On November 26, 1922, Howard Carter made a small hole in a sealed doorway at the bottom of a flight of sixteen steps in the Valley of the Kings. He held a candle to the gap. Lord Carnarvon, standing behind him, asked: “Can you see anything?” Carter’s answer — “Yes, wonderful things” — became one of the most quoted lines in the history of archaeology.
What Carter was looking at, through a hole in a 3,200-year-old doorway, was the antechamber of the most intact royal burial ever found in Egypt. The tomb had been sealed since approximately 1323 BCE, its entrance buried under the construction debris of the tomb directly above it (KV9, Ramesses VI), which is why ancient robbers had never found it. Nearly everything inside was exactly as it had been placed at the time of the burial.
Who Was Tutankhamun?
Tutankhamun ruled Egypt from approximately 1332 to 1323 BCE as a pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty. He became king at around nine years old, following the reign of his father Akhenaten — whose identity was long debated but has been confirmed by DNA analysis conducted in 2010 (published in JAMA) as Tutankhamun’s biological parent.
Akhenaten had fundamentally restructured Egyptian religion around the worship of a single solar deity, the Aten, closing temples and redirecting the resources of the traditional priesthood. Tutankhamun’s reign reversed this — he restored the worship of Amun and the traditional pantheon, repaired the temples Akhenaten had closed, and moved the court back to Thebes from the new capital at Amarna.
He died at approximately 18–19 years old. The cause of death remains uncertain — CT analysis of his mummy has suggested a combination of factors including a malaria infection and complications from a leg fracture, though the evidence is not conclusive. He had no surviving children; his wife Ankhesenamun, daughter of Akhenaten, outlived him briefly before disappearing from the record. With his death, the 18th Dynasty’s direct line ended.
His reign was politically minor. His tomb made him the most recognized pharaoh in the world.
The Discovery
By 1922, Howard Carter had been excavating in the Valley of the Kings for years under the patronage of Lord Carnarvon, a wealthy British aristocrat who funded the work. Most Egyptologists believed the Valley had yielded all its secrets; Carnarvon was ready to stop funding. Carter persuaded him to finance one more season.
On November 4, 1922, a worker’s footstep broke through the top of a stone step. Carter’s team uncovered a staircase of sixteen steps leading to a sealed doorway bearing the royal necropolis seal. He cabled Carnarvon to come from England. Three weeks later, on November 26, they opened the inner door together.
The clearance of the tomb took Carter and his team ten years. More than 5,000 objects were catalogued, documented, and eventually removed for conservation. Carter’s meticulous recording of every object’s position before it was moved remains one of the great achievements of field archaeology.
The Tomb and What’s Inside It
KV62 is small for a royal tomb — 110 square meters of burial space, significantly less than the corridors of KV9 or KV17. This is consistent with the theory that Tutankhamun died unexpectedly and was placed in a tomb originally prepared for a non-royal official rather than in the royal tomb that would have been under construction for him.
The four chambers:
Antechamber: the first room Carter entered — originally packed with gilded furniture, dismantled chariots, beds, boxes, and hundreds of objects piled in organized disorder. Now empty; the objects are in Cairo and Giza.
Annex: a side room connected to the antechamber, containing food vessels, oils, wine, and equipment for the afterlife’s practical needs.
Burial chamber: the inner room, accessed through a wall plastered and painted over to conceal it. This is the room visitors enter today. It contains Tutankhamun’s outermost sarcophagus (a gilded quartzite chest, still in situ), the mummy inside it within a climate-controlled case, and the wall paintings — among the most unusual in the Valley of the Kings. The paintings are on a yellow ground rather than the standard white-plastered surface, and their style is different from the elaborate religious programs of the larger royal tombs. They show Tutankhamun’s funeral procession, the Opening of the Mouth ceremony, and Ay (his successor) performing the final rites — the only depiction of a royal funeral in action from the entire Valley.
Treasury: accessible through an open doorway in the burial chamber wall, this room contained the gilded canopic shrine, model boats, statuettes of protective deities, and ritual objects. The doorway was guarded by a statue of the god Anubis on a shrine. Also now empty; everything removed to Cairo.
The Objects: Where They Are Now
Over 5,000 artifacts from KV62 form one of the most significant archaeological collections in existence. The majority have been in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo since their excavation. A significant portion are now being transferred to the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) near the Giza pyramids, which opened in stages from 2023 onward and is receiving the complete Tutankhamun collection as its centerpiece. Confirm the current state of the transfer and which objects are on display in Cairo versus Giza before planning a Cairo visit around seeing specific pieces.
The golden death mask: 11 kilograms of solid gold, inlaid with lapis lazuli, obsidian, and colored glass. The most recognized object from ancient Egypt.
The innermost coffin: solid gold, 110 kilograms. One of three nested coffins; the two outer ones are gilded wood.
The four nested shrines: the burial chamber’s bulk, fitted together like Russian dolls around the sarcophagus, each gilded and inscribed.
The golden throne: a state chair with the most naturalistic royal portraiture from the Amarna period in the collection — the figures of Tutankhamun and Ankhesenamun rendered with unusual intimacy.
The Curse: What Actually Happened
Lord Carnarvon died in Cairo on April 5, 1923 — five months after the tomb’s opening — from an infected mosquito bite that became septic. British newspapers, already saturating their coverage with Egyptian mysticism, seized on the death and invented a “curse of the pharaohs.”
The reality: Carnarvon was in poor health before the excavation, had suffered lung damage from a car accident in 1901, and died of blood poisoning — a risk before antibiotics for anyone with a compromised immune system. Of the approximately 58 people associated with the tomb’s discovery and clearance, Howard Carter himself lived until 1939, 17 years after opening the tomb. The deaths that followed were consistent with the normal mortality rates of a group of people, many of them elderly, over a seventeen-year period.
The curse is a newspaper invention. It has nothing to do with what’s in the tomb.
Visiting KV62
- Entry ticket
- EGP 750 (foreign adult) / EGP 375 (foreign student) — in addition to the standard Valley of the Kings entry ticket
- Hours
- 6:00 AM – 5:00 PM
- Photography
- Not permitted inside KV62
- Time needed
- 15–20 minutes (the tomb is small)
- What you see
- The burial chamber, Tutankhamun’s mummy in its climate-controlled case, the outermost sarcophagus, and the burial chamber wall paintings
- What you don’t see
- The treasures — almost all objects are in Cairo or being transferred to the GEM near Giza
Managing expectations: KV62 is a small tomb. The experience of standing in the actual burial chamber with Tutankhamun’s mummy present is genuinely moving for many visitors, but the physical space is modest and the paintings, while distinctive, are not as elaborate as those in KV9, KV11, or KV17. The famous objects are not here.
The Howard Carter House: for the human story of the discovery — Carter’s methods, the years of searching, the moment of opening — the Howard Carter House museum on the West Bank is the essential companion visit. It’s five minutes from the Valley of the Kings ticket office and specifically designed to give the KV62 discovery its proper context. See the Howard Carter House guide for details.
Combining visits: KV9 (Ramesses VI) — directly above KV62, the debris of whose construction buried the entrance — is the natural first stop in understanding how KV62 survived. KV17 (Seti I) — the finest decorated tomb in the Valley — provides the contrast of what a well-resourced royal tomb looks like.