Tutankhamun with hasty cartouche replacements.

Why the tomb survived

Tutankhamun was a minor pharaoh. He died young, his name was struck from the royal lists by his successors, and his small awkward tomb was forgotten.

Within a hundred years the entrance was buried beneath the rubble from cutting Ramesses VI's much larger tomb directly above. A village of workers' huts was built on top of the rubble. Robbers who emptied every other Valley of the Kings tomb missed KV62 entirely.

By the time Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon began their systematic search in 1907, the location had been lost for more than three thousand years.