The Discovery of Tutankhamun
A Season Away From Abandonment
By the autumn of 1922, Howard Carter had spent most of his professional life in Egypt and the last five seasons in the Valley of the Kings searching for a tomb he could not prove existed. His patron, George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, had grown impatient. Carnarvon was a wealthy English aristocrat who funded Egyptian excavations partly for the pleasure of discovery and partly as a hedge against the boredom of convalescence — he had been in poor health since a motoring accident in 1901. In the summer of 1922 he told Carter that the 1922–23 season would be the last he would finance. If nothing turned up, the expedition would end.
Carter had one unexplored triangle of ground remaining in his concession, beneath the spoil heaps of earlier excavators near the tomb of Ramesses VI. He had long suspected this area, having found a cache of embalming materials in 1907 that bore the seal of Nebkheperure — the throne name of Tutankhamun. On 4 November 1922, one of Carter's Egyptian workmen clearing rubble at the base of an ancient hut found the top of a stone step cut into the bedrock. By the following day, the staircase was fully cleared: sixteen steps descending to a plastered doorway still bearing its original seals.
Carter sent a telegram to Carnarvon: 'At last have made wonderful discovery in Valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact; re-covered same for your arrival; congratulations.' He then, remarkably, refilled the staircase and waited.
The Opening
Carnarvon and his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert arrived in Luxor on 23 November. On 24 November the staircase was cleared again, and the doorway fully exposed. The seal impressions showed the oval cartouche of Tutankhamun alongside the necropolis seal of a jackal over nine captives — confirmation that the tomb had not been fully robbed in antiquity. There were signs of two ancient intrusions and reclosings, but the tomb was substantially intact.
On 26 November 1922, Carter made a small hole in the upper left-hand corner of the inner doorway and inserted a candle. He waited for the hot air to escape — a precaution against fire — and looked in. The famous account in his published record of the discovery, 'The Tomb of Tutankhamen' (1923), describes the experience: 'As my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues and gold — everywhere the glint of gold.'
Carnarvon, standing behind him, asked if he could see anything. Carter replied: 'Yes, wonderful things.'
What Was Inside
The tomb of Tutankhamun (designated KV62 in the Valley of the Kings numbering system) consisted of four rooms: the Antechamber, the Annex, the Burial Chamber and the Treasury. Its contents, accumulated over three seasons of meticulous documentation and removal between 1922 and 1932, comprised roughly 5,400 individual objects — the most complete assemblage ever recovered from an Egyptian royal burial.
The Antechamber was stacked with furniture, dismantled chariots, boxes of clothing, a throne of gilded wood and glass inlay, alabaster vessels, and the two life-size gilded wood guardian statues of the king that stood flanking the sealed entrance to the burial chamber. The disorder — objects piled haphazardly, some overturned — was partly the legacy of the ancient tomb robbers who had entered twice, briefly, in the years immediately after the burial, and partly the result of the hasty reclosing by necropolis officials.
The Burial Chamber contained the nested sarcophagi: an outermost rectangular quartzite sarcophagus enclosing three coffins of decreasing size, the innermost solid gold, collectively weighing over 300 kilograms. Within lay the mummy of the king, the gold funerary mask covering his head and shoulders. The mask, 54 centimetres high and weighing roughly 11 kilograms, is of beaten and burnished gold inlaid with lapis lazuli, quartz, obsidian, turquoise, and coloured glass. It remains the most recognisable object from ancient Egypt and is now in the Grand Egyptian Museum, which opened in Giza in 2023 and finally houses the complete Tutankhamun collection under one roof.
The Treasury held the canopic shrine — a gilded wooden chest on a sled, its four compartments containing alabaster jars with the king's internal organs — and over thirty model boats, shabti figurines by the hundreds, and, most poignantly, two small mummified foetuses, presumably the king's stillborn daughters.
Who Was Tutankhamun?
The historical Tutankhamun (ruled approximately 1332–1323 BC) was a minor king of the 18th Dynasty, significant in Egyptological terms not for any military achievement or long reign but for the reversal of the religious reforms imposed by his probable father Akhenaten. Akhenaten had abolished the traditional Egyptian pantheon in favour of exclusive worship of the sun disc Aten, shifted the capital from Thebes to the new city of Akhetaten (modern Amarna), and suppressed the temples of Amun and the other gods. Tutankhamun, who came to the throne as a child of around eight or nine years, changed his birth name (originally Tutankhaten, 'living image of Aten') to Tutankhamun, restored the temples of Amun at Karnak and Luxor, and moved the capital back to Thebes. He died young — around eighteen or nineteen — and was buried in a tomb that appears to have been prepared originally for someone else.
Physical examination of the mummy, including CT scanning carried out in 2005, has suggested a constellation of health problems: a cleft palate, a clubfoot, evidence of Kohler disease in the left foot, and multiple cases of malaria detectable from DNA in bone tissue. Whether any of these conditions caused or contributed to his death remains debated; a broken leg, possibly sustained in a fall, may have been a contributing factor. No evidence of murder has survived scientific scrutiny.
The 'Curse' and Its Context
On 5 April 1923, Lord Carnarvon died in a Cairo hotel from blood poisoning following an infected insect bite he had nicked while shaving. He was fifty-seven and had been in chronically poor health for two decades. Within hours, newspapers around the world were reporting a 'pharaoh's curse'. A story claiming that an inscription reading 'Death shall come on swift wings to him that touches the tomb of the pharaoh' had been found above the entrance was entirely fabricated; no such inscription exists.
The curse narrative has proved ineradicable despite the absence of any supporting evidence. Carter himself, who handled more of the tomb's contents than anyone, lived until 1939, dying at sixty-four. Of the twenty-two people present at the official opening of the Burial Chamber in February 1923, the majority lived into old age. The 'curse' is a media construction that says more about the appetite for supernatural explanation than about anything Carter found in KV62.
The Long Excavation and Its Legacy
Carter's excavation of KV62 was, by the standards of his time, meticulous. He photographed every object in situ, numbered each one, and maintained detailed records. The ten years of work required to empty the tomb fully — a pace that frustrated the popular press enormously — reflected a genuine commitment to documenting the material in its context rather than simply extracting the treasure. The records Carter produced, now digitised and accessible through the Griffith Institute at Oxford, constitute the most detailed record of any Egyptian royal burial ever made.
The discovery transformed Egyptology from an antiquarian pursuit into a discipline with genuine public prominence and shifted the politics of Egyptology — the Egyptian government's insistence on retaining all finds, and the international controversy that surrounded Carter's strained relationship with the Egyptian authorities, prefigured the repatriation debates that would dominate heritage discussions a generation later.
Open the map to locate the Valley of the Kings, KV62 and the wider Theban necropolis in their landscape context on the west bank of the Nile at Luxor.